#american occupation of the philippines

[1900scartoons]

All Right, Bill, I'm a Comin'!

October 8, 1907

A large bee flies towards the Philippines, with a bag labelled 'Bill Taft's Bee to Manila.' Taft stands waving a flag reading "Rush Bumblebees"

The caption reads "The war department has been puzzled by a cable dispatch from Manila: 'Rush Bumble Bees.' That's easy - Secretary Taft forgot the presidential bee in the hurry of departure."

The bees had been ordered as part of a plan to cross-pollinate Philippine crops.

See Also: Theodore Roosevelt; William Howard Taft

From Hennepin County Library

Original available at: https://digitalcollections.hclib.org/digital/collection/Bart/id/6073/rec/1734

[cheesy-cryptid]

Vampires & Vampire Hunters but make it about during the late 1800s in the Philippines

[buckyclevens]

just learned that one of my great uncles was a survivor of the Bataan Death March

[dormats-town]

remember that the Philippines wasn't a free country until 1946. the Philippines hasn't even been free yet for 100 years.

remember that the Philippines was promised freedom when America 'defeated' the Spanish, America continued their occupation for another 43 years so that they could start selling goods to areas in Asia. they did not allow the Philippines to rule themselves because they saw us as savages, unfit and unready to let our own country prosper.

then, once they released us, they let anyone rich enough with the 'proper' credentials to rule our towns, our provinces. they made sure these dictators looked just like us so that we would be easier to puppet.

then with these dictators, they massacre the suffering people who are only trying to survive. they call it a 'war on drugs' but it is a genocide of the people. we are still being killed.

slowly but surely, there are less and less dark skinned pinoys in the filipino population. they are killing my people. i want us Americans to think about that, i really, really do.

all of these conflicts feel so, so far away- but at some point you have to wonder as they grow closer and closer, will you be behind the gun or in front of the barrel?

As always, death to imperialism.

[metamatar]

Employers desire foreign workers who are accustomed to the hazardous work sites of industrial construction; in particular, they specifically solicit migrants who do not have a history of labor organizing within SWANA. In response, labor brokerage firms brand themselves as offering migrant workers who are deferential. Often, labor brokers conflate the category of South Asian with docility; [...] as inherently passive, disciplined, and, most important, unfettered by volatile working conditions. "We say quality, they [U.S. employers] say seasoned. We both know what it means. Workers who are not going to quit, not going to run away in the foreign country and do as they are told.” [...]

For migrants, the U.S. oil industry presents a rare chance to apply their existing skill set in a country with options for permanent residency and sponsorship of family members. Migrants wish to find an end to their tem­porary worker status; they imagine the United States as a liberal economy in which labor standards are enforced and there are opportunities for citizenship and building a life for their family. [...] What brokers fail to explain is that South Asian migrants are being recruited as guest workers. Migrants will not have access to U.S. citizenship or visas for family members; in fact, their employment status will be quite similar to their SWANA migration.

While nations such as the Philippines have both state-mandated and independent migrant rights agencies, the Indian government has minimal avenues for worker protection. These are limited to hotlines for reporting abusive foreign employers and Indian consulates located in a few select countries of the SWANA region. [... Brokers] emphasize the docility of Indian migrants in comparison to the disruptive tendencies of other Asian migrant workers. [...] “Some of these Filipino men you see make a lot of trouble in the Arab countries. Even their women, who work as maids and such, lash out. The employer says one wrong thing and the workers get the whole country [the Philippines] on the street. [...] But you don’t see our people creating a tamasha [spectacle] overseas.” [...] Just as Filipinx migrants are racialized to be undisciplined labor, Indian brokers construct divisions within the South Asian workforce to promote the primacy of their own firms. In particular, Pakistani workers are racialized as an abrasive population.

[...] While the public image of the South Asian American community remains as model minorities, presumed to be primarily upwardly mobile professionals, the global reality of the population is quite to the contrary. [...] From the historic colonial routes initiated by British occupation of South Asia to the emergence of energy markets within the countries of SWANA, migrants have been recruited to build industries by contributing their labor to construction projects. Within the last decade, these South Asian migrants, with experience in the SWANA oil industry, have been actively solicited as guest workers into the energy sector of the United States. The growth of hydraulic fracturing has opened new territory for oil extraction; capitalizing on the potential market are numerous stakeholders who have invested in industrial construction projects across the southwestern United States. The solicitation of South Asian construction workers is not coincidental. [...] Kartik, a globally competitive firm’s broker, explains the connection of Indian labor to practices of the past. “You know we come from a long history of working in foreign lands. Even the British used to send us to Africa and the Arab regions to work in the mines and oil fields. It’s part of our history.”

