While we're waiting

Some interesting bits from a book called Getting Out by Michael Walzer.

As many as 300,000 civilians perished, either caught in the crossfire or in cholera and typhus epidemics. A gruesome episode occurred in September 1901 on the Visayan island of Samar after guerrillas slaughtered 37 Americans in the town of Balangiga. The U.S. commander, Gen. Jacob H. "Hell-Roaring Jake" Smith (nicknamed for his booming voice), a veteran of the Civil War and Indian campaigns, declared, "I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better you will please me. I want all the persons killed who are capable of bearing arms in actual hostilities against the United States." When asked to declare who those persons were, Smith announced they were people ten years and older. Smiths's wishers were carried out. Samar was made into a "howling wilderness." A court-martial indicted Smith for butchering two hundred Filipinos, but, like Lieutenant William Calley, who perpetrated the notorious massacre of the Vietnamese My Lai villagers in 1968, Smith was treated leniently. Although he was passed over for promotion to commandant of the Marine Corps, he became a major general following his service in the Philippines, and in the eyes of the military he was regarded as a hero and cheered on his return to San Francisco in 1902.

On July 4, 1946, President Harry S. Truman formally recognized the independence of the Philippines with a proclamation announcing, "The glorious part taken by the Filipino people in the recent terrible war has unquestionably earned for them the right to celebrate July 4, 1946."

"If the French had governed Vietnam the way the Americans administered the Philippines, our struggle against them would have been unnecessary."
-- Ho Chi Minh

that sounds like a good one.



"It's for the pain. Rarely touch the stuff...Can I have another?"

Max Boot is a neocon. Can't stomach the man.

There can be no patriotism without permanent opposition and criticism.