The Philippine-American War

Death Toll: 1,000,000

IN 1908 MANUEL ARELLANO REMONDO, IN GENERAL GEOGRAPHY OF
THE PHILIPPINE ISLANDS, WROTE: THE POPULATION DECREASED DUE TO THE WARS, IN THE FIVE-YEAR PERIOD FROM 1895 TO 1900, SINCE, AT THE START OF THE FIRST INSURRECTION, THE POPULATION WAS ESTIMATED AT 9,000,000, AND AT PRESENT (1908), THE INHABITANTS OF THE ARCHIPELAGO DO NOT EXCEED 8,000,000 IN NUMBER.

I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines . We have gone to conquer, not to redeem And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the [American] eagle put its talons on any other land.

Mark Twain October 15, 1900 The New York Herald

Between the years 1899 and 1913 the United States of America wrote the darkest pages of its history. The invasion of the Philippines for no other reason than acquiring imperial possessions, prompted a fierce reaction of the Filipino people. 126,000 American soldiers were brought in to quell the resistance. As a result, 400,000 Filipino insurrectos died under the American fire and one million Filipino civilians died because of the hardship, mass killings and scorched earth tactics carried out by the Americans.

In total the American war against a peaceful people who fairly ignored the existence of the Americans until their arrival wiped out 1/6 of the population of the country. One hundred years have passed. Isnt it high time that the USA army, Congress and Government apologised for the horrendous crimes and monstruous sufferings that inflicted upon the peoples of Filipinas?

Alfonso Velzquez

It was American policy at the turn of the century to kill as many Filipinos as possible. The rationale was straightforward:

With a very few exceptions, practically the entire population has been hostile to us at heart, wrote Brigadier General J. Franklin Bell. In order to combat such a population, it is necessary to make the state of war as insupportable as possible, and there is no more efficacious way of accomplishing this than by keeping the minds of the people in such a state of anxiety and apprehension that living under such conditions will soon become intolerable.

The comparison of this highly successful operation with our less successful adventure in Vietnam was made by, among others, Bernard Fall, who referred to our conquest of the Philippines as:

the bloodiest colonial war (in proportion to population) ever fought by a white power in Asia ; it cost the lives of 3,000,000 Filipinos. (cf. E. Ahmeds The Theory and Fallacies of CounterInsurgency, The Nation, August 2, 1971.)

General Bell himself, the old sweetheart, estimated that we killed one-sixth of the population of the main island of Luzon some 600,000 people.

Now a Mr. Creamer quotes a Mr. Hill (who grew up in Manila , presumably counting skulls) who suggests that the body count for all the islands is 300,000 men, women, and childrenor half what General Bell admitted to.

I am amused to learn that I have wandered so far from easily verified fact. There are no easily verified facts when it comes to this particular experiment in genocide. At the time when I first made reference to the 3,000,000 (NYR, October 18, 1973), a Filipino wrote me to say she was writing her masters thesis on the subject. She was inclined to accept Falls figures but she said that since few records were kept and entire villages were totally destroyed, there was no way to discover, exactly, those facts historians like to verify. In any case, none of this is supposed to have happened and so, as far as those history books that we use to indoctrinate the young go, it did not happen.

Gore Vidal

EXCEPT during the sixties when the Filipino-American War of 1899-1902 was referred to as the first Vietnam , the death of 1.4 million Filipinos has been usually accounted for as either collateral damage or victims of insurrection against the imperial authority of the United States .

The first Filipino scholar to make a thorough documentation of the carnage is the late Luzviminda Francisco in her contribution to The Philippines: The End of An Illusion ( London , 1973).

This fact is not even mentioned in the tiny paragraph or so in most U.S. history textbooks. Stanley Karnows In Our Image (1989), the acclaimed history of this intervention, quotes the figure of 200,000 Filipinos killed in outright fighting. Among historians, only Howard Zinn and Gabriel Kolko have dwelt on the genocidal character of the catastrophe. Kolko, in his magisterial Main Currents in Modern American History (1976), reflects on the context of the mass murder:

Violence reached a crescendo against the Indian after the Civil War and found a yet bloodier manifestation during the protracted conquest of the Philippines from 1898 until well into the next decade, when anywhere from 200,000 to 600,000 Filipinos were killed in an orgy of racist slaughter that evoked much congratulation and approval.