Seasoning Labor: Contemporary South Asian Migrations and the Racialization of Immigrant Workers, Saunjuhi Verma in the Journal of Asian American Studies

[wait-a-minute-lassie]

Hi Tumblr peeps,

Has anyone read the Jo Gar stories written by Raoul Whitfield? You know, the guy known as the "Island Detective" solving cases in interwar Manila?

[littlestpersimmon]

When ppl talk about the "banality of evil" its often about how boring the system that upholds imperialism is, but it's also how evil is commonplace, an ingredient to the cement that builds the foundation of the imperial core. You read about what the IOF is doing to Palestinians and yet fail to realize that American soldiers were doing the same things in the Philippines in 1902 during the american occupation, which is still not recognized as a genocide to this day. You think about Congo today but don't realize that a hundred years ago within the same land, the king of Belgium would cut off the hands of natives if they didn't collect and extract enough rubber, and its not much different when you replace"rubber" with "cobalt", "Belgian king" with "American oligarch".. the world immediately, utterly feels godless. One war seamlessly transitioning into another. How can there be so much grief for something as ordinary as a component to something I am literally holding in my hands right now. How can you make sense of that.

In the Philippines, there is a legend that says that the sturdiest, strongest buildings are constructed using the blood of a thousand children. The most prominent structure to remember this legend by, was a bridge called "Tulay ng San Juanico", built by none other than Philippine Dictator Ferdinand Marcos, who is renowned to this day by his record of unfathomable human rights abuse. San Juanico Bridge stands, used for commute in the daily lives of filipino civilians under the shadow of the empire, in an all consuming, impenetrable and unbearable mundanity. You can find 20, 45, a hundred, a million people who are kind, but at the same time I think about how so many of these kind people walk this earth without thought or personal responsibility, completely and totally unwilling to lose an iota of comfort and convenience, without once stopping to think, what do they owe the next coming generation, the ones that are still here, and the ones nameless and buried in this world's wreckage, in the necessity of its evil.

[opencommunion]

"In the twenty-first century, nothing is more indicative of U.S. empire than the global reach of the U.S. military. Much of this power comes from its approximately 800 military bases located in around eighty countries, accounting for about 95 percent of the world’s foreign military bases. No other country comes close to the U.S. level of worldwide military control. ... The United States probably has more military bases than any other empire in history, yet most Americans remain largely ignorant of their numbers and location. The history of these bases is an imperial history, tied to war, occupation, and military expansion. Wherever the U.S. military has gone bases have usually followed, giving the United States an ongoing presence long after the war or occupation is over.

The creation of bases has accompanied each wave of U.S. expansion. Military forts enabled continental conquest—255 in total—which functioned as foreign bases on land that was often still controlled by Native peoples. These forts operated as the military outposts of settler-colonialism and were targeted by Native peoples as violations of territorial integrity. The War of 1898 and subsequent occupation of overseas colonies resulted in a global basing system, and by 1938 the United States had fourteen military bases outside its continental borders in Puerto Rico, Cuba, Panama, the Virgin Islands, Hawaii, Midway, Wake, Guam, the Philippines, Shanghai, the Aleutians, American Samoa, and Johnston Island. ... The explosion of foreign bases during World War II would be followed by surges during the Korean War, the War in Vietnam, and the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, showing that wars and occupations continue to expand U.S. territory, even if the form of those acquisitions has shifted since the days of settler-colonialism and annexation. The contemporary number, which hovers around 800 to 900, is still an impressive network that places the military within striking distance of every spot on the globe. Historian Bruce Cumings calls the modern form of U.S. empire an 'archipelago empire,' small islands of U.S. control from which power can be projected anywhere in the world. It has become increasingly difficult to tell where the boundaries of the United States begin and where they end.

... For most U.S. citizens these bases are either invisible or accepted as a natural part of our national security apparatus. David Vine argues that Americans 'consider the situation normal and accept that US military installations exist in staggering numbers in other countries, on other peoples’ land. On the other hand, the idea that there would be foreign bases on US soil is unthinkable.'"

