This book is often recommended as a historical primer of US imperialism. A lot of it is history, which I’ve condensed into a couple of important sections here. There are not many annotations as it’s quite self-explanatory and very long-winded at times.
Sections that were particularly interesting to me: Chapter 2, Indian Country with its parallels to Nazi expansionism and Zionism. Chapter 6, the Filipino-American War which I didn’t know about. Chapter 16, rubber and tin (by the way did you know that 83% of Malaya’s rubber exports were stolen by Britain to pay their debts to the USA?
How to Hide has a conspicuous blind spot: the CIA regime change operations of América Latina and Africa. Hence I consider Vijay Prashad’s Washington Bullets as a companion book as it dives very deeply into these subjects.
Why are these two books so often recommended? Because they provide a key insight into the imperial core’s foreign policy. After WW2, colonialism was out of vogue. The US sought to dominate the world through neoliberal economics. The imperial core continues to use the same playbook today.
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◆ Introduction: Looking Beyond the Logo Map
▪ Why did Roosevelt demote the Philippines? We don’t know, but it’s not hard to guess. Roosevelt was trying to tell a clear story: Japan had attacked the United States. But he faced a problem. Were Japan’s targets considered “the United States”? Legally, yes, they were indisputably U.S. territory. But would the public see them that way? What if Roosevelt’s audience didn’t care that Japan had attacked the Philippines or Guam? Polls taken slightly before the attack show that few in the continental United States supported a military defense of those remote territories.
▪ This was not how it looked from the Philippines, where air-raid sirens continued to wail. “To Manilans the war was here, now, happening to us,” the reporter wrote. “And we have no air-raid shelters
▪ Adding up the land under U.S. jurisdiction—colonies and occupations alike—by the end of 1945 the Greater United States included some 135 million people living outside the mainland.
▪ Another part has to do with technology. During the Second World War, the United States honed an extraordinary suite of technologies that gave it many of the benefits of empire without having to actually hold colonies. Plastics and other synthetics allowed it to replace tropical products with man-made substitutes. Airplanes, radio, and DDT enabled it to move its goods, ideas, and people into foreign countries easily without annexing them. Similarly, the United States managed to standardize many of its objects and practices—from screw threads to road signs to the English language—across political borders, again gaining influence in places it didn’t control. Collectively, these technologies weaned the United States off the familiar model of formal empire. They replaced colonization with globalization.
▪ This self-image of the United States as a republic is consoling, but it’s also costly. Most of the cost has been paid by those living in the colonies, in the occupation zones, and around the military bases. The logo map has relegated them to the shadows, which are a dangerous place to live. At various times, the inhabitants of the U.S. Empire have been shot, shelled, starved, interned, dispossessed, tortured, and experimented on. What they haven’t been, by and large, is seen.
◆ A Note on Language
▪ The chief argument of this book is that we should think of the United States differently. Rather than conceiving of it as a contiguous blob, we should take seriously its overseas holdings, from large colonies to tiny islands.
◆ 1. The Fall and Rise of Daniel Boone
▪ The culture changed, too. Rather than being despised “banditti” or “white savages” on the fringes of civilization, settlers acquired a new identity: pioneers. No longer scofflaws, they were the proud flag-bearers of a dynamic nation.
◆ 2. Indian Country
▪ The Cherokees were, Ross explained to the U.S. Senate, “like the whiteman in manners, morals and religion.”
Not all Native Americans chose that path. Whether to stick to indigenous ways or take up foreign ones was a hard call, and opinions understandably varied. But by doubling down on Europeanization, the Cherokees were calling the government’s bluff. They were “civilized” by every rule of white society. So shouldn’t their land claims be respected
▪ Around two thousand left voluntarily, as per the agreement. But the rest, some sixteen thousand, refused. The government sent seven thousand militiamen and volunteers to round them up at bayonet point and imprison them. The incarcerated Cherokees were then forcibly relocated to present-day Oklahoma. The Cherokees called this journey Nunna daul Isunyi, the “trail where we cried.” The Trail of Tears, as it is known in English, was a bitter march, undertaken by some on foot. Starvation, cold, and disease killed thousands, including Ross’s wife.
