During a February 2016 speech that was given while campaigning for the US presidency in South Carolina, Donald Trump regaled his audience with a story of how an American general by the name of Pershing captured some “50 terrorists” while fighting in the US-Philippine War. Pershing allegedly shot almost all of the captives with bullets that were dipped in pig’s blood. After that Pershing’s soldiers allowed a single survivor to live to tell other Moros about what would happen to them if they continued to resist the American occupation. Appreciate audiences reportedly clapped and howled as Trump delivered his punch line—that these shootings deterred Muslim terrorists and ended the Moro rebellion, bringing several dozen years of peace to the Southern Philippines.
Two months later, while stumping in Costa Mesa, Donald Trump circulated another version of what I will be calling his “pig bullet” tales when he delivered a public address that criticized President Barack Obama’s decision to accept Middle Eastern war refugees into the USA. This time, however, the number of problem-free years in the Southern Philippines was raised from 25 to 42. 1
Listeners could connect the dots. Wasn’t it clear, that regardless of his rhetorical embellishments, Donald Trump was getting at some underlying historical “realities”? What neoliberal politician could publicly dispute the fact that the adoption of unpleasant deterrent strategies might help today’s counterterrorists when they fought cunning members of Al Qaeda or ISIS units?
In August 2017, in the aftermath of a terrorist attack in Barcelona, Spain, US President Donald Trump again tried to take some lessons from America’s military past. In a tweet that contained tiny slivers of a meta-narrative that he, and others, had co-produced over the years, the American commander-in-chief admonished his readers to “study what General Pershing of the United States did to terrorists when caught.” 2 The same tweet went on to say that because of Pershing’s efforts there was “no more Radical Islamic Terror for 35 years.” Linda Qiu of the New York Times explained to readers of her newspaper that it appeared that President Trump was referencing a “long-debunked fable about how Gen. John J. ‘Black Jack’ Pershing had crushed a rebellion in the predominantly Muslim Moro Province of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War.” 3
Linda Qiu’s contextualization of these pig bullet tales was relatively charitable in comparison with some harsher critiques of Trump’s Pershing narratives. Other critics lambasted the American President for circulating “alternative facts ” that detractors were convinced bore little resemblance to actual historical events. 4 It was bad enough that an American President seemed to be playing fast and loose with the “facts,” but he was also accused of spreading political dissension. Anwar Ouassini and Mostafa Amini opined that Donald Trump was using Islamophobic tweets so that he could form a “public memory” that mobilized a “particular vision of the American colonial effort in the Philippines.” 5 They seemed to have assumed that there was a different, more stable, more accurate, public memory that could have been envisioned.
In this particular book, I will be arguing that there are times when opinion makers may be wrong about their misrepresentations of well-known “archival” facts, but they nevertheless may be right about their representations of the sentiments, or the rhetorical culture, of a bygone age. In other words, what if pundits like Linda Qiu overlooked the fact that those pig bullet “fables” were produced, and circulated, by earlier generations of American soldiers and civilians who shared Trump’s views regarding “Muslim” deterrence strategies?
Regardless of how we may feel about Trump’s faith in his personal abilities, it is possible that his particular framing of one of Pershing’s deterrence strategies does provide some ironic insight into the sentiments of several American generations who valorized “Rough Riders” like Theodore Roosevelt and others who believed in America’s exceptionalism and her Manifest Destiny. What if educated US military officers felt that they needed to use their ethnographic knowledge and demanded that pigs be buried with dead “Mohammedans”? What if the ordinary American soldier who volunteered to serve during the American–Philippine War or the “Moro Rebellion” wanted revenge after witnessing the mutilation of fellow soldiers?
Is it any coincidence that Trump’s detractors shied away from saying whether the “tough guys” of yesteryear actually put into practice techniques that looked much like the ones that Trump referenced? Few quoted Theodore Roosevelt’s defense of war as a necessary evil that helped the fitter races conquer their inferiors, and there were few nuanced analyses of how Senate Committees, during the summer of 1902, heard horrific tales from soldiers who participated in the burning of countless Filipino villages. As we shall see in Chapter 2, American soldiers who traveled to these regions wrote back home about marching past pulverized towns and villages that were shelled by naval guns. Although some scholars write confidently about wartime mortality and morbidity rates, these figures are just guesses, statistics used in heated debates.