Zinns A Peoples History of the United States (1980) cites 300,000 Filipinos killed in Batangas alone, while William Pomeroys American Neo-Colonialism (1970) cites 600,000 Filipinos dead in Luzon alone by 1902. The actual figure of 1.4 million covers the period from 1899 to 1905 when resistance by the Filipino revolutionary forces mutated from outright combat in battle to guerilla skirmishes; it doesnt include the thousands of Moros (Filipino Muslims) killed in the first two decades of U.S. colonial domination.

E. San Juan, Jr.

In A Peoples History of the United States, Howard Zinn writes of American sadism during the PhilippineAmerican war:

In November 1901, the Manila correspondent of The Philadelphia Ledger reported:

The present war is no bloodless, opera bouffe engagement; our men have been relentless, have killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people from lads of ten up, the idea prevailing that the Filipino as such was little better than a dog Our soldiers have pumped salt water into men to make them talk, and have taken prisoners people who held up their hands and peacefully surrendered, and an hour later, without an atom of evidence to show that they were even insurrectos, stood them on a bridge and shot them down one by one, to drop into the water below and float down, as examples to those who found their bullet-loaded corpses.

In Manila , a U.S. Marine named Littletown Waller, a major, was accused of shooting eleven defenseless Filipinos, without trial, on the island of Samar . Other marine officers described his testimony:

The major said that General Smith instructed him to kill and burn, and said that the more he killed and burned the better pleased he would be; that it was no time to take prisoners, and that he was to make Samar a howling wilderness. Major Waller asked General Smith to define the age limit for killing, and he replied everything over ten.

In the province of Batangas , the secretary of the province estimated that of the population of 300,000, one third had been killed by combat, famine, or disease. American firepower was overwhelmingly superior to anything the Filipino rebels could put together. In the very first battle, Admiral Dewey steamed up the Pasig River and fired 500-pound shells into the Filipino trenches. Dead Filipinos were piled so high that the Americans used their bodies for breastworks. Mark Twain said further of the brutal American genocide: I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the philippines . we have gone to conquer, not to redeem and so i am an anti-imperialist. i am opposed to having the [american] eagle put its talons on any other land.

They called it the "water cure" - waterboarding in the Philippines

Mark Twain October 15, 1900 the new york herald

We have pacified some thousands of the islanders and buried them; destroyed their fields; burned their villages, and turned their widows and orphans out-of-doors; furnished heartbreak by exile to some dozens of disagreeable patriots; subjugated the remaining ten millions by Benevolent Assimilation, which is the pious new name of the musket; we have acquired property in the three hundred concubines and other slaves of our business partner, the Sultan of Sulu, and hoisted our protecting flag over that swag. And so, by these providences of god and the phrase is the governments, not mine we are a World Power.

Mark Twain

Filipino historian E. San Juan, Jr., alleges that the death of 1.4 million Filipinos constitutes an act of genocide on the part of the United States .

Mark Twain was deeply disturbed by the sadistic war crimes committed by the evil U.S. military in a Vietnam-like genocide which lasted from 1899 to 1902. He was also disgusted with the virtually universal racism in which White Americans shamelessly wallowed throughout those benighted turnof-the-century years. (The very years which moral Neanderthals in America even now call The Good Old Days.) Twain cynically saluted America s first international genocide by suggesting that we replace the stars and stripes in our flag with the skull and crossbones.

Our soldiers have pumped salt water into men to make them talk, and have taken prisoners people who held up their hands and peacefully surrendered, and an hour later, without an atom of evidence to show that they were even insurrectos, stood them on a bridge and shot them down one by one, to drop into the water below and float down, as examples to those who found their bullet-loaded corpses.