▪ Thomas Jefferson had fantasized about dividing the entire country, with Native on one side and European on the other—hence his plan for the Louisiana Purchase. By reserving most of the new territory for Indians, he could free up land in the East for whites.
For the first few decades of the country’s history, this continental-scale apartheid had remained informal and incomplete. It was the population boom—particularly the crisis surrounding the lands of the Cherokees and neighboring tribes in the Southeast in the 1830s—that gave the issue a new urgency. To handle it, Andrew Jackson sought and won new legislation to allow him to aggressively negotiate east-for-west deals.
▪ Indians regarded these squatters with horror. “No matter how little is left the red man, such heartless wretches will never rest content or let the Government rest until the Indians are made landless and homeless,” warned The Cherokee Advocate. “It is beyond the power of words to express the character of such men—dead to all human feeling and knowing no law
◆ 3. Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Guano but Were Afraid to Ask
▪ What did work was guano. That term can refer to any bird or bat feces used as fertilizer, but the guano on everyone’s minds was the nitrogen-rich droppings of cormorants, boobies, and pelicans on the Chincha Islands off the coast of Peru. Islands make attractive rookeries for seabirds in general. The Chinchas had the additional virtue that they hardly ever saw rain. The guano piled hundreds of feet high and baked in the sun, so that the very rock of the islands was centuries’ worth of calcified bird droppings
▪ For workers, the Navassa Phosphate Company used African Americans from Baltimore. Promising a tropical life of picking fruit and romancing beautiful women, the company induced the often-illiterate workers to sign long contracts and step on board.
Yet once the workers disembarked, they found conditions considerably less idyllic. The scorched, jagged, sea-battered island had neither fruit nor women. Instead, it offered a scurvy-inducing diet of hardtack and salted pork, along with the company of abusive white overseers. Such necessities as shirts, shoes, mattresses, and pillows could be got only from the company store at wildly inflated prices. Workers who fell ill were fined. Those who made trouble were “triced”: tied up for hours in the hot sun with their arms in the air and their feet barely touching the ground
▪ Without Haber–Bosch, the earth could sustain, at present rates of consumption, only about 2.4 billion people. That is well under half of today’s population
◆ 4. Teddy Roosevelt’s Very Good Day
▪ Spain sold the Philippines to the United States for $20 million. Puerto Rico and Guam (a Micronesian island, valuable as a Mahan-style base) came free. Because of the amendment anti-imperialists had passed, the United States couldn’t annex Cuba. But it could occupy it, placing the country under military control until a suitable government could be installed—a government suitable to Washington, that is.
No representative from Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, or Guam had a say in any of this. It’s doubtful that they would have agreed to it. “This is not the Republic we fought for, this is not the absolute independence we dreamed about,” said a bitter Máximo Gómez
◆ 5. Empire State of Mind
▪ But South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun, one of the nation’s prime defenders of slavery, objected. “We have never dreamt of incorporating into the Union any but the Caucasian race—the free white race,” he insisted on the Senate floor. “Are we to associate with ourselves, as equals, companions, and fellow-citizens, the Indians and mixed races of Mexico
▪ In the late 1860s the president of the Dominican Republic signaled that he would welcome the U.S. purchase of his country. President Ulysses S. Grant was eager for the deal—the Dominican Republic was, after all, prime sugar and coffee real estate. Yet even with a rich country served up on a plate, even at the urging of a popular war-hero president whose party controlled Congress, legislators wouldn’t swallow the bait. The Dominican Republic was “situated in tropical waters, and occupied by another race, of another color,” explained the Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, and “never can become a permanent possession of the United States.”
