Quick Reading: Philippine-American War (1899-1903)

It puzzles me (though perhaps it shouldn't anymore) that regard for the Philippine-American war had been relatively shy and tight-lipped--as though, by design, thrifty, stingy, or demure. I view it of course in contrast to the emphases taxed on the Spanish, the Japanese, the Marcoses, in cargoes of essays, plays, films, fiction, poetry, music, not least of all paintings, some even sculpture.... Essays orbiting 1899-1903 convince me of just how baleful my sense of history has been. Some of them did anger me; but even more alerted me to my lame, lazy register of the story of our nation. Links below direct you to the sites that have posted some such writings in very brief excerpts, if not in the original. Most of you, I'm certain, speak of a measure of awareness (some to astuteness) as concerns the revolution and the Fil-Am war. It shames me so that I have only now begun an attentive tour of those chapters in our nation's saga.

Of course, though I inserted the essay "To the Person Sitting in Darkness," I do not count it an especially affirming note to the cause then of the Philippine revolution. Little about the author's being the famous Mark Twain (or Samuel Langhorne Clemens minus the pen) made the freedom cause, for me, all the more silly or by notches the more right. Twain, being the humorist writer he was known to be (i.e. of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Celebrated Jumping Frog, my favorite The Gilded Age, and Innocents Abroad), had been largely taken to in his time as satirist and comic. Now, I look on his words approvingly on account not of their being the fiery protests of a well-known Westerner, but of their being fair and frank in their admissions. I prefer his words read by many for whatever is much that they hint of the drifts of thinking, rare or usual in the America of those years. This was eras before Guantanamo, decades ahead of the camps in the Holocaust or the merciless bombings of towns in Japan, way prior to the Vietnam War, the Korean massacres, and the Bay of Pigs Invasion. And to my mind, it merits some deal, if not of telling, at least of our remembering as those bequeathed the gains of past hope, courage, and sacrifice.

I'm not Anti-American, at all, and I don't find that unseemly to say for the reasons in which I ardently believe. The American establishment, besides, is not alone with a history of foreign occupations, abuse and killings. What I'm against is any policy, domestic or foreign, that helps make a reality of some of the horrors narrated in the writings I would like shared with you--most of them meticulous to the final appalling detail. What renders them so depressing for me is the fact of our encounter, as a people, with such a terror of a policy in action, something launched in the interest of a "civilizing mission," which though harrowing and violent in itself could not even live up to its surface justifications. The American (as can and must other) society can be a close friend to any separate community. But if it ages to desert unsolved the puzzle that has been its very history (pieces of which built from well beyond its territory), we, beyond being co-actors in just such tale, must know the parts of it that make a fraction of our narrative... We study events to check them less for the debate that knowledge of them occasions than for the lessons they impart which we may apply to our time... Frank McCourt wrote in the novel Angela's Ashes that "no one can make up an empty mind; you must stock it"; and I agree with him. The first Fil-Am war is only one event among several, several like it which we must recall for the wisdom and the empowerment there is to earn from it. Knowledge is right here for us to wield, though not always without cost, usually with benefits to outvalue the price paid for it. The point is not to reap anyone or thing the affection or loathing that's useless or unfair to give now. In remaining in contact with the roots of a past rich in pain, we need not forgo our chances at relief, recovery, joy, cooperation, friendship, respect, and peace. We must arm each other with the knowledge of what we cannot again let happen, things we were once at pains to survive as a still young nation, those that we must, by now, be advised not to allow to repeat in the Philippines or elsewhere.

Another link, by the way, leads to "Battle Royal," chapter one of Ralph Ellison's wonderfully crafted "The Invisible Man." It's worth your time. -tears, tears, tears- Hee hee. (For still more classic fiction reading, you can check out http://members.lycos.co.uk/shortstories/) Peruse galore!

"Proclamation of War" by Pedro Paterno

"The Balangiga Massacre: Getting Even" by Victor Nebrida

"Kipling, 'the White Man's Burden,' & US Imperialism" in Monthly Review

"To the Person Sitting in Darkness" by Mark Twain


"Mark Twain - Anti-Imperialist" in Mark Twain's Weapons of Satire: Anti-Imperialist Writings on the Philippine-American War by Jim Zwick

"Ferocity of the Filipinos" in The New York Times (07 August 1899)

"Kramer Revisits the Fil-am War" in The Johns Hopkins University Gazette

"The Water Cure: Debating torture and counterinsurgency—a century ago" by Paul Kramer

"Macario Sakay: Tulisan or Patriot?" by Paul Flores

"Miguel Malvar, the Last Holdout" by Paul Dimayuga

"Keeping the Spirit of 1896 Alive" by Onofre D. Corpuz

"Gen. Jose Ignacio Paua: A Chinese General in the Philippine Revolution" by Teresita Ang-See


EXTRA:


"Martyrdom of a Leader" by Alexader Remollino

"Ugly Balikbayans and Heroic OCWs" by Vicente L. Rafael