Uncovering America’s Forgotten Massacre in the Philippines
In 1906, US troops slaughtered up to 1,000 Moros at Bud Dajo in the southern Philippines, then called it a battle. Historian Kim Wagner explains how an empire can commit atrocities and how it teaches itself to forget them.
US troops massacred a thousand Moro men, women, and children in the Philippines in March 1906. US officials celebrated the massacre as a great military victory, and photographs of the dead circulated as souvenirs, postcards, and trophies. (National Archives and Records Administration)
In March 1906, US troops climbed the volcanic crater of Bud Dajo on the island of Jolo in the southern Philippines and killed a thousand Moro men, women, and children who had resisted American colonial authority. The event was celebrated by US officials as a military victory, and photographs of the dead circulated as souvenirs, postcards, and trophies. Today Bud Dajo is almost entirely absent from American historical memory.
In his new book, Massacre in the Clouds, Kim Wagner reconstructs the massacre and the machinery of denial that followed it. Wagner shows how US empire turned mass killing into a heroic “battle” and how that lie survived for more than a century. Historian Michael G. Vann spoke with Wagner about Bud Dajo, American colonial violence, atrocity photography, anti-Muslim racism, and why forgetting is never innocent.
Michael G. Vann
For readers unfamiliar with Bud Dajo, can you briefly walk us through what happened in March 1906? Who were the Moros in the crater, why were they there, and what did US forces believe they were confronting?
Kim Wagner
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