Who massacred 30 people in the Philippines?

I have never read Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, but I did read a great book about the Philippines' gold, Gold Warriors: America's Secret Recovery of Yamashita's Gold. It is an interesting read. I have no problem with a critique of America's abuse of the Philippines, in fact I wish more people knew about it, in the US and in the Philippines, but the current Filipino ruling class is just as complicate if not more. I am specifically thinking about the Hello Garci scandal and that connection.

That was a very informative post .

@ Whitenoise

While I agree that the history of the Philippines' colonial and neocolonial period is integral to understanding some of the political and social dysfunction in the country, I do not think that it is fair to focus solely on American intervention. This is a complex country with over 7,000 islands that are all fairly different, and have a different backstory. Maguindanao and Mindanao definitely fit this description.

Having said that, as a whole the failure of the law and order is the main culprit to the problems the Philippines currently faces. This is tied to corruption and classism which have roots in both the colonial and post colonial periods. What I would be interested in seeing in the news is an explanation of the entrenched political and business class families of the Philippines. Al Jazeera recently had a nice segment on this. The brutality of war and violence grabs more attention, but I think that real backstory is more about corruption, class, and a government that regular people know does not work in their interest.

Update: At least 46 people dead

http://blogs.current.com/news/2009/11/24/update-to-philippines-story-46-dead/

1902: PHILIPPINES/UNITED STATES. Pressure by anti-imperialist groups in the U.S. finally forces the War Department to charge two American officers in connection with the Samar holocaust. Major Littleton Waller is charged with ordering the execution of eleven Filipino guides who had committed the crime of finding edible roots without telling American troops about them. During the court martial, Waller testified that, during a single eleven day period, his men burned more than two hundred and fifty homes, shot thirteen water buffalo and killed thirty nine people. Waller's defense was the admirable one that he was simply "following orders" The standard Nazi defence seems perfectly reasonable to the court martial board and Waller is duly acquitted.

General Jacob "Kill Everyone Over Ten" Smith is then court martialled. In the Kafkaesque world of the U.S. military, he is not charged with mass murder, genocide or war crimes, of which he abundantly and self-evidently guilty, but with "conduct to the prejudice of good order and military discipline". In other words shooting his mouth off to the press about turning Samar into a howling wilderness and killing everyone over the age of ten. It's okay to kill all them niggers, you're just not supposed to tell everyone you're gonna do it. Smith is duly found guilty of saying nasty things in the hearing of the press and sentenced "to be admonished by the reviewing authority." Smith's "admonishment" is retirement. When he steps ashore in San Francisco in August 1902 he is wildly cheered as a hero.

I personally strung up thirty-five Filipinos without trial, so what was all the fuss over Waller's "dispatching" a few "treacherous savages"? If there had been more Smiths and Wallers, the war would have been over long ago. Impromptu domestic hanging might also hasten the end of the war. For starters, all Americans who had recently petitioned Congress to sue for peace in the Philippines should be dragged out of their homes and lynched. Colonel Frederick Funston at a banquet in Chicago.

In the fine tradition of the American military, Funston, a self-confessed mass murderer and a man who advocated lynching Americans for practising freedom of speech, will be forever honored by having Fort Funston in California named after him.

1902-1913: PHILIPPINES. The Muslim "Moro" people of the Sulu Archipelago and the island of Mindanao apparently haven't heard that the U.S. war against the people of the Philippines is over and they continue the battle against the invaders.

It may be necessary to kill half the Filipinos in order that the remaining half of the population may be advanced to a higher plane of life than their present semi-barbarous state affords. U.S. General William Shafter

The Moros had never been conquered during three hundred years of Spanish rule and their territory, which comprised just under half of the area of the Philippines, was not part of the treaty between Spain and the U.S. The American war against the Moros was a completely separate war of imperial conquest. The first major massacre by the U.S. is at Padang Karbala. American trooops attack the town with three hundred troops and sophisticated weaponry. Hundreds of Moros are killed.

The Moros will carry on a guerrilla war against the invaders for eleven years. More than one hundred thousand people, the vast majority civilians, will be killed by the U.S.

1902: PHILIPPINES. U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt declares that the U.S. war against the Filipino people has ended but, inevitably, it's just another lie. The Filipinos' resistance to the occupation of their country by the U.S. continues unabated. The Filipinos defending their country against the U.S. are, in the usual way, referred to as insurgents by the U.S. government and by the ever-cooperative U.S. press. In total, the U.S. will use just under 130,000 troops to invade and occupy the Philippines. The American troops will be led by a total of thirty generals, twenty six of whom are highly qualified for the job, having been engaged in the United States Government's genocide of native Americans.

The war against the people of the Philippines was a classic American war of empire. The U.S. used what was, for the time, high tech weaponry and relied on American warships to bombard Filipino positions. The Filipinos defending their country were forced to use rifles picked up from the dead, spears, lances and machetes. American losses were trivial, 4234 deaths of which the majority were from disease. Less than 1500 Americans were killed in combat. Philippine military deaths are estimated at around 20,000. The number of completely innocent Filipino civilians killed by the U.S. in the process of "benevolent assimilation" is probably between 600,000 and 1,000,000. Millions of Filipinos were injured and maimed. Hundreds of thousands of houses were burned, hundreds of towns and villages destroyed.
We have pacified some thousands of the islanders and buried them; destroyed their fields; burned their villages, and turned their widows and orphans out-of-doors; furnished heartbreak by exile to some dozens of disagreeable patriots and subjugated the remaining ten millions by Benevolent Assimilation, which is the pious new name of the musket. Mark Twain
The U.S. conducts a military occupation of the Philippines until the 1920s. After the U.S. ceases direct military occupation, it installs a series of brutal dictatorships, armed, supported and controlled by the U.S., culminating in the viciously repressive and rapacious regime of Ferdinand Marcos. While stealing billions for themselves and their cronies, the dictatorships repay their American benefactors by permitting the U.S. military to construct and maintain massive military bases in the Philippines and to use Filipinos as vast pool of cheap and politically powerless labor.

