Friday, April 25, 2008

1905-1909: Treacherous Muslims and Ze Quest For Ze Master Race

1905: HONDURAS. U.S. Marines invade Honduras “to protect interests”.

1905: DOMINICAN REPUBLIC. The U.S. invades and occupies the cities of Monte Cristo, Puerto Plata, Samana and Sanchez in order to seize customs revenues on behalf of U.S. banking interests. U.S. Navy vessels remain off the coast to intimidate any Dominicans who might be harboring foolish ideas about defending their country.

1905: RUSSIA. In the first of many attempts to grab Russian oil reserves, robber baron John D. Rockefeller sends large sums of money to Lenin and Trotsky in an attempt to topple the Czar, who won't let Rockefeller have the goodies. Rockefeller's goal is to instigate and control the first Communist revolution in Russia and then get his hands on the oil with the connivance of the grateful revolutionaries.

1905-1913: UNITED STATES. The major bankers, including America's most ruthless robber barons, begin conspiring to establish a privately-owned central bank which will create and control the U.S. money supply, effectively giving the robber barons almost complete control of the U.S. economy. Among the conspirators are J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, the Rothschilds and Paul Warburg.

In a particularly devious plot to build public and political support for a central bank, Morgan publishes rumors that many American banks are insolvent, creating a run on the banks. The smaller banks then have to call in loans in order to repay their depositors, forcing borrowers to sell their properties for a pittance. The result is a spiral of bankruptcy leading to the financial collapse of 1907.

The collapse is duly followed by a Senate commission which, by amazing coincidence, determines that a central bank, exactly as envisioned by the men who had brought about the collapse in the first place, is the answer to all these little financial difficulties. By another amazing coincidence, the Senate commission is headed by none other than Nelson Aldrich, a man deep in the bankers' deep pockets and soon to be married into the Rockefeller family.

A happy side effect of the Panic of 1907, as with all other panics, depressions and financial collapses, is that the boys in the back room, the Rockefellers, Morgans, Rothschilds, Warburgs and their clubmates, can swoop down and pick up the wreckage of their smaller competitors' banks for a fraction of their previous worth, consolidating their control of the banking industry.

The Morgan interests took advantage
to precipitate the panic (of 1907),
guiding it shrewdly as it progressed.
Fredrik Allen, Life Magazine.

1906: UNITED STATES. Emma Goldman is arrested in New York at an anarchist meeting called to protest police suppression of free speech at a previous meeting. Can't be havin' no free speech about suppression of free speech in the land of the free now, can we? Is it okay to say that?

1906:PHILIPPINES. The resistance of the Muslim "Moro" people of the Philippines to the invasion and occupation of their country by the U.S. goes on. The Moros total some three hundred thousand people, less than five percent of the total Filipino population, but control about forty five percent of the land area, a situation the American invaders find intolerable.

The Lord God Almighty through his representative on Earth, William McKinley, had on October 24, 1898, personally ordered the U.S. to seize the Philipppines and so the U.S. duly carries out a genocidal campaign against the "savage" Moros, destroying homes and villages, slaughtering men, women and children. The American crusade against the Moros reaches its low point at what is euphemistically called the Battle of Bud Dajo.

About six hundred people, most of whom are unarmed women and children, seek sanctuary in the fortified crater of an extinct volcano on Jolo Island. The Moro men are armed with less than two hundred old rifles and with knives and spears. Their "artillery" consists of rocks to be thrown at the attackers.

Major General Leonard Wood, a good buddy of Theodore Roosevelt's, leads about eight hundred American soldiers to the crater. Artillery pieces are brought up and ranged around the lip of the crater and then used to slaughter the Moros "like fish in a barrel", killing every single person in the crater. Among the dead are 196 women and 340 children. The Washington Post breathlessly prints the story of the Bud Dajo massacre as the “Thrilling Story of American Valor.” Theodore Roosevelt, not to be outdone by anyone in the murderous bullshit sweepstakes, congratulates Wood on “the brilliant feat of arms wherein you....so well upheld the honor of the American flag.”

U.S. Secretary of War William Howard Taft, cables Roosevelt that “the well-known treachery of the Mohammedan” and “the fanatical and savage desire that their women and children should perish with them” made the slaughter “unavoidable.” It sure is a relief to know that America retains the moral high ground and that the massacre was the fault of them filthy, fanatical Muslims and not the pure, white Christian boys lobbing the shells down on their heads. As the bodies of Muslim families rot in Bud Dajo, Taft throws a Philippine-themed dinner party.

President Roosevelt finds Taft's explanation “entirely satisfactory.” An official whitewash, excuse the pun, quickly clears Wood of having done anything un-Christian. Instead of swinging on the end of a rope as a mass murderer and war criminal, Wood is, appropriately enough, made U.S. Army Chief of Staff.

We will conquer the world,
but we will lose our soul.
John Quincy Adams

1906: UNITED STATES. Black troops riot against racial segregation in the U.S. military. Three companies of black soldiers are discharged by President Theodore Roosevelt. Can't be havin' no uppity niggers trying to upset apartheid in the U.S. Army.

1906: HONDURAS. U.S. Marines invade Honduras “to protect interests”.

1906: MEXICO. In the spirit of international cooperation, Arizona State Troopers are brought into Mexico by the management to slaughter workers striking at the American-owned Cananea copper mine.

The people of Mexico will have
to be supplanted by another race,
which is gradually being done,
before any great development
can be expected there.
James Stillman

1906: PHILIPPINES. Filipinos enjoy the boundless benefits of America's God-directed "benevolent assimilation" when Dr. Richard "Mengele" Strong, a professor of tropical medicine at Harvard, experiments with cholera on prisoners in the Philippines, killing thirteen of the filthy heathen.

1906-ongoing: UNITED STATES. Devout Christian, corn flake magnate and anti-masturbation campaigner J.H. Kellogg begins ze quest for ze master race by founding The Race Betterment Foundation. Kellogg was a classic master race proponent, a screaming loony, who put boxing gloves on little boys at bedtime so they couldn't touch their pee pees and considered a daily enema of several gallons of water to have a beneficial effect in reducing sexual tension. Maybe he had a point, the enema was so much fun, you didn't need anything else.
A remedy for masturbation which is almost always successful in small boys is circumcision. The operation should be performed by a surgeon without administering an anesthetic, as the brief pain attending the operation will have a salutary effect upon the mind, especially if it be connected with the idea of punishment. In females, the author has found the application of pure carbolic acid to the clitoris an excellent means of allaying the abnormal excitement. J.H. Kellogg

Contrary to what we have been carefully programmed to believe, the quest for the master race was not a creation of the German Nazis but of the American ruling elite and their minions, following naturally from the racism of the "Founding Fathers" including slave owner Thomas Jefferson who wrote that "blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind."

