Bad American

An excellent piece of writing by William N. Grigg in his blog Pro Libertate. There are excellent historical cites to the Philippine Insurrection and Captain Blackadder. Make sure you play the video at the end of the last minutes of the Blackadder series. Poignant and especially fitting under the circumstances.

From the article:

Not everybody in Washington approved of annexing the Philippines. Massachusetts Senator George Frisbie Hoar, for instance, complained that the seizure would turn the United States, once a proudly independent republic, into “a vulgar, commonplace empire founded upon physical force, controlling subject races and vassal states, in which one class must forever rule and the other classes must forever obey.”

Not so, parried Senator Knute Nelson of Minnesota. “We come as ministering angels, not as despots,” Nelson piously pronounced, anticipating – by more than a century – contemporary paeans to Washington’s armed missionaries of global democracy.

After Filipino partisans massacred a company of US infantrymen at Balangiga, American commanders anointed Colonel Jacob Smith, a decorated veteran of Wounded Knee, to confer the same benediction on that village he had administered to the Sioux.

“I want no prisoners,” Smith instructed his troops. “I wish you to kill and burn. The more you kill and the more you burn, the better you will please me.” He commanded his troops to raze the village and kill everyone over the age of ten, and to turn the area into “a howling wilderness.”

Elsewhere, ministering angels under the command of General Frederick Funston (who was later awarded a Medal of Honor) were detaining, torturing, and executing Filipinos indiscriminately. In their effort to locate guerrilla leader Emilio Aguinaldo, Funston’s men made plentiful use of the same interrogation tactic used decades later by the Imperial Japanese: Waterboarding, or what was then called the “water cure.” During a post-war speaking tour, Funston boasted of not only torturing countless Filipinos, but also of summarily sentencing dozens to be executed without trial, and ordering numerous massacres of civilians. The war criminal also “suggested that anti-war protestors be dragged out of their homes and lynched,” observes historian William Loren Katz.

Amazing how some things in American history never change.