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Comment by _iyig | Hacker News Reader

From Wikipedia:

"United States control of the Philippines was never intended to be permanent. From the beginning, the colonial mission was seen as one of paternalistic "tutelage"—of preparing the nation for eventual independence—and aside from a few "retentionists", the question was generally not if, but when, independence would occur."

The U.S. fought a brutal war against Filipino independence from 1899-1902, but progress continued towards self-rule via the Jones Act of 1916, the The Tydings–McDuffie Act of 1935, and finally the 1946 Treat of Manila which relinquished all U.S. claims to sovereignty in the Philippines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Manila_(1946)#Initia... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Philippines_(18... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Philippines_(18...

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>United States control of the Philippines was never intended to be permanent. From the beginning, the colonial mission was seen as one of paternalistic "tutelage"

That snippet sounds a little self-serving, "we're just a force of good and we want good for all". The situation is more complicated, and the more powerful countries -including the US- around the world at that time were all in pursuit of expanding their territory and power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Imperialism

Yes, that's why the U.S. also fought a brutal war against Filipino independence.

Regardless, they ultimately delivered on the promise of independence, and at the apex of American military and political power.

Ah, Wikipedia, that reliable source of political opinion stated as fact. Whose intent? The other option would have been just not to occupy the Philippines for fifty years. Can you see how that would have seemed like a different (better?) policy to most Filipinos? Leaving that aside, actions of USA officials and opportunists over that period was not much along the lines of "tutelage" in the finer points of democracy and very much along the lines of "let's take advantage of this preexisting Spanish feudal arrangement in order to extract as much as we can from these people". Philippines is still dealing with the effects of that.

My comment was not to defend the racist, patronizing, and jingoistic proclivities of 19th-century American politicians, but to explain how the U.S. approach to empire differed in both outcome and intent from its European and Asian counterparts.

I'm not seeing that. Most European colonial powers have withdrawn from most of their colonies. Those colonies still feel the effects of colonization, both ill effects and more benign effects. How are the actions of USA in Philippines different from that?

Compared to other colonial powers the U.S. introduced representative democracy, got rid of the state religion (Catholicism), and bestowed colonial peoples with a broad set of civil rights and liberties. They also decolonized right after WW2 at the height of their power in Asia, in contrast to France and the U.K. which hung onto their empires even into the 50s and 60s.

Representative democracy is if anything in worse shape in Philippines than it is in USA. Certainly it was nothing to admire during the decades Marcos ruled. Also Catholicism is still very common. Colonialism with slightly different ritual formalisms, yet largely the same aims and results, is still colonialism. USA colonialism doesn't require American governors to remain in place. IMF/IBRD administrators do the job just as well, and they didn't leave in the 60s.

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