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Comment by givemeethekeys | Hacker News Reader

Forgetting what is America is one of the reasons Americans lost the Philippines as a territory.

Did they ever want to keep it? It was my understanding that, as with Mexico following the Mexican American War, many in the US didn't want permanent integration due to racial sentiments; the thought of giving tens of millions of Filipinos US citizenship horrified them.

For anyone interested: the article mentions “How to Hide an Empire” by Daniel Immerwahr. It's a very well-written and well-researched book -- Immerwahr does a great job creating a narrative from all the historical events in the book. The reason I mention it here is because it goes into detail about Americans' reluctance to grant full citizenship to residents of its overseas territories.

Ordinary American citizens didn't like the idea of being colonizers, since they had, not long ago, been a colony themselves and fought to free themselves.

Oh, they love a part of it. The part where they get the cheap labor, but not the part where they hang around for too long and start asking for human rights.

> Ordinary American citizens didn't like the idea of being colonizers, since they had, not long ago, been a colony themselves and fought to free themselves.

Bad comparison: the American Revolution was a group of colonialists rebelling against their colonialist bosses, not a rebellion of the colonised against the coloniser. Indeed, one of the American Revolution’s complaints was that London was too protective of Native American rights, and was limiting its colonies expansion into Native American territories. So rather than an anti-colonialist rebellion, it was a pro-colonialist rebellion

Yeah it's quite impressive how widespread this mythology is and how deeply people buy into it. Many have this anachronistic view of rough-and-ready, good old boy Americans rebelling against tea-sipping foppish British fancy lads solely in the noble pursuit of freedom. The reality is somewhat more nuanced and tbh far more interesting too.

But people like to have a simplified view of history that validates their beliefs and bristle when confronted with the reality that things weren't so simple, and their heroes were often darker, more complex and tbh more problematic than they realise.

> Indeed, one of the American Revolution’s complaints was that London was too protective of Native American rights, and was limiting its colonies expansion into Native American territories.

I've never heard of this. Do you have some links to read more about it?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Proclamation_of_1763

See also https://www.ushistory.org/us/13f.asp which says (my emphasis):

> from the perspective of almost all NATIVE AMERICANS the American Revolution was an unmitigated disaster… Gradually, however, it became clear to most native groups, that an independent America posed a far greater threat to their interests and way of life than a continued British presence that restrained American westward expansion.

> With remarkably few exceptions, Native American support for the British was close to universal.

The vast majority of Native Americans supported the British in the Revolutionary War, because while the British did not always respect their rights, they did so to a greater degree than the Revolutionaries did

I do not know about the Philippines. The US military controlled Okinawa up until 1972, and even then was not very hype about "giving it back" (Okinawa's history mirrors Hawaii, so reversion to Japan was not necessarily the "correct" end state, bit it was a popular one at the time).

I think the reality is that so long as these territories are not states, I think most Americans are "fine", and barely even register that this is happening. I think even the status of places like Puerto Rico (US citizens since 1917!) has only fairly recently been understood by most Americans compared to 20 years ago.

Things are nuanced and not totally black and white, and with the Philippines it does feel like the ball was rolling so strongly that any colonial ambitions would be hard to establish. But Guam was also taken at the same time and is still a territory!

Places small enough to be permanent military bases are likely good candidates for permanent colonialisation by the US gov't.

If the US had annexed/colonized/assimilated the Philippines permanently (post 1920s), it would have had to resolve the 500 years of unresolved history of Mindanao and Sulu: first colonized /occupied by Spanish [0], then by the US itself.

The US role in the Philippine-American War (1899-1902) is underdiscussed, but it includes large-scale civilian deaths, cholera, famine, torture, mutilation, executions, (by both sides) concentration camps; it has been claimed the cholera was intentionally used against the civilian population. Casualties were as high as 1 million of the 6-7 million total population. [1] Mark Twain (along with other anti-imperialists) famously opposed the war and said it betrayed the ideals of American democracy by not allowing the Filipino people to choose their own destiny.

The Moro Rebellion (1899–1913) was an armed conflict between the Moro people (Muslims in Southern Philippines: Mindanao, Jolo, Sulu) and the US military during the Philippine–American War. [2]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindanao#Spanish_colonization_...

[1]: Casualties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine%E2%80%93American_Wa...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moro_Rebellion

Fantastic and timely comment.

I was in Mindanao just this week, and did not get a full understanding of some of the groups hostile to Americans. (Notably the Moro, but not the only group)

On the contrary, independence for the Philippines was official US policy as of 1916, less than two decades after winning the islands from Spain. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jones_Law_(Philippines)>

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