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... ...Universal Declaration of Human Rights, December 10, 1948 -- "A Cause for Celebration" ... 'Demands of Dignity' 'Demands of Dignity' <DEVELOPING THE DISCOURSE ON OUR DECEMBER 1Oth DECLARATION>
On-Line Edition of the Book by Ed Aurelio C. Reyes Appendix 2-- B: War of Aggression to Enforce the Sale |
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CONTENTS OF THIS BOOK: Response
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Chapter Two - -------------------- Appendix 2-B War of Aggression to Enforce the Sale
See: Centennial Site designed by Management Systems Consultants (MSC) Communications Technologies, Inc. Hosted by MSC Computer Training Center. <http://www.msc.edu.ph/centennial/philam.html>; Veltisezar Bautista, The Filipino Americans (From 1763 to the Present) Their History, Culture, and Traditions, <http://www.filipino-americans.com/filipino_am.html>; The World of 1898: The Spanish-American War, website of Library of Congress Hispanic Division. <http://www.loc.gov/rr/hispanic/1898/intro.html>. Account from William Loren Katz Mr. Katz is the author of forty U.S.
history books, and has been affiliated with New York University since
1973. His website is www.williamlkatz.com.
His essay draws from his The Cruel Years (Beacon Press, 2003) and more
heavily from Stuart Creighton Miller, “Benevolent Assimilation”: The
American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899-1903 (Yale University Press,
1982), a moving account of this country’s first major overseas
imperialist venture. President William McKinley
dispatched Admiral Dewey to the Philippines with a pledge to bestow
civilization and Christianity on its people, and promise eventual
independence. Perhaps he was unaware that most Filipinos were Catholics.
Perhaps he did not know that General Aguinaldo and his 40,000 troops were
poised to remove Spain from the islands. Dewey supplied Aguinaldo with
weapons and encouraged him, but that soon changed. From the White House and the
U.S. high command to field officers and lowly enlistees the message became
“these people are not civilized” and the United States had embarked on
a glorious overseas adventure against “savages.” Officers and enlisted
men - and the media — were encouraged to see the conflict through a
“white superiority” lens, much as they viewed their victories over
Native Americans and African Americans. The Philippine occupation unfolded
at the high tide of American segregation, lynching, and a triumphant white
supremacy ideology. U.S.
officers ordered massacres of entire villages and conducted a host of
other shameful atrocities as the Philippine quagmire dragged on for more
than a decade. “A white man seems to forget that he is human,” wrote a
white soldier from the Philippines. Atrocities abounded. To produce “a
demoralized and obedient population” in Batangas, General Franklin Bell
ordered the destruction of “humans, crops, food stores, domestic
animals, houses and boats.” He became known as the “butcher” of
Batangas. During a triumphal U.S. speaking tour General Frederick Funston, bearing a Congressional Medal of Honor and harboring political ambitions, bellicosely promoted total war. In Chicago he boasted of sentencing 35 suspects to death without trial and enthusiastically endorsed torture and civilian massacres. He even publicly suggested that anti-war protestors be dragged out of their homes and lynched. Funston’s words met far more applause than criticism. In San Francisco he suggested that the editor of a noted anti-imperialist paper “ought to be strung up to the nearest lamppost.” At a banquet in the city he called Filipinos “unruly savages” and (now) claimed he had personally killed fifty prisoners without trial. Captain Edmond Boltwood, an officer under Funston, confirmed that the general had ...told his troops “to take no prisoners.” See William Loren Katz, “U.S. Water Boarding, 1899 Style,” www.williamlkatz.com Massacres, Other Atrocities
General
Franklin Bell saw military action in the Philippine American War
as a major in 1898. By 1902, he was a general in the army and was in
charge of pacifying the southern Tagalog area. In particular, he became
infamous because of his reconcentration policy in Batangas, which was
aimed at isolating the Filipino guerrillas. Everyone was either an enemy
or a friend of the United States. Neutrality in the war was not an option
for anyone. He ordered all residents to move to the reconcentration zone
area by Christmas of 1901 and to bring all the supplies they could. By
January 1, those outside the zone area and bearing no pass will be
arrested and those attempting to flee will be shot. He ordered the
confiscation or destruction of all the supplies outside the zone area. So
effective was the Batangas campaign that in seven months, General Miguel
Malvar, whose guerrilla forces operated in that province, was forced to
surrender with his 3,000 troops. But the reconcentration was a destructive
campaign. It was estimated that due to war, pestilence, and famine, only
200,000 of the former 300,000 population of Batangas survived. Ironically,
despite the brutality of his campaign, he was merely chastised by the U.S.
