That’s the impression I got, too. Most of the atrocities happened in the Muslim southern isles of the country. An area which gave the Spanish trouble, the Americans trouble, and the current Philippine government trouble. Just to give it some context, rather than excuse the ugly things that happened.
For the most part, most Filipinos seem to consider the US rule in good terms after the fighting was over. Especially compared the Spanish. Do not ask about the Japanese occupation in polite company.
It makes me wonder if this hasn’t been used as a bit of rhetoric by Duterte, “How dare the US criticize me for executing undesirables when they haven’t apologized for the war crimes they committed here a century ago”.
Correct.
There are millions of Filipinos in the US. Part of the reason for that is they benefited from an educational system partly set up by the American government.
I suspect that this is the case. Duterte is trying to deflect criticism of his own support for atrocities against Filipinos by dredging up those by the US more than a century ago.
In my experience, Filipinos are more likely to be grateful for the US’s liberation of the islands from the Japanese than to recall actions during the rebellion. US support for the dictator Ferdinand Marcos would be a much more recent sore point.
Actually, under present rules of warfare they pretty certainly were.
OK, now there is one issue I should mention here. The US really screwed over the Philippines after WW2.
See the war really destroyed much of Manila were I read almost 90% of homes were destroyed and 100% of its commercial and manufacturing was destroyed because the Japanese had decided to use it for a Stalingrad-like defense. Manila thus suffered more damage in the war than any other Asian city outside Japan.
BUT, after the war when the US was making Japan pay for its war damages the US basically threw the Philippines under the bus and didnt make the Japanese pay for rebuilding Manila because we were more interested in making Japan into our new ally.
Yes, and so then in just about every conflict before the 20th century (and even including WWI, which used poison gas). * That was then. *
Shining Spear the Cro-Magnon likely violated the present rules of warfare when killing off Og the neanderthal. Certainly the Ancient Israelites committed them, and the Spartans, the Romans, the Huns, and so forth.
Not true. Japan paid reparations to the Philippines. 198 billion indemnity.
I have no idea what your point is.
The Holocaust was legal under the laws of Nazi Germany. It was still a war crime.
I could not find the word genocide in the links provided, which I skimmed but did not read. I did find evidence of atrocities, as well as modest attempts to avoid them (Waller) and punish those giving extreme orders (General Smith). I’ll add and concede that apologetics make poor history, or at least do a disservice to contemporaries opposing brutality at the time. I know little about this era.
This author makes the genocide case: E. San Juan, Jr.: U.S. Genocide in the Philippines
I’m not sure I agree. Here’s a quote: [INDENT][INDENT] As defined by the UN 1948 “ Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” genocide means acts “committed with intention to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” It is clear that the U.S. colonial conquest of the Philippines deliberately sought to destroy the national sovereignty of the Filipinos. The intent of the U.S. perpetrators included the dissolution of the ethnic identity of the Filipinos manifest in the rhetoric, policies, and disciplinary regimes enunciated and executed by legislators, politicians, military personnel, and other apparatuses. [/INDENT][/INDENT] Destroying sovereignty falls short of genocide. I haven’t come across evidence of annihilationism. But then the author says this: [INDENT][INDENT] As with the American Indians, U.S. colonization involved, among others, the “destruction of the specific character of a persecuted group by forced transfer of children, forced exile, prohibition of the use of the national language, destruction of books, documents, monuments, and objects of historical, artistic or religious value.” The goal of all colonialism is the cultural and social death of the conquered natives, in effect, genocide. [/INDENT][/INDENT] Ok, those sorts of things might be genocidal, but then the author destroys his argument by implying that all colonialism is genocide.
FWIW Samantha Power’s treatise on genocide, A Problem from Hell doesn’t cover the Philippines experience. I could not find an entry for “Philippines” or “Spanish American War” in Adam Jones’ Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction (2nd edition) in the index.
In short, while I can’t rule out the possibility that the policy was genocidal, it doesn’t look that way to me. Not all war atrocities and not all that is awful is genocidal.
Well, yes, we made it a crime. Ex Post Facto. The legality thereof is still debated.
But we didnt charge Germany or Britain for using Poison gas in WWI, and that’s a war crime today, isnt it?
The British committed what would be war crimes today against the Boers, and so forth.
Just about every war in the past had multiple war crimes under todays definitions.
Outcome 3: Profit!
It was a war crime because they lost. Do you think it would have been a war crime if Germany had won the war?
It was rather obvious from the OP that he considered US actions in the Philippines to constitute genocide. madsircool did not attempt to refute that assertion. His remark did not make it clear whether he disagreed with the assessment, or merely hadn’t read the links, which prompted my question.
The UN definition is not the only definition of genocide. Merriam-Webster defines it as:
or
By the first definition, some US actions in the Philippines were genocide, even if the second definition didn’t apply.
Exactly. We are discussing whether those actions constitute war crimes under modern definitions, not whether they were illegal at the time. It’s a pedantic argument to say that the weren’t war crimes because there was no statute on the books at the time that defined them as war crimes. Whether an apology might be warranted today (which is the subject of this thread) is based on modern definitions of war crimes, not whether they were technically defined as war crimes at the time they were committed.
Similarly, arguments about whether apologies or reparations might be due for slavery are based on modern attitudes. At the time, slavery was 100% legal.
Whether a crime was committed is a separate issue from whether the perpetrator was tried, convicted, and punished. These would still be war crimes if Germany had won the war. The difference would be that the Nazi leadership would not have been tried for the.
I don’t know about that. The Nuremberg Trials were and are plenty controversial, even among esteemed jurists.
N.b: I am, of course, completely repulsed by what the Nazis did. But many people seem to think that prosecuting Germans afterwards was a simple as convicting someone of murder.
In any case, this issue is irrelevant to the atrocities during the Philippine-American War. It’s clear from the Senate Committee report and other reports that many acts were committed that were illegal under US and Philippine law at the time, such as the killing of wounded, POWs, non-combatants, destruction of property, and so on. Some of these resulted in court-martials or other sanctions, but most did not. It doesn’t really matter whether these are called war crimes or genocide or simply recognized as mass murders - they were illegal at the time, as well as being illegal today. Quibbling over what to call them is dodging the issue.
OK, I can agree with that. Especially since the issue of this thread is about an apology, which is certainly more of a political question than anything else. What would the US have to gain by apologizing? Probably nothing. What does it lose by not doing so? Again, probably nothing.
For the record, I agree. While the historical record shows that US forces committed what might be regarded as atrocities in the Philippines, at this point in time, when everyone who committed such crimes is long dead, as are most immediate relatives of any victims, there is really no point in issuing an apology. The discussion might be different if the events happened more recently.
As has been said, Duterte’s raising the issue of US war crimes is a political ploy to deflect attention from his own involvement in extrajudicial killings (mass murders, by another name).
Hi all, it seems to me as if there is some change in the way this things will be looked at and hopefully we will see some compensation for the people that suffered the atrocities…
" In the US, descendants of Namibia’s Herero and Nama tribes have reportedly filed a compensation lawsuit against Berlin over the tens of thousands of people slaughtered by German troops in the African state early last century.
The legal complaint was filed Thursday with the US District Court in New York over an “incalculable damages” that were caused, Reuters reports. The plaintiffs claim that even if any reparation will be paid to Namibia, there’s no guarantee of any compensation to the victims."
Peace