President Trump and General Pershing by Marouf A. Hasian

Author:Marouf A. Hasian
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030014735
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Lingering Memories of Pershing, Bud Dajo, and Bud Bagsak

While most American military and civilian accounts are written in ways that assumed that the violence in and around Jolo “ended” with Bud Dajo, but this was not the case. As Ranato Olivero noted in 2005, these bloody volcano engagements inspired new leaders such as Japal, Jahandal, and Sahipa who continued the resistance that Adam had started. 92 Dozens of attacks by the Moro led to repressive measures being carried out by Pershing and his subordinates. Yet time after time, major massacres were said to have “ended” Moro threats.

Did Pershing’s post-Bud Bagsak fame spark soldierly interest in the production and circulation of “pig bullet” tales? The more that journalists followed Pershing around as he rose in the ranks, the more that his tactics were credited with deterring Moro raids on American posts or Filipino towns.

Oftentimes huge assertions seemed to be made about the effectiveness of the tactics that were employed by Pershing’s soldiers, “Pershing apparently had prisoners interrogated,” claimed one 1960s researcher who talked to one of Pershing’s soldiers. This interrogation began, it was said, “by suspending them [Moros] by the heels over a pit filled with a carcass of a dead pig, into which they were gradually lowered.” 93 The line between fact and fiction, opinions and actual realities, blurred in many retrospective reminisces.

A fair reading of the textual and visual materials that were produced during these colonial years reveals that before the advent of the Great War most of the veterans who had served in the Philippines, and many who wanted to comment on their actions, were convinced that the use of brutal methods was justified and salutary. All sorts of evidence of triumphalism, and textual feelings of vindication, surfaced time and time again in the pages of leading popular magazines, newspapers, and academic journals of the time.

In theory, the Philippine-American War had ended in 1902, but those who admired or hated rebels like the Tausug Moros recalled how these Muslims waged a decade-long conflict with American imperialists. Few generals or soldiers seemed to be in any hurry to leave a region that served as a testing ground for US weaponry. Many left fragments indicating that when they went home they wanted to return, and colonial administrators, soldiers, and citizens who traveled to the Southern Philippines constantly wrote about their own technological prowess, their eugenical worth, and their proven racial superiority. 94

In many of the imperial rhetorics that were produced between 1899 and 1914, the divide-and-conquer strategies of the American occupiers oftentimes depended on the juxtaposing of the nefarious insurgent attacks of the weak Northern Filipinos with the fanatical attacks of the oath-taking Muslims in the South. The presses ensured that millions of readers understood the challenges that confronted Leonard Wood , John Pershing , and other American administrators who kept telling journalists that they only used overwhelming force as a last resort. This was a world where Boston Brahmins, soldiers from the West, and the sons and daughters of

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