United States attacks into the countryside often included scorched earth campaigns[62] in which entire villages were burned and destroyed, the use of torture (water cure[79]) and the concentration of civilians into protected zones.[80] In November 1901, the Manila correspondent of the Philadelphia Ledger reported:The present war is no bloodless, opera bouffe engagement; our men have been relentless, have killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people from lads of ten up, the idea prevailing that the Filipino as such was little better than a dog.

A New York-born soldier The town of Titatia [sic] was surrendered to us a few days ago, and two companies occupy the same. Last night one of our boys was found shot and his stomach cut open. Immediately orders were received from General Wheaton to burn the town and kill every native in sight; which was done to a finish. About 1,000 men, women and children were reported killed. I am probably growing hard-hearted, for I am in my glory when I can sight my gun on some dark skin and pull the trigger (Benevolent Assimilation, pg. 88). Corporal Sam Gillis We make everyone get into his house by seven p.m., and we only tell a man once. If he refuses we shoot him. We killed over 300 natives the first night. They tried to set the town on fire. If they fire a shot from the house we burn the house down and every house near it, and shoot the natives, so they are pretty quiet in town now.

Filipi no villagers were forced into concentration camps called reconcentrados which were surrounded by free-fire zones, or in other words dead zones. Furthermore, these camps were overcrowded and filled with disease, causing the death rate to be extremely high. Conditions in these reconcentrados were inhumane. Between January and April 1902, 8,350 prisoners of approximately 298,000 died. Some camps incurred death rates as high as 20 percent. One camp was two miles by one mile (3.2 by 1.6 km) in area and home to some 8,000 Filipinos. Men were rounded up for questioning, tortured, and summarily

executed. In Manila , a U.S. Marine named Littletown Waller, a major, was accused of shooting eleven defenseless Filipinos, without trial, on the island of Samar . Other marine officers described his testimony:

The major said that General Smith instructed him to kill and burn, and said that the more he killed and burned the better pleased he would be; that it was no time to take prisoners, and that he was to make Samar a howling wilderness. Major Waller asked General Smith to define the age limit for killing, and he replied Everything over ten.

In the province of Batangas , the secretary of the province estimated that of the population of 300,000, one third had been killed by combat, famine, or disease.

American firepower was overwhelmingly superior to anything the Filipino rebels could put together. In the very first battle, Admiral Dewey steamed up the Pasig River and fired 500-pound shells into the Filipino trenches. Dead Filipinos were piled so high that the Americans used their bodies for breastworks.

A British witness said:

This is not war; it is simply massacre and murderous butchery.

IraqWar Parallels Philippine-American War

BY BING ARADANAS, a Lompoc native who visited Philippine tribes last year to document whats left of pre-colonial indigenous Asian culture and to build the case for a pan-tribal national identity.

I have spent the last year stressing over the Iraq War, worried for the lives of U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians, and questioning my notion of democracy. I am distressed by the war in Iraq s parallels to the PhilippineAmerican War, which, though perhaps the least-known U.S. war, was America s longest foreign military conflict 37 years in which nearly 200,000 civilians died.

The parallels between the two wars are many. On October 19, 2003, the New York Times identified three similarities in its article Bush Cites Philippines as Model in Rebuilding Iraq the seizure of a sovereign nation, the installation of a Western-style democracy, and flimsy evidence to justify war. But there are more: America shot first both times, both wars involved weaker countries rich in natural resources, and both sparked prominent antiwar movements. U.S. propaganda labeled resistance fighters opposed to American occupation brigands in the Philippines and terrorists in Iraq , while cheerleading media reduced the human dimension of both enemies to elicit pro-war support.

The conquest of the Philippines was America s first experiment with nation building. If Bush truly views it as a model for rebuilding Iraq, we should learn what happened to the first nation America built, and its impact on the Philippine people.

Philippines, My Philippines

The least Asian country in Asia, is how fellow backpackers described the Philippines to me when I traveled there last summer. I found their assessment true; locals typically have American nicknames and Spanish surnames, they are Christian, speak English, and religiously follow American trends. Most signs are in English and billboards advertise skin-whitening soaps. Mixed Filipinos with lighter skin and pointed noses play the heroes and sex symbols in movies while Filipinos with native flat noses and brown skin play villains, servants, and buffoons.

