HIGHWAY 42 – THE BEGINNING OF THE US IMPERIAL FOREIGN EMPIRE
The 1898 Spanish-American War & the US Desire to Take the Spanish Colonial Islands:
How did this war begin? This was the first American media-created war. We had newspapers in need of being sold. The celebrities of vocal and visual fame were yet to exist, so war and civil wrongs became the pitch to increase readership.
Businessmen saw how opinion could be created, and the nationalistic urge of this God-blessed or bled nation was itching to get involved, so front-page journalism sold the urge for war.
What was this war? Well, it was part of the thought process to remove Spanish rule from the island territories in the Pacific and the Western Hemisphere that the Spanish still controlled. These lands were needed for our new global navy to rule the oceans and control human behavior. They were possessions we sought to gain and control.
Imperial Spanish Background: Cuba & the Philippines
Cuba:
The Spanish controlled Cuba since Columbus in 1492. This island controls access to the Gulf of Mexico, and it is this vantage point that is so valuable and why we still control Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay. Looking at our present lives, that is why the US has its presence there. And no, we are not giving it up. Nor is Cuba free and independent of US control. Our control began here with the winning of this war with Spain.
In Cuba, the desire not to be controlled by a foreign nation was started by one man of the ruling class. In 1868, a man known as Carlos M. Céspedes issued the Grito de Yara. He rang his bell to call his slaves to work and told them that they were all freed, and asked them to join his revolution against Spanish rule. This started a ten-year war. The leader himself died in 1873, when deposed in a leadership coup. The war ended in 1878, and all the slaves who fought with the rebels were freed, but not those who did not see themselves as free. Remember, Spanish Cuba and Brazil were the last two Western Hemisphere lands to end slavery.
Spain was a Catholic and greedy nation. They took from their ruled colonial lands and gave nothing back in return. They built churches and palaces for the landowners to live and rule. They put nothing into the colonial community except imported slaves for labor. They only took. They kept nothing in their homelands that could be planted and could grow again. The monies were spent for home furnishing and home illusions of ownership rule. Industry was not their thing. They were not Sadducee businessmen, rather Pharisees of colonial rule, believing it would go on forever. A greedy Sky God-sponsored lifestyle of King and Catholic Church rule. That was why Spain lost its lead when they were the suppliers of the metals that created currencies in the decades of the 1500s and 1600s. The Protestants and their work ethic accumulated wealth, while the Catholics just lived off the fat