Kellogg, a staunch advocate of apartheid who believed that the American gene pool would be "contaminated" by immigrants and various inferior races, will soon be joined by the Rockefellers, the Harrimans, the Dulles family, the Bush family and many other members of the ruling class and their lackeys who will finance and promote the pseudo-science of eugenics not only throughout the United States but in Germany, leading ultimately to the mass murder of tens of millions of Slavs, Jews, Gypsies and other "subhumans".

Eugenics enjoys rapid growth in America's rich racist soil and becomes an integral part of American culture. Ministers of the Christian religion are encouraged to make reference to the quest for racial purity in their sermons and are given awards by the American Eugenics Society for their efforts.

American high school biology texts contain chapters on limiting immigration and on sterilization and race segregation in the cause of eugenics. When the motion picture is invented, eugenics movies are quickly made and distributed. American children are taught that eugenics is morally right and is the only way to preserve ze "purity of America's gene pool". "Fitter Family" contests are held at state fairs to determine the "purity" of a family's bloodline. Losers are sent to the gas chambers. Sorry, just kidding. For the time being, at least.

1906-09: CUBA. The U.S. invades and occupies Cuba to “protect American interests” by controlling the outcome of elections.

1906: UNITED STATES. Ten blacks and two whites are killed during race rioting in Atlanta.

1907: NICARAGUA. The U.S. invades Nicaragua at Puerto Cortés on behalf of the usual "interests", American coporations.

1907: HONDURAS. U.S. troops invade and occupy five Honduran cities to “protect American interests”. Try to guess what they are.

1907: CHILE. The American-supported Chilean dictatorship uses machine guns supplied by the U.S. to gun down as many as three thousand striking saltpeter workers and their families in Iquique. The workers are part of the growing labor movement in Chile which threatens to reduce the profits of business owners by demanding a living wage and safer working conditions.

1908: PANAMA. U.S. troops invade to ensure the "correct" outcome of elections.

1907: UNITED STATES. Emma Goldman is arrested in New York while attempting to exercise freedom of speech by speaking on "The Misconceptions of Anarchism". Naughty Emma.

1908: UNITED STATES. A fifteen year veteran of the U.S. Army, William Buwalda, shakes Emma Goldman's hand after she gives a lecture on patriotism in San Francisco. Buwalda is duly court martialed and sentenced to five years hard labor and a dishonorable discharge. Naughty William. There ain't no constitutional right to shake hands.

1908: UNITED STATES. When two accused black men are transferred from the local jail for their own safety, white residents of Springfield, Illinois go on a racist rampage. The residents of Abraham Lincoln's home town set fire to homes and businesses in the black section of Springfield. A crowd of almost twelve thousand comes to watch the fun and sabotages attempts by fire fighters to put out the blazes. A black man who attempts to defend his business is killed, his business is burned and his body hung from a tree.

Thousands of black residents flee Springfield as five thousand National Guard troops enter. The National Guard does not stop the killing. The mob seizes an eighty four year old black man whose crime is being married to a white woman. The mob cuts his throat and lynches him in a schoolyard. Forty black owned homes and some twenty black businesses are destroyed in the rioting. At least seven people are killed.

Ultimately, a grand jury brings in over a hundred indictments but only one defendant is convicted of a crime, stealing a sword. The white woman who had directed much of the violence committed suicide before facing charges. The woman whose accusation of rape had started the rioting, later admitted that she had lied.

1908-1921: UNITED STATES. Black boxer Jack Johnson knocks out Tommy Burns in Australia and becomes heavyweight boxing champion of the world. Johnson's victory sets off a firestorm of racism orchestrated by the American press who call for a "great white hope to restore order to the world."

The great white hope is former champion Jim Jeffries who comes out of retirement saying, "I am going into this fight for the sole purpose of proving that a white man is better than a Negro." At the 1910 fight between Johnson and Jeffries, the ringside band plays "All coons look alike to me" and the all-white crowd chants "Kill the nigger".

Jeffries is, in fact, the great white disappointment and Johnson whups his white ass real good. Johnson's victory is followed by race riots throughout the U.S., as white lynch mobs attack black neighborhoods. The Texas Legislature bans films of Johnson's victories over white boxers. In 1913, Johnson flees the U.S. in the wake of trumped up charges of violating the Mann Act's stipulations against transporting white women across state lines for prostitution. He returns to the U.S. in 1920 and is duly arrested and sent to Leavenworth Prison where there is a reduced risk of him defeating any white boxing champions.

1909: UNITED STATES. A Greek man accused of having an affair with a “white” woman in Omaha kills a police officer trying to arrest him, presumably under the city's No Porking of Honky Women by Greeks ordinance. The Omaha Daily News unleashes a hate campaign against immigrants. "Greeks are a menace to the American laboring man...just as the Japs, Italians, and other similar laborers (are)," the paper tells its readers.

When mobs fail in their attempt to seize and lynch the accused, they turn on the neighborhood of Greek Town, burning and looting homes and businesses and beating men, women and children. Eventually, every building in the immigrant neighborhood is burned to the ground. Police do nothing to stop the violence and, ultimately all people of Greek descent are driven from the area.

The news and truth are not the same thing.
Walter Lippmann

1909-1912: NICARAGUA. The United States repeatedly invades Nicaragua to “protect American interests” which consist primarily of those of the notorious Brown Brothers Bank, financial backer of slave cotton production and later to be instrumental in the financing of the rise of the German Nazi party and Adolf Hitler via George W. Bush’s grandfather, Prescott Bush, and, by amazing coincidence, in the selling of put options prior to the World Trade Center attacks in 2001.

1909-59: CUBA. A series of U.S.-maintained racist white dictatorships, sometimes installed via stage-managed “elections”, rules Cuba. Corruption, repression, racial discrimination and hopeless poverty for the majority are the norm while the local white elite such as the Bacardi family and wealthy Americans such as merchant of death, master race proponent and Nazi supporter-to-be Irenee Dupont steal the land and wealth of the country.

1909: UNITED STATES. Female garment workers go on strike in New York and a large number are duly arrested. Can't be havin' no withdrawal of labor in the land of the free. The presiding judge tells the arrested women, "You are on strike against God."

Thursday, March 20, 2008

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

1900: UNITED STATES. Cuba begins to benefit mightily from its forced association with America as Walter Reed infects twenty two workers in Cuba with yellow fever paying them $100 if they survive and $200 if they contract the disease. They name a military hospital after the heroic doctor.

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: CHINA. U.S. Marines invade China to “secure facilities” for Rockefeller’s Standard Oil.

1901: COLOMBIA. The U.S. invades the Colombian state of Panama to “protect interests”.

1901: UNITED STATES. The U.S. Army violently suppresses a Creek Indian revolt in Oklahoma.

1901: CUBA. The infamous Platt Amendment to the U.S. Army Appropriations Bill “gives the U.S. the right (sic)” to “intervene militarily in Cuba whenever the U.S. decides such intervention is warranted.” The Cubans, still under military occupation by the U.S., are given the “option” of accepting the Platt Amendment as part of the Cuban Constitution or having the U.S. remain in occupation of Cuba forever.

