American politics and media surrounding the colonization of the Philippines

books:

	• Benevolent Assimilation: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899-1903 Stuart Creighton Miller Yale University Press, 1984 - 342 pages average customer review:based on 12 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Very Educational

I am in agreement with the other reviewers that this is a very good history of the US/Philippine War that should be more broadly read. Parallels with Vietnam and the present oily Iraqi War are eerie: attacks on the patriotism of war critics to silence them, support of the wide spread use of various tortures against the adversary including "The Chinese Water Treatment" (aka "Chinese Water Torture"--from which "Waterboarding" is only a variation), the excusing of massacres of civilians by American soldiers, etc. There truly is nothing new under the sun when it comes to these dirty little 3rd world wars. I'm reminded of the poet Robinson Jeffers' poem "Blood Lakes." So many blood lakes and we always fall in--with apologies to Jeffers' spirit if I've essentially misquoted him.

Perhaps we can overcome our national "Altzheimer's" on the issue of these 3rd world colonial/neo-colonial wars and stay out of them when the next opportunity presents itself. In the meantime, I would settle for our exit from the present Iraqi mess with all due and reasonable speed. America's moral force and image in the world is not improved by our involvement in such bloody horrors.

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Essential

A very interesting story about the American armies attempt to end the Phillipine insurgency that broke out in the wake of the Spanish-American war. Originally allied with the Americans the Phillipinoes were angry that the U.S had promised indpedendence and from their point of view, reneged on the promise. An insurgency broke out and the American army used classic anti-insurgency methods to break it, including creating institutions and providing incentives for the people not to back it, as well as combatting it. Famous figures such as Roosevelt, Taft, Pershing and Macarthur's father were involved. This is an important part of American history that is often forgotten.

Seth J. Frantzman

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American politics and media surrounding the colonization of the Philippines

This book reviews the politics and media surrounding the actions by the US in the Philippines following the Spanish-American war. It gives great insight into the propaganda used to sell the war to the American pubic and to obfuscate the atrocities that American soldiers committed there. Miller paints a fascinating picture of egocentric American political and military commands steeped in duplicity and self-delusion; these patterns will be interesting and familiar to any student of the wars in Vietnam and Iraq.

The material is sourced mainly from newspaper editorials, political speeches, congressional inquiries and the letters of politicians and high ranking military figures.
This book will not tell you anything about what the war was like for the soldiers on the ground, American or Philippino. It won't tell you much about tactics. It won't teach you anything about Philippine culture of the time, either.

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Imperialism Up Close

This book is an excellent general history of the American invasion and conquest of The Philippines in 1898-1902. The author immersed himself in private letters, official hearings, and newspaper editorials from the era. The result of this research is a compelling picture of a sleazy and violent episode in American history, when Republican politicians launched a war to boost their prospects in the 1898 midterm elections. The book is timelier than ever after 9/11, since imperialism has come back into vogue in the guise of anti-terrorism -- anyone who has illusions about America's "innocence" today should read Miller's accounts of atrocities and racism circa 1900.

I gave the book four stars instead of five only because the narrative is based almost exclusively on U.S. sources. In particular, Miller's endless rehashing of imperialist and anti-imperialist newspaper editorials gets quite old at times.

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deja vu, one century on

This book was originally from 1982, written in a time of post-Vietnam regret. However, this book may have picked up on themes, very much in the U.S. press in the period of the Philippines war of a century ago, that are suddenly current in fall 2005: systematic use of torture by American forces (particularly the "water cure"); carelessness with the lives of civilians in the battle zones; denunciation of Americans with doubts about the war as unpatriotic or traitorous; the denial of normal legal due process to an enemy deemed too savage and inferior to be worthy of it; considerable confusion on the events where U.S. forces transpose one war (i.e., Spain 1898 or War on Terror 2001) into a new one (the Philippines in 1899 or Iraq today) more by act of U.S. will than enemy action. The author does stretch some comparisons between the Philippines war and Tonkin Gulf and My Lai, but given the events of Operation Iraqi Freedom the book seems eerily more relevant now.

Another reviewer has noted that Mr. Miller's research was almost entirely from U.S. sources. That does take it down from five stars but we should remember that this book, as with the Iraq war, is more about the U.S. mind-set than about the other side. Thus the book's tone is a bit as lurid as the press of that day but it is startling how the U.S. public read this news coverage year after year and then -- as Mr. Miller notes -- forgot. We might wind up putting Iraq out of mind as well, its veterans and victims as forgotten and neglected as those of 1902, a point Mr. Miller does us a favor by raising. Scary.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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