▪ The late nineteenth century was a great time for fairs, and this one pulled out all the usual stops: mock battles, speeches, parades, and a “World’s Congress of Beauties.” The main attraction, though, was colonized people. The organizers promised “over a thousand natives of Uncle Sam’s insular possessions”—Filipinos, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and Hawaiians. The Filipino contingent would include not only “civilized Tagals” but “half-wild, monkey-like dwarfs of the interior of Luzon.”
◆ 6. Shouting the Battle Cry of Freedom
▪ “I want no prisoners,” Smith allegedly told his subordinate. “I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better you will please me.” All rice was to be seized, Smith insisted, and any male over the age of ten who did not turn himself over to the U.S. government should be killed. “The interior of Samar,” he ordered, “must be made a howling wilderness.” (no wonder the nazis admjrednthem)
▪ If movement spread disease, so did confinement. Reconcentration was, from an epidemiological perspective, a particularly horrifying tactic. It forced populations with different immunities and diseases together into close quarters in unsanitary conditions. At the same time, it cut Filipinos off from their fields, leaving them reliant on imported food, often nutritionally poor rice from Saigon, if they got food at all. Malnutrition increased susceptibility to many diseases, and it led directly to beriberi
◆ 7. Outside the Charmed Circle
▪ The ploy was used repeatedly, in country after country around the Caribbean. The United States seized the levers of finance and trade but left sovereignty formally intact. “Dollar diplomacy” was the polite name for this, though “gunboat diplomacy” was the more accurate euphemism. To ensure political and financial “stability,” U.S. troops entered Cuba (four times), Nicaragua (three times), Honduras (seven times), the Dominican Republic (four times), Guatemala, Panama (six times), Costa Rica, Mexico (three times), and Haiti (twice) between 1903 and 1934. The United States helped to put down revolts, replaced governments when necessary, and offered battleships-in-the-harbor “advice” to others. But the only territory it annexed in that period was the U.S. Virgin Islands, peacefully purchased from Denmark in 1917
▪ The leaders of the colonized world raced to Woodrow Wilson in the hopes of winning his support. They were to be profoundly disappointed. The British, who controlled travel within their empire, refused to let Gandhi travel to Paris. They arrested Sa‘d Zaghlul and exiled him to Malta (he eventually made it to Paris, but only after Wilson had left).
Pedro Albizu Campos faced his own ordeal. Like many Puerto Ricans, he identified as white. Yet he had Native and black heritage, too (his wife mistook him for South Asian upon meeting him). The army had placed him in a segregated black regiment. Albizu objected, protesting that he was white. In what must have been a humiliating episode, a board of physicians examined him and concluded that he wasn’t.
▪ The leaders of the colonized world raced to Woodrow Wilson in the hopes of winning his support. They were to be profoundly disappointed. The British, who controlled travel within their empire, refused to let Gandhi travel to Paris. They arrested Sa‘d Zaghlul and exiled him to Malta (he eventually made it to Paris, but only after Wilson had left
▪ Not only did Wilson do nothing to liberate Puerto Rico, he took the war as an occasion to expand the U.S. Empire. In 1917 his government purchased the Danish West Indies, a small cluster of Caribbean islands next to Puerto Rico that offered a population of some twenty-six thousand and, more important, promising naval bases. This colony, the U.S. Virgin Islands, became the first populated territory annexed since 1900.
When it came to the nationalists of the colonized world, there is no evidence that Wilson even read their many petitions. Nguyen the Patriot got no response from Wilson. The only nationalist leader from outside Europe who won Wilson’s ear in Paris was Jan Smuts, soon to be the South African prime minister, who sought an international system that would bolster the white control of southern Africa
▪ One disgusted Chinese protester called Allied leaders in Paris “a bunch of robbers bent on securing territories and indemnities.”