1901-22: UNITED STATES. In a series of decisions, the U.S. Supreme Court rules that colonies of the United States which, as we all know, do not exist, are constitutional but that U.S. constitutional rights do not necessarily apply to the colonized peoples of the non-existent colonies. Praise the Lord we got that straight.

1901: UNITED STATES. That revered American institution, the lone assassin, springs out of the woodwork at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, and fires a few shots into the Rockefellers' hand picked and financed boy, President William McKinley.

McKinley survives and seems to be recovering nicely but then, unexpectedly and unaccountably, goes downhill and dies. The culprit is one Leon Czolgosz, identified as an anarchist. At the time, native Americans having been genocided almost out of existence, anarchism was the bogey man of the day and the excuse for whatever repression was required to maintain the status quo. The war on anarchism, to coin a phrase, was especially useful in keeping factory workers laboring away in atrocious conditions for a pittance in order to further enrich the ruling class.

On McKinley's being taken into the bosom of God, the Morgans' boy, Theodore Roosevelt, vaults into the presidency, having been vice-president for only six months since the death of Garret Hobart. Roosevelt is ideal presidential material: a racist, warmongering, jingoistic tool of the Morgans. What more could the ruling elite ask for?

I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn't like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth. Theodore Roosevelt
The shooting of McKinley provides an excellent opportunity for some fear mongering and persecution. In Chicago, nine anarchists are charged with conspiracy to assassinate McKinley although there is absolutely no evidence linking them to the assassination. Another anarchist is arrested for, gasp, publishing an article in a German language anarchist paper. In Kansas, vigilantes attack a meeting of anarchists. In Wyoming, a man expressing sympathy for Czolgosz is tarred and feathered. In New York, a suspected anarchist is mobbed.

It's amazing how fast the wheels of "justice" can spin when they want to. Ole Lee Harvey, sorry, Leon is arrested, tried, convicted and is sitting on death row, all within twenty days of the shooting, getting a quick lesson in Truth, Justice Or The American Way. Czolgosz exercises his Constitutional right to remain silent. His lawyer, Loran Lewis, does not call any witnesses in Czolgosz' defense and, apparently never having heard of the Constitution, tells the jury that his client's silence is an admission of guilt. With a defense attorney like that, who needs a prosecutor? Czolgosz is duly fried in the electric chair. Lewis goes on to greater things.

1901: UNITED STATES. Emma Goldman, taking all that bullshit about free speech a little too literally for the powers-that-be, writes an article describing the late McKinley as the "president of the money kings and trust magnates." Goldman is duly arrested, "vigorously" interrogated, held for two weeks then released without being charged with any crime. Goldman was, of course, absolutely right. McKinley was exactly what she said; bought and paid for by the Rockefellers and their clubmates. Moreover, McKinley was the first great war criminal and mass murderer of the twentieth century, a trivial detail which remains buried beneath the usual mountain of pious nonsense.

1901: CUBA. The rape of Cuba by the U.S. ruling class gets underway with a vengeance. American lumber interests move in and begin clear cutting Cuba's ten million acres of virgin timber. American companies take over mines, sugar plantations and railroads. The Rockefellers' murderous United Fruit swoops down on Cuba "buying" almost two million acres of the country for twenty cents an acre. Within a year, more than eighty percent of Cuban mineral exports are in American corporate hands.

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."

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
1902: COLOMBIA. A U.S. naval blockade is set up and American forces invade the Colombian state of Panama to prevent the government of Colombia defending the Isthmus against an impending U.S. attack.

1902: UNITED STATES. President Theodore Roosevelt does his bit for white supremacy as he inaugurates Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day. Thirty thousand people hear Roosevelt speak with “indignation in every word" about this “small but peculiarly trying and difficult war” and "the honor of the flag”. Best of all, Roosevelt characterizes America's genocidal imperial war against the people of the Philippines as a "triumph of civilization over forces which stand for the black chaos of savagery and barbarism."

To what extent Roosevelt is just performing his primary task as president and lying and to what extent he is delusional remain open to debate but the Filipino people, of whom America will eventually kill almost a million and whose country will be effectively stolen from them for almost a century, would doubtless challenge Roosevelt's statement that it is a small war.

But Roosevelt's slimy racist hypocrisy at least has an appropriate venue. Arlington National Cemetery, theoretically the final resting place of valiant American warriors, will become the final resting place of some of America's worst mass murderers, Nazis and traitors.

1902: UNITED STATES. Senator George Hoar demands an investigation as evidence mounts of U.S. war crimes in the Philippines. Theodore Roosevelt resists Hoar’s demands and growing public opposition to the racist, imperialist war against the people of the Philippines and persistent reports of war crimes, atrocities and torture by American troops.

A public statement by American Brigadier General Jacob H. Smith that he intended to set the entire Philippine island of Samar ablaze and would probably wipe out most of the population, finally forces Roosevelt to do a little PR work. He gives the job of whitewashing American war crimes to dyed–in-the-wool imperialist, Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge whose standing U.S. Senate Committee on the Philippines has been studiously avoiding the question of American war crimes for months.

But even Lodge can’t keep the lid on the cauldron of war crimes and torture being acted out by the United States of America. The first witness is the latest U.S.-installed dictator of the Philippines, William Howard Taft, who concedes under questioning that Filipinos are being tortured by the U.S. military. General Robert P. Hughes, chief of staff to genocide artist, General Elwell S. Otis, concedes that Filipino houses are burned indiscriminately. David P. Barrows, explains that the concentration camps established by the U.S. military and the tortures being conducted by the U.S. are not really as bad as people think and that the Filipinos are actually benefiting from it all.

The report of the U.S.-installed dictator of the province of Tayabas, Major Cornelius Gardener is presented to the Committee:
Of late by reason of the conduct of the troops, such as the extensive burning of the barrios in trying to lay waste the country so that the insurgents (sic) cannot occupy it, the torturing of natives by so-called water cure and other methods, in order to obtain information, the harsh treatment of natives generally, and the failure of inexperienced, lately appointed Lieutenants commanding posts, to distinguish between those who are friendly and those unfriendly and to treat every native as if he were, whether or no, an insurrecto (sic) at heart, this favorable sentiment above referred to is being fast destroyed and a deep hatred toward us engendered.
Attempts to have Major Gardener appear before the Committee are duly blocked.

Sergeant Charles S. Riley testifies about entire villages being burned by U.S. forces and described the "water cure" torture carried out by U.S. troops against Filipinos.
A.(The victim) was tied and placed on his back under a water-tank holding probably one hundred gallons. The faucet was opened, and a stream of water was forced down or allowed to run down his throat. His throat was held so he could not prevent swallowing the water, so that he had to allow the water to run into his stomach. He was directly under the faucet, with his mouth held wide open. When he was filled with water, it was forced out of him by pressing a foot on his stomach or else with the hands; and this continued from five to fifteen minutes." A native interpreter stood directly over this man as he lay on the floor, and "kept saying some one word which I should judge meant 'confess' or 'answer.' When this unhappy man was taken down and asked more questions, he again refused to answer, and then was treated again.
Q. In front?
A. Yes, on the stone walk. They started to take him inside the building, and Captain Glenn said, "Don't take him inside. Right here is good enough." One of the men of the Eighteenth Infantry went to his saddle and took a syringe from the saddlebag, and another man was sent for a can of water, what we call a kerosene can, holding about five gallons. He brought this can of water down from upstairs, and then a syringe was inserted one end in the water and the other end in his mouth. This time he was not bound, but he was held by four or five men and the water was forced into his mouth from the can, through the syringe.
Q.
Was this another party?

