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The Forbidden Book
By Abe Ignacio, Enrique De La Cruz, Jorge Emmanuel |
ORDER -- Item #3251, Price $24.95
On
February 4, 1899, the United States went to war based on a false
claim that Filipinos began attacking American soldiers in Manila. The
first shots were actually fired by an American soldier as Filipinos
crossed a bridge, and historians would later discover a “prearranged
plan” by U.S. military to precipitate a war as soon as an incident
was provoked. Misled by false reports, the Senate passed (by one
vote) a treaty to annex the Philippines. President McKinley would
later justify the war by claiming that God had counseled him to take
the Philippines in order to civilize and Christianize the Filipinos.
What was really behind the annexation was the need for overseas
markets and raw materials for the American industry. Opposition to
the war was led by the Anti-Imperialist League who members included
many prominent Americans including presidential candidate William
Jennings Bryan, suffragist Jane Addams, labor leader Samuel Gompers,
African American activist Ida Wells Barnett, and writer Mark Twain.
The “anti-imperialists” were branded as traitors by “pro-
expansionists” and Filipinos were depicted as savages in order to de-
legitimize their resistance to American occupation. American
opposition to the war grew as more and more American soldiers died
and as revelations of military atrocities, torture of prisoners,
killing of Filipino children, and concentration camps surfaced in
media reports, military trials, and a senate hearing. President
Roosevelt prematurely declared the war over on July 4, 1902 but the
last major battle was fought in 1913 and hostilities did not ceased
until 1914. Some readers may find interesting parallels between the
Philippine-American war and events of today.
Brimming with insights into the beginnings of American imperial
policy overseas, this book reconstructs an era that was to shape and
refine U.S. intervention in the modern world. Through political
cartoons in an era when the colonizer itself worked to hide the truth
from the American people about the forgotten war a century ago, this
book restores for the present generation a past marred by
misinformation, racism, blind patriotism and outright lies. A thought-
provoking education about the miseducation of the American people by
arrogant imperial leaders whose successors never seem to learn the
lessons of history. A particularly relevant book which makes it
essential reading for the present generation of Filipinos and other
colonial subjects of the modern PAX AMERICANA.
The brutal war waged by the United States against the Filipino people
at the turn of the century has been shrouded in darkness for a long
time, the truth concealed from generations of Americans. THE
FORBIDDEN BOOK brings that shameful episode in our history out in the
open, with a wonderful combination of crystal-clear text and
extraordinary cartoons. The book deserves wide circulation.
Description
A Chicago Chronicle cartoon in January 1900 showed President McKinley
preventing Uncle Sam from reading the “Forbidden Book” about
the “true history of the war in the Philippines.” Today, most
Americans know nothing about a 15-year war with the Philippines that
resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Filipinos.
Comments on the Book
In this extraordinary collection of political cartoons from the
period of the Philippine-American War and subsequent colonization,
frank visual satire and caricature vibrate with ‘forgotten’ histories
from the turn of the 19th century: they link U.S. imperial conquests
in the Pacific to those in the Caribbean, refract American
perceptions of Filipinos through its devastating treatments of blacks
and native peoples, explicitly admit U.S. ambitions to employ not
only war, but education and culture, to surpass the reach and power
of the European empires by the end of the 20th century.
These ‘forbidden’ images are windows onto an earlier moment in the
history of American empire, a history in which we still live and
struggle today.
-Lisa Lowe
University of California, San Diego
-Roland G. Simbulan
Professor of Development Studies and Public Management, and
Vice Chancellor, University of the Philippines
-Howard Zinn
Professor Emeritus, Boston University
Author of A People's History of the United States
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Copyright © 2004 by AACP, Inc.
Most recent revision September 22, 2004