Perhaps these reports of “atrocities ” were viewed by the majority of Progressive Americans as atypical incidents. Those who believed in the tenets of muscular Christianity, the survival of the fittest, the duties of “Anglo-Saxons,” etc., produced social and military arguments during this era that rationalized the carrying out of all types of imperial or colonial violence. Necessitous, totalizing wars against weaker races had to be fought in the name of racial regeneration, and if resisting indigenous populations lost their lives during this “extirpation,” this only provided more experiential evidence of the inferiority of “dying races.” The deaths of these “others” became incidents of war, regrettable losses, but inevitable. In theory, less educated Americans—pacifists or anti-imperialists who lived during the Progressive years—seemed to have forgotten their eugenical lessons. Sometimes “tough guys” have to “go native” and adopt the savage tactics of their enemies if they want to win guerilla campaigns.
Today, many of Trump’s contemporaries call this “collateral damage,” and those who fight the post-9/11 battles in the “Global War on Terror” (GWOT ) put old wine in new bottles as America’s “new” Way of War is fought in similar, totalizing fashion. As the chapters of this book will demonstrate, many of the same officers and soldiers who heard about the burial of pigs with Moro Muslims left us archival materials that put on display their responses to the arguments that were crafted by anti-imperialists . Military officers and their lawyers in Washington, DC, who surveyed what was happening in the Philippines between 1898 and 1913 disagreed with each other about how best to interpret the Lieber Codes that were produced during the American Civil War and they had heated disagreements about the applicability of Hague Conventions provisions. Long before Donald Trump arrived on the scene, many US militarists lampooned the efforts of idealistic “humanitarians” who tried to stop, or regulate, these “savage wars of peace .” 6
Trump might have offended the politically correct sensibilities of some Americans who did not understand that his get “tough” policies were a part of a long, historical US tradition, what critical scholars called a “genealogy” (see below). In places like Wounded Knee, Cuba, and Haiti, Americans fought other savage wars of peace , and those veterans who survived these brutal campaigns left behind what Michel Foucault and others have called archival elements, discursive units of analysis or “fragments.” These rhetorical fragments became some of the residual materials, decaying matter, that would be restored and reassembled by motivated scholars. The archives were filled with indeterminate texts and hazy public recollections of America’s Philippine campaigns drifted along to the point where populist leaders like Trump could cherry pick this or that military “history.” For more than a few of Trump’s conservative supporters, his ability to speak in non-elitist, vernacular ways about American exceptionalist powers should not get in the way of understanding America’s “get tough” policies.
A critical review of hundreds of newspapers, television commentaries, popular press articles, academic journals, and other artefacts that circulated between 2016 and 2017 reveals that President’s Trump’s commentaries about Pershing became entangled in heated debates about a host of other issues. Participants in these conversations argued about Pershing, the framing of Muslim threats, Trump’s knowledge of American history, the efficacy of using tough tactics for counterterrorism, and the dangers of circulating what many called “post-truths ’ or alternative facts . In many cases, journalists, Trump detractors, and other observers who were trained to believe in the methodological importance of social scientific, empirical research tried to “fact check” what Trump had to say about Pershing and the use of pigs’ blood. One of the arguments that I will be making in this book is that these social agents should be viewed as rhetors and arguers, who were inventing and circulating their own fictional accounts at the same time that they argued that they were conveying unvarnished “truths.”
Neoliberals of all political stripes, perhaps worried about the corrosive effects of America’s obsession with “post-truths ,” sought to frame these Trumpian contests in binary wars. They pitted the President’s alleged false “alternative facts ” against the “real” histories about Pershing that purported came from the archives or from interviews with military experts. Fact-checking thus became a preferred methodological or pedagogical approach that was supposed to educate readers about American’s benign intervention overseas. Consulting the archives, or listening to the military experts talk about Pershing , helped inoculate US publics so that they would be immunized from the contagious effects of Trump’s historical (mis)readings of the US-Philippine War or the Mo...