The United States As Oppressor in the Philippines

The United States as the oppressor in the Philippines.  Note especially the dramatic difference between the pious prayer by our president and the facts on the ground as reported by The Philippines Reader.

In August of 1994, I, Lowell Noble, spent two and a half weeks in the Philippines teaching Free Methodist pastors and students about social justice, the kingdom of God and community development.  In preparation for the trip, I did some background reading on the history of the Philippines and the U.S. involvement in the Philippines.  I was shocked and shamed as I discovered how Americans had brutalized the Filipino people.

Even though I was a college professor for much of my life, I am now retired, I was ignorant of our treatment of the Filipino people.  Previously, I knew that we had obtained the Philippines during the Spanish American war and after our conquest.  The U.S. had set up a school system and a public health system; after nearly 50 years, we gave the Philippines their independence.  Basically, the history I had been taught made these United States look like the 'good guys.'

]Upon reading The Philippines Reader, which consisted primarily of primary documents, in other words, the actual writings and statements of U.S. and Filipino leaders, I discovered a trail of greed, imperialism, ethnocentrism (false belief that Americans are superior to Filipinos) and oppression on a scale and viscousness  usually associated with a Hitler or a Stalin.

Next an excerpt from a speech by President McKinley to Methodist church leaders on November 21, 1898.  The Spanish had been defeated (largely by Filipino soldiers, not U.S. soldiers); the Filipino people were free from over 300 years of Spanish domination.  McKinley's speech drips with religious piety combined with American ethnocentrism to justify our conquest of the Philippines:

"When I next realized that the Philippines had dropped into our laps I confess I did not know what to do with them.  I sought counsel from all sides---Democrats as well as Republicans---but got little help.  I thought first we would only take Manila; then Luzon; then the other islands also.  I walked the floor of the White House night after night until midnight; and I am not ashamed to tell you, gentlemen, that I went down on my knees and prayed Almighty God for light and guidance more than one night.

And one night late it came to me this way---I don't know how it was, but it came: (1) that we could not give them back to Spain, that would be cowardly and dishonorable; (2) that we could not turn them over to France and Germany, our commercial rivals in the Orient, that would be bad business and discreditable; (3) that we could not leave themselves to themselves, they were unfit for self-government, they would soon have anarchy and misrule over there worse than Spain's was; and (4) that there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God's grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellowmen for whom Christ died.  And then I went to bed, and went to sleep, and slept soundly, and the next morning I sent for the chief engineer of the War Department (our map-maker), and I told him to put the Philippines on the map of the United States, and there they are, and there they will stay while I am President."

In January, 1990, a U.S. Senator by the name of Beveridge spoke about U.S. war aims:  our desire for markets for our goods, our need for cheap raw materials and tropical crops, our desire for military bases in the orient, the rivalry with other commercial European powers, and the supposed superior morality of white Anglo-Saxons.

From ethnocentrism to oppression.  How devastating was the U.S. conquest of the Philippines?  The editors of The Philippine Reader summarize the human cost of the war as follows; as you read this account, remember that the OT defines oppression as the crushing, humiliating, animalizing, impoverishing, enslaving or killing of a people:

"How many Filipinos died resisting American aggression?  It is doubtful if historians will ever agree on a figure that is anything more than a guess.  The figure of 250,000 crops up in various works; one suspects it is chosen and repeated in ignorance. . . . Records of the killing were not kept  and the Americans were anxious to suppress true awareness of the extent of the slaughter, in any case, in order to avoid fueling domestic anti-imperialistic protest.  How many died of disease and the effects of concentration camp life is even more difficult to assess.

General Bell, who one imagines might be in as good a position to judge such matters as anyone, estimated in a New York Times interview that over 600,000 people in Luzon alone had been killed or had died of disease as a result of the war.  This estimate given in May 1901 means that Bell did not include the effect of the Panay campaign, the Samar campaign, or his own bloodthirsty Batangas campaign (where at least 100,000 died), all of which occurred after his 1901 interview.  Nor could it include the 'post-war' period, which saw the confinement of 300,000 people in Albay, wanton slaughter in Mindanao, and astonishing death rates in Bilibid Prison, to name but three instances where killing continued.

A million deaths?  One does not happily contemplate such carnage of innocent people who fought with extraordinary bravery in a cause which was just, but is now all but forgotten.  Such an estimate, however, might conceivably err on the side of understatement. To again quote the anonymous  U.S. Congressman, "They never rebel in Luzon anymore because there isn't anybody left to rebel."

General Arthur MacArthur, the father of General Douglas MacArthur, was one of the key designers of the policies to defeat and destroy the Filipino people, mostly innocent civilians.  A General Smith ordered his men to : "kill and burn, kill and burn, the more you kill and the more you burn the more you please me. . . . no time to take prisoners."  When asked to define the age limit for killing, Smith replied, "Everything over ten."  Extermination and concentration camps the order of the day.  The American genocide of Native Americans west of the Mississippi served as the model.

What has happened since the brutal U.S. conquest of the Philippines?

1.  The U.S. government and business elite have allied themselves with the Filipino landowning and political elite with the result that landownership has been more and more concentrated in the hands of a few people and corporations.  The number of landless peasants has increased sharply; poverty and oppression has worsened.  Read Ownership by Charles Avila, a Filipino Catholic priest.  Also read
A Captive Land by James Putzel.
2.  The U.S. invested much more money in the rebuilding of Japan after World War II than it did in the rebuilding of the Philippines.  The Filipino people were promised major assistance from the U.S., but our ally received only a small amount of money.

3.  The U.S vigorously supported a Jubilee type land reform or agrarian reform in Japan, Korea and
Taiwan after World War II; this land reform provided the basis for strong and more equitable economic growth.  Each of these three nations is now quite prosperous with the number of poor sharply reduced.  The U.S. opposed similar agrarian reform in the Philippines; instead it helped crush legitimate attempts by peasants to regain control of their own land.

4.  U.S. multi-national corporations have directed some Filipino agriculture to produce cheap food exports for the United States.  These corporations have made millions of dollars using cheap Filipino labor to do so.

5.  Instead of making the Philippines safe for authentic democracy, the U.S. has made it safe for exploitation.