Stefan Aune, "American Empire," in At War: The Military and American Culture in the Twentieth Century and Beyond, 2018

Map source

[probablyasocialecologist]

The urge toward cosmopolitanism was a direct effect of the rise of the United States to world power: Americans were, it seemed, everywhere! At the close of World War II, the United States was the undisputed world power, the only major force left standing and with a booming wartime economy. The troops could have come home after the war, but instead they stayed on and built permanent bases, and were periodically replenished by new crops of American boys. The American project spread itself around the world through military occupation (West Germany, South Korea, Japan), war (Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia), and an archipelago of military bases that stretched from Micronesia to the Philippines to Puerto Rico. To complement this military success, a host of government-sponsored programs—Fulbright Fellowships, state-sponsored arts tours, Area Studies departments, federal grants for literary translation—were founded, many of them still in existence today and promoting an ethos of worldly “exchange.” The hope was to bring all the world to Americans, since Americans seemed to be bringing themselves to all the world. This was one of the few moments in American life when government policy was mirrored by a positive popular style, rather than, as in the 1930s or 1960s, darkly refracted through a dissident culture more vibrant and appealing. Another way of putting this is that not many citizens opposed American foreign policy in the 1940s and 1950s, and so the High Imperial Aesthetic thrived precisely because it did not have to compete with serious dissent. This was made possible, in part, by an insistence that the United States was spreading democracy rather than colonizing, which meant leaving behind the adamantly imperial jingoism of the earlier century for the more subtle propaganda of liberal cosmopolitanism. High Imperial Aesthetics emerged as a way to gloss over the dissonance between what was said and what was done—but also, to manage these tensions.

[elbiotipo]

I'm not as well versed in the Philippines' history since I read this a long time ago, but the Philippines were taken from Spain as colonies after the US war with Spain in 1898. At the time, the Filipinos were already waging their own independence war against Spain. The Filipinos declared the First Philippine Republic in June 12 1899. However, the United States refused to accept it, which led to a bloody independence war that lasted decades, where the US military commited genocidal acts:

After World War II and the end of Japanese occupation, because of the obvious drag of holding a colonial possession of millions of people across the Pacific* during an era of decolonization, the US eventually "gave" the Philippines their independence in 1946 after World War II. The fact that they choose the 4th of July was not casual at all: they very much tried to imprint themselves, the former colonial power, as the gentle benefactors of a "daughter republic". There are INCREDIBLY racist cartoons of the US setting itself up as a "teacher" to its conquered nations, "preparing" them for self-determination.

This was a common practice by the US. I've read this in depth a long time ago and I'm sure you can find this in better detail elsewhere, but as the US was rising as an imperial power, it presented itself as an "Empire of Freedom", in suppossed contrast to the European powers, at the same time it did the same, if not worse (as shown in the Philipines) exploitation and crimes across the Pacific and Latin America. If they had could, they would have extended an entire plantation economy all around the Caribbean. Countless interventions testify this.

Of course the Philippines became independent, but it wasn't out of the benvolence of the United States. The US was perfectly willing and able to annex places on the Pacific. Of course you know about Hawai'i and Puerto Rico, which centuries after, still does not have self-determination. But how many Usamericans know about the "associated states" of Palau, Micronesia and the Marshall Islands, of the military bases at Guam? And let alone the countless genocides in the continental US in the name of manifest destiny.

Anyways. My point is, if you saw a post claiming the Philippines' independence was in the 4th of July, maybe you should have asked yourself why, exactly.

[datura-tea]

still thinking about filipinos in the fallout wasteland, but now in the context of my headcanon that fallout america annexed the philippines in 1946 instead of granting the nation its independence.

what made me think of this headcanon? the timeline between our world and the fallout world splits at about that period, and, well, there's precedent for the annexation: in real life, there were 50 years of american occupation, and there's ongoing american intereference in our politics, economy, and culture (essentially making the philippines an american neo-colony, but i digress), and considering how fallout america is just america turned up to 11, these things will just be magnified, and so: the philippine annexation of 1946.

now, there's nothing in fallout canon about the philippines except for a brief off-hand comment from the newscaster at the beginning of fallout 4 about american troops in mambajao (an island in camiguin) but this already tells me that, by 2077, if american military presence in the philippines has managed to reach that part of mindanao, the american occupation has intensified.

that little nugget already paints such a vivid picture of what's happening in fallout philippines - an american military base in mindanao tells me that more indigenous communities were displaced (real life example: the aeta and ibaloi communities in luzon, who still, to this day, cannot return to their ancestral lands), that sexual exploitation of women and children was rampant (irl: the sex industry in angeles city, among other areas), that american soldiers were free to enact violence on filipinos without facing any consequences (irl: jennifer laude's murder at the hands of joseph pemberton), that american imperialism is thriving in the archipelago, and that the sino-american war is serious and ramping up.

but let's see what the newscaster actually says:

"It would also appear our troops stationed overseas are experiencing some unusual weather, as well. On the Island of Mambajao the nights are cold. Unseasonably so for Southeast Asia. But for the 5th Infantry, that's as comfortable as an Autumn jamboree. All the easier for our mechanized hellcats to drive any screaming Commie meanies right into the Bohol Sea."