A.
No, this was the same man. The syringe did not seem to have the desired effect, and the doctor ordered a second one. The man got a second syringe, and that was inserted in his nose. Then the doctor (Dr. Lyons, an American) ordered some salt, and a handful of salt was procured and thrown into the water. Two syringes were then in operation. The interpreter stood over him in the meantime asking for this second information that was desired. Finally, he gave in and gave the information that they sought, and then he was allowed to rise.
Private William L Smith corroborates Sergeant Riley's testimony and admits that he had assisted in the complete destruction by burning of the town of Igbaras, a town of ten thousand people. Sergeant Edward J. Davis related other incidents of torture by U.S. forces and the burning of another town of twelve thousand people. Other witnesses recounted similar incidents.
Until recently, I had thought that these things (torture) were sporadic and isolated, but I have been forced to the belief that they are but a part of the general plan of campaign. Senator Joseph Lafayette Rawlins
By a strict party vote, the Committee refuses to call other proposed witnesses, calling witnesses instead from a "safe" list created by the U.S. War Department. The attempt to hide the truth of what the U.S. is doing to the Filipino people backfires when the veterans on the safe list begin lecturing the anti-imperialist members of the Committee on the need to shoot and/or burn all Filipinos because of their "inability to appreciate human kindness."

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.

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 Phillipines 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.

1903: HONDURAS. U.S. Marines invade to stop a popular revolution against the U.S. client Honduran dictatorship.

1903-present: CUBA. Using the Platt Amendment as the “legal” basis, the U.S. steals and occupies a large area of land around Guantanamo Bay, Cuba in order to construct a massive naval base which, a century later, will be used as part of a worldwide network of offshore concentration camps and torture centers by the Government of the United States of America.

1903-04: DOMINICAN REPUBLIC. U.S. forces invade and occupy the capital city of Santo Domingo to “protect American interests” by preventing a nationalist revolution against the U.S.-supported dictatorship.

1903-14: COLOMBIA. The government of Colombia refuses to cave in to U.S.-dictated conditions for the construction of a canal through the Isthmus of Panama.The JP Morgan banking interests, which essentially own the Roosevelt regime, buy, for a pittance, the shares of the French company which had been trying to build a canal through the Isthmus.

A Morgan-connected lobbyist for the Panama Canal Company, lawyer William Cromwell, then directs, literally from Roosevelt's White House, a stage managed “revolution” and subsequent invasion and occupation of the Colombian state of Panama by the U.S. The “nation” of Panama is invented out of thin air by Sullivan and the boys and a U.S.-controlled puppet dictatorship is installed.

The farcical Hay-Buneau Treaty is signed, purporting to grant the U.S. authority over a ten mile wide strip of "Panama" in perpetuity. Giving away the land on behalf of the invented country of "Panama" is a Frenchman named Buneau, a shareholder of the French company which had failed in its attempt to build a canal. After providing his meaningless signature on the document signing away "Panama's" territory, Buneau hotfoots it to Washington for his cash payoff and then goes home to France, never to set foot in the mythical nation of "Panama" again.

The Roosevelt regime hands $40 million of U.S. government money to the Morgan interests which had acquired the worthless French canal company prior to the "revolution". By amazing coincidence, one of the major beneficiaries of the scam is Teddy Roosevelt's brother-in-law Douglas E. Robinson, a director of Morgan's Astor National Bank who pockets a cool six million bucks.

William Cromwell is made the fiscal agent of the newly invented "nation" of Panama, a very profitable position. His law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell and its two star shysters, brothers Allen and John Foster Dulles, will go on to play the pivotal role in organizing the cartels and business deals which will eventually bring us Adolf Hitler and the Second World War.

1903: UNITED STATES. Mary Harris ("Mother") Jones leads child workers demanding a maximum fifty five hour work week.

1904: UNITED STATES. Racist war monger and Nazi mouthpiece-to-be William Randolph Hearst begins publishing articles in his San Francisco Chronicle on the yellow menace of Japanese laborers in California. Hearst's hate and fear campaign will lead to the California legislature passing a resolution that Japanese immigration must be prevented.

1904: UNITED STATES. As the slaughter in the Philippines rages on, censorship and self-censorship prevent the publication of Mark Twain's War Prayer, a scathing indictment of the unholy alliance of religion and false patriotism which is invariably used to manipulate Americans into supporting the imperial war du jour. Harper's Bazaar refuses to print the story and since Twain is under contract to them, he cannot publish it elsewhere. Twain later concedes that he avoided publishing the story in subsequent years because "he had a family to support" and publication of the War Prayer in the land of the free would effectively end his career. Twain wrote to a friend, "Only dead men can tell the truth in this world." The War Prayer is duly published after his death.

1904: UNITED STATES. The Colorado Militia is used to suppress a miners' strike at Dunnville. Six strikers are killed. Almost eighty miners are "deported" to Kansas.

1904: DOMINICAN REPUBLIC. U.S. and British forces invade and occupy Puerto Plata, Sosua and Santo Domingo to “protect national interests”.

1904: PANAMA. U.S. forces invade the recently invented "nation" of Panama to suppress the Panamanian independence movement. Can't be havin' no locals runnin' the place.

1904-05: KOREA. U.S. Marines invade and intervene in the Russo-Japanese war.

Saturday, February 23, 2008

1895-1899: The Spanish-American War, A Sordid Little War



1895: COLOMBIA. U.S. troops invade the Colombian state of Panama to “protect American interests”.

1895: UNITED STATES. Josiah Strong, minister of the Christian religion, publishes Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis, in which he contends that the United States, as the home of the “superior” Anglo-Saxon race, has an obligation to spread political "liberty", "Christianity" and "civilization". Strong's book was enormously popular and the first edition sold 158,000 copies. The delusions of racial, moral and societal superiority promulgated by Strong were an important factor in encouraging Americans of the day to rationalize U.S. aggression against other nations.

1895: COLOMBIA. U.S. Marines invade the Colombian state of Panama. Again.

1895: UNITED STATES. Whites attack black workers in New Orleans killing six.