Such animosity meant little to U.S. leaders at the time—they didn’t have much business in places like Egypt and Korea. But later it would come to mean a great deal. The Chinese protester complaining of “robbers” in Paris—that was a young Mao Zedong. Nguyen the Patriot also gained renown, although by another name: Ho Chi Minh. That Egyptian boy reciting poems and making speeches was Sayyid Qutb, a leading Islamist thinker who would become the key inspiration for Osama bin Laden
◆ 9. Doctors Without Borders
▪ Meanwhile, in Puerto Rico, Ashford, Gutiérrez, and their colleagues treated hundreds of thousands and headed off the direst cases, of which there were many. Hookworm treatment, plus parallel campaigns that the military ran against yellow fever and smallpox, brought the Puerto Rican death rate down dramatically. Yet Ashford and Gutiérrez watched in frustration as their patients succumbed to reinfection again and again. Treatment could forestall death, but all the worm pills in all the dispensaries couldn’t change the larger facts: most Puerto Ricans were poor, they worked outdoors without shoes or privies, and their government lacked the resources, and possibly the will, to do much about that
▪ After the revelation of the tests themselves came another revelation: some of the experiments were race based. African Americans, Japanese Americans, and Puerto Ricans were tested to see if they would fare differently than whites against mustard agents.
Beyond the experimental use of Puerto Ricans in racial tests, the Chemical Warfare Service relied on them for field tests at its “jungle” testing site: San José Island off Panama, an entire island for testing chemical weapons. The Puerto Ricans weren’t brought there because of their race per se. They were brought because they were easy to get. The Military Personnel Division refused to send enough men “from the Continental Limits” for the tests but was happy to send Puerto Ricans. One GI who participated in the tests on San José Island (and later developed stomach and throat cancer) observed that more than two-thirds of his fellow soldiers had Spanish surnames and couldn’t understand the instructions in English.
Jay Katz (931)
◆ 10. Fortress America
▪ Maybe it wouldn’t have to. Two years into the Depression, Calvin Coolidge noted a “reversal of opinion” about Philippine independence. A number of politicians, FDR included, were coming around on the issue. Rather than absorbing the Philippines’ trade and migrants and defending it against Japan, the new thinking went, why not just get rid of it?
The 1930s are known as a decade of protectionism, when the United States put up hefty tariffs to barricade itself against the world. Now it seemed that this spirit was going to change the very borders of the country. The Philippines was going to be dumped over the castle walls
◆ 11. Warfare State
▪ Despite being loyal citizens who had surrendered their homes at the navy’s request, the Aleuts languished in these camps. Though no barbed wire surrounded them, leaving was impossible: the Aleuts needed military permission and (in most camps) a boat to leave, neither of which was forthcoming
▪ The long internment wasn’t born of any animosity toward the Aleuts. They weren’t the “enemy.” It just seems that officials found it easier to keep the Aleuts where they were—far away—than to bring them home. Plus, the military had taken over many of their homes. And because censorship was watertight, there was no public pressure. Nobody knew.
The delay mattered, though. Sickness in the camps—the predictable result of a near-total lack of infrastructure—turned to death. In the West Coast camps, the death rate of internees was no greater than that of normal civilians. But in Alaskan camps, by the war’s end, 10 percent had
▪ Kiyoshi Osawa, an internee who had lived in the Philippines for sixteen years, since he was a teenager, remembered “the indescribable wave of uncertainty and humiliation” as he “languished in prison.”
Osawa and his fellow internees are never mentioned in U.S. accounts of Japanese internment. That’s partly because of the general tendency to exclude the colonies from U.S. history, though it surely also has to do with the short-lived nature of the affair. Whereas West Coast internment, Hawaiian martial law, and Aleut internment lasted years, the Philippine internment was ended in weeks by the Japanese invasion in late 1941.
◆ 12. There Are Times When Men Have to Die
▪ Now it was Roosevelt’s turn to be irate. “You have no authority to communicate with the Japanese government,” he scolded Quezon. “So long as the flag of the United States flies on Filipino soil,” he promised, “it will be defended by our own men to the death.”
“To the death” was not just stirring rhetoric; it was the likely outcome. The Roosevelt administration had already agreed with Britain on a “Germany first” strategy for the war, which meant prioritizing Europe. The acknowledged price of that strategy was letting Japan take the Philippines. Was the United States truly willing to see that happen? Churchill asked. The secretary of war, a former governor-general of the Philippines, reassured him: “There are times when men have to die.”
