Massacre in the Clouds: An American Atrocity and the Erasure of History Author : Kim A Wagner ISBN-13 : 978-1541701496 Publisher : Public Affairs Guideline Price : £28 The United States has, in the postwar period, become so adept at “delegating” authority through a dense and sometimes shifting network of influence and clientelism that it is easy to forget it once had a formal empire of its own. The impetus for its imperial ventures came from its intervention in the Cuban War of Independence against the flailing Spanish Empire in 1898, which resulted in the acquisition of Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines. The latter would be the most troublesome of Washington’s new possessions, with Filipinos taking up arms against their new overlords in a series of regional insurgencies from 1899 to 1902.
But even when US forces had pacified most of the archipelago, there remained a restive region – the south, in the provinces of Mindanao and Sulu, where they faced continued fighting for several years from Muslim insurgents known as Moros (the Spanish having transposed the name of their historic Moorish adversaries to Philippine Muslims). The colonial administration had begun to finally get Mindanao under control in 1906 when it decided to extirpate a community of Moro holdouts that had taken refuge on the extinct volcano of Bud Dajo on the island of Sulu to evade US rule and its hated poll taxes. The ensuing assault in March of that year would result in the infamous massacre of.
