Here’s more on why “Godfather” Kristol and the neocons love TR so much. From Edmund Morris’s book, Theodore Rex (pp. 109-110), Senator George Hoar excoriated Teddy Roosevelt for his disastrous, imperialistic venture in the Philippines. “You have wasted six hundred millions of treasure,” the senator boomed. “You have sacrificed nearly ten thousand American lives — the flower of our youth. You have devastated provinces. You have slain uncounted thousands of the people you desire to benefit . . .” [200,000 was the approximate number].
TR replied to Sen. Hoar in a Memorial Day speech to aged veterans of the Union army: “Oh, my comrades, the men in the uniform of the United States who have for the last three years patiently and uncomplainingly championed the American cause in the Phiippine Islands, are your younger brothers, your sons. They were fighting to impose orderly freedom upon a fragmented nation, according to rules of just severity sanctioned by Abraham Lincoln. We believe that we can rapidly teach the people of the Philippine islands . . . how to make good use of their freedom.'”(emphasis added).
Murdering tens of thousands of innocent Filipino civilians was indeed consistent with Lincoln’s “rules of just severity,” as any neocon “Civil War” historian will tell you.
Like Lincoln, TR then played the race card to disguise his true imperialistic, warmongering intentions. He proclaimed that lynchings carried out in the U.S were “infinitely worse than any that has ever been comitted by our troops in the Philippines . . .” Even the New York Times editorialized that this was “in extremely bad taste.”
2:04 pm on August 26, 2003