In March
▪ Japan latched on to the bitterness of the colonized. Japanese propagandists reminded Filipinos of the United States’ long history of empire, starting with the dispossession of North American Indians and moving through the Mexican War, the annexation of Spain’s colonies, and the Philippine War, right up to the scorched-earth policy adopted in the face of the Japanese invasion. “America has wasted your funds in the creation of grand boulevards and exclusive mountain resorts,” one Japanese writer added, gleefully rubbing salt into the wounds inflicted in the era of Daniel Burnham.
▪ Filipinos quickly saw that Japan had come not to liberate the Philippines, but to ransack it
▪ A new president was sworn in: Jose Laurel, a Yale-educated justice of the Philippine Supreme Court. His father had died in a U.S. reconcentration camp. Laurel received a twenty-one-gun salute.
▪ The pretense that all victims of the Japanese were guerrillas was easily dispensed with, as when troops rounded up hundreds of young women for sexual predation. Large hotels, including MacArthur’s Manila Hotel, became the site of organized mass rapes. Diaries kept during the Battle of Manila are replete with other stomach-churning atrocities: pregnant women disemboweled, babies bayoneted, whole families slaughtered. Prepared to die, Iwabuchi’s men felt few moral restraints (nanking)
▪ Within a week of fighting, U.S. shelling of the whole area in front of advancing troops became, as one report put it, “the rule rather than the exception.” Any structure suspected of containing Japanese troops was a target. “Block after bloody block was slowly mashed into an unrecognizable pulp,” recorded the 37th’s official history.
That included refugee centers, such as the Philippine General Hospital (a Parsons-built landmark), where a few Japanese soldiers were holed up—and more than seven thousand civilians. The 37th fired at the hospital for two days and nights. These were “days of terror,” remembered a Filipino trapped inside. “I can still hear the screams of the wounded clearly to this day.” Other refugee shelters—the Remedios Hospital, the Concordia Convent—met similar fates.
▪ Oscar Villadolid, a boy at the time, remembers a familiar scene from the aftermath of Manila’s “liberation.” A GI came down his street handing out cigarettes and Hershey bars. Speaking slowly, he asked Villadolid’s name. When Villadolid replied easily in English, the soldier was startled. “How’d ya learn American?” he asked.
Villadolid explained that when the United States colonized the Philippines, it had instituted English in the schools. This only compounded the GI’s confusion. “He did not even know that America had a colony here in the Philippines!” Villadolid marveled.
Take a moment to let that sink in. This was a soldier who had taken a long journey across the Pacific. He’d been briefed on his mission, shown maps, told where to go and whom to shoot. Yet at no point had it dawned on him that he was preparing to save a U.S. colony and that the people he would encounter there were, just like him, U.S. nationals.
He thought he was invading a foreign country
◆ 13. Kilroy Was Here
▪ The war brought the United States, as Winston Churchill put it, to the “summit of the world.” It made more goods, had more oil, held more gold, and possessed more planes than all other countries combined. It was, Truman marveled, “the most powerful nation, perhaps, in all history.”
But what is less often appreciated is how much territory the United States had won, too. In 1940 its colonized population had made up about 13 percent of the Greater United States. Now, adding it all up—the colonies and occupations—yielded a much larger total. The overseas area under U.S. jurisdiction contained some 135 million people. That was, remarkably, more than the 132 million who inhabited the mainland.
◆ 14. Decolonizing the United States
▪ But of course, that’s not what happened. Not even close. Instead, the United States and its allies did something highly unusual: they won a war and gave up territory. The United States led the charge, setting free its largest colony (the Philippines), folding up its occupations, nudging its European counterparts to abandon their empires, and demobilizing its army. It didn’t annex any land in the war’s aftermath; the closest it came was taking control of the islands of Micronesia in 1947, but technically they remained under the United Nations as the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (in 1986 a subset, the Northern Marianas, became a U.S. territory
▪ First, that war fueled a global anti-imperial resistance movement that put up major impediments to colonial empire. Second, it introduced other ways of projecting power across the planet, ways that didn’t depend on large colonies
▪ its independent government.
