[On February 4th,
1899 Filipino rebels launched an attack on American troops in Manila, the
opening salvo in what would become the Philippine American
War (or Philippine
Insurrection—see Thursday’s post for more on that distinction). So this
week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of contexts for that largely forgotten,
brutal turn of the 20th century conflict, leading up to a weekend
post on the war’s legacies for 20th and 21st century
histories!]
On why what
might seem to be a semantic distinction is anything but.
Between its
February 1899 starting point and its July 1902 close, the military conflict
between Filipino and U.S. forces would take more than 4000 American and
more than 20,000 Filipino soldiers’ lives, and contributes to the deaths of
another 200,000 Filipino civilians. To use the words of A Few Good Men’s Captain Jack Ross (Kevin Bacon), “Those
are the facts, and they are undisputed.” In the light of such clear and
horrific historical details, it can seem mighty silly to quibble over whether
to call that conflict the Philippine American War or the Philippine
Insurrection (or Rebellion, or whatever similar term one might employ). There’s
no doubt that debates over historical frames or lenses can and too often do
obscure the human experiences (and, too often, horrors) at the heart of those
histories; whether we call the forced transport of African slaves to the Americas
the Middle Passage or the Triangle Trade or the Transatlantic slave trade, for
example, the tens of millions of Africans affected by it—and the millions of
them who died aboard those ships—comprise the stories and histories on which we
should most fully focus. That lesson holds true for many if not all histories,
and is certainly the case when it comes to the turn of the 20th
century military conflict in the Philippines.
Yet as an English
Professor (I know I’m also and in this space chiefly an AmericanStudier, but Professor
of English Studies is my official job title and a central part of my
identity), I know that language matters a great deal, and indeed is not just a
frame for reality but a principal method through which reality (or at least the
human experience of it) can be constructed. Among the many such effects of
calling the Philippine American War an “insurrection” instead would be a clear
vision of the Philippines themselves as under United States control in the era.
That is, an insurrection or rebellion is always an attempt to battle and
overthrow an existing regime, the power structure in that particular place and
time. Yet as I’ve noted throughout this series, the U.S. Senate didn’t approve the Treaty of Paris
that ended the Spanish American War until four days after the opening shots of
the Philippine American War—so even if we don’t see the two conflicts as
inextricably intertwined (as I argued on Monday we should), or don’t recognize
the validity of Emilio Aguinaldo’s June
1898 Philippine Declaration of Independence, it makes very little sense to
consider the United States as the clear authority in the islands as of February
1899. And if the U.S. wasn’t that authority at that time, then there’s no
reason not to see the conflict that began in that month as a war between two
equal forces for control over the islands (or even, if you want to go further,
as a continued U.S. invasion of the islands and attempt to overthrow the
established First
Philippine Republic).
Moreover, thinking
of the conflict as a war in those ways also significantly challenges our sense
of when it ended. It’s true that Aguinaldo was captured and surrendered in March
1901, and his fellow general Miguel
Malvar did so in April 1902, leading to President Theodore
Roosevelt’s July 4, 1902 peace amnesty. But many Filipino forces (especially
Muslim Filipinos in the islands’ southern, Moro region) continued fighting for
more than a decade after that; this conflict has come to be known as the Moro
Rebellion, and is said to have ended with the June
1913 Battle of Bud Bagsak. But here again, calling this conflict a “rebellion”
gives credence to the U.S. as an established authority in the Philippines; and
if we’re able to question that authority when it comes to the first years of
this war, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to do so throughout the
conflict. At the very least, there’s significant value in thinking about all 14
years of the conflict as a series of battles between opposing forces seeking
control of the islands, and reframing the war in that way starts with a
semantic shift.
Last war context
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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