"screaming commie meanies" tells me that there's a significant communist presence in the philippines, which i am taking to mean that the communist party of the philippines and the new people's army are alive and well and fighting against the american occupation. i really don't think there'd be many chinese communist spies in the philippines at this time since filipino communists are against chinese imperialism as well, but tbh this part isn't solidified in my brain as much... anyway

essentially, fallout philippines has the problems of current, real life philippines, just amplified. american occupation on one hand, chinese imperialism on the other, unusual cold weather (which tells me that climate change was also a problem in the fallout universe), the threat of nuclear war... all with ordinary filipinos in the middle. would it be a stretch to say that a lot of them fled to america and established their own communities there? that those communities would have thrived and retained our creativity and sense of community/pagkakapwa abroad? that those communities would have survived the bombs and banded together and kept themselves and their culture alive, in the apocalypse?

[1900scartoons]

The Handy Little Red Schoolhouse 

December 9, 1906

Uncle Sam rings a bell at the Open Door to Orient School. Racist depictions of Japanese people frolic around.

The caption reads 'Why not have a little schoolhouse on the Philippine islands for the Jap boys to run and turn it over to them?'

Japan was angered by a decision in California to ban Japanese students from public schools. The authors solution is to give them the Philippines.

From Hennepin County Library

Original available at: https://digitalcollections.hclib.org/digital/collection/Bart/id/6657/rec/324

[cheesy-cryptid]

American occupation era Philippines but our girlie here is secretly a vampire hunter at a fancy party looking for her target 🦇🧛‍♂️🌴

[darkhopping]

“[in u.s. history class] why are we critical thinking lmao” DIYOS KO PO

put me back of philippines

[memecucker]

The relationship between colonialism and religion is more complicated than the Civilization game where you’re trying to score a religious victory and it’s easier to convert places you conquer.

It’s not a matter of religion being imposed purely for the purpose of religion being imposed even if that may have been the personal motives of individual colonizers because even if there was a truly missionary motive these missions could only exist insofar as it was economically sustainable and oftentimes this takes the form of exploitation of the indigenous population.

Also the flat conception of religious colonialism overlooks how as colonialism progressed as a type of “social technology” there was in many places a shift away from seeking to replace indigenous organized religions (if they were present in the first place) towards recruiting the indigenous religious authorities to the colonial side.

Like for example with the colonies of the Iberian powers there was no separation of church and state and I don’t just mean in the sense of “the state imposed religious dogma and the church officially endorsed the state” I mean basic everyday functions of the state relied upon services of the church. Eg; If a colonial Governor wanted to say, requisition corvee labor from villages for a building project and he wished to know the populations of these villages in order to decide which to pull laborers he wouldn’t be looking at any state mandated census but instead would rely upon the archives and records of the Catholic Church because records would be kept of church attendance. If the governor wanted to hunt some rebel named “Diego of San Juan” he’d look at baptismal records to find examples of people named “Diego” and who they’re related to.

This meant that Spanish and Portuguese colonialism had an actual material interest in enforcing religious homogeneity and Catholic supremacy because that’s how their colonial states functioned. The colonial bureaucracy was in fact synonymous with the Church’s bureaucracy and so if some people weren’t Catholic they existed outside the Church which meant they existed (at least partially) outside the State. One example that’s a bit relevant is the original version the “National Commission on Indigenous Peoples” in the Philippines was set up during the American occupation and was called “Bureau of Non-Christian Tribes” because the groups in question are largely people who existed outside of direct Spanish colonial control (and wouldve been labeled “savages” in the 19th century) and hence “non-Christian”.

Anyway in the case of the Portuguese colonial empire in Asia this wound up being part of the reason for its collapse. By making their state function in the requirement that it’s subjects be observant Catholics the Portuguese had a lot of trouble making allies because if indigenous elites could be persuaded to convert then great but if they didn’t then they were gonna get really pissed off especially when they start hearing the Portuguese are torturing people under their rule that feel the same. And so without a network of allies the Portuguese colonial empire in Asia began to fall apart leaving only Goa, Macau and East Timor. Elsewhere the Portuguese had been replaced by the Dutch, English and French all of whom had systems of governance which was not as so dependent on doctrinal supremacy as the Iberians eg; the Dutch agreed to help the Shogunate put down a Christian revolt in 1638 and the East India Company actually banned Christian missionaries from operating in its territories until 1813 when Parliament forced them to allow Christian missionaries to preach.

