(Johnny breathes heavily) (soft music) - There is a cluster of 7,000 islands that looks like one of the
most beautiful places on earth. People have been living here
for over 30,000 thousand years, traveling between these islands, trading with each other
and with the region, and developing religion,
identity, and culture. It eventually became
a country called Ma'I. And while all of these
advancements were happening here on these islands, another group of humans had been evolving in
another part of the world, over here in Europe. (techno music) But this other group
had a different culture, a different religion. Many of their advancements were achieved through expansion, not collaboration. And their religion thrived
when they stomp out others. They wanted to conquer. This island, these people, this culture would soon be swallowed, stripped of what made them, them. And soon, their name would be changed, after the name of the
King of their conquerors. This isn't a story just
about a big powerful military taking over new lands. We know that story pretty well. The story of these people
offers a new perspective to anyone who will listen. It's a perspective that has being wiped from our history books, because of the inherent
discomfort and tension with this fact that the United States, once a colony that heroically
threw off an empire to become independent, soon became an empire itself. It contradicts our
founding belief that it is, quote, self-evident that
all men are created equal. And this story isn't just history. That empire still exists today, with colonial possessions and subjects. It's all wrapped up in the story of these 7,000 islands and their people. So, I wanna tell you the story of how the US stole the Philippines. - There are still American citizens today who do not have equal voting rights. These are citizens of
America's island territory. (upbeat music) - The US Constitution grants a citizenship to everyone born on US soil except in one jurisdiction. - Quick pause, because I wanna tell you about something that is important to me and happens to also be the
sponsor of today's video, which is BetterHelp. I'm a big believer in therapy. I've been in therapy for
almost two years now. And it has changed my life. For many years, I didn't
think therapy was for me. I thought it was for everyone else. And so, I sort of avoided it. But when I finally
started going last year, I really started to realize
that there was so much that I could be working
on day in and day out that could dramatically reshape how I think about the world, and ultimately make me more happy. BetterHelp is a platform that is trying to make therapy more accessible to people. It's a virtual platform. So you have access not
just to the therapists that are in your town, but to a huge network of
15,000 thousand therapists. So you can find the right fit for you. Finding the right therapist
is sometimes difficult. And with BetterHelp, you can, for free, switch to a new therapist
as many times you need to until you find the right fit. Your therapist is in touch with you. You can message them right in the app throughout the week if needed. And it is an affordable
and approachable way to get in on therapy whenever you want. And BetterHelp is available worldwide. Anywhere in the world that you are, that has an internet connection, you can get in on counseling. This isn't a crisis line. This is a professional
counseling and therapy by certified professional therapists. Therapy can be expensive. And with BetterHelp, it is more affordable than traditional therapy, and they even offer
financial aid when needed. So they really are trying to
make this more accessible, which is something I deeply believe in. I think that in our culture, we don't value therapy
enough, and we really should because I think all of us
have stuff we can work on. Thank you BetterHelp for
supporting this channel, for sponsoring this video. There's a link in my description. It is betterhelp.com/johnnyharris. Going to that link will give
you 10% off your first month of BetterHelp, if you
want to get started today. So, let's get back to the video. This video could be called how
Spain stole the Philippines, since Spain was the
first nation to conquer and control these islands 500 years ago. Actually, exactly 500 years ago. And indeed, Spain left
a very deep influence on these islands, not
least of the name itself, which is named after King Philip. Spain brought their religion,
their language, their culture, which is why the most common last names in the Philippines are
like Reyes or Del Rosario, De la Cruz, De los Santos. But the heyday of the
Spanish empire came and went. And by the 1800s, it
was kind of crumbling. But it was the arrival of a new superpower that I believe had a bigger imprint, not just on the Philippines,
but on the US itself. It established rules and behaviors that we still grapple with today. And that's why this is the story of how the US stole the Philippines. So let's go. - [News Anchor] To this
day, we can see the traces of the almost 400 hundred
years of Spanish rule over the Philippines. But even more striking is
the more recent influence of the United States. - Okay, so it's the end of the 1800s. Up until now, US expansion
sort of looks like this. It's all happening on this mainland. And at this point, there
sort of became a big debate of, do we keep going? Some people wanted to
keep expanding the US outside of this mainland. The President at the time
wasn't a big expansion guy but he was surrounded
by people who loved war, specifically this guy. And these people who
surrounded the President had their eye on this Spanish colony, right off the American coast called Cuba, where the locals were
rising up against Spain. (suspenseful music) Wait a minute, isn't this a
video about the Philippines? Why are we talking about Cuba? We're getting there in
just a second, okay? So anyway, Cuba. Americans didn't wanna
go to war with Cuba. They're like, we don't need more war. But thanks to the explosion of an American submarine in Cuba, which was probably an accident, and thanks to some highly
unethical journalism that blamed the explosion on Spain, and a big thanks to again
