Obras de Gregg Jones
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Estadísticas
- Obras
- 4
- Miembros
- 246
- Popularidad
- #92,613
- Valoración
- 4.3
- Reseñas
- 6
- ISBNs
- 10
They were like a couple of good old boys joshing each other. When Teddy Roosevelt asked his Attorney General about the legality of his administration’s conduct in the Philippines he replied: “No, Mr. President, if I were you I would not have any taint of legality about it.” Furthermore, he added: “… you were accused of seduction and you have conclusively proved that you were guilty of rape.”
That’s my favorite quote in the book, on page 350. It gives us the lighter note on the military horror-show our government visited upon the would-be independent nation, after saving them from the imperial clutches of Spain. Sad to say that in order to crush any ideas of independence, we used the same brutal methods of imposing our will, including “Reconcentration Camps," burning towns, shooting prisoners and those merely suspected of hostility, and the “Water Cure,” which was a version of the water boarding we later used in our war on terror. The cruel war we waged, without respect for human rights was a self-conscious continuation of the wars against Native Americans. In fact a number of senior officers had been involved in the recently completed conquest of the west and described handling ‘savage’ inferior peoples in the same disdainful way.
History repeats, especially when we sleepwalk into the same situations without a true understanding of our legacy, how we got there and where we claim to be going. We easily become hypocrites, espousing freedom for ourselves while avidly abusing the rights of others. Words like democracy become stripped of meaning when due process is ignored and authority figures are allowed free reign above the law, as our military, winked at by our civil government, was allowed to operate to crush independence movements.
… (más)