The American conflicts in the Philippines at the end of the 19th century and in Iraq at the beginning of the 21st have a lot in common, and cartoons can help enforce the wars' lessons.
Political cartoons were the topic of discussion Friday in a speech by California State University at Northridge Professor Enrique de la Cruz. He said the conflict in the Philippines has been erased from the American national memory.
De la Cruz, a professor of Asian American Studies, co-authored "The Forbidden Book: The Philippine-American War in Political Cartoons."
"One of the reasons the U.S. keeps on getting into wars like [the Iraq war] is because we forget," he said. "We have really short-term memory. I hope this book helps with that."
De la Cruz showed the audience a Smithsonian Institution Web site, "The Price of Freedom," which lists the United States' major wars. The war in the Philippines is not included. It is only mentioned as part of the Spanish-American War.
"In fairness to the Smithsonian, they're starting to change things," he said. "They're beginning to revise, but they refuse to give the Filipino war 'event status' in its own category. They're going by official military history."
Most experts estimate the conflict involved at least 250,000 United States soldiers and Filipino death estimates range from 600,000 to one million people, de la Cruz said.
Using political cartoons from his book, de la Cruz illustrated the negative attitudes toward Filipinos by Americans during the period of the conflict.
In his speech, sponsored by the Asian American Center, the American Studies Department, the Asian Community at Tufts and the Filipino Culture Society, de la Cruz said the Filipino conflict bears a strong resemblance to the war in Iraq.
To go to war, he said, a country needs "a legitimate, legal reason" and "moral scaffolding."
In the case of the Iraq war, the legitimization was provided by the country's violations of United Nations disarmament and inspections resolutions. The moral case, de la Cruz said, was to "bring Democracy to Iraq [and] liberate the Iraqi people from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein."
The United States justified its annexation of the Philippines because of the 1898 Treaty of Paris. The "moral scaffolding" was what Rudyard Kipling called "the white man's burden" - the idea that Western nations had an obligation to bring civilization to Third World peoples.
De la Cruz showed more of his book's cartoons, which portrayed the peoples of non-Western countries as savages. "Those cartoons degraded and demonized [Filipinos] and gave rise to the racist attitudes that plagued Filipinos in the 1920s and 30s," de la Cruz said, "leading to the anti-Filipino riots of that period."
He said the conflict in the Philippines bore an uncanny resemblance to the war on Iraq. The Philippines "were [the U.S.'s] ticket into the imperialist club," he said.
In addition to increasing awareness of the war in the Philippines, de la Cruz said his presentation may affect the University. "Perhaps this talk will inspire the students to talk to the administration about getting an Asian American program here at Tufts," he said.