Senate. See:
<http://opmanong.ssc.hawaii.edu/filipino/PAWLinks.html>
General Jacob Smith, who had been wounded fighting at Wounded Knee, said his overseas campaigns were “worse than fighting Indians.” He promised to turn Samar province into a “howling wilderness.” Smith defined the enemy as anyone “ten years and up” and issued these instructions to Marine Commander Tony Waller: “I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better it will please me.” He became known as “Howling Jake” Smith. See William
Loren Katz, “U.S. Water
Boarding, 1899 Style,”
www.williamlkatz.com Writing about the Caloocan fight, Captain Elliot, of the Kansas Regiment said: “Talk about war being 'hell,' this war beats the hottest estimate ever made of that locality. Caloocan was supposed to contain seventeen thousand inhabitants. The Twentieth Kansas swept through it, and now Caloocan contains not one living native. Of the buildings, the battered walls of the great church and dismal prison alone remain. The village of Maypaja, where our first fight occurred on the night of the fourth, had five thousand people on that day—now not one stone remains upon top of another. You can only faintly imagine this terrible scene of desolation. War is worse than hell.” See: Soldiers’ Letters: Being Materials for the History of a War of Criminal Aggression. (N.P.: Anti-Imperialist League, 1899). In Jim Zwick, ed., Anti-Imperialism in the United States, 1898-1935. (December 12, 1996.) Water Cure, Other Forms of TortureThe “water cure” was
probably first instituted when U.S. forces encountered local resistance.
Professor Miller states that General Frederick Funston in 1901 may have
used it to capture the Filipino General Emilio Aguinaldo. A New York
World article described the “water cure” as forcing “water with
handfuls of salt thrown in to make it more efficacious, is forced down the
throats of patients until their bodies become distended to the point of
bursting . . ..” This may have been only one on the versions used. The
water cure became front-page news when William Howard Taft, appointed U.S.
Governor of the Philippines, testified under oath before Congress and let
the cat out of the bag. The “so called water cure,” he admitted, was
used “on some occasions to extract information.” The Arena, an
opposition paper, called his words “a most humiliating admission that
should strike horror in the mind of every American.” Around the same
time as Taft’s admission a soldier boasted in a letter made public that
he had used the water cure on 160 people and only 26 had survived. The man
was compelled by the War Department to retract his damaging confession.
But then another officer stated the “water cure” was being widely used
when he reported, “the problem of the ‘water cure’ is in knowing how
to apply it.” Such statements leave unclear how often the form of
torture was used for interrogation and how often it became a way to
exhibit racial animosity or display contempt. See William
Loren Katz, “U.S. Water
Boarding, 1899 Style,”
www.williamlkatz.com The
Americans committed barbaric acts because of the population’s support to
the guerrillas. For instance, by December 25, 1901, all men, women, and
children of the towns of Batangas and Laguna, were herded into small areas
within the poblacion of their respective towns. The American troops
burned their houses, carts, poultry, animals, etc. The people were
prisoners for months. From:
Veltisezar Bautista, The Filipino Americans (From 1763 to the
Present) Their History, Culture, and Traditions, as carried by
Zwich in <http://www.filipino-americans.com/filipino_am.html> Balangiga
Victory Rare
military victory was won by the townspeople of Balangiga near the Southern
tip of Samar island on September 28, 1901. With careful preparation and
the element of surprise, the people's action was signaled by the incessant
pealing of the churchbells, upon which the Balangigueños rose as one to
slay all the members of "Company C" of the 9th US Infantry,
using mostly bolos and a few firearms, leaving
48 American soldiers dead and 22 wounded. The US military cried
"Massacre!" although as a military occupation force they could
not qualify as massacre victims. They retaliated by committing massacres
all over the Samar Island, and shipped the Balangiga churchbells to the
US, claiming it as war booty in the undeclared war. Filipinos call it the
Balangiga Victory, and are demanding that the bells be returned to the
Philippines. From:
Veltisezar Bautista, The Filipino Americans (From 1763 to the
Present) Their History, Culture, and Traditions, as carried by
Zwich in <http://www.filipino-americans.com/filipino_am.html> Accounts
in Letters from Soldiers The
US government recruited volunteers to augment its regular troops fighting
the Spanish-American War, and about 12,000 enlisted themselves only to
find out that they were not being fielded to fight not the Spaniards but
Filipinos. Several
American soldiers who took part in the battles in Manila and the suburbs
wrote letters telling about those battles to their relatives in the United
States. These letters were published in local and national press in the
United States by the Anti-Imperialist League in 1899 in the United States. Schirmer
tells us: "When
Otis had driven the insurgents from their trenches around Manila with the
aid of Dewey's guns he had reported heavy Philippine losses of some 4,000
killed, wounded and (imprisoned) to 250 American casualties. In the weeks
following, as the United States continued to drive the Filipinos back,
reports persisted of terrible losses. It was the view of the Boston
Evening Transcript, however, that official dispatches cast little
light on the on the situation, 'but thousands of private soldiers are
every week sending home letters which tell the horrible truth.'