This was what the Second World War had done. Colonized peoples had seen their white overlords defeated by an Asian power—it was the sort of sight that was hard to unsee. They’d heard Japan’s message of “Asia for the Asiatics” blaring from radio speakers for years. In Burma and the Philippines, they’d tasted liberty itself when Japan granted those colonies nominal independence in 1943.
▪ So they formed armies, armies beyond the control of any outside power. There was Mao Zedong’s Red Army in China, the Burma National Army, the Indian National Army, the Viet Minh, the Lao Issara (Free Laos), the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army, and the Hukbalahap in the Philippines. Some had grown under Japan’s protection, others were born of the anti-Japanese resistance, still others were hastily assembled in the heady days after the war. “From one end of the vast continent to the other,” wrote a journalist in Asia, “it has seldom been possible since Japan’s collapse to escape the sound of continuing gunfire.”
It was the Asian Spring. The whole continent had become, in the words of one of MacArthur’s generals, “an enormous pot, seething and boiling.”
▪ Let us leave the Chinese and Filipinos to take care of their own internal affairs,” one speaker urged. “The Filipinos are our allies. We ain’t gonna fight them!” cried another. The demonstrators read a letter of support from the Filipino Democratic Alliance. The organizers, meanwhile, passed a resolution declaring solidarity with the Filipino guerrillas
▪ All the members of the 823rd Engineer Aviation Battalion in Burma, an African American unit, sent Truman a letter saying that they were “disgusted with undemocratic American foreign policy.” They did not “want to be associated” with the “shooting and bombing to death the freedom urge of the peoples of the Southeast Asiatic countries. We do not want to ‘unify’ China with bayonets and bombing planes.
▪ The United States still had more ships, planes, and bases than anyone else. But its peacetime army was only the sixth largest in the world. It was in no position to colonize the planet
▪ Policymakers in the 1930s hadn’t cared what the Indonesians, Indians, or Indochinese thought about Philippine politics. But now Asia was off the leash, and Washington was searching for its grip. Now it mattered. Dropping the badly bruised Philippines in exchange for goodwill within the tumultuous decolonizing world wasn’t a hard choice.
Even High Commissioner McNutt could see this. “All Asia, the billion-peopled Orient, will be watching us in the Philippines,” he remarked. The promise of independence had “attracted the wonder and respect of the colonial peoples of the Far East.” To renege on that promise, McNutt conceded, would be “to betray Americanism as a byword in this great part of the world.”
And so, rather than trying to forcibly retain its colony, as its European counterparts had done, the United States rushed it out the door. “This is the first instance in history where a colony of a sovereign nation has been voluntarily given complete independence,” Truman bragged (somewhat stretching the facts). “Its significance will have world-wide effect.
◆ 15. Nobody Knows in America, Puerto Rico’s in America
▪ None of this was pretty. Yet the 1950 uprising was, for Muñoz Marín, an unexpected boon. Free to arrest virtually anyone he wanted, he cleared the island of nationalist leaders during the all-important voter registration period. The violence allowed him to promulgate a clear story, which the mainland press reinforced. Reformers pursuing prosperity, like him, were rational. Nationalists, by contrast, were lunatics.
◆ 16. Synthetica
▪ Often, those two motives blended together. Complex industrial societies depended on goods that they couldn’t mine or grow at home. But it wasn’t just that they needed those goods, they needed secure access to them, the kind that couldn’t be denied even if war broke out. And if they couldn’t get it? Germany had crashed headfirst into that problem during World War I, when its enemies locked it out of South American markets. South America was where the all-important nitrates came from, used to make fertilizer and explosives. Germany found itself in the extremely uncomfortable position of fighting a two-front war without access to either Peru’s guano or Chile’s sodium nitrates. It was only Fritz Haber’s timely invention of ammonia synthesis that kept Germany fighting for four years.