1896: UNITED STATES. Once again in the forefront of freedom and liberty, the United States Supreme Court puts its stamp of approval on apartheid in the land of the free. In Plessy v. Ferguson the Court rules that "separate but equal" facilities satisfy guarantees under the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

1895-98: UNITED STATES. Yellow media mogul and Nazi mouthpiece-to-be William Randolph Hearst and yellow media tycoon Joseph Pulizter engage in a contest to see which man can reduce American journalistic standards to the lowest possible level. A mixture of exaggeration, outright lies and fabrications, jingoistic nonsense, xenophobia and sensationalism, so-called "yellow journalism", apparently sells newspapers in the U.S. and Hearst and Pulitzer strive to outdo each other in their race to the sewers. The two newspaper barons play the major role in "manufacturing consent" by manipulating the U.S. public before and during the long-planned war which led to the U.S. invasions of Cuba, the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico.

In fantasyland America, Pulitzer, who plumbed the depths of sleazy and dishonest publishing, will ultimately be remembered only for the Pulitzer Prize, ironically intended as a recognition of quality journalism.

1896: UNITED STATES. Vivisection gets a boost when Dr. Arthur Wentworth performs spinal taps on twenty nine children at Children's Hospital in Boston to determine if the procedure is harmful.

1896: NICARAGUA. U.S. Marines invade the port of Corinto.

1896: UNITED STATES. Corporations directly buy their first presidential election. William McKinley is elected with $6 million in cash from from corporations. His opponent, populist William Jennings Bryan, has only $600,000 to spend on the campaign. The six mil buys McKinley's campaign hundreds of trained speakers, millions of posters, buttons, and billboards, and three hundred million campaign flyers printed in nine languages.


McKinley was peculiarly susceptible to the boys with the money. In 1893, he had been rescued from bankruptcy with $100,000, a pretty big chunk of change in 1893, by a conspiracy, sorry, consortium, of John D. Rockefeller, his friend Mark Hanna and similar types. Hanna duly became McKinley's top political adviser and chairman of the Republican National Committee. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Trust kicked in a cool quarter million to McKinley's election campaign. And, to keep Rockefeller's rival, J.P. Morgan, happy, his minion Garret A. Hobart, the director of various Morgan enterprises including the Liberty National Bank of New York, was made Vice-president, nicely rounding out the robber baron ticket.

A grateful McKinley will soon, on behalf of the same corporate interests who bought his election, preside over the illegal annexation of the nation of Hawaii and a war of empire against Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines.

All questions in a democracy
are questions of money.
Mark Hanna
McKinley’s Campaign Manager

1896: UNITED STATES. State militia are used to break a miners’ strike in Leadville, Colorado.

1897-ongoing: UNITED STATES. America's leading merchants of death, the Dupont family, enter into a conspiracy with their European competitors to monopolize the world gunpowder market. Better killing through chemistry.

1897: UNITED STATES. Theodore Roosevelt, tightly allied to the J.P. Morgan banking interests, is made Assistant Secretary of the Navy. During a speech at the U.S. Naval War College where plans for a war of empire against Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines have been under development since 1894, Roosevelt says, "diplomacy is utterly useless where there is no force behind it; the diplomat is the servant, not the master, of the soldier...No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumphs of war."

1896: NICARAGUA. U.S. forces invade the Nicaraguan port of Corinto to “protect American interests”.

1897: UNITED STATES. At the Lattimer Mine in Pennsylvania, a sheriff and his deputies open fire on striking mineworkers, killing nineteen. Most of the victims are shot in the back.

I897: UNITED STATES. Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Navy, Theodore Roosevelt, sends a cable to Admiral George Dewey advising him to prepare for an attack on the Spanish fleet in the Philippines pending "developments" in Cuba. Whoa there Teddy, we haven't blown the Maine up yet. And six weeks before the Maine does blow up, Roosevelt writes a letter to his very good friend, gun runner William Astor Chanler, saying, "I earnestly hope that events will so shape themselves that we must interfere (in Cuba) some time not in the distant future."

1898-1900: CHINA. U.S. troops invade to oppose the Boxer Rebellion which is an attempt to end Western domination of China.

1898: NICARAGUA. U.S. Marines invade the Nicaraguan port of San Juan del Sur.

1898: UNITED STATES. White Democrats disagree with an editorial written by the Wilmington, North Carolina Daily Record's black editor. They march on the newpaper's office, burning and destroying it. The mob goes on a racist rampage in the city, killing fourteen blacks. The Democrats then stage a coup forcing Wilmington Mayor Silas P. Wright and black and white members of the city government to resign.

1898: UNITED STATES. Once again the United States Supreme Court demonstrates clearly whose pulling its strings when it declares invalid a section of the Erdman Act which had made it a criminal offense for railroads to dismiss employees or discriminate against prospective employees based on their union activities. Can’t be havin’ none of that in the land of the free.

1898: UNITED STATES. Wall Street stock market manipulator E.H. Harriman and Judge Robert Scott Lovett gain control of the Union Pacific Railroad with cash arranged by William Rockefeller and the Warburg family's Kuhn, Loeb Company. In return, Harriman deposits the vast receipts from the railroad into the Rockefellers' City Bank and, when he issues tens of millions of dollars in "watered" (fraudulent) railroad stock, Harriman sells most of it through the crooks at Kuhn, Loeb.

Harriman and the Rockefellers have a nice little conspiracy going. Harriman charges those oil companies competing with the Rockefellers vastly inflated freight rates. The Rockefellers then buy the struggling companies for peanuts and build Standard Oil into a monstrous and utterly ruthless monopoly. The Rockefellers sell oil products below cost in every market in which there is a competitor, driving it out of business. The Rockefellers then jack up their prices to the absolute maximum they can extort from consumers.

1898-1959: CUBA. In the midst of countless hostile actions, the destruction of the Cuban economy and an ongoing, vitriolic propaganda campaign by the U.S. against Spain, the USS Maine enters Havana Harbor on the patently absurd pretext of it being, in the words of the grotesque U.S. consul in Havana, a “friendly act of courtesy”. The secondary pretext, of protecting Americans in Cuba, is equally absurd as Frederic Remington pointed out.

Remington, an illustrator for the Hearst newspapers, the key element in the propaganda campaign preparing the U.S. public for the long-planned U.S. invasion of Cuba, sends a cable to Hearst telling him that, contrary to the hysterical tales being invented and carried in the Hearst papers, “all is quiet” in Cuba and asks for permission to return to the U.S. Hearst sends Remington a cable saying, “Please remain. You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.”

On cue and as though by magic, the USS Maine oh-so-conveniently blows up in Havana Harbor, resulting in the death of two hundred and sixty six U.S. sailors. By a fabulous stroke of luck, of the two hundred and sixty six corpses, only two belong to officers and to junior officers at that. Enlisted men were barred from going ashore. Officers were not.

By another fabulous stroke of luck, the U.S. has, since 1894, been beavering away planning for a full scale war against Spain and the seizure of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. The blowing up of the USS Maine is the starting whistle.

The “act of terrorism” is, of course, immediately blamed on the Spanish who, self-evidently, had absolutely nothing to gain and everything to lose by blowing up the Maine. A massive and hysterical propaganda campaign in the U.S. mass media, largely owned by Hearst and his fellow media slut, Pulitzer, whips the American public, who have already been well prepared by several years of vicious anti-Spanish propaganda, into a mindless war frenzy.

