The other night I gave a lecture at UC Davis for BRIDGE, the Filipino Outreach and Retention Program. The topic was the Filipino American War, and current militarization in the southern Philippines (as part of Bush's "war on terrorism" -- to deflect criticism, I said, that the war on Iraq was making him neglect the war on Al-Qaida).
In any case, I read the following excerpt below by way of an ending. It's from a letter by William James -- known to most people as a psychologist and the writer of The Varieties of Religious Experience -- but also an ardent anti-imperialist as well. (The excerpt is long, but read at least the final paragraph.)
The letter was written to the Boston Evening Transcript in March 1899, just a little over a century ago; I take the excerpt from Boone Schirmer and Stephen Shalom 's excellent The Philippines Reader: A History of Colonialism, Neocolonialism, Dictatorship, and Resistance (Boston: South End Press, 1987):
We are now openly engaged in crushing out the sacredest thing in this great human world -- the attempt of a people long enslaved to attain to the possession of itself, to organize its laws and government, to be free to follow its internal destinies according to its own ideals. War... aims at destruction, and at nothing else. And splendidly are we carrying out war's ideal. We are destroying the lives of these islanders by the thousand... But these destructions are the smallest part of our sins. We are destroying down to the root every germ of a healthy national life in these unfortunate people, and we are surely helping to destroy for one generation at least their faith in God and man. No life shall you have, we say, except as a gift from our philanthropy after your unconditional submission to our will....Posted by the wily filipino at February 28, 2003 01:02 PMIt is horrible, simply horrible. Surely there cannot be many born and bred Americans who, when they look at the bare fact of what we are doing, and do not blush with burning shame at the unspeakable meanness and ignominy...?
Why, then, do we go on? First, the war fever; and then the pride which always refuses to back down when under fire. But these are passions that interfere with the reasonable settlement of any affair; and in this affair we have to deal with a factor altogether peculiar with our belief, namely, in a national destiny which must be "big" at any cost, and which for some inscrutable reason it has become infamous for us to disbelieve or refuse. We are to be missionaries of civilization, and to bear the white man's burden, painful as it often is. We must sow our ideals, plant our order, impose our God. The individual lives are nothing. Our duty and our destiny call, and civilization must go on.
Could there be a more damning indictment of that whole blasted idol termed "modern civilization" than this amounts to?...
...The issue is perfectly plain at last. We are cold-bloodedly, wantonly and abominably destroying the soul of a people who never did us an atom of harm in their lives. It is bald, brutal piracy, impossible to dish up any longer in the cold potgrease of President McKinley's cant... -- surely as shamefully evasive a speech, considering the right of the public to know definite facts, as can often have fallen even from a professional politician's lips. The worst of our imperialists is that they do not themselves know where sincerity ends and insincerity begins....
The impotence of the private individual, with imperialism under full headway as it is, is deplorable indeed. But every American has a voice or a pen, and may use it. So, impelled by my own sense of duty, I write these present words. One by one we shall creep from cover, and the opposition will organize itself.