Like most places in the world,
there is a dark side to the Philippines. It’s a place of appalling poverty and
injustice, a blighted land where too many politicians, businessmen, religious
leaders and ordinary citizens allow greed and self-interest to triumph over
rule of law, justice and the common good.
The fact that the country is scattered
across thousands of islands has stunted social, economic and political
development. So has the legacy of colonialism — more than three centuries of
Spanish domination, followed by 47 years of American rule. The Philippines
became a nominally independent nation only in 1946, so its institutions remain
weak and fragile, and its sense of national identity is still embryonic.
author: Honor in the Dust
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The following is an excerpt from The
New York Times book review by Candice Millard on Gregg Jones’ Honor In the
Dust:
Quote
Jones, who was once a correspondent in
Manila and whose first book, “Red Revolution,” took readers inside the New
People’s Army, has a thorough understanding of the Philippines. But it is on
the United States that “Honor in the Dust” casts the brightest, and at times
harshest, light. After America first entered the Philippines in 1898, during
the course of the Spanish-American War, President William McKinley insisted
that it was the Filipinos’ “liberty and not our power, their welfare and not
our gain, we are seeking to enhance.” The American people, however, flush with
victory, had started to dream of expansion, even empire, and pressure mounted
on McKinley not just to free Spanish colonies but also to lay claim to them. By
1900, an election year, McKinley had begun to give in, arguing that “territory
sometimes comes to us when we go to war in a holy cause.” Addressing a campaign
crowd in Nebraska, he asked, “Shall we deny to ourselves what the rest of the
world so freely and justly accords to us?” The answer, as he knew it would be,
was an instantaneous and uproarious “No!”
There was within the United States a
strong and vocal anti-imperialist movement, which included former President
Grover Cleveland, Andrew Carnegie and Mark Twain, but it struggled to tamp down
the country’s growing expansionist zeal, and to compete with the energy,
tenacity and bulldog ambition of one man in particular: Theodore Roosevelt.
Roosevelt, who in just six years rose meteorically from New York City police
commissioner to president, nurtured a deep and unshakable contempt for what he
called the “unintelligent, cowardly chatter for ‘peace at any price.’ ” Not
only had the “clamor of the peace faction” left him unmoved, Roosevelt wrote,
it had served to strengthen his conviction that “this country needs a war.”
Unquote
A New History of the
Philippine-American War
By CANDICE MILLARD
The New York Times
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