Back in the US, I settled into the bunker in North Marin, northern california in mid February 1986. I had accepted an operational detail scheduled for early April, and I dearly valued the opportunity for R&R in a safe place.

And then. Marcos called for elections, I called my friends, and we set up for the long haul in what was to pass into the mists of time as mikey’s “Fall of the Philippines Party”. We set up with all the booze and meds required for a long term siege, and we vowed to hold out til Marcos was dead.

It was one of the great events never recorded, as the population of the bunker swelled to well over sixty, and no one slept or ever wandered far from the TV News, in spite of the need to make lovely fruit flavored blender drinks and various implementations of the pork sandwich.

We stuck it out, I’ll have you know, and in various quarters where people speak in hushed tones about overseas events they might have influenced, the fall of the Philippines party at mikey’s bunker that winter week in in ‘86 remains legendary.

One of those “I was there” moments.

Go ahead – ask around DC if you want. Nobody will admit to being there, but nobody will tell you frankly they weren’t…

The nature of the beast, I suppose…

mikey

That said, it’s pretty easy to maintain that level of ignorance. As someone who was first even moderately aware of world events during the Reagan presidency, I never had a history class in school that did more than nod at the Spanish-American war, and was told nothing about our occupation of the Philippines. About all that I did learn about the Philippines was that Marcos’s overthrow by a popular movement that installed Corazon Aquino was a good thing that our government was totally on board with – the support of prominent administration figures for Marcos not being a major feature of the news coverage. Even when the Philippines were in the American news during Marcos’s ouster and the later trial, or when the Navy left Subic Bay, or when Mount Pinatubo erupted, the occupation and the brutal crushing of the insurgency just were not mentioned.

I can strongly endorse the Karnow book. If anyone does read it, as a small reward you will find a hilsarious Elihu Root / William Taft story in there.

Douthat is so young, part of a generation of appalling ignorance of history, that I wonder if he’s even aware of the effect (or the facts!) of the Pacific/Philippine war in WWII. I bet he never took it into consideration in creating his theory, even if he does know about it.

I may look at Matt Y’s page, (but he’s pretty darn young, too), but I think you have nailed it. Our relations would undoubtedly be very different without the events of WWII. In fact, there’s a good chance the islands would have demanded their independence during the sixties, when independence was a time that had come. (of course, that’s not going into effects of WWII there, either, which truly “changed everything.” Like you said, this is a blog post)

I sure hope this meme doesn’t catch on.

The fact that neither could be allowed to happen today is a GOOD thing. It means we have evolved to the point where, even at the risk of not succeeding, we simply do not deploy savage, indiscriminate violence in the pursuit of our goals.

I can never help but notice that the people who draw these sorts of parallels also seem to be the same people who don’t place a great deal of value on the lives of innocent foreigners in their own countries…

mikey