Posted on 10/23/2016 4:41:02 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
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.”
Most Americans would have no idea what these new Filipino leaders are talking about. We forgot the Philippine War long ago. Filipinos remember it vividly. It stands with the horrors of Japanese occupation during World War II as one of their great national traumas. A very old debt is finally coming due.
(Excerpt) Read more at bostonglobe.com ...
The Spaniards warned the Filipinos that the US wouldn’t respect their Catholic faith; basically said “be careful what you wish for”. The Filipinos believed the Americans would support independence for them, which we did not.
He was turtored by a Philippine Communist after being kicked out of a series of schools in his younger years. He never joined the party but the Commie filled his brain with anti-US crud, reaching back to Moro days...
The Filipinos can choose to work with America or be slaves of China in the Han Chinese East Asian co-prosperity sphere.
Thailand has existed as a free country for many decades because it always accommodates the strongest power, be it China, Russia or the US.
This action by the Philippines is simply a statement that the US, under The Messiah, is the weakest of the lot.
They have a choice: be friends with the west, or become part of China.
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