Now of course the EIC example is in particular interesting because what you’re basically seeing is the colonial state shedding its reliance on the Christian Church in favor of courting the support of indigenous religious leaders and recruiting them into the colonial apparatus but at the same time you have churches seeking to operate whats can be considered a type of “rival” colonial project that would have an almost parasitic relationship in that the churches profited in their own way while also in a way undermining the local legitimacy of the official colonial state.

[secular-jew]

Colonialism is a disease

Imagine being an Arab Muslim and having the audacity to call someone else a colonizer. The illustration below is a snapshot of Islamic colonialism and occupation of other people's lands, from the 7th-9th centuries. Islam went on to attack, destroy, occupy and colonize vast swaths of Europe and southeast Asia, as well as what is now called Turkey.

The world has witnessed many colonial empires since the beginning of time. Most notably, the Mongols, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Babylonians, Egyptians, Islam/Ottomans, Portuguese, Dutch, French, Spanish, British, and American. The only empire that didn't take land, even after winning world wars, were the Americans. They actually gave back the Philippines. But I digress.

All of these empires were in large part, created by bloody conquest, and built on the backs of the newly subjugated. The Hebrews were, famously, slaves in Egypt. No one seems to teach this in the west, focusing more on the Romans, but of all the colonialists, one of the most deadly brutal and expansionist empires were the Muslims aka the Islamists. The Islamic empire expanded by sheer, from Medina (where Muhammad massacred and enslaved the 50% majority Jewish population) all the way into western North Africa, much of Europe, and large populations of Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Malaysia, parts of India now called Pakistan, etc). As it expanded using violence and fear, Islam literally took 100 million slaves out of Africa, and was responsible for one of the greatest mass murders in history: killing 10 million (or more) on the forced march from their homelands to the Middle East.

Some examples of Islamic slavery include the Al-Andalus slave trade, the Trans-Saharan slave trade, the Indian Ocean slave trade, the Comoros slave trade, the Zanzibar slave trade, the Red Sea slave trade, the Barbary slave trade, the Ottoman slave trade, the Black Sea slave trade, the Bukhara (Uzbekistan) slave trade, and the Khivan slave trade from which Islam took millions of slaves out of Persia to the Islamic khanates. There are Arab/Islamic societies today (Libya, a well-known example) that still trade slaves.

Compare this to Israel. Israel/Judea was never colonial nor expansionist. The Hebrews (aka Jews) were often properties of and were subjugated by, colonial empires, including the Islamic colonial empire.

They Hebrews themselves, as noted above, were most famously slaves of the the colonial Egyptian empire, some 4,000 years ago, before being murdered and subjugated by Islam starting in the 7th century. Somehow able to escape Egyptian tyranny through their own efforts (some say, by the grace of Hashem), the Hebrews settled in their current indigenous homeland 3.600 years ago - a small area by global standards, smaller than Belize, Albania, or Montenegro. They were happy there, and even at their peak, did not attempt to force convert others or expand much beyond their lands.

As historian Barbara Tuchman wrote, Israel is “the only nation in the world that is governing itself in the same territory, under the same name, and with the same religion and same language as it did 3,000 years ago.” Despite all the occupations and forced exiles, the Jews/Hebrews/Israelites have maintained a continuous presence in Judea/Israel/Samaria for some 3,600+ years. And even though Israel was granted modern statehood in 1948, it is one of the oldest continuously maintained countries in the world. The 'modern' state of Israel came to fruition post WWII, in 1948; the redefinition of borders and modern statehood after the fall of the big colonials was in no way unusual to Israel. Many country's modern borders came to be defined in the post colonial period (post WWI & WWII). While Israel and Lebanon and Iraq and Iran and Syria and Egypt were all ancient civilizations, dating back thousands of years, modern statehood came in the 20th century: For example, statehood was granted to Egypt in 1922; Saudi Arabia and Iraq in 1932; Lebanon in 1943; Indonesia, South Korea & Vietnam in 1945; Syria & Jordan in 1946; India & Pakistan in 1947; Israel, & Myanmar in 1948; Laos, Libya & Bhutan in 1951; Cambodia in 1953; Morocco, Sudan & Tunisia in 1956; Ghana & Malaysia in 1957; and so on.

The problem is, the tribalism and supremacy of Islam, can't stand that it's once-conquered land is now in the hands of the original owners. Islam believes that once it puts a flag in the sand somewhere, it's theirs.

Oh, and by the way, Andalusia (Spain) is next in Islam's sights.