Extermination

"It was represented to me that the Filipino will not work; that even when willing he can not work adequately; that increase of wages merely enables him to enjoy more idleness, and that the introduction of Chinese labor would act as a stimulus and by competition compel him to work. I even met Americans (I am ashamed to say) who, in their impatience at the slow-going Filipino, struck him or abused him with violent language, and boldly declared that the only thing to do is to exterminate him like the American Indian, replace him by Chinese, and develop the country...
My professed friendship for the Filipinos and my indignation at such un-American conduct on the part of not a few of my fellowcountrymen compelled me to study this problem..."
David H. Doherty, 1904

Senator Carmack's testimony / Reconcentration

While the American mood fluctuates between benevolent assimilation or
total extermination Senator E.W.Carmack comes on a visit to the
islands and finds Filipinas in full swing:

"The trade conditions observable at Manila are merely a reflection of
what may be witnessed in the interior. A journey through the
provinces can not help giving a most discouraging impression. Many
towns, formerly well-built, were destroyed during the war. Churches
are in ruins;whole villages, here and there, lie waste.

The growth in the import of rice is attributed to 1)The almost total
loss of their farm animals (estimated officially at 90% due to the
war and rinderpest) 2)Injury done to the irrigation system during the
war3)The scarcity of adult male labour as a result of the war. The
dispropotionate number of women and children consequent upon the war
is still noticeable...

...Notwithstanding that in the beginning many of the provinces were
organized as civil governments, it has been thought necessary now and
again to substitute them with a politico-military government, and to-
day at least six of the provinces are still organized on that basis.
Extreme military methods for controlling the population are provided
for by law and their application in certain cases authorized. Of
these the most marked is what is known as " reconcentration."

RECONCENTRATION: The use of this plan for reducing a population to
submission is authorized by section (i of the Commission's act No.
781, further organizing the constabulary, in the following
words: "'In provinces which are infested to such an extent with
ladrones or outlaws that the lives and property of residents in the
outlying barrios are rendered wholly insecure by continued predatory
raids. and such outlying barrios thus furnish to the ladrones or
outlaws their source of food supply * * * it shall be within the
power of the civil governor, upon resolution of the Commission. to
altilorize the provincial governor to order thaut the residents of
suchi outlying barrios be temporarily brought within stated proximity
to the poblacion or larger barrios."

It is a fact that no year has passed without the application of this
policy in a larger scale. In 1902 it was undertaken in the region
about Lake Taal, comprising parts of Laguna and Batangas provinces.
It then affected not less than 100.000 people, according to the
report of Colonel Wagner, who inspected the camps. ...each of which
included from 8000 to 14ooo persons. During 1903 the same plan was
pursued in Albay, where very large areas were entirely deprived of
population, the inhabitants being herded in camps.
Besides the official application of the policy on a larger scale,
other instances have occurred. Several camps now exist in Cavite, and
not long since, reconcentration was tried in Tayagas, without
official authority, according to ex-governor Taft. It is beyond the
question, from the testimony both natives and Americans who are
conversant with the workings of reconcentration that its effects are
the most disastrous, causing widespread suffering. In the camps food
is distributed only when extreme want requires it. .... The lack of
house accommodations and the scarcity of food as well as the
overcrowding of the inmates of the camps have invariably caused much
increase in mortality. At the same time there has been a tremendous
loss of crops and houses throughout the districts in which
reconcentration has taken place...

It is the testimony of capable American lawyers in Manila that under
existing law it is entirely possible to convict any human being in
the archipelago of "bandolerismo" (the local name for membership in
or assistance to organized bands of insurrectionists), without regard
to guilt. That such conviction can be secured is, in fact, the open
boast of some constabulary officials...
How effective have been may be seen from the situation in the Bibilid
prison...The total number of persons confined August 31, 1903,on
charges of "aiding insurrection, conspiracy,highway robbery, illegal
custody of arms, rebellion, sedition, violation of oath of
allegience, violation on articles of war, and treason was 1093. On a
recent date the number of men confined in Bilibid who had been
sentenced and were awaiting capital punishment was 100.

. As General Davis mildly states the situation (Report, 190.3, p.
31): "Americans in the Philippines have not so far been an unmixed
blessing to the native inhabitants". We have, in fact, destroyed the
public buildings of the country, inflicted continuous crop losses
during a period of six years; ravaged and burned large sections of
territory; produced conditions leading to the death of most of the
farm animals and to serious human and animal epidemics; brought
foreign trade to an unprofitable condition by our tariff legislation;
inaugurated a tremendously expensive government for the benefit of
foreign officeholders; established a partisan judiciary; crowded the
prisons and deported or sent to the gallows the best and most
patriotic of the native leaders.

