And pathetic. The U. S. of A. has learned absolutely NOTHING in a littleover a century. To whit:

...The Filipinos, who took a jaundiced view of McKinley's "benevolent assimilation,'' proceeded to declare war on the United States in February 1899. By the time the benevolence died down in July 1902, Filipino losses would total twenty thousand soldiers and more than two hundred thousand civilians, against 4,200 Americans dead...

Mark Twain's position on the Philippine war, when it finally coalesced, beggared the Democrats' timidity and the Republicans' bombast. It quickly blossomed into the representative, and prophetic, voice of principled American dissent. It defined the public work of his last ten years:

"We were to relieve them from Spanish tyranny to enable them to set up a government of their own,' Mark Twain had pointed out to his interviewer in London, "and we were to stand by and see that it got a fair trial. It was not to be a government according to our ideas, but a government that represented the feeling of the majority of the Filipinos, a government according to Filipino ideas. That would have been a worthy mission for the United States.
   
"But now--why, we have got into a mess, a quagmire from which each fresh step renders the difficulty of extrication immensely greater· I'm sure I wish I could see what we were getting out of it, and all it means to us as a nation.''...

Dissent from the war or criticism of its aftermath carried a price. The dissenter was likely to be branded as nothing more than a damned antiimperialist, and that was the next thing to being a damned traitor. "There is no reasonable doubt about that," Fred C. Chamberlain would fulminate in the afterglow of victory. "Their work cost the lives of hundreds of American soldiers,--stabbed in the back as they stood out there on the firing line, by their own countrymen... All up and down this great country the Anti-Imperialists made speeches of sympathy for the men who were shooting at our own soldiers." And who were the Anti-Imperialists? They were the damn Masons, the damn women's assemblies, the damn Democrats, the damn inflammatory magazine Farm and Home. Not to mention the damn Anti-Imperialist League. This last was the outgrowth of that "Peace Appeal to Labor," signed in April by William Dean Howells and several of his friends. These activists, who included Andrew Carnegie and William James, founded the League in October 1899. It went approximately nowhere....


From: Powers, Ron: Mark Twain, A Life. NY, Simon & Schuster, 2005, Chapter 45

[ which, by the way is possibly the best book I've read in a decade ]