The eradication of Filipino culture began in the 1500s when Spain colonized the Philippines . For three centuries the Spanish ruled and native customs were outlawed. Spain s lasting legacies include Latin surnames, Catholicism, and a deeply ingrained belief that native brown skin is inferior to lighter skin. In 1898, Filipino revolutionaries booted out the Spanish, but the countrys freedom was short-lived. In 1899, the U.S. took over the country and continued squelching the Filipino culture, supplanting it with American ways.

American influence was visible at every level. Schoolchildren saluted both the American and Filipino flags. They sang both The Star Spangled Banner and the Philippine national anthem, Lupang Hinirang, a song crafted by Americans to the melody of an American tune Maryland , My Maryland. Longtime Goleta resident Ambrose Baggao was born in the Philippines in 1912. He said Americans made English the

national language of instruction, a policy still enforced today. If he spoke his native Ilocano in school, he was fined a farmworkers half-hour wage.

America gave enormous landholdings to corporations, such as Dole and Del Monte for pineapple plantations. It created a more stable environment for American capitalism by building roads, bridges and communications, and English-language public schools to prepare its new colonial subjects for the low-wage workforce.

Americans considered Filipinos inferior and perpetuated racist views in the United States . Government anthropologist W. J. McGee, for example, displayed Filipino tribes as zoo animals at the 1904 St. Louis Fair, labeling some as savages and monkey-like. National Geographic Magazine in 1912-13 called nonChristian Filipinos wild and uncivilized.

Despite their lesser status, many Filipinos immigrated to the U.S. searching for opportunity. Baggao joined 100,000 other Filipinos who poured into America in the 1920s and 30s. Most were young, poor, uneducated, and male. Filipinos immigrated freely due to colonial status as American nationals with U.S. passports. However, they couldnt legally vote, own property or a business, work government jobs, become citizens, practice law, or marry white or Mexican women. They were excluded from many restaurants, hotels, and swimming pools, and encountered racially segregated theater seating.

The overwhelming majority found only menial work in cities or physical labor on farms, railroads, and in fish canneries. Like the Chinese and Japanese before them, Filipinos helped build America by providing labor for frontier industries until racist hostility led to laws preventing further immigration respectively: the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882; the Gentlemens Agreement of 1907 and Reed-Johnson Immigration Act of 1924; and the Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934. The bigotry exhibited by Americans was particularly devastating to Filipinos, who, unlike previous immigrants whod faced discrimination, had learned in Americanized schools to see themselves as equals of white Americans.

The Seeds of War

At Lompoc High School years ago, I was jolted awake during history class when the word Filipino materialized in our textbook. Being Filipino-American, I was thrilled. But my excitement turned to embarrassment as I learned Filipinos were the bad guys. The book didnt mention that Filipinos were the first Asian group to settle permanently in America (near New Orleans, 1763); that Filipinos organized the strike that led to the formation of the United Farm Workers (Delano, 1965); nor that Filipinos invented the fluorescent bulb, the one-chip video camera, and co-discovered the antibiotic erythromycin. Rather, I read about The Philippine Insurrection, 1899-1902, in which Filipinos, instead of gratefully accepting the gift of American domination after the Spanish-American War, rebelled against their legitimate ruler America and lost. Ashamed for my heritage, I was relieved my classmates didnt jack me after class.

How did America justify violent conquest? There was no threat of communism, terrorism, or dictators with weapons of mass destruction. Filipinos had neither fired the first shot against Americans, nor had they invaded U.S. shores.

The American-Philippines war commenced in 1899. In June 1898, Filipinos had won their two-year war for independence against Spain , aided at the very end by America , which was fighting its own three-month war against Spain . Unbeknownst to Filipinos, however, America and Spain had arranged for the Spanish to lose to American troops not to Filipinos in a phony battle staged by Admiral Thomas Dewey in Manila Bay . Edouard Andr, Belgian consul to the Philippines , arranged the deal. In December 1898, America secretly purchased the Philippines , Guam, and Puerto Rico from Spain for $20 million in Paris .