Senator E.W. Carmack, December 1904

The Filipino genocide

Between the years 1899 and 1913 the United States of America wrote the darkest pages of its history. The invasion of the Philippines__ for no other reason than acquiring imperial possessions, prompted a fierce reaction of the Filipino people. 126000 American soldiers were brought in to quell the resistence. As a result, 400000 Filipino "insurrectos" died under the American fire and one million Filipino civilians died because of the hardship, mass killings and scorched earth tactics carried out by the Americans. In total the American war against a peaceful people who fairly ignored the existence of the Americans until their arrival wiped out 1/6 of the population of the country. One hundred years have passed. Isn't it high time that the USA army, Congress and Government apologised for the horrendous crimes and monstruous sufferings that inflicted upon the peoples of Filipinas?

Alfonso Velázquez


It was American policy at the turn of the century to kill as many Filipinos as possible. The rationale was straightforward: "With a very few exceptions, practically the entire population has been hostile to us at heart," wrote Brigadier General J. Franklin Bell, a propos our seizure of the Philippines. "In order to combat such a population, it is necessary to make the state of war as insupportable as possible, and there is no more efficacious way of accomplishing this than by keeping the minds of the people in such a state of anxiety and apprehension that living under such conditions will soon become intolerable."
The comparison of this highly successful operation with our less successful adventure in Vietnam was made by, among others, Bernard Fall, who referred to our conquest of the Philippines as "the bloodiest colonial war (in proportion to population) ever fought by a white power in Asia; it cost the lives of 3,000,000 Filipinos." (cf. E. Ahmed's "The Theory and Fallacies of Counter-Insurgency," The Nation, August 2, 1971.) General Bell himself, the old sweetheart, estimated that we killed one-sixth of the population of the main island of Luzon—some 600,000 people.
Now a Mr. Creamer quotes a Mr. Hill ("who grew up in Manila," presumably counting skulls) who suggests that the bodycount for all the islands is 300,000 men, women, and children—or half what General Bell admitted to.
I am amused to learn that I have wandered "so far from easily verified fact." There are no easily verified facts when it comes to this particular experiment in genocide. At the time when I first made reference to the 3,000,000 (NYR, October 18, 1973), a Filipino wrote me to say she was writing her master's thesis on the subject. She was inclined to accept Fall's figures but she said that since few records were kept and entire villages were totally destroyed, there was no way to discover, exactly, those "facts" historians like to "verify." In any case, none of this is supposed to have happened and so, as far as those history books that we use to indoctrinate the young go, it did not happen."

Gore Vidal

"EXCEPT during the sixties when the Filipino-American War of 1899-1902 was referred to as “the first Vietnam,” the death of 1.4 million Filipinos has been usually accounted for as either collateral damage or victims of insurrection against the imperial authority of the United States. The first Filipino scholar to make a thorough documentation of the carnage is the late Luzviminda Francisco in her contribution to The Philippines: The End of An Illusion (London, 1973).
This fact is not even mentioned in the tiny paragraph or so in most U.S. history textbooks. Stanley Karnow’s In Our Image (1989), the acclaimed history of this intervention, quotes the figure of 200,000 Filipinos killed in outright fighting. Among historians, only Howard Zinn and Gabriel Kolko have dwelt on the “genocidal” character of the catastrophe. Kolko, in his magisterial Main Currents in Modern American History (1976), reflects on the context of the mass murder: “Violence reached a crescendo against the Indian after the Civil War and found a yet bloodier manifestation during the protracted conquest of the Philippines from 1898 until well into the next decade, when anywhere from 200,000 to 600,000 Filipinos were killed in an orgy of racist slaughter that evoked much congratulation and approval....” Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980) cites 300,000 Filipinos killed in Bat@ngas alone, while William Pomeroy’s American Neo-Colonialism (1970) cites 600,000 Filipinos dead in Luzon alone by 1902. The actual figure of 1.4 million covers the period from 1899 to 1905 when resistance by the Filipino revolutionary forces mutated from outright combat in battle to guerilla skirmishes; it doesn’t include the thousands of Moros (Filipino Muslims) killed in the first two decades of U.S. colonial domination."

