re: #167 Ojoe

Well the USA helped kick the Japanese out of the Philippines, I suppose that was imperial, but you might ask a Filipino if it was a good idea to kick the Japanese out.

Umm, hello?

The Japanese occupation of the Philippines happened more than four decades after the American conquest.

The Philippine–American War was an armed military conflict between the Philippines and the United States, which arose from the struggle of the insurgent First Philippine Republic against United States annexation of the islands. The war was a continuation of the Philippine struggle for independence, following the Philippine Revolution, led by Emilio Aguinaldo and the Spanish-American War.

The struggle officially began on June 2, 1899, when the First Philippine Republic declared war against the United States and it officially ended on July 4, 1902, after Aguinaldo’s surrender.However, remnants of the Katipunan and other resistance groups, such as the Pulajanes and the Moro, continued hostilities until June 15, 1913 (Battle of Bud Bagsak).

The war led to the establishment of the Anti-Imperialist League by Mark Twain, who staunchly opposed the war, as well as to writing of The White Man’s Burden by Rudyard Kipling which is a poem about colonialism. In its aftermath, the war would change the cultural landscape of the islands with the introduction of the English language, the disestablishment of the Catholic Church, and the impact of an estimated 200,000-1,500,000 casualties.

But of course, America Is Not An Empire.