Two months later, U.S. private Willie Grayson shot Filipino passersby without provocation while patrolling his camp in Manila . Shooting between both sides followed. The shooting incident gave America the excuse it needed to wage war, and Congress quickly ratified the secret $20 million deal. General Elwell Otis lied to the American public saying that Filipinos fired the first shot, igniting anti-Filipino war fever. Racist newspaper cartoons depicted Filipinos as monkey-like children and stupid barbarians. The conflict provoked an antiwar movement in the form of the Anti-Imperialist League, founded by such prominent Americans as author Mark Twain, industrialist Andrew Carnegie, and former President Grover Cleveland.

The war lasted until 1936. Former NBC journalist Stanley Karnow detailed the atrocities in his 1989 book, In Our Image. Foreshadowing U.S. military terrorism decades later in Vietnam, El Salvador, Guatemala, Chile, and Colombia, U.S. soldiers in the Philippines raped gook women, threw ****** infants in the air and bayoneted them, summarily executed monkey prisoners and goo-goo elders on bridges and let their corpses float downriver to terrorize the population, burned entire villages to enforce mass relocations and to control food supplies, and crowded people into jails so tightly they couldnt sit down.

Filipino freedom fighters from the south were so fierce that American .38 caliber guns often failed to kill them. So the unwelcome Americans developed a superior gun specifically designed to kill southern Filipinos: the Colt .45 ACO. The worst massacre occurred at Bud Dajo in 1906: The U.S. killed 600 unarmed civilians, four years after America formally declared victory. According to the Museum of the Filipino People in Manila , the Moro Wars in the South ended in 1936, contrary to beliefs that the Philippine Insurrection ended in 1902 or that brigand resistance ended in 1913.

When America granted Philippine independence in 1946, horrendous strings were attached. The General Relations agreement gave America control over foreign policy; the Bell Trade Law gave America control over tariffs and currency; the Military Assistance agreement gave America control over the army; the Military Bases Agreement allowed America to maintain bases there for 99 years. The Rescission Act of 1946 denied full veterans benefits promised to Filipinos whod fought loyally for the U.S. during World War II simply because they chose to reside in the Philippines after the war.

Iraqand the Philippines

Nation-building lasted 47 years, enriched a handful of wealthy Americans, ushered in one anti-democratic puppet regime after another, contributed to the ongoing decline of native identity and culture, and promoted the Philippines worldwide reputation for cheap mail-order brides and underage prostitutes. And a century of neocolonial U.S. capitalism has certainly dented the Filipino psyche. All things American enthrall the average youth fast food, violent video games, singing karaoke to American pop songs, fashion, Hollywood, text phones, and basketball.

Under the surface, however, theres another story. Because Im a brown-skinned Filipino, locals opened up to me in a way they never would with a white American. I found everywhere a grumbling resentment of American hegemony but a simultaneous fatalism that nothing can be done about it, so why bother.

And who can blame them? Since independence, America has consistently helped corrupt puppet presidents crush nationalist movements and defeat nationalist presidential candidates. For example, the American government propped up Ferdinand Marcos for 20 years. Even though he jailed and tortured thousands of his political opponents and had many of them killed, and the Guinness Book of World Records ranks him as the biggest thief of all time, five consecutive U.S. presidents hailed him as a leader of democracy, particularly Ronald Reagan. And for almost a century, U.S. war crimes were buried by lies, omissions and propagandizing spins in history books.

Americas first experiment with nation-building began with a war where America shot first, a war sold to the American public on false pretexts, fueled by a manipulative media that portrayed the enemy as sub-human, involving a weaker Third World nation abundant in natural resources, and opposed by a prominent antiwar movement. I find these parallels of the Philippine-American War with the war on Iraq disgusting.

