Before Vietnam
Miller, Stuart Creighton
Before Vietnam "BENEVOLENT ASSIMILATION": THE AMERICAN CONQUEST OF THE PHILIPPINES, 1899-1903 by Stuart Creighton Miller Yale University Press. 340 pp. $25. When the United States sent its troops...
...Stone and Martin Luther King Jr...
...Said a teletype operator in Philadelphia when My Lai was uncovered: "I can't believe our boys' hearts are that rotten...
...From Miller, we learn how historical blindness condemns us to repeat in agonizing detail our earlier experience and to ignore the historical roots of protest...
...Here, sixty years early, are Saigon's "five o'clock follies," the press briefings "too divorced from reality to be of much value...
...Here are politicians claiming, as did Richard Nixon seventy years later, that the United States had exercised "remarkable restraint" in fighting the war, and demagogues quick to label the antiwar opposition traitorous...
...Here are pressures on the soldiers which echo those described in Philip Caputo's Vietnam novel, A Rumor of War...
...Particularly striking is the testimony from American military officers that the opposition was a nationalist uprising...
...In stunning contrast to the 1960s, many newspapers and prominent individuals spoke out strongly against the war, even in advance of its outbreak (which Miller blames on the Americans...
...Or again: "The success of this unique system of war [waged by Aguinaldo] depends upon almost complete unity of action of the entire population...
...Here are body counts and My Lais, Colonel Pattons and Captain Medinas...
...Here are scorched-earth policies: "At present," writes an American captain, "we are destroying this district, everything before us...
...When the United States sent its troops into the jungles of Vietnam in the 1960s, few people realized that it was following a precedent set at the turn of the century, when the U.S...
...That such unity is a fact is too obvious to admit of dis-ission...
...armed forces put down a nationalist uprising in the Philippines...
...But the American boys of Lieutenant Calley's Charlie Company were doing little that the American boys of 1900 had not done before them...
...Filipinos are either Indians "as full of treachery as our Arizona Apache" or "niggers": "The country won't be pacified until the niggers are killed off like the Indians...
...And the re velations of war crimes met a much more immediate response in 1900...
...As Stuart C. Miller writes in the fine study, "Benevolent Assimilation": The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899-1903, "Both wars were counterin-surgencies intended to deny a racially different people the right of self-determination, fought by American soldiers who expressed a racist contempt for the enemy...
...What do these parallels—and Miller's fascinating book—teach us...
...Here are free-fire zones ("deadlines") around concentration camps...
...he writes of "the juvenile street and campus scenarios enacted by 'Yippies,' angry students, and a few aging adolescents on college faculties who found it rejuvenating to play 'revolution.' " But surely that contempt is ill-advised...
...Given the history Miller portrays with such devastating detail, we must cherish any and all voices calling out against policies such as those employed first in the Philippines and later in Vietnam...
...in Miller's words, "everything outside of the camps was systematically destroyed— humans, crops, food stores, domestic animals, houses, and boats...
...The imperialists of 1900 favored annexation but no citizenship in order to avoid becoming, in the words of Virginia Senator John W. Daniel, "a witch's cauldron," "black spirits and white, red, gray spirits . . . spotted people with zebra signs on them...
...In the process, one expansionist denounced the Declaration of Independence as "the most damnable lie as the devil ever invented...
...I have three columns out, and their course is easily traced by the smoke from burning houses...
...Here is Douglas MacArthur's father, Arthur: "I have been reluctantly compelled to believe that the Filipino masses are loyal to Aguinaldo and the government which he heads...
...Richard H. Minear (Richard H. Minear is a historian at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst...
...Singularly depressing is the racism of many Americans in the Philippines and at home...
...Michael Cimino's film The Deer Hunter to the contrary notwithstanding, America had no innocence to lose in Vietnam...
...Miller, a historian at San Francisco State since 1962, is strangely contemptuous of the antiwar movement of the late 1960s...
...At the least, that American brutality in Asian wars did not begin in 1963, and that anti-imperialist sentiment existed in the United States long before I.F...
...Miller is at pains to limit the analogy between the Philippines and Vietnam, but to this reader the similarities are overwhelming...
Vol. 47 • May 1983 • No. 6