E. San Juan, Jr.




In A People’s History of the United States Howard Zinn writes of American sadism during the Philippine-American war:

"In November 1901, the Manila correspondent of The Philadelphia Ledger reported:
“The present war is no bloodless, opera bouffe engagement; our men have been relentless, have killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people from lads of ten up, the idea prevailing that the Filipino as such was little better than a dog...
“Our soldiers have pumped salt water into men to make them talk, and have taken prisoners people who held up their hands and peacefully surrendered, and an hour later, without an atom of evidence to show that they were even insurrectos, stood them on a bridge and shot them down one by one, to drop into the water below and float down, as examples to those who found their bullet-loaded corpses.”
In Manila, a U.S. Marine named Littletown Waller, a major, was accused of shooting eleven defenseless Filipinos, without trial, on the island of Samar. Other marine officers described his testimony:
"The major said that General Smith instructed him to kill and burn, and said that the more he killed and burned the better pleased he would be; that it was no time to take prisoners, and that he was to make Samar a howling wilderness. Major Waller asked General Smith to define the age limit for killing, and he replied “everything over ten.”
In the province of Bat@ngas, the secretary of the province estimated that of the population of 300,000, one third had been killed by combat, famine, or disease.
American firepower was overwhelmingly superior to anything the Filipino rebels could put together. In the very first battle, Admiral Dewey steamed up the Pasig River and fired 500-pound shells into the Filipino trenches. Dead Filipinos were piled so high that the Americans used their bodies for breastworks.
A British witness said:
“this is not war; it is simply massacre and murderous butchery.”
Mark Twain said further of the brutal American genocide:
“...I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the philippines. we have gone to conquer, not to redeem... and so i am an anti-imperialist. i am opposed to having the [american] eagle put its talons on any other land.”
Mark Twain
October 15, 1900
the new york herald

“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; subjugated the remaining ten millions by Benevolent Assimilation, which is the pious new name of the musket; we have acquired property in the three hundred concubines and other slaves of our business partner, the Sultan of Sulu, and hoisted our protecting flag over that swag.
“And so, by these providences of god — and the phrase is the government’s, not mine — we are a World Power.”

— Mark Twain

El genocidio filipino

EL PRIMER GENOCIDIO

El Padre Fray Manuel Arellano Remondo, al informarnos que "la población disminuyó por razón de las guerras", se refiere indudablemente a las víctimas de la Guerra entre la primera República de Filipinas de 1898 y Estados Unidos de Norteamérica.

Esa disminución de la población filipina nos lo señala luego otra fuente, esta vez norteamericana, como constituyendo "la sexta parte de la población filipina".

La fuente norteamericana a la que nos referimos es la del historiador James B. Goodno autor del libro The Philippines: Land of Broken Promises, Nueva York, 1998, cuya página 31 nos suministra esa importante cifra y dato. Si hemos de creer que fue la sexta parte de la población filipina la que pereció como víctima de las sangrientas masacres perpetradas por la soldadesca invasora de Estados Unidos entre 1898 y 1902, las bajas de una población total de nueve millones sumarían, de hecho, a un millón y medio (1,500,000).

Y, diga lo que se diga, este hecho histórico es evidencia de nada menos que un genocidio cometido en contra del pueblo filipino que precisamente es de habla española. Si ahora se puede inclusive decir que el español nunca se habló en Filipinas, ese resultado es la evidencia misma del genocidio perpetrado durante la guerra filipino-usense que se prolongó hasta 1907, ----incluyendo la masiva resistencia armada puesta frente a la invasión militar de Estados Unidos, por parte del segundo presidente y general de la República Filipina de 1898, Macario Sacay y de León.

(El Presidente Sacay asumió el poder tras la captura y arresto domiciliar del Presdiente Aguinaldo; pero en 1906 fue engañado, mediante políticos filipinos (que empezaron a creer en la "benevolencia" norteamericana), con una falsa oferta de amnistía y un puesto a la proyectada Asamblea Nacional. Fue calladamente ahorcado en 1907 de una forma injusta y totalmente criminal en comparación con el caso de José Rizal. ¡Ahorcaron criminalmente al segundo presidente de la República de Filipinas!)

El citado Don Luciano de la Rosa nos informa que "es de esperar que una enorme proporción de esas bajas sean filipinos de habla hispana ya que eran los de este habla los que mejor entendían los conceptos de independencia y libertad y los que escribieron obras en idioma español sobre dichas ideas".

Guillermo Gómez-Rivera