Week 5_Christina Lukban_A02

In this week’s reading Empire of Death and the Plague of Civic Violence by Hamamoto, he connects the rise of psychotic murderers to the United State’s history of imperialism. These ideas of imperialism, militarization, and racism in the United States is the biggest influence of the byproduct of psychopathic murderers in our society against minorities. All these different forms of murder, crime, violence, and hate all have underlying motivations that tie back to a deeper understanding of our history full of war around the world and discrimination against each other’s differences. With the United States framing itself to be superior, dominant, and powerful throughout our past, this idea has always been deeply ingrained into our society’s mindset and adds to the hostile attitude toward certain groups of people such as foreigners.Throughout this reading there were many disturbing instances of military men having murderous psychosexual urges over Asian American women. Being a Filipino-American woman, this was incredibly unsettling for me to read. There is a deep interwoven connection between the histories of the Philippines and America that traces back to how America’s imperialist acts and colonization of the Philippines has led to many Filipinos having no choice but to emigrate to America. In the reading there are two cases of these Filipinas falling victim to the “longest undeclared war in American history, the military war on female civilians. More specifically, it is yellow female civilians who have been victimized by the ‘undeclared war’ against them by the U.S military.” An example of this in the reading was when Sergeant Jack Wayne Reeves with a “taste for yellow flesh” raped and murdered South Korean women and then after did a mail-order Asian bride service for a young Filipina named Emelita Villa. The only reason she agreed to this is because of the effort to lift her family out of poverty that was caused by the hundreds of years of colonial rule and military occupation by the U.S in the Philippines. This byproduct of colonization and imperialism has led to her becoming this military man’s sex-slave and later his victim of murder. The other instance is of the Filipina American named Rosalie Ortega with the war veteran Valentine Underwood. Valentine Underwood was a convicted rapist with an extensive history of violence against women but was still recruited by the U.S Marine Corps. This veteran later raped and murdered her as well. In the United States we hold these military men in such high regards and give them medals and benefits, but does this make their murderous acts (in and out of war) acceptable?

Question: What can we do as students to prevent this mistreatment and criminal acts from ever happening again in our society today?

1898 political cartoon: "Ten Thousand Miles From Tip to Tip" meaning the extension of U.S. domination (symbolized by a bald eagle) from Puerto Rico to the Philippines.

References:

Everet, Marshall (1898). "War in the Philippines"

Hamamoto, D.Y. (2003). Empire of Death and the Plague of Civic Violence