American newspapers carry out their sacred duty of printing lies to deceive the masses and carry headlines such as “The Warship Maine Was Split in Two by an Enemy’s Infernal Machine”, “How the Maine Looks As It Lies, Wrecked by Spanish Treachery” and “The Maine Was Destroyed by Treachery”. Illustrations in the newspapers, presented as fact and accepted as such by the American public, show imaginary explosives beneath the Maine and imaginary wires running ashore to imaginary Spanish evildoers.

And Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Theodore Roosevelt, who had, prior to the Maine explosion, warned Admiral Dewey to be ready to attack the Spanish, cold bloodedly kicks off the wars against Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines when he tells American newspapers that the Maine explosion definitely was not an accident, a statement for which there was absolutely no factual basis and was clearly designed to inflame the American public.

Six weeks later, a U.S. Naval Court of Inquiry surprises no one by coming to the conclusion that the Maine explosion was caused by a mine and we’re all supposed to know who put it there, aren’t we? The head of the Court of Inquiry, Captain William T. Sampson, will be duly rewarded with a nice fat promotion to the command of the U.S. North Atlantic Fleet.

But there are one or two things about this Court of Inquiry which seem to have been forgotten. The Judge Advocate of the U.S. Navy, Adolf Marix, reported to the court that his informants in Havana indicated that a two hundred pound mine had been placed beneath the Maine's powder magazines by divers working for Cuban businessmen, not by the Spanish, who were, of course, the last people in the world who would do anything to give the U.S. an excuse to attack.

The Cuban businessmen were, in turn, connected to the American gun runner William Astor Chanler who had been involved in smuggling arms to Cuba and was, purely coincidentally, a very good friend of Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Theodore Roosevelt. And Roosevelt wasn't the least bit squeamish about killing a few hundred Americans. In one of his less guarded moments, he had written to Henry Cabot Lodge, "I don’t care whether our sea-coast cities are bombarded or not, this country needs a war."

In 1971, British historian Hugh Thomas will quote William Astor Chanler as claiming responsibility for the blowing up of the Maine in a conversation with the American ambassador to the USSR, William C. Bullitt in the early 1930's. Shortly after the conversation with Bullitt, Chanler died. Information on the cause of his death is difficult to find.

The blowing up of the USS Maine serves as the pretext for the U.S. attack on all Spanish possessions in the Caribbean and the Pacific which had been planned by the U.S. since 1894. The U.S. invades Cuba and occupies and seizes Puerto Rico, preventing its first scheduled democratic election. The U.S. later seizes Guam and invades the Philippines. In the fantasyland of American "history", this unprovoked war of aggression and empire building is called the Spanish-American War. In Cuba, it is more accurately known as the U.S. intervention in the Cuban War of Independence.

And now that Theodore Roosevelt has the splendid little war he has been so keen on, it's time to turn it to political advantage. Roosevelt heads off to "liberate" Cuba with the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry Regiment, the so-called Rough Riders. Roosevelt has very good friends in the U.S. mass media and he makes sure there is a constant flow of reports of his exploits, real or imagined. To be doubly sure, he has his very own "embedded" reporter, Richard Harding Davis of the New York Herald, whose glowing reports are picked up by a host of other American newspapers and magazines. Roosevelt's propaganda engine would have us believe that he and the Rough Riders defeated the Spanish at San Juan Hill in Cuba virtually single handed. Roosevelt lobbied mightily for a Congressional Medal of Honor but he and his cronies couldn't persuade the War Deparment to cough up. It would have to wait until 2001 for William "Wet Willy" Clinton to put the icing on Roosevelt's propaganda cake.

The Humboldt (California) Times puts a nice racist spin on things when it prints a New York press story reporting that "Japs are excluded" from serving in the U.S. Navy. The report continues that “in view of the fact that there were several Japanese on board the Maine when it was blown up, it is interesting to learn the government has adopted a method that will keep them out of our navy.” The idea, apparently is that all people of Japanese ancestry are spies and those who were killed on the Maine had “useful information which (could) have been used for Japan's benefit.” Well, Praise the Lord that those yellow devils got themselves blown up before they could betray the world’s loudest demockracy. The paper goes on, “The government has passed a rule that men admitted to the navy must be more than five feet, four inches tall. Navy officers say that will exclude the Japs.”

And who is making tens of millions of dollars yet again in their role as America's leading merchants of death during this “splendid little war”? None other than the Duponts of course, who provide the majority of gunpowder to the U.S. government for its conquest of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Once again, it’s a case of Better Killing Through Chemistry thanks to the Dupont family.

When the Spanish in Cuba are defeated, the U.S. immediately changes its tactics, which were purportedly intended to help Cubans win their independence. The U.S. military refuses to allow Cuban independence fighters, the majority of whom are black, to take part in the surrender ceremonies or the creation of a Cuban government. The U.S. does not allow the Cubans to be present at the signing of the peace treaty in Paris. To prevent democracy prevailing and the Cuban government falling into the hands of its, gasp, black majority, U.S. dictator John R. Brooke disbands the mainly black Cuban army but leaves the previously demonized white Spanish officials in place. Hold on there John, I thought we were fighting the Spanish and helping the Cubans…

Unlike Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Guam, Cuba is not directly seized by the U.S. due to the Teller Amendment to the U.S. declaration of war against Spain. Instead, following U.S. military occupation, a series of repressive, racist dictatorships, ultimately connected with the U.S. Mafia, is installed. American sugar companies, multinationals, the Mafia, various Nazi supporters and merchants of death such as the DuPont family and other wealthy, white friends of the various U.S. supported dictatorships prosper while the great majority of Cubans live short lives of poverty, hopelessness and fear.

1898. NICARAGUA. U.S. Marines invade the port city of San Juan del Sur.

1898-present: HAWAII. In the midst of all this murderous empire building, the U.S. purports to formally annex the independent nation of Hawaii, the government of which had been overthrown by a coup of American sugar barons in 1893. By happy coincidence, the illegal annexation of Hawaii happens just in time for the U.S. to use Hawaii as a base for its planned invasion and occupation of the Philippines.

The U.S. remains in illegal occupation of Hawaii until the present day.

1898: HAWAII. Now that Hawaii has been stolen by the U.S., the great benefits of freedom and equality enjoyed in the U.S. are generously given to Hawaiians. Congress extends the racist Chinese Exclusion Act to Hawaii and the immigration of people of Chinese descent from Hawaii to the U.S. is prohibited. The U.S. appoints commissioners to run Hawaii. Unsurprisingly, among them is sugar baron and coup leader Sanford Dole. And to ensure harmony with our not-quite-white brothers in Hawaii, the list of commissioners is nicely rounded out by John T. Morgan, a grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, an advocate of apartheid, a supporter of legalized lynching and a devout opponent of the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which was intended to prevent the denial of voting rights based on race.

