Vonnegut reading Mark Twain

Vonnegut reading Mark Twain
Rodel Rodis, Apr 18, 2007

Kurt Vonnegut, one of my favorite authors, was 84 when he died last week. The best selling author of “Slaughterhouse-Five”, “Cat’s Cradle” and 17 other novels was a vocal critic of the Bush administration. Of the 3200 American soldiers who have died in that war, Vonnegut wrote that they are being treated “like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.”

In February of 2003, just as George W. Bush was preparing to launch his invasion of Iraq, Vonnegut participated in a reading of Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove’s book, “Voices of a People’s History of the United States.” Vonnegut chose to read Mark Twain’s response to President Theodore Roosevelt’s congratulating U.S. Commanding General (later Philippine Governor-General) Leonard Wood for his military victory in 1906 against the Moros in the Philippines. It was a prescient choice because the impending invasion of Iraq was eerily similar to the U.S. invasion of the Philippines in 1899, especially in the Muslim south.

President Theodore Roosevelt declared a similar “Mission Accomplished” on July 4, 1902 to declare an end to the hostilities in the Philippines. But it was far from over, especially in Muslim Mindanao where the Moros continued to resist U.S. rule as they had successfully repulsed Spanish attempts at colonial subjugation.

In the Battle of Bud Dajo, which took place March 10, 1906, in the island of Sulu in the southern Philippines, forces of the U.S. Army under the command of Major General Leonard Wood, a naval detachment comprising of 540 U.S. soldiers attacked a village hidden in the crater of the dormant volcano Bud Dajo. No American soldiers were killed in the “battle” although the initial reports showed that 16 were killed when they were just wounded. More than 600 mostly unarmed Muslim villagers were slaughtered, but none wounded.

Kurt Vonnegut reading Mark Twain: “This incident burst upon the world last Friday in an official cablegram from the commander of our forces in the Philippines to our Government at Washington. The substance of it was as follows:

A tribe of Moros, dark-skinned savages, had fortified themselves inthe bowl of an extinct crater not many miles from Jolo; and as they were hostiles, and bitter against us because we have been trying foreight years to take their liberties away from them, their presence in that position was a menace. Our commander, Gen. Leonard Wood, ordered a reconnaissance. It was found that the Moros numbered six hundred,counting women and children; that their crater bowl was in the summit of a peak or mountain twenty-two hundred feet above sea level, andvery difficult of access for Christian troops and artillery. Then General Wood ordered a surprise, and went along himself to see theorder carried out.

Gen. Wood’s order was, “Kill or capture the six hundred.”

There, with six hundred engaged on each side, we lost fifteen men killed outright, and we had thirty-two wounded-counting that nose and that elbow. The enemy numbered six hundred -- including women and children -- and we abolished them utterly, leaving not even a baby alive to cry for its dead mother. This is incomparably the greatest victory that was ever achieved by the Christian soldiers of the United States.

So far as I can find out, there was only one person among our eighty millions who allowed himself the privilege of a public remark on this great occasion -- that was the President of the United States. All day Friday he was as studiously silent as the rest. But on Saturday he recognized that his duty required him to say something, and he took his pen and performed that duty. This is what he said: Washington, March 10. Wood, Manila:- I congratulate you and the officers and men of your command upon the brilliant feat of arms wherein you and they so well upheld the honor of the American flag.

(Signed) Theodore Roosevelt.

I have read carefully the Treaty of Paris. I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem. It should, it seems to me, be our pleasure and duty to make these people free and let them deal with their own domestic questions in their own way; and so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.”

From Mark Twain in 1906 to Kurt Vonnegut in 2003 to us in 2007.

Send comments to Rodel50@aol.com.

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Raymundo Marquez
Apr 21, 2007 08:32:00

I have but a passing acquaintance with Kurt Vonnegut while taking up English in college, though I have known of his resistance to the brutalities of war. He was captured by the Germans during WW II, and along with six other American soldiers, he was assigned to an underground camp in Dresden where their main task was to burn all the corpses that were dumped there. Those experiences formed the theme of his best-selling "Slaughterhouse Five," and his life-long views about war.

It's not at all a surprise that he would quote Mark Twain, whose attachment to his works led him to name one of his sons Mark. But with all due respect to Mr. Rodis, I find it a long leap to equate what happened in Sulu more than a hundred years ago to what is happening in Iraq. I can only surmise he is invoking Vonnegut to attack President Bush, as if the essays Vonnegut wrote about Iraq are the last words on this war. They are not.

I must remind Mr. Rodis there are countless Americans holding divergent views from his, and I can sense he is trying to politicize it, not much different when Harry Reid recently said that war is "lost." Rodis' views, though more subltly expressed, echo those of his liberal editor, Lito Gutierrez.

Vonnegut, in his life, represented a far more complex personality, and to
use a fragment of what happened more than a century ago in the Philippines, which he quoted, as a way to bash the president and America is not fair to the country that Rodis had adopted. Yes, history is full of mistakes that foreign powers have committed against countries they colonized, and they have admitted those. But to resurrect a piece of the past as a way of viewing America as a barbaric nation while it's fighting barbaric countries like Iraq and Iran is not fair.

I wish Mr. Rodis would have honored the memory of Vonnegut with his body of work rather than to indulge in another tawdry exercise of attacking the president. There is a time for civility, folks.