I have reservations about Memorial Day. This doesn't make me less "patriotic" any more than acknowledging doubt makes me less faithful. Faith is the complement of doubt, and skepticism is the complement of patriotism — in a democracy, anyway.
"Thanking" veterans for their service without honestly reflecting on what we're thanking them for reduces such gestures to meaningless platitudes. I know veterans who are intensely uncomfortable with such shallow expressions of "gratitude" and consider them insulting. I'm one of them.
What bothers me most is the unquestioned assumption that my country's wars are always just and honorable. Nothing could be further from the truth — except the excuses made for those wars.
What exactly are we "thanking" these men and women for — following orders? Never questioning commands no matter how hideous? Make no mistake, American warfare is rife with hideous commands. Nuremberg established that obeying such commands doesn't merit "thanks."
Or do only people from countries that lose wars have to admit they were wrong to fight them? Win, lose or draw, always casting ourselves as "good guys" defiles history.
Since we're the "good guys," we tell ourselves that our leaders are noble and trustworthy, therefore our cause is just. Problem is, more often than not the exact opposite is true. And the methods employed in fighting even "just" wars become less justifiable with each new atrocity.
If we're always the "good guys," those we fight are always the "bad guys" — right? But what about those "bad guys" — what about their wives and kids? When Green Berets dragged a farmer's son out of his hamlet in Nerkh, Afghanistan, shot him on mere suspicion, then through an interpreter told his father where to go find his body, did he think we were the "good guys?"
Christ's criterion for identifying the "good guys" was, "Ye shall know them by their fruits." Therefore let's reflect on what our politicians never mention in their self-righteous Memorial Day homilies: Let's remember the good guys' victims.
In that spirit, consider a forgotten war — one most historians mention only as "footnote" to the Spanish-American war, despite it lasting 14 years longer and costing 10 times more American lives than the war against Spain. I refer to the American invasion and occupation of the Philippines, 1899-1913.
That war's victims have long since been silenced by bayonets, bullets and bombs, so I'm forced to allow the "victors" to testify against themselves:
After Emilio Aguinaldo's partisans fought themselves free of the Spaniards, the Americans who encouraged them to take up arms betrayed them, installing their own military dictatorship. President McKinley's excuse:
…we could not leave them to themselves — they were unfit for self-government — and they would soon have anarchy and misrule over there worse than Spain's was … there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all … to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God's grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow-men for whom Christ also died.
Problem is, most Filipinos except in the southern islands were already Christians, and had been for 300 years. But McKinley's real motives for denying a people their hard-won freedom were less holy: "Incidental to our tenure in the Philippines is the commercial opportunity to which American statesmanship cannot be indifferent."
U.S. military personnel were only too eager to carry out what McKinley called "benevolent assimilation":
Gen. William Shafter: "It may be necessary to kill half the Filipinos in order that the remaining half of the population may be advanced to a higher plane of life than their present semi-barbarous state affords."
Brig. Gen. Jacob H. Smith, a Wounded Knee veteran, ordered Maj. Littleton Waller, commanding the 315th Marines deployed to the island of Samar: "I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn; the more you kill and burn the better it will please me."
When Waller asked who was to be spared, Smith answered: no one over 10 years old.
Col. Frederick Funston: "I personally strung up 35 Filipinos without trial, so what was all the fuss over Waller's dispatching a few treacherous savages? If there had been more Smiths and Wallers, the war would have been over long ago. Impromptu domestic hanging might also hasten the end of the war. For starters, all Americans who had recently petitioned Congress to sue for peace in the Philippines should be dragged out of their homes and lynched."
L. F. Adams, enlisted (rank unrecorded): "In the path of the Washington Regiment and Battery D of the Sixth Artillery there were 1,008 dead n-----s, and a great many wounded. We burned all their houses. I don't know how many men, women, and children the Tennessee boys did kill. They would not take any prisoners."
And those were Christian Filipinos. Muslims caught it even worse.
The 1906 "Moro Massacre": For days U.S. troops fired down upon and hurled explosives onto more than 900 unarmed Muslim women, children and elderly trapped in a volcanic crater on Jolo Island, killing them all.
Theodore Roosevelt acclaimed commanding Gen. Leonard Wood's performance: "I congratulate you and the officers and men of your command upon the brilliant feat of arms wherein you and they so well upheld the honor of the American flag."
Mark Twain, who understood "honor" better than Roosevelt, bitterly observed, "…we abolished them utterly, leaving not even a baby alive to cry for its dead mother. This is incomparably the greatest victory that was ever achieved by the Christian soldiers of the United States."
Between a quarter-million and 1.3 million Filipino civilians died from "benevolent assimilation," either killed outright, starved to death in American concentration camps, or from the cholera epidemic that spread through and from those camps. Americans slaughtered more Filipinos during the first 14 years of their occupation than were killed during three centuries of Spanish rule.
Why commemorate the victims of a forgotten, century-old war? Because I refuse to commemorate the "service" of those who tortured and murdered them.
And to show that our ruling criminals' lies haven't changed from one century to the next. Back then the excuse was to "uplift, civilize and Christianize" savages. Today it's to "bring democracy" and "defend their human rights." How starving and murdering children achieves this is never explained — but former Secretary of State Madeline Albright said it was "worth the cost."
I see no difference between Col. Funston's boasts of stringing up Filipino "savages" and "American Sniper" Chris Kyle having fun shooting Iraqi "savages." My purpose here was to hold up dead soldiers' words as a mirror to remind my fellow Americans that as often as not the real savages aren't the ones dispatched by American bayonets, bullets and bombs — they're the ones wielding them.
God willing, enough of us will someday become sickened at the savages in the mirror to tell the world's Funstons and Kyles we don't want their "services" any more.
Al-Hajj Frederick H. Minshall is a U.S. Navy veteran with a degree in fisheries biology who has lived in Alaska since 2004. He's an Ithna-Ashari ("Twelver") Shi'a Muslim whose chief hobby is overindulging his five grandchildren. "Al-Hajj" (Arabic root "Hijr" — "journey") means "the Pilgrim," and is a traditional title for one who has made pilgrimage to Mecca.
The views expressed here are the writer's own and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)alaskadispatch.com.