http://www.wbur.org/artery/2017/03/09/kinzer-true-flag
In 1898, the United States "suddenly found itself with the chance to rule faraway lands," Stephen Kinzer writes in his new book. "The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire," focuses on the causes and consequences of "a ravenous 55 day spasm" when "the United States asserted control over five far-flung lands with a total of 11 million habitants: Guam, Hawaii, Cuba, the Philippines and Puerto Rico."
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However, one need not be local in order to know who Kinzer is. He spent more than two decades at the New York Times in various capacities, including as the bureau chief for Managua, Bonn, Berlin and Istanbul. Furthermore, he is the author of eight previous books, including "The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War" and "Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq."
Like any good scholar who recognizes the present in the past, Kinzer identifies much throughout “The True Flag” about the Spanish-American War that Americans would later experience in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. Then as now, the American endeavor in the Philippines was marred by unrealistic time and troop requirements, unexpected civilian casualties, unwelcoming natives, mission creep and forms of what have come to be called counterinsurgency and even waterboarding, which contemporaries called the “water cure” and to which Mark Twain would raise what became a standard objection in the 2000s.
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Roosevelt became a fanatical imperialist during his occupation of several offices throughout the 1880s and 1890s, not once he became president in 1900. Twain, meanwhile, had spent the 1890s living abroad and his last major work — "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court" — was a decade behind him when the United States attacked the Spanish fleet at Manila Bay in the Philippines.
who remembers the Anti-Imperialis league, and how hard they railed against TR and the other maniacs who set us on the course we've travelled for over 100 years?
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