this guy, Teddy Roosevelt, who at this point was just a peon, he was literally the assistant
secretary of the Navy, but he somehow cajoled his boss's boss, the President of the United States, to go to war in Cuba to
liberate the Cubans from Spain. So the US declared war on Spain in 1898. But this begins a new era
of war in the United States. No longer can you just go into
war and just take over land. You need an angle. You need to sell the war
to the American people. So the angle on this war was liberation. We're liberating the people. - The people you liberate
will witness the honorable and decent spirit of
the American military. - No, no, no, that's later. We're talking about 1898. But, yes, the whole idea of selling war to the American public didn't
really go away after this. Why did the US go to war in Iraq? - [Pres. Bush] In the early
stages of military operations... - So anyway, the US is
now at war with Spain, which is an empire that
is deeply in decline, as I mentioned. It's not gonna be hard to win. But soon, it's not just Cuba. The US, really meaning, Teddy Roosevelt, who again is just an assistant
secretary of the Navy, he's not a big decision maker, he somehow maneuvers the situation to say, let's liberate
next door Puerto Rico, and while we're at it,
let's go into the Pacific and liberate Guam and the
Philippines from Spain as well. Teddy didn't even ask his boss to do this. He literally sent off a cable
to the Navy Commander in Asia that was George Dewey,
go attack the Philippines where Spain is, that is
what your mandate is. And George Dewey is like, okay. I've been told to go to war
with Spain in the Philippines. Teddy was sort of the mind like, better to ask forgiveness than permission. I mean, I get that but, kind of nuts that he pulled it off. Anyway, and now, because
of Teddy Roosevelt, who we literally named the
Teddy Bear after, side note, we are at war not in the Caribbean only, but also in the Pacific. The US arrives to the Philippines and sees that the locals
had already been fighting against the Spanish for years. The Spanish were weak and
were totally declining. So it's like the top of the ninth inning or like the fourth quarter of the Spanish in the Philippines. And the US shows up and is
like, let us liberate you. And the Philippines were like, well, we've sort already
been fighting this bloody war for years against the Spanish, so yeah, I guess, United States,
if you wanna come help us deal the final blow to Spain, like, sweet. So George Dewey, this Navy Commander, and his fleet show up to Manila. Meanwhile, back in the US, people are like, wait,
weren't we just supposed to invade Cuba? What are we doing in the Philippines now? And the US government is like, because the Philippines is a perfect hub for commercial opportunities in Asia, and we think that if we don't take it Japan or Germany might take it, which will clearly diminish
our geostrategic advantage in the Pacific. No, they didn't say that. They said, we want to liberate the people of the Philippines, liberate. - The people you liberate
will witness the honorable and decent spirit of
the American Military. - So the Spanish see the US arrive to the Philippines and were
like, great, we're done. So the Spanish Military
Commanders asked to meet with the US military commanders. They meet in secret, and Spain is like, listen, I know we're losing
but we really wanna save some face here. We don't want to look like we lost to the Filipino revolutionaries. And I'm not kidding, the
Spanish Commander literally said that he would, quote,
be willing to surrender to white people but not to the Filipinos. So the US Commander is like, okay, there's an opportunity here. We said we were here to
liberate the Filipinos, but we haven't promise anything yet, so we would much rather look
like the US defeated Spain instead of help the
Filipinos defeat Spain, much better for our brand,
says the United States. So together, the United
States and Spanish militaries organized a fake battle, a fake battle in which the
US would fight the Spanish in Manila and the Spanish
would intentionally lose. And the climax of this
whole theatrical battle, according to the plan,
was that at the end, the US would storm towards the
inner walled city of Manila, the last stronghold of
where the Spanish are. Oh, and the key detail in this whole plan, they would not let the Filipino fighters, the ones that have been
doing all the actual fighting against the Spanish,
join them as they stormed towards the walled city
to deal the final blows to the Spanish empire. And this would mean that the Filipinos technically didn't gain
their independence. It was actually the US
who conquered the Spanish. And then the Spanish are like, oh, can you give us 20 million
dollars for our troubles. And the U.S was like, yeah, sure. So now the US wins the
war and they claimed sovereignty over the Philippines. So yeah, this happened. They did the fake battle. They won the war. Instead of liberating the Filipinos, they just said, hey,
we're your new colonizers. Psych. Meanwhile, back in the United States, they gotta keep up this white
savior liberation narrative that they created to justify
going to war with Spain. So you see a lot more
theatrical PR by the government. They staged this giant military
parade in New York City, where this military Commander
who did the fake war, George Dewey, marches down. They called it Dewey Day. It was like a two day
parade in New York City. They created a big military arch for him. He became a military
hero for having liberated all these people from the Spanish. And then you start to see
these crazy advertisements, like the soap advertisement that has George Dewey, the
Commander, washing his hands, with the caption, quote,
the first step towards lightening the white man's burden is through teaching the
virtues of cleanliness. And on the side, you have
soap being off-loaded in the Philippines and
being given to the locals. The US had to frame this not as conquest, but as the honorable duty of the US to civilize these people, or in the words of the soap ad, quote, to brighten the
dark corners of the earth. Geez, this is insane, and
was not that long ago. Okay, so this is where
things really heat up. It's 1900 now, Spain