Among the many notable American accomplishments in the Philippines was the destruction of the first republic to be established in Asia.

1901: PHILIPPINES. The U.S. establishes concentration camps in the Philippines. Eventually, hundreds of thousands of Filipinos will be held captive in the camps and thousands will die in them. American troops commit countless war crimes and atrocities, systematically destroying everything outside the so-called “dead lines”, including crops, boats, animals, houses, farm buildings and human beings. Property belonging to the concentration camp inmates is stolen. U.S. troops enslave Filipinos, particularly those of Chinese descent, as forced labor.

Torture is standard American procedure. The so-called water cure was very widely used by the U.S. in its war against the people of the Philippines. Other beneficiaries of "benevolent assimilation" were hanged by the thumbs, dragged by horses or hung with fires then started beneath them. A favorite American torture was tying a victim to a tree and shooting him or her through the legs. The victim was shot again each day until either he "confessed" or died.

American troops routinely murdered wounded Filipinos and bragged of "taking no prisoners". Official reports claimed that fifteen Filipinos were killed by the U.S. for every one wounded, almost the inverse of the norm. General Arthur McArthur, never one to miss an opportunity for a racist comment, explained the unsual death/wounded ratio by saying that whites do not succumb to wounds as readily as people of "inferior races."
The war in the Philippines has been conducted by the American army with scrupulous regard for the rules of civilized warfare, with careful and genuine consideration for the prisoner and the non-combatant, with self-restraint, and with humanity never surpassed. Elihu Root, U.S. Secretary of War
Root, highly paid shyster for some of the most ruthless Americans in history including William "Boss" Tweed and robber barons Jay Gould and E. H. Harriman was, not surprisingly, a little flexible when it came to matters of truth.

I am now stationed in a small town in charge of twenty five men, and have a territory of twenty miles to patrol....At the best, this is a very rich country; and we want it. My way of getting it would be to put a regiment into a skirmish line, and blow every nigger into nigger heaven. On Thursday, March 29, eighteen of my company killed seventy-five nigger bolomen and ten of the nigger gunners....When we find one that is not dead, we have bayonets. U.S. Soldier

BACKSTORY : AS USUAL A LITTLE HISTORICAL SETUP SEEMS TO BE IN ORDER ;)

BACK TO WHERE WE NEVER LEFT ?

1898: PHILIPPINES. On the night of October 24th, the President of the United States of America receives formal instructions from The Lord God Almighty

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"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, that there was nothing left for us to do...but to take them all (the former Spanish colonies) 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 fellow-men for whom Christ also 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 and I told him to put the Philippines on the map of the United States."

William McKinley's jihad against the Filipino people has begun. When told that the people of the Philippines are Roman Catholic, McKinley responds, "Exactly."

1900-1904: The Philippines, A Full Dress Rehearsal For Iraq

1900: PHILIPPINES. Genocide artist cum U.S. Army General Elwell Otis tries to deflect criticism of atrocities and torture by U.S. troops by claiming that the Filipinos who are defending their country are just as naughty as the Americans who have invaded and occupied it. Filipino leader Emilio Aguinaldo suggests that neutral journalists and representatives of the International Red Cross inspect his military operations.

Otis refuses to allow such a thing but Aguinaldo manages to smuggle four reporters,two English, one Canadian and one Japanese, into the countryside to see the treatment of American prisoners first hand. They report that American prisoners of the Filipinos are “treated more like guests than prisoners,” and are “fed the best that the country affords". The four reporters are expelled from the Philippines by the U.S. as soon as their stories are printed. American prisoners released by the Filipinos tell other reporters that they too had been well treated.

1901-02: PHILIPPINES. The Philippine resistance to the American occupation kills fifty four American troops in the town of Balangiga on Samar Island. Fighting back against the American occupation is, of course, strictly verboten and this relatively trivial opposition to the American theft of their country by Filipino patriots is massively propagandized by the U.S. press as the Balangiga Massacre.

The U.S. launches a vicious collective punishment of the Filipino people in retaliation. General Jacob H. Smith tells the commanding officer of the Marines assigned to "clean up" the island of Samar, "I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn; the more you kill and burn the better it will please me." He orders that the entire island of Samar be converted into a "howling wilderness." He specifically orders that all males over the age of ten are to be shot. Step one is to burn the town of Balangiga to the ground.

The U.S. then cuts food and trade in order to starve the people of Samar into submission to their American masters. U.S. troops rampage across the island looting and burning thousands of homes. And killing. In its relentless quest for justice, the United States slaughters tens of thousands of inhabitants of the island of Samar, virtually all of them helpless civilians.

Three church bells looted from the ruins of the parish church of Balangiga by American soldiers are still proudly held by the U.S. military, two at Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming and the other by the 9th Infantry Regiment, currently stationed in the U.S. client regime of South Korea.

A frisky volunteer from the state of Washington writes, "Our fighting blood was up, and we all wanted to kill 'niggers'....This shooting human beings beats rabbit hunting all to pieces."