Genocides in history
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Genocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group. It is defined in Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG) as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the groups conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."[1] The preamble to the CPPCG not only states that "genocide is a crime under international law, contrary to the spirit and aims of the United Nations and condemned by the civilized world", but that "at all periods of history genocide has inflicted great losses on humanity".[1] Determining what historical events constitute a genocide and which are merely criminal or inhuman behavior is not a clear-cut matter. In nearly every case where accusations of genocide have circulated, partisans of various sides have fiercely disputed the interpretation and details of the event, often to the point of promoting wildly different versions of the facts. An accusation of genocide is certainly not taken lightly and will almost always be controversial. The following list of genocides and alleged genocides should be understood in this context and cannot be regarded as the final word on these subjects.

1 Alternative meanings of genocide 2 Timeline of genocides 2.1 Before 1490 2.2 1490 to 1914 2.2.1 Americas 2.2.1.1 United States of America 2.2.1.2 Argentina 2.2.2 Australia 2.2.3 France 2.2.4 Philippines This proves it was genocide: American atrocities Enraged by a guerrilla massacre of U.S. troops on the Island of Samar, General Jacob H. Smith retaliated by carrying out an indiscriminate attack upon its inhabitants.[82] His order "KILL EVERY ONE OVER TEN" became a caption in the New York Journal cartoon on May 5, 1902. The Old Glory draped an American shield on which a vulture replaced the bald eagle. The bottom caption exclaimed, "Criminals Because They Were Born Ten Years Before We Took the Philippines ". Published in the New York Journal-American, May 5, 1902. Smith was eventually court-martialed by the American military and forced to retire.[82] The number of Filipino casualties was at the time, and still is, intensely debated and politicized.[citation needed] It is estimated that some 34,000 Filipino soldiers lost their lives and that as many as 200,000 civilians may have died directly or indirectly as a result of the war, most due to a major cholera epidemic that broke out near its end.[83] In 1908 Manuel Arellano Remondo, in General Geography of the Philippine Islands, wrote: The population decreased due to the wars, in the five-year period from 1895 to 1900, since, at the start of the first insurrection, the population was estimated at 9,000,000, and at present (1908), the inhabitants of the Archipelago do not exceed 8,000,000 in number.[84] In light of the massive casualties suffered by the civilian population, Filipino historian E. San Juan, Jr., alleges that the death of 1.4 million Filipinos constitutes an act of genocide on the part of the United States .[85] Atrocities were committed on both sides.[86] United States attacks into the countryside often included scorched earth campaigns[71] in which entire villages were burned and destroyed, the use of torture (water cure[87]) and the concentration of civilians into "protected zones".[88] In November 1901, the Manila correspondent of the Philadelphia Ledger reported:"The present war is no bloodless, opera bouffe engagement; our men have been relentless, have killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people from lads of ten up, the idea prevailing that the Filipino as such was little better than a dog...."[89]

This proves it was genocide: American soldiers' letters and response Throughout the entire war American soldiers would write home about the horrors and atrocities which the United States committed in the Philippines . In these letters they would criticize General Otis and the U.S. military; when these letters reached anti-imperialist editors they became national news and forced the War Department to look into their truthfulness. Two of the letters went as follows:

1. A New York-born soldier: The town of Titatia [sic] was surrendered to us a few days ago, and two companies occupy the same. Last night one of our boys was found shot and his stomach cut open. Immediately orders were received from General Wheaton to burn the town and kill every native in sight; which was done to a finish. About 1,000 men, women and children were reported killed. I am probably growing hard-hearted, for I am in my glory when I can sight my gun on some dark skin and pull the trigger (Benevolent Assimilation, p. 88).[90] 2. Corporal Sam Gillis: We make everyone get into his house by seven p.m., and we only tell a man once. If he refuses we shoot him. We killed over 300 natives the first night. They tried to set the town on fire. If they fire a shot from the house we burn the house down and every house near it, and shoot the natives, so they are pretty quiet in town now.[90] However, General Otis investigation of the content of these letters consisted of sending a copy of them to the authors superior and having him force the soldier/author to write a retraction. Then, when a soldier refused to do so, as Private Charles Brenner of the Kansas regiment did, he was, remarkably, court-martialed. In the case of Private Brenner, the charge was for writing and conniving at the publication of an article whichcontains willful [sic] falsehoods concerning himself and a false charge against Captain Bishop.[49] This is not to say that all American soldiers letters home explained the atrocities committed by the U.S. so as to bring about the American publics and General Otis displeasure. Many portrayed U.S. actions as the result of Filipino insurgent provocation and thus entirely justified. One such letter home was written by Private Hermann Dittner and was titled the trouble with the nigs. It went as follows: It then became apparent that a fight was imminent. So on February 3 we posted our sentry at the same old place. The insurgents kicked but without avail. Our colonel was down there and an insurgent called him a s n -b h. Of course this made Stotsenburg mad and he gave orders to arrest the lieutenant as soon as they could catch him.[91]

