The joints and trusses propping up the DC Empire are groaning and straining under their unbearable weight. The Empire's satrapy in the Philippines is vigorously reasserting its independence from its former colonial master: Sometimes Americans think we have won a war, only to realize years or decades later that our victory was incomplete. Now we are facing an eruption of anger over a war we waged more than a century ago. Rarely has blowback from an overseas intervention come back to haunt us so long after the shooting stopped.
This unexpected challenge has emerged from the Philippines. The new president, Rodrigo Duterte, recently announced plans to pull his country out of America’s orbit and adopt an “independent” foreign policy. “I am anti-West,” he explained. “I do not like the Americans. It’s simply a matter of principle for me.”
Duterte’s grievance is rooted in history. Americans, he asserted, unjustly seized the Philippines in 1899, waged a horrific military campaign to suppress native resistance, and “have not even apologized to the Filipino nation.” He waved photographs showing bodies of Filipinos killed in that war.
Soon after Duterte made that startling speech, his foreign minister, Perfecto Yasay, went even further. In 1899, Yasay asserted, the United States “arrogated our victory in the struggle for freedom” and then used “invisible chains” to bind Filipinos into “shackling dependency.” Americans, he said, treat Filipinos as “little brown brothers not capable of true independence or freedom.” To escape from that humiliation, he concluded, the Philippines must end its “subservience to United States interests.”
All the Yankees did in 1899 was to slaughter some 300,000 civilians resisting foreign domination, depriving them of self-determination. Some people really know how to carry a grudge.
Speaking of old sins and wars thought to have been won, there's also the little matter of DC's immoral and brutal invasion of the Southern States, an act of naked aggression and exploitation that took the lives of hundreds of thousands, maimed thousands more, and plunged millions into poverty. I'm reminded of an observation by Jefferson Davis: "A question settled by violence, or in disregard of law, must remain unsettled forever." Or, as in the case of the Philippines, resettled later.