Haber had solved the nitrate problem, but there were many other raw materials that advanced economies required, including petroleum, iron, coal, indigo, tin, copper, sisal, cotton, kapok, silk, quinine, tungsten, bauxite, and palm oil. The United States, with its massive mainland stretching across multiple climatic zones, was blessed with an abundant crop of internal raw materials. But it, too, was dependent. It relied most visibly on rubber, which grew only five to ten degrees from the equator, and which it got mainly by dint of its friendly relations with European empires.
▪ Jeeps rode on synthetic rubber tires. Tanks rolled on synthetic rubber treads, and they rolled much farther than German panzers, whose inferior treads grew brittle and cracked in the cold. (“The Germans apparently had not controlled the distribution of styrene,” one U.S. chemist clucked.) By the war’s end, nearly nine in ten pounds of U.S. rubber were factory-made, mostly from oil. This was, wrote an awed observer, “one of the most remarkable industrial achievements of all time.
◆ 19. Language Is a Virus
▪ Languages are standards, just like stop signs and screw threads, but they run much deeper. Languages shape thought, making some ideas more readily thinkable and others less so. At the same time, they shape societies. Which languages you speak affects which communities you join, which books you read, which places you feel at home. That a single language has become the dominant tongue on the planet, spoken to a degree by nearly all educated and powerful people, is thus an occurrence of profound consequence
▪ Yet the empire was vast, and there simply weren’t enough colonial officials to wash out every offending mouth. So the government relied on other tools. It passed laws in English, demanded that civil servants use English, and, in the U.S. Virgin Islands, made English proficiency a requirement for voting. Most important, colonial authorities turned to education. Inculcating English was the “cardinal point” of the whole Philippine school system, explained the superintendent of education there. Across the empire, students were expected, at least at the higher grades, to work in English.
▪ Even though few adult Filipinos spoke English fluently by the time the Philippines became a commonwealth and Quezon became its president, the looming presence of English in the schools and government had blocked local languages from taking root. The result was, after hundreds of years of colonial rule (counting Spain), the Philippines had no indigenous language spoken throughout the archipelago.
“When I travel through the provinces and talk to my people, I need an interpreter,” Quezon lamented. “Did you ever hear of anything more humiliating, more horrible than that?”
▪ It’s not just that English users dominate the internet. The medium itself favors English. Its programming languages are derived from English, so anyone seeking to master Python, C++, or Java—to name three popular coding languages—will have a
◆ 21. Baselandia
▪ The bases were there by agreement—Washington offered protection and usually funds in exchange for the right to plant its outposts. But for the people who lived next to them, it could feel like colonialism
▪ The year after the occupation ended, more than a hundred Japanese died at the hands of U.S. service members. Technically, crimes committed by uniformed perpetrators were subject to trial in Japanese courts. But the Japanese government relinquished jurisdiction in 97 percent of cases in the early years, turning thousands of alleged criminals over to their superior officers for punishment
▪ The more that military fought, the more Japanese firms profited. The Korean War had been a godsend. The Vietnam War helped, too. The men who fought it drank Kirin beer, carried Nikon cameras, rode Honda motorbikes, and dropped bombs with Sony parts. The polyethylene body bags they came home in? Made in Japan. (japaj vn war)
▪ The Philippines, for example, hosted large contingents of U.S. service members, yet no one was driving Philippine trucks to the battlefronts. It mattered that Japan had other factors spurring its growth, including a high rate of savings, market protections, an entrepreneurial culture, and a government that ably promoted industrial development
▪ In the face of the protests, the United States returned Okinawa to Japan in 1972. But it kept the bases. Today, 20 percent of the island is used by the U.S. military
◆ 22. The War of Points
▪ It was time to “finally sow shit in their backyard,” as National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski said. The two governments agreed to bankroll the mujahidin via a matching arrangement: one U.S. dollar for every Saudi one