Relatives and friends were turning these letters over to the press,
and so they reached the public. "Toward
the end of May (1899), the Anti-Imperialist League published Soldiers'
Letters, a collection of the same. It was, in large part, a record
of racism and slaughter..." On
the basis of these letters, which the reluctant, even, shocked US soldiers
were writing about in letters sent to their parents and close friends, the
Anti-Imperialist League and other groups that opposed the war caused
congressional hearings to be conducted to look into the conduct of the
war. This now form part of public record, and the top officers of the US
military could only seek to exonerate themselves by claiming that the
atrocities could not deny were committed in violation of official
policies. Whatever they could deny they still sought to deny. See Schirmer, Ibid., p. 142, quoting the BET, February 7and April 24, 1899. Filipino
Heroism Even in Defeat Veltisezar
Bautista, as excerpted by Jim Zwich, gives us this post-mortem on the
Filipino-American War: "It
took the United States more than three years to defeat the army of the
first Philippine Republic. However, the outcome of the war was never in
doubt, mainly because the United States enjoyed tremendous military
advantages. "In
numbers alone, the U.S. was superior. Although there were only 20,032
enlisted men and 819 officers in the U.S. Expeditionary Force in the
Philippines as of January 31, 1899, more troops arrived in subsequent
months. By April 16, 1902, more than 120,000 American soldiers had fought
or served in the Philippines. Even more superior were the arms used by the
Americans, who were well equipped. U.S. warships were on the coast, ready
to fire their big guns when needed. "In
contrast, the Filipino arms were a motley of rifles. Some had been
supplied by the Americans during the Spanish-American War, others smuggled
in by Filipino patriots, seized from the Spanish army, or taken from
American soldiers. Artillery was likewise limited. Most of their cannons
were captured from the Spaniards. Many Filipino soldiers did not even have
guns, but used spears, lances and bolos (big knives) in fighting. Filipino
soldiers also lacked military training. They did manage to win some small
battlefield encounters, but these only delayed the ultimate victory for
the Americans. Their resistance did not arouse public opinion in America
against the U.S. military campaigns in the Philippines to the same degree
that American public opinion forced the United States to withdraw from the
Vietnam War more than 70 years later. "Nevertheless, the United States had to pay a very high price, more than 4,000 American soldiers’ lives. One of them was Major General Henry C. Lawton, who was killed in the Battle of San Mateo on December 23, 1899. He was the highest-ranking U.S. military officer to be killed in action in the Philippine-American War. The U.S. government also spent about $600 million in all. From:
Veltisezar Bautista, The Filipino Americans (From 1763 to the
Present) Their History, Culture, and Traditions, as carried by
Zwich in <http://www.filipino-americans.com/filipino_am.html> And
if this author may add his own concluding word on this matter, here is a
quote from my own "open letter to Rizal" written in 1989 in
response to his "The Philippines, Within a Century,"
where he says in part, "Very likely the Philippines will
defend with inexpressible valor the victory secured at the price of so
much blood and sacrifice...:": "The
heroism of our people was more than validated in the fields of battle. ...
That we lost in that war of resistance to American occupation is no reason
to diminish the high esteem that (we) have had for our brother and sister
Filipinos of that period. Our people gave their all, as the leaders of the
Revolution had earlier called on them to do: To struggle for the
Independence of the Philippines as far as our strength and means will
permit. "Our
brothers and sisters did struggle despite their having to suffer torture
and imprisonment, for as long as the breath of life still passed between
their lips, that is, until they were with their children mercilessly
massacred and their villages razed to the ground. "Our
gallant compatriots were crushed with sheer brute force by the marauding
American troops who were committing genocide in our Islands while the
American government chanted slogans on democracy, freedom, progress, peace
and so on, to misinform and mislead its own citizenry and those of our
people they could deceive and confuse." All
that may very well be about to end now.
From:
Ed Aurelio C. Reyes, The Philippines, A Century Thence: An Open
Letter to Rizal , 2nd Ed. (Manila:
Kamalaysayan, 2007), p. 12.
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APPENDICES: App 2-A:
Treaty of Paris, 1898
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