Study What General Pershing Did To Terrorists When Caught

Study what General Pershing of the United States did to terrorists when caught. There was no more Radical Islamic Terror for 35 years!

On Thursday Trump upped Pershing’s effectiveness by 10 years, to 35. Problematically for him, the bullets-in-pigs-blood episode never happened.

Bullets in pig's blood maybe not, but in his own book Pershing talks about one officer who buried a Muslim insurgent with a pig and said it had become a practice in the army. That doesn't mean Pershing ordered it. It doesn't tell us how common a practice it was. It doesn't prove that it actually happened, but we do know that Pershing said it happened.

It's not something Pershing ordered. It's also not something he stopped (assuming he could have). But by Pershing's account, it's what the army was doing in the southern Philippines at the time.

The tweet didn't say just exactly what Pershing or somebody else did, but when I saw the story and was skeptical about the tweet, I went to Google Books to look up Pershing's memoir, and I found the story. It doesn't look like news sources did even the minimal research, but chose instead to focus on a story Trump told back during the campaign.

The pig's blood anecdote is a very silly story and hard to believe. How were the insurgents to know that bullets had been dipped in pig's blood? But if somebody says, "study what General Pershing did," why wouldn't you go to Pershing's own book on the subject to find out what he said was happening?

P.S. Snopes rated the "buried with a pig" story false, but also didn't look it up in Pershing's book. If Trump were a Democrat, they'd at least have called the story partially true.

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