# What did the US gain from the Phillipines? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [November 30, 2015, 11:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-the-us-gain-from-the-phillipines/739022 "2015-11-30T11:44:25Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 6\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![JRDelirious](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jrdelirious/32/9531_2.png) [@JRDelirious](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JRDelirious)\ **Post date:** [December 3, 2015, 2:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-the-us-gain-from-the-phillipines/739022/81 "2015-12-03T14:32:29Z")
> [@Kobal2](#): > > It was a euphemism coined in the mid-1930s, when the adjectives “colonial” and “possession” started getting more and more bad press. And it stuck because even after being promoted to Department they had special exceptions distinct from “Metropolitan France” . ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [December 3, 2015, 3:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-the-us-gain-from-the-phillipines/739022/82 "2015-12-03T15:29:00Z")
> [@Siam\_Sam](#): > > It was the white businessmen who _were_ racist, and the spin you are sadly trying to put on the situation is simply false. Pretty racist differing between people born there simply on their skin color. It was the Queen who was trying to take away rights of people based on their skin color, not the “white businessmen”. ---
**Author:** ![Siam\_Sam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/d78d45/32.png) [@Siam\_Sam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Siam_Sam)\ **Post date:** [December 3, 2015, 3:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-the-us-gain-from-the-phillipines/739022/83 "2015-12-03T15:41:04Z")
> [@Urbanredneck](#): > > I think one of the worse cases of imperialism was in Australia. What right did Great Britain have to suddenly dump all their prisoners there and eventually take over the whole territory of Australia and Tanzania? Granted the natives there were just small tribes with no national governments so to speak but still, did GB have the right to just drop in and set up shop? They’d been shipping them to Georgia, but the American Revolution stopped that. Australia was discovered at just the right time to offer an alternative to take up the slack. I wonder how Australia would have developed had there been no Revolution or if we had lost. ---
**Author:** ![user\_hostile](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/user_hostile/32/474_2.png) [@user\_hostile](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/user_hostile)\ **Post date:** [December 3, 2015, 5:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-the-us-gain-from-the-phillipines/739022/84 "2015-12-03T17:46:53Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > Sort of. The terms of the North Atlantic Treaty specify where an attack must occur in order to be covered under its terms. The attack must occur in Europe, North America, Turkey, or on an island controlled by one of the signatories and located in the Atlantic Ocean north of the Tropic of Cancer. (It also used to include Algeria when that was part of France.) So if an attack was made against Hawaii or French Guiana, NATO wouldn’t be obligated to respond. Good point. I suppose the British-Argentine war over the Falklands (or Maldives) did not engender a NATO response, either, since its a British Overseas Territory in the south Atlantic. I only learned about this from a Frenchman at a bar French Guiana while working the launch preparations for an Ariane rocket. This was partly in response to a question as to why the French flag flying rather than a “French Guiana” flag; I just assumed it was granted independence from France as part of the decolonization movement. The answer give left me with the crude impression was that FG was to France as what Alaska was to the US. ---
**Author:** ![Isilder](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/cc9497/32.png) [@Isilder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Isilder)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2015, 12:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-the-us-gain-from-the-phillipines/739022/85 "2015-12-05T12:50:44Z")
> [@coremelt](#): > > Aboriginals were not considered citizens of Australia until 1967, and were regulated under Flora and Fauna Law. Thats all not true. They had difficulty gaining documentation to prove citizenship, for example, but its not as if they were ever simply denied residency or ownership rights on that basis… the documentation issue is bureaucracy “need a witness to your birth… your parents need documentation” etc etc. The follow on was the inability to vote, access social security, hospitals etc… The Flora and Fauna reference could be taken as allegory - that they were being killed and treated as if they were just wildlife… or it could be taken as a garbled claim that the only native right they were afforded was the right to take game from natural habitats . Nowhere did Australian law treat the Australian aboriginal or Torres Straight Islander as lesser. (they were recently in Papua… but thats close enough to say they were native… they were living on the land first, and then it became Australia… ). The UK would not tolerate such a law, the UK’s policy was to treat all humans as human. At the coal face, eg the police, the magistrates courts, the polling booth, the governemnt officers and public servants in or from them… where the law was actually implemented, thats a different question. Also the “not a citizen” is allegorical to say that their native rights were denied… “terra nullus”… that if you didn’t fence your claim, you didn’t even record its boundaries nor policed them… then you dont own the land… if a bunch of Brits had been living in Australia as a socialist commune, you can bet that they would not be told their claim to their land was “Terra Nullus” they’d be told that they owned the land… say from here to there, and 15 miles wide… Indeed, the squatters rights to claim ownership was granted to europeans, and much land was granted to people who just had to PROMISE to develop it, with no follow up… indeed many of the grants under such schemes were to timber getters, who let the free land return to the gov, they were just bypassing timber license fees by having a temporary ownership of land exempt from any tax… (as they never actually owned it there’s never be a tax on it. ) Other land grants were to farmers who were claiming it merely to blockade their competition , thus increasing the value of their land and its resources. Yet if an aboriginal claimed it, the aboriginal was told that “thats not development and your claim is denied”. ---
**Author:** ![hibernicus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hibernicus/32/2802_2.png) [@hibernicus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hibernicus)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2015, 1:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-the-us-gain-from-the-phillipines/739022/86 "2015-12-05T13:27:56Z")
> [@user\_hostile](#): > > And as an added bonus, the only state in South America that is a member of NATO. Well, French Guiana is not a member of NATO in its own right. Hawai’i is a good analogy in this case; each is part of a country that is a member of the alliance, while being outside the geographical scope of NATO. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-the-us-gain-from-the-phillipines/739022.md?page=4)