1898-present: PUERTO RICO. The U.S. invades and occupies Puerto Rico, a rich island with a strategic position long coveted by American militarists and robber barons, just as its one million people are in the process of achieving independence from Spain and are about to hold their first democratic elections. The first priority of the world's loudest demockracy is, of course, to cancel the scheduled elections which, as in Cuba, would have resulted in a free country ruled by, gasp, black people. The nation of Puerto Rico is stolen from its people and becomes an occupied colony of the U.S. Repeated independence movements are ruthlessly and murderously crushed by the U.S. Puerto Rican patriots and independence leaders are imprisoned and tortured. The Spanish language is outlawed in schools and the American colonizers send missionaries to further the destruction of local culture. Local agriculture is systematically destroyed, making the island dependent on food imports from the U.S. and driving Puerto Ricans to work as virtual slave labor on what rapidly become American-owned plantations. Other Puerto Ricans are driven into the factories of U.S.-owned companies as cheap labor. A completely powerless puppet legislature is installed to create the usual tawdry illusion of democracy. In plain fact, Puerto Rico is a dictatorship run by the U.S. military.

The U.S. forces Puerto Ricans to become U.S. citizens in 1917 in order to allow them to be drafted into the military after the U.S. enters WW I just in time to be in on the treaty signing. In the fine tradition of American demockracy, Puerto Rico is given "non-voting" status in the U.S. Congress. The U.S. constructs major military bases and uses large parts of Puerto Rico, particularly the islands of Culebra and Vieques, as bombing ranges. Puerto Rico’s El Yunque rainforest is used by the U.S. for chemical warfare testing. The island of Vieques is used for test firing radioactive depleted uranium (DU) armaments (dirty bombs) which the U.S. will later use in its covert nuclear wars against the people of Iraq, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan.

General Nelson A. Miles, who headed the U.S. invasion of Puerto Rico was not just a talented genocide artist who had carried out innumerable slaughters of native Americans so that their land could be stolen, he was also, as befits a senior U.S. military officer, a truly gifted liar. Miles said, “We have not come to make war upon the people of a country that for centuries has been oppressed, but, on the contrary, to bring you protection, not only to yourselves but to your property, to promote your prosperity, and to bestow upon you the immunities and blessings of the liberal institutions of our government.” Well gee, thanks a lot there Nelson. Thought for a minute you were here to steal our country.

1898-present: GUAM. The U.S. invades and seizes the strategically located island of Guam. It becomes a permanent part of the American Empire.

1898: PHILIPPINES. The U.S. Navy under Admiral Dewey, who was warned by Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt BEFORE the Maine explosion to be ready to attack the Spanish, destroys the Spanish fleet at Manila Bay. Filipino independence leader Emilio Aguinaldo returns from exile and resumes the Filipino war of independence against the Spanish. On June 12, 1898, having defeated all Spanish forces in the Philippines outside the capital of Manila, Aguinaldo signs the Philippine Declaration of Independence and ranges twenty thousand Filipino independence fighters in fourteen miles of trenches around the city of Manila, trapping fifteen thousand Spanish troops.

The ever-benevolent United States is, of course, in the Philippines only, as Admiral Dewey says, to "protect the natives and free them from the yoke of Spain", a sort of nineteenth century Operation Filipino Freedom. Aguinaldo honors an American request not to attack the Spanish garrison, holding off for three months as Dewey waits for U.S. troops to arrive. Unknown to Aguinaldo, Dewey assures the U.S. government that he will "enter the city and keep the Indians (Filipinos) out." When U.S. troops finally arrive, Dewey and General Wesley Merritt make a secret agreement with the Spanish governor, Fermin Jaudenes, for a mock battle after which the Spanish will surrender to the U.S. Dewey warns the Filipino independence fighters to stay out of Manila or they will be fired on by the U.S. The farce is carried out and the Spanish duly surrender to the U.S.

A few weeks later, the Philippine assembly ratifies the Malolos Constitution, establishing the Philippine Republic as an independent nation. During the Paris Peace Conference between the U.S. and Spain, President William McKinley first orders that the U.S. annex Luzon, Guam and Puerto Rico but not the Philippines. But, apparently, God has other ideas. On the night of October 24th, the President of the United States of America receives formal instructions from The Lord God Almighty.

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."

1898: UNITED STATES. In December, McKinley issues what is farcically called the Benevolent Assimilation proclamation, one of the most outrageous pieces of hypocrisy ever crafted.
We come, not as invaders or conquerors, but as friends, to protect the natives in their homes, in their employments, and in their personal and religious rights. All persons who, either by active aid or by honest submission, co-operate with the Government of the United States to give effect to these beneficent purposes will receive the reward of its support and protection. All others will be brought within the lawful rule we have assumed, with firmness if need be, but without severity, so far as possible.....Finally, it should be the earnest wish and paramount aim of the military administration to win the confidence, respect, and affection of the inhabitants of the Philippines by assuring them in every possible way that full measure of individual rights and liberties which is the heritage of free peoples, and by proving to them that the mission of the United States is one of BENEVOLENT ASSIMILATION substituting the mild sway of justice and right for arbitrary rule. In the fulfillment of this high mission, supporting the temperate administration of affairs for the greatest good of the governed, there must be sedulously maintained the strong arm of authority, to repress disturbance and to overcome all obstacles to the bestowal of the blessings of good and stable government upon the people of the Philippine Islands under the free flag of the United States.
Needless to say, the reality didn't quite align with McKinley's pious lies.
In the path of the Washington Regiment and Battery D of the Sixth Artillery there were 1,008 dead niggers, and a great many wounded. We burned all their houses. I don't know how many men, women, and children the Tennessee boys did kill. They would not take any prisoners. U.S. Soldier
1899: PHILIPPINES. The real Battle of Manila takes place when U.S. troops slaughter three thousand Filipinos in a battle for the capital of the Philippines. Admiral Dewey steams up the Pasig River and fires five hundred pound shells into the Filipino trenches. Filipino corpses are so numerous that the Americans later use the bodies to makes breastworks. A British witness says, “This is not war; it is simply massacre and murderous butchery.”
The slaughter at Manila was necessary, but not glorious. The entire American population justifies the conduct of its army at Manila because only by a crushing repulse of the Filipinos could our position be made secure. We are the trustees of civilization and peace throughout the islands. Chicago Tribune
1898: UNITED STATES. As always, the U.S. press is doing a fine job of brainwashing the masses and, however we may criticize them for their whoring on behalf of the the ruling elite, we have to admire their flexibility. In the blinking of an eye, Filipino independence leader Emilio Aguinaldo, who had foolishly decided to oppose the U.S. theft of the Philippines, is repositioned from international statesman to brutish dictator. Aguinaldo even undergoes a change in skin color, appropriate since America's war against the Filipino people is, fundamentally, a racist war of conquest against "niggers" and "Indians".

