After Barcelona attack, Trump said we should study John J. Pershing. Here’s what Trump got wrong. - The Washington Post
▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/08/18/after-barcelona-attack-trump-said-to-study-general-pershing-heres-wh
A sordid tale of General John J. Pershing executing Muslim insurgents in the Philippines at the turn of the century is a favorite of President Trump.
“They were having terrorism problems, just like we do,” Trump told a throng of cheering supporters in South Carolina in February 2016.
“[Pershing] caught 50 terrorists who did tremendous damage and killed many people. And he took the 50 terrorists, and he took 50 men and he dipped 50 bullets in pigs’ blood — you heard that, right? He took 50 bullets, and he dipped them in pigs’ blood. And he had his men load his rifles, and he lined up the 50 people, and they shot 49 of those people. And the 50th person, he said: You go back to your people, and you tell them what happened. And for 25 years, there wasn’t a problem.”
It’s a story Trump has repeated, and echoed again Thursday after what authorities have called a terrorist attack in Barcelona that killed at least 13 people and left many more wounded when a driver smashed his van onto a busy sidewalk.
“Study what General Pershing of the United States did to terrorists when caught. There was no more Radical Islamic Terror for 35 years!” he tweeted.
Brian M. Linn, a history professor at Texas A&M University, did just that nearly two decades ago when he published “Guardians of Empire,” a book on the U.S. military presence in Asia from 1902 to 1940.
His verdict on Trump’s claim?
“There is absolutely no evidence this occurred,” he told The Washington Post.
#fake_news !
suivent détails sur l’affaire, son invention (ou ré-invention) après 2001 et autres horreurs commises par les états-uniens lors de la répression de l’insurrection aux Philippines après la conquête de 1898.
Other atrocities were committed by U.S. forces during the conflict. After a garrison of Army soldiers was overrun and massacred, a unit of Marines was dispatched in September 1902 to root out insurgents on the island of Samar on the central coast. Major Little Waller, who led the Marine unit, arrived from China and was unfamiliar with the terrain. Fever overtook him, his men panicked and the Filipino porters carrying his equipment mutinied.
Eleven porters were executed in a remote area, but news of the act quickly spread. “Dead men tell no tales, but they leave an awful smell” became a common American saying afterward, Linn said. Waller was later acquitted in a court-martial.