This proves it was genocide:

Concentration camps Filipino villagers were forced into concentration camps called reconcentrados which were surrounded by free-fire zones, or in other words dead zones. Furthermore, these camps were overcrowded and filled with disease, causing the death rate to be extremely high. Conditions in these reconcentrados are generally acknowledged to have been inhumane. Between January and April 1902, 8,350 prisoners of approximately 298,000 died. Some camps incurred death rates as high as 20 percent. "One camp was two miles by one mile (3.2 by 1.6 km) in area and 'home' to some 8,000 Filipinos. Men were rounded up for questioning, tortured, and summarily executed."[92] In Batangas Province , where General Franklin Bell was responsible for setting up a concentration camp, a correspondent described the operation as relentless. General Bell ordered that by December 25, 1901, the entire population of both Batangas Province and Laguna Province had to gather into small areas within the poblacion of their respective towns. Barrio families had to bring everything they could carry because anything left behindincluding houses, gardens, carts, poultry and animalswas to be burned by the U.S. Army. Anyone found outside the concentration camps was shot. General Bell insisted that he had built these camps to "protect friendly natives from the insurgents, assure them an adequate food supply" while teaching them "proper sanitary standards." The commandant of one of the camps referred to them as the "suburbs of Hell."[92] This proves it was genocide:

Philippines

In an article "We Charge Genocide: A Brief History of US in the Philippines" that appeared in the December 2005 issue of Political Affairs (an online magazine that bills itself, "Marxist Thought Online"), E. San Juan, Jr., director of the Philippines Cultural Studies Center, Connecticut, argued that during the Philippine-American War (18991902) and pacification campaign (19021913), the operations launched by the U.S. against the Filipinos, an integral part of its pacification program, which claimed the lives of over a million Filipinos, constituted genocide.

In November 1901, the Manila correspondent of the Philadelphia Ledger reported: "The present war is no bloodless, opera bouffe engagement; our men have been relentless, have killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people from lads of ten up, the idea prevailing that the Filipino as such was little better than a dog...." U.S. Army Gen. Leonard Wood, who took part in the Moro Crater massacre in 1906, called for the extermination of all Filipino Muslims since, according to him, they were irretrievably fanatical.

Gore Vidal, in an exchange of letters in the New York Review of Books about the Philippines campaign says, discussing General J. Franklin Bell's own reporting that American troops were responsible for 600,000 dead men, women, and children on the island of Luzon alone, "If this is not a policy of genocide (no dumb letters on the dictionary meaning of the word), it will do until the real thing comes along."

Total Filipino casualties was and is still a highly-debated and politicized number. A discussion and analysis of this is contained in John M. Gates, "War-Related Deaths in the Philippines ", Pacific Historical Review. It is estimated that some 34,000 Filipino soldiers lost their lives and as many as 200,000 civilians may have died directly or indirectly as a result of the war, most due to a major cholera epidemic that broke out near its end. Another estimate, in the Encarta Encyclopedia, is that between 200,000 and 600,000 Filipinos died during the war with fewer than 5,000 American deaths. More deaths occurred during the pacification program (19021913) following the declaration of victory in the war. One estimate of total Filipino deaths is as high as 1.4 million.