1899: PHILIPPINES. In March, U.S. troops capture Malolos, the seat of Aguinaldo's government. The U.S. conducts a war against the Filipino people throughout 1899 in a series of bloody battles. The U.S.-appointed dictator of the Philippines is the military governor, General Elwell Stephen Otis. Otis is well qualified for the position, having been instrumental in carrying out the United States Government's successful genocide of native Americans. Otis' command is staffed with officers who, too, have learned the craft of genocide, killing native Americans.

The war against the people of the Philippines becomes nothing more than an extension of America’s racist wars against native Americans and its enslavement of blacks. American troops in the Philippines routinely talk and write of hunting and killing “niggers” and “Indians”. The phrase “nigger hunting” frequently occurs in letters written by American troops to the folks back home. Such letters also include gruesome details of burning villages, slaughtering prisoners and civilians, forced labor and looting. In 1900, Otis is replaced by another talented genocide artist, General Arthur McArthur, who carries on the good work.

U.S. Army Colonel Jacob Smith tells American reporters that fighting the Filipinos is "worse than fighting Indians". Smith says that he is using tactics against the Filipinos which he had learned fighting "savages" in the American west and Smith, a "veteran" of the Wounded Knee massacre of three hundred and fifty native American men, woman and children, knows all about exterminating the inferior races. The New York Times enthusiastically endorses Smith's embrace of genocide as "long overdue." The American press, as always doing its sacred duty to deceive and manipulate the American public on behalf of the ruling elite, routinely refers to the Filipinos fighting the foreign invaders of their country as "insurgents".

In the U.S. Senate, Albert Beveridge isn't shy about stating the real motives for America's war against the people of the Philippines.
The Philippines are ours forever....And just beyond the Philippines are China's illimitable markets. We will not retreat from either....We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee, under God, of the civilization of the world.....The Pacific is our ocean.....Where shall we turn for consumers of our surplus? Geography answers the question. China is our natural customer....The Philippines give us a base at the door of all the East....No land in America surpasses in fertility the plains and valleys of Luzon. Rice and coffee, sugar and cocoanuts, hemp and tobacco.....The wood of the Philippines can supply the furniture of the world for a century to come. At Cebu the best informed man on the island told me that 40 miles of Cebu's mountain chain are practically mountains of coal......I have a nugget of pure gold picked up in its present form on the banks of a Philippine creek. . . .It has been charged that our conduct of the war has been cruel. Senators, it has been the reverse.....we are not dealing with Americans or Europeans. We are dealing with Orientals.
And the mass murder of the Filipino people and the theft of their country has another motive. One of the major goals of the U.S. ruling elite was the economic conquest of the Far East and especially the opening of the vast Asian markets to the petroleum products of the Rockefellers. At the time, the U.S. fleet lacked a base in the Far East. The extension of American military might to the Far East on behalf of the Rockefellers and their clubmates demanded a place where American warships could be based, repaired and replenished with coal and ammunition. Unfortunately for the Filipinos, their country fit the bill perfectly.

1899: GUAM. The U.S. establishes a prison for Filipino political prisoners on the the island of Guam.

1899: PHILIPPINES. The staff correspondents of the American newspapers stationed in Manila cable a joint protest against censorship of the press by the U.S. military. The correspondents make the shocking allegation that the American people have been deceived about what is going on in the Philippines. They report that they have been forced to participate in this misrepresentation. Genocide artist General Elwell Otis, U.S. military dictator of the Philippines, explains the suppression of the truth as being a good thing. The truth, he says, "would alarm the people at home." Can't be havin' nobody alarmed in the land of the free.

1898: UNITED STATES. U.S. troops attack Chippewa Indians at Leech Lake, Minnesota.

1898: UNITED STATES. The American Anti-Imperialist League is formed to oppose the U.S. annexation of the Philippines. Among the members is Mark Twain who will serve as vice president of the league from 1901 until his death in 1910. It will have to wait until 1992, however, until many of Twain’s anti-imperialist writings are published in book form. Better late than never.

1898: UNITED STATES. Funny thing about America, the boys in the back room have got everyone so thoroughly brainwashed they’ll kill and die for them on the most ludicrously fabricated pretexts even though, during and after every war, men in uniform are treated like shit. It’s been that way since the Revolution and it’s still that way today.

The war against Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines was no different. American troops were inadequately housed, poorly fed and had shoddy medical care. Thousands died from communicable diseases such as typhoid. There were allegations of contaminated meat. The patriotic folks at Armor supplied 500,000 pounds of canned meat to the military. It had already been shipped to Britain and returned but, hey, business is business. The answer? Appoint a commission to "investigate" the problem.

And what fine, upstanding person of unquestioned integrity do we select to head this noble commission? Why none other than Grenville Dodge, big time genocide artist and, more to the point, big time railroad swindler and a man who committed treason for cash against the federal government during the Civil War. One of Dodge’s best rackets had been defrauding the federal government of millions of dollars on per-mile railroad construction subsidies. Appointing Dodge to investigate possible fraud and mismanagement by the War Department is sort of like appointing Allen Dulles to the Warren Commission or Henry Kissinger to the 9-11 Commission. Oh yeah, we did that too.

Unsurprisingly, Dodge does his job just the way he’s supposed to and finds that everything in the War Department is just swell. What a relief!

1899: NICARAGUA. U.S. forces invade parts of Nicaragua to “protect interests” during the revolution of Juan Reyes. What they are really doing is trying to help Reyes who will be more "understanding" to American gold mining and other commercial interests.

1899: COLOMBIA. U.S. forces invade the Colombian state of Panama.

1899: SAMOA. U.S. and British forces invade to “protect interests” and control the succession to the Samoan throne so it comes out right.

1899: UNITED STATES. Two thousand people gather in Georgia to witness the lynching of Sam Holt, a black farm laborer accused of killing his white employer. A contemporary newspaper report states that Holt's ears, fingers and other parts of his body were cut off. He was then burned at the stake. Holt's bones were crushed and his heart and liver cut into small pieces. Souvenir collectors paid twenty five cents for a piece of bone. A piece of Holt’s liver, cooked, sold for ten cents.

1899: UNITED STATES. In a six week period during March and April, twelve black men are lynched in Georgia including a minister of religion, Elijah Strickland, who was tortured before being lynched. Yet again it's a case of Truth, Justice or the American Way and none of the murderers is charged.

1899-1901: UNITED STATES. On behalf of corporate interests, the U.S. Army occupies the Coeur d’Alene, Idaho mining region to break a miners’ strike.

1899: WAKE ISLAND. The U.S. invades and occupies Wake Island to use it as a cable station as part of its military strategy against the people of the Philippines.

1899: UNITED STATES. In a long-running battle with mineowners, miners blow up machinery in Wardner, Idaho. President William McKinley sends federal troops to crush the miners and, using the ruling elite's standard divide and conquer tactic, picks black units from the segregated U.S. army on the theory that racial divisions will prevent them sympathizing with the white miners. The troops conduct house-to-house searches at bayonet-point and make mass arrests throughout the area. More than a thousand people are held prisoner without charge or trial for months in so-called "bullpens". Eventually all are released without a single charge being laid.

Friday, February 8, 2008