MANILA, Philippines - Emilio Aguinaldo should be honored as the father of our country. We have honored lesser men, including Dug-out Dog MacArthur, but in Manila, only Camp Aguinaldo reminds us of this great man. Only in Cavite is he remembered. During the American Occupation, Aguinaldo was ignored because he reminded us of the most shameful episode in American history, worse than Vietnam and the Indian massacres.
General Bell proclaimed, “All able men will be killed!” A Republican congressman wailed, “Our soldiers took no prisoners; when they got hold of a Filipino, they killed him.”
L.F. Adams of Missouri testified, “There were 1,000 dead niggers... we burned their houses. I don’t know how many men, women, children the Tennessee boys did kill. They would not take any prisoners.”
Captain Bishop shouted, “Kill them! Damn it, kill them!” General Smith ordered the Massacre of Samar: “I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn; the more you kill and burn, the more you will please me,” and further ordered that all persons, men, women, and children down to ten years of age were to be executed.
The Americans invented the water cure and the zona system for the Filipinos. The water cure consisted in forcing water into the mouth till the stomach bulged like a balloon, then having several Americans jump on the stomach to force the water out of every hole in the body.
The zona system was instituted to kill all members of a neighborhood for crimes committed by a few. President McKinley himself denounced the zona system thus: “It was extermination. The only peace it could beget was that of the grave.” This system was used on their enemies by the Japanese and the Germans during World War II.
It was a cruel war the Americans waged against us. The usual ratio between dead and wounded is one dead to every five wounded. In the Boer War, American Civil War, Spanish American War and the two World Wars, the proportion somehow remained constant. Even the Japanese killed only one Filipino for every five wounded.
But the American official war record in the Philippine campaign shows exactly the EXACT REVERSE: for every one Filipino wounded in battle, five were killed. In Northern Luzon, 1,014 Ilocanos were killed and only 95 wounded, a ratio of 10 Ilocanos killed for every one wounded.
Yet Filipinos resisted the American invaders from October 1898 to April 1902, almost four years, longer than it took the Americans to beat the Japanese.
The Americans took six months to defeat Spain and 42 months or seven times longer to defeat Filipinos. The Americans had six times more casualties fighting the Filipinos than they had fighting the Spaniards.