loses the war, obviously. And the US now owns Puerto Rico, Guam, and they claim the Philippines. But the local Filipinos,
who have been fighting for their freedom for years are like, no, no, no, no, you just waltzed
in here, on our rebellion, and conspired with the Spanish to make it look like
you were liberating us. No, this is our country, we
don't need another colonizer. And this is where things really heat up. (upbeat music) The Filipinos start fighting
again for their independence. And this time, against the United States. It is a pretty horrible bloody war, one that I've never
learned about in school. It include massacres of
men, women, and children by the United States,
and hundred of thousands of civilian deaths. But the US eventually won and
they established a government in the Philippines. Back in the US, the appetite for expansion continued to go down,
and people sort of just forgot about the Philippines. They forgot that there was a war there. One newspaper summed it up by saying, Americans didn't know if the Philippines were islands or canned fruit. But the fact remained
that the US went to war and now owned the Philippines, in addition to Puerto Rico and Guam. So this begged a very important question, one that hadn't been
asked before, which is, is all of this land America? Are these people Americans? This was a huge question. And the answer to that questions affects how we see these
territories still today. Okay, so a few years after these wars, there's a guy in New York
City who's importing oranges from one of these
territories, Puerto Rico. And he's paying tariffs on these imports because that's what you do
when you're importing oranges from another country. Wait a minute, another country? This guy was like, didn't
we conquer Puerto Rico, and Guam, and the Philippines? Isn't that America? The Constitution says
that you can't put tariffs on stuff coming from
other parts of the US. Like New Jersey can't put tariffs on avocados from California. So he sued and his case, and
a bunch of others like it, made it to the Supreme Court. So now the Supreme Court must decide. Is this land, where we just won a war, is this America? Are these Americans? If they are, do they
get all the same rights as other Americans? Do they get to vote? Do they get to participate
in the US economy without tariffs? Like any other state does? And honestly, this isn't a question about oranges and tariffs. The real question at stake here is, is America the land of the free, where all are created equal? Or are we an empire? No different than any other empire that scoops up colonial
possessions in war, and rules the people, who
are usually black and brown, as subjects, not fully
a part of the country. That was the question that was at stake. And in these series of
cases in the early 1900, the Supreme Court decided that America was the latter, is the latter. They created a new category of land called unincorporated territories,
where the people don't have any representation
in the democracy, but where Congress can
create laws on their own, particularly laws dealing with revenue, which would not be allowed
by the Constitution for states within the Union. We can create revenue
laws, except that's totally unconstitutional for other
parts of our country. In other words, unincorporated territories are land we control and
exploit for revenue, but whose people don't get to vote and don't get the right to trial by jury. So, yeah, the Philippines,
in addition to Puerto Rico and Guam, remained
unincorporated territories, a place that the US could just ignore without a lot of consequence. They weren't important
enough or strategic enough to be considered to become
states, like Hawaii or Alaska. So they sort of faded from
American consciousness. Like, this is why we never
heard about this in school, it didn't make it into the
history books in any salient way. And how far the Philippines
had faded from people minds became very clear in December
of 1941, during World War II. The US had owned the
Philippines for like 40 years when a fleet of Japanese
bombers flew across the Pacific and bombed an American
naval base in Hawaii. - [Narrator] And the severe
bombing of Pearl Harbor by the enemy's planes
(indistinct) Japanese. But what we don't really
remember is on that day, Japan bombed Guam and the Philippines, two American territories,
as well as several other American and British territories. - Yesterday, December 7th, 1941, a date which will live in infamy. - Here is the draft of this speech. This is the original draft that FDR spent the day marking
up before he gave it. Zoom-in a little bit and
you'll see on this draft that it mentioned the
Philippines originally. But FDR crossed it out. He crossed out the mention of Manila. Yes, the Philippines was
on some map somewhere. Yes, we technically owned it. But the people really
didn't want to hear about it because these people weren't Americans. The Supreme Court had decided that. They weren't gonna become
states anytime soon, so why mention them? After that day, Japan actually full-on invaded the Philippines. They didn't do that to Hawaii. But they did to the Philippines,
until the end of the war. At which point, the Philippines were finally granted independence in 1946. Fast forward to today, and this we own you, but you're not
really Americans precedent, established by the Supreme Court, still applies to four million people who live in unincorporated territories. Or let's just call a spade a spade, let's call them what they are. These are colonial possessions. The people who lived here don't experience the full rule of law, they
don't get trial by jury, they don't have full
representation in our democracy, and they don't get to
vote for the President. This is why when a
hurricane hits Puerto Rico, the government response is
not nearly what it should be. The way Trump talked about Puerto Rico as almost another country,
as not a part of us, mirrors exactly how the Supreme Court talked about this
unincorporated territories. They're for revenue, not to
compete with American farmers. We conquered these places,
but we didn't wanna bring the people fully into
the American project. We left them out. And there, they remain today. (soft music)
