An atrocity committed by US troops in the Philippines
MASSACRE IN THE CLOUDS An American atrocity and the erasure of history
KIM A. WAGNER 400pp. PublicAffairs. £28.
WE USUALLY THINK of colonialism as driven by a lust for wealth. In Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad wrote about the white men drawn to the Congo: “The word ‘ivory’ rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it”. Diamonds and gold motivated the Europeans who flocked to the interior of what today is South Africa. And the long Dutch rule over Indonesia began as a quest for spices, until other products – such as coal and oil – turned out to be more valuable. Curiously, however, no such dream of riches drove the half century of American control of the Philippines, the largest of the colonies the United States seized from Spain in 1898. For much of that period, in fact, American sugar producers and other farmers lobbied vigorously for tariffs that would bar Philippine products.
What did motivate the Americans? Kim A. Wagner’s chilling account of a mass killing by US troops in 1906 reminds us that colonialism had emotions as well as economics behind it. The US had come late to the race for territory in the global south – indeed, Rudyard Kipling’s plea to “take up the white man’s burden” was specifically urging a US takeover of the Philippines – and warfare against the Filipinos offered Americans a chance to show that they were just as adept at conquering “savages” as Europeans. With the end of the Indian Wars in the 1890s, furthermore, one arena in which military-minded young Americans had traditionally proved themselves was now closed.
From 1899 to 1902, the US fought a brutal war against advocates of Philippine independence, which left several hundred thousand Filipinos dead. But resistance simmered on in the southern, predominantly Muslim islands of the archipelago, where the governor, who commanded all US troops in the Philippines, was the crusty, ambitious Major General Leonard Wood, a close friend of President Theodore Roosevelt.
One of these was the small, volcanic island of Jolo. There were no great riches to be had there, but some of its inhabitants, Muslims from the Moro people, bristled at the idea of becoming American subjects. They had managed to stay free from all but nominal Spanish control and had no interest in submitting to a new set of infidel foreign overlords. When the Americans insisted that every adult male pay a cedula, a sort of head tax, a thousand or more of the island’s inhabitants refused and took refuge in the crater of an extinct volcano, Bud Dajo. Their only weapons were knives, rifles and boulders that could be rolled down the steep mountainside. Massacre in the Clouds is the story of how, over several days o
