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TO THE PERSON SITTING IN DARKNESS:
CRIMES AGAINST THE PHILLIPINES
By Giles Weaver
II
The people who sat in the darkness saw a great light…
A funny thing happened on the way to the Treaty of Paris in the winter of 1898. You’ve seen it! It’s the one in which Brad Pitt plays “America,” Angelina Jolie plays “Spain,” and Lucy Liu plays, “The Philippines.” They all meet in Paris so that Spain (Jolie) can sign over everything she’s got to America (Pitt) – and I mean everything -- for losing the ten week Spanish American War at the Battle of San Juan Hill in Cuba (famous for Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders). Isn’t that funny? Spain was a colonial power!
 “What did Spain (Jolie) have to give America (Pitt)?” you ask. Cuba, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines (Liu). Not too shabby for a monstrous colonial power that spread death, disease, and destruction across the globe. Not to mention Catholicism. But I repeat myself.
America (Pitt) really must have wanted this exotic Asian flower (Liu) something fierce, because he kicked $20 million into the pot to sweeten the deal for Spain (Jolie) whom he had just crushed. And this was back when almost everyone was a farmer and $20 million was a lot of tomatoes. But, wouldn’t you know it, the Filipinos had been fighting their own war for independence against the Spanish, and were not about to trade one colonial master for another -- even if it was a trade up.
It is a distress to look on and note the mismoves, they are so strange and so awkward. Mr. Chamberlain manufactures a war out of materials so inadequate and so fanciful that they make the boxes grieve and the gallery laugh, and he tries hard to persuade himself that it isn’t purely a private raid for cash, but has a sort of dim, vague respectability about it somewhere, if he could only find the spot; and that, by and by, he can scour the flag clean again after he has finished dragging it through the mud, and make it shine and flash in the vault of heaven once more, as it had shone and flashed there a thousand years in the world’s respect until he laid his unfaithful hand upon it. It is a bad play – bad.
- -- Mark Twain
- “To The Person Sitting in Darkness”
 Meanwhile, back in the States, Mark Twain (who, incidentally, was born in Missouri in 1836) watched the events unfolding in Paris as well as in London with equal disgust. While America made its play for the Philippines, the British, at the height of their colonial empire, fomented a war with the Dutch Boers in South Africa. A British man named Alfred Milner, High Commissioner for Southern Africa, wanted to create a block of British colonies across Africa that he would rule. Twain didn’t think that was such a hot idea, and did not believe Britain’s Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, would be so passionate about his cause if there weren’t a fortune in diamond mines to be had in the deal.
Twain viewed European colonialism as a barbaric practice, not to mention it was down right un-American. It was colonialism that separated the old world of the Europeans and the new world of the United States. Twain was proud that the United States liberated Cuba from the Spanish, but was even more proud that Congress turned power over to the Cubans and withdrew. Twain’s position on colonialism was consistent with his beliefs regarding slavery set down in his masterpiece, ‘Huckleberry Finn,” published in 1884. He was a true populist. So it was not surprising that Twain wasn’t exactly thrilled with annexing the Philippines and publicly came out against it. Others, however, were thrilled with the idea of having their very own sub country. Twain saw a revolting similarity between the pro-annexation crowd in the U.S. and the pro Boer War crowd across the Atlantic. McKinley wanted so badly to emulate the British and their grand empire upon which the sun never set. Today, with Bush and Blair, the roles are reversed.
The British got their war, but not the one they thought they would get. It took years of scorched earth policies and 22,000 British casualties to bring the Boers to their knees.
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 Sir Conan Doyle in his Boer Uniform
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A detour for the curious: in literary/academic history, the Boer War has great significance – all from the opposite perspective as Twains. Poet Rudyard Kipling of “white man’s burden” fame was a veteran of the Boer War. Here’s a good one: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, wrote 'The Great Boer War' and 'The War in South Africa: Its Causes and Conduct,’ detailing his experience in a field hospital. His justifications for the conflict led to his knighthood in 1902. My favorite is Winston Churchill whose genuinely heroic exploits in the Boer War were detailed in, 'London to Ladysmith: Via Pretoria' and 'Ian Hamilton's March,' and the notoriety they brought to him helped Churchill get elected to the British Parliament. Here is one of those riddles of history: if there had been no Boer War would Winston Churchill have been positioned to assume the leadership of England during World War II?
The more we examine the mistake, the more clearly we perceive that it will be bad for the business. The person sitting in the darkness is almost sure to say: “There is something curious about this – curious and unaccountable. There must be two Americas: one that sets the captive free, and one that takes a once captive’s new freedom away from him, and picks a quarrel with him with nothing to found it on, then kills him to get his land.”
- -- Mark Twain
- “To The Person Sitting in Darkness”
Twain was not impressed.
From where he was sitting, not only was annexation a “bad play,” but his beloved America had also turned Benedict Arnold. You see, after U.S. Naval Commander in Asia George Dewey destroyed the Spanish navy in Manila Bay back in 1897, the United States allied with Filipino revolutionaries led by Emilio Angulinda to seek out and capture any remaining Spanish ground forces. Once Spain was defeated, however, America’s new ally was swiftly put back in its place. Twain writes, [America] “… fooled them, used them until we need them no longer; then derided the sucked orange and threw it away.”
 In January of 1899, while fighting between American and Filipino troops was already occurring, President William McKinley issued the “Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation” which announced America’s intent to annex the Philippines and “assimilate” it into the United States. Imagine hearing that one on CNN every day for a month. Sounds like “Healthy Forests” and “Clear Skies,” doesn’t it? You’re right.
When the news of the proclamation reached the Philippines it was greeted with all the warmth of a striking cobra. How could Spain cede the Philippines to America when Spain herself no longer ruled it? And what’s all this about “assimilation?” That doesn’t sound very benevolent. There is one answer to all three questions: superior military power, and the United States was not only prepared to use it, but gave the commander of American troops in the Philippines a mandate to “extend by force American sovereignty over this country.”
The Treaty of Paris was finally ratified in February of 1899. Angulinda’s Filipino government issued a counter proclamation to McKinley’s “benevolent assimilation,” declaring that they would not allow the United States to occupy the Philippines. So we massacred them.
Don’t take my word for it. Listen to one of our own soldiers. Captain Elliott of Kansas described what “benevolent assimilation” really meant:
Talk about war being “hell,” this war beats the hottest estimate ever made of that locality. Caloocan was supposed to contain seventeen thousand inhabitants. The Twentieth Kansas swept through it, and now Caloocan contains not one living native. Of the buildings, the battered walls of the great church and dismal prison alone remain. The village of Maypaja, where our first fight occurred on the night of the fourth, had five thousand people on that day—now not one stone remains upon top of another. You can only faintly imagine this terrible scene of desolation. War is worse than hell.
And perhaps he is saying to himself, “It is yet another civilized power with its banner of the Prince of Peace in one hand and its loot basket and its butcher knife in the other. Is there no salvation for us but to adopt civilization and lift ourselves down to its level?”
- -- Mark Twain
- “To The Person Sitting in Darkness”
American military strength was vastly greater than the Filipinos – in numbers, in equipment, and in training. Yet, just like the British and the Boers, they could not quickly subdue what many American historians arrogantly call the “Filipino Insurrection.”
 American forces indiscriminately killed natives (women and children included), burned villages, looted homes, and engaged in systematic torture of Filipino captives. The war finally “ended” in 1902 when Angulinda was captured through trickery and deceit by General Frederick Funston (right). Several years later, Twain would lay his sight on Funston himself in “A Defense of General Funston,” after Funston labeled all those who had doubts about the war “traitors.” After Angulinda was captured, Filipino guerillas continued to fight American forces until 1913.
Many people supported the colonization of the Philippines, and had no troubles with the slaughter of the Filipino “niggers.” No person supported in more than Alfred Beveridge, United States Senator from Indiana:
"The Philippines are ours forever. We will not repudiate our duty in the archipelago. We will not abandon our duty in the Orient. We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee under God, of the civilization of the world."
Others like Twain, and Sumner before him, saw a great injustice and refused to be silent. In 1903, George Hoar, distinguished Senator from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, had this to say on the Senate floor to his colleagues who supported the war in the Philippines:
“What has been the practical statesmanship which comes from your ideals and sentimentalities? You have wasted six hundred millions of treasure. You have sacrificed nearly ten thousand American lives, the flower of our youth. You have devastated provinces. You have slain uncounted thousands of the people you desire to benefit.”
Here’s the box score:
American military deaths: 4,324.
American soldiers wounded: 2,818
Philippine military deaths: 20,000 (est.)
Philippine civilian deaths: 250,000 to 1,000,000.
250,000 – 1,000,000. Nobody bothered to count.
Twain refused to see the colonization of the Philippines as some kind of noble effort. In 1901, his growing disgust with imperial ambitions led to his decision to publish, “To The Person Sitting in Darkness.” Later, he would serve as Vice-President of the Anti-Imperialist League. In this passage, Twain slays all the dragons:
There have been lies; yes, but they were told in good cause. We have been treacherous; but that was only in order that real good might come out of apparent evil. True, we have crushed a deceived and confiding people; we have turned against the weak and friendless who trusted us; we have stamped out a just and intelligent and well ordered republic; we have stabbed an ally in the back and slapped the face of a guest; we have bought a shadow from an enemy that hadn’t it to sell; we have robbed a trusting friend of his land and liberty; we have invited our clean young men to shoulder a discredited musket and do bandits’ work under a flag which bandits have been accustomed to fear, not to follow; we have debauched America’s honor and blackened her face before the world; but each detail was for the best. We know this. The head of every state and sovereignty in Christendom and 90 per cent of every legislature, including our Congress and our fifty state legislatures, are members not only of the church, but also of the blessings-of-civilizations-trust. This world-girdling accumulation of trained morals, high principles, and justice cannot do an unright thing, an unfair thing, an ungenerous thing, an unclean thing. It knows what it is about. Give yourself no uneasiness; it is all right.
- -- Mark Twain
- “To The Person Sitting In Darkness”
Filipino nationalists issued their Declaration of Philippine Independence on June 12, 1898. America annexed, colonized, and ruled the Philippines for the next 48 years – until 1946. The Philippines were granted their “independence” with the Bell Trade Act that forced the archipelago under the permanent financial rule of the United States. The U.S. Congress extorted ratification of the Bell Trade Act from the Philippine Congress by threatening to withhold desperately needed post World War II reconstruction funds. So much for the apostle Matthew’s “great light.”
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