Explanation: After the Spanish-American War, the Philippines were released from Spanish control. Drinks all around!
Only… the US, who had previously supported the Filipino rebels during the war, had been ‘convinced’ of the ‘necessity’ of annexing the Philippines. Notably, the US President McKinley had become convinced that it was “God’s will” that America “civilize” the Philippines “for their own good” - notwithstanding the fact that they had just set up a genuinely democratic republic and constitution of their own before the war had even ended. This despite several loud domestic voices - including that of writer Mark Twain, Democrat presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, and industrialist Andrew Carnegie (who offered the US government 20 million dollars to let the Philippines go free) - that foreign colonies were not in the moral or economic interests of the USA.
For about 3-4 years a ‘conventional’ war was waged, wherein about ~20,000 Filipino soldiers were killed by direct US action, and several atrocities were committed by US forces, including massacres which killed several thousand Filipino civilians, and over 10,000 who died in concentration camps (in the literal and British sense of ‘where we round up civilians to hold against their will’, not formal death camps of the type Nazi Germany would make infamous - not that concentration camps of either type are in any way moral). However, the great mass of Filipino civilian deaths were caused by famine and an outbreak of cholera just before the war’s end - both issues which could have been addressed successfully in peacetime, but were instead hampered by the prosecution of an unjust and unjustifiable war by the Americans. A period of guerilla war followed for about ~5 years, with much lower casualties.
Public American interest in the entire project quickly waned once it became apparently that the Filipinos did not welcome the “White Man’s Burden”. The American middle class had less taste for the ‘prestige’ of a foreign empire than it did economic opportunities, and all occupying the Philippines offered was a hole in the national budget and a ringing question of why we were even there. A few years after the period of guerilla war ended, despite a lack of renewed hostilities, the US settled on simply trying to extricate itself from the Philippines without humiliating itself (God, why does that sound familiar?). The decision was made to ‘generously’ ‘grant’ the Philippines their eventual independence in 1916, and in 1934, a definite date was set.
A lot of death for no real fucking reason. Great going, US.
I keep re-listening to Dan Carlin’s “American Peril” every few years because it haunts me. Hard not to feel like our epitaph was authored by the temptations of imperial ambition.
Explanation: After the Spanish-American War, the Philippines were released from Spanish control. Drinks all around!
Only… the US, who had previously supported the Filipino rebels during the war, had been ‘convinced’ of the ‘necessity’ of annexing the Philippines. Notably, the US President McKinley had become convinced that it was “God’s will” that America “civilize” the Philippines “for their own good” - notwithstanding the fact that they had just set up a genuinely democratic republic and constitution of their own before the war had even ended. This despite several loud domestic voices - including that of writer Mark Twain, Democrat presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, and industrialist Andrew Carnegie (who offered the US government 20 million dollars to let the Philippines go free) - that foreign colonies were not in the moral or economic interests of the USA.
For about 3-4 years a ‘conventional’ war was waged, wherein about ~20,000 Filipino soldiers were killed by direct US action, and several atrocities were committed by US forces, including massacres which killed several thousand Filipino civilians, and over 10,000 who died in concentration camps (in the literal and British sense of ‘where we round up civilians to hold against their will’, not formal death camps of the type Nazi Germany would make infamous - not that concentration camps of either type are in any way moral). However, the great mass of Filipino civilian deaths were caused by famine and an outbreak of cholera just before the war’s end - both issues which could have been addressed successfully in peacetime, but were instead hampered by the prosecution of an unjust and unjustifiable war by the Americans. A period of guerilla war followed for about ~5 years, with much lower casualties.
Public American interest in the entire project quickly waned once it became apparently that the Filipinos did not welcome the “White Man’s Burden”. The American middle class had less taste for the ‘prestige’ of a foreign empire than it did economic opportunities, and all occupying the Philippines offered was a hole in the national budget and a ringing question of why we were even there. A few years after the period of guerilla war ended, despite a lack of renewed hostilities, the US settled on simply trying to extricate itself from the Philippines without humiliating itself (God, why does that sound familiar?). The decision was made to ‘generously’ ‘grant’ the Philippines their eventual independence in 1916, and in 1934, a definite date was set.
A lot of death for no real fucking reason. Great going, US.
I keep re-listening to Dan Carlin’s “American Peril” every few years because it haunts me. Hard not to feel like our epitaph was authored by the temptations of imperial ambition.
This just remind me the real story around Cuba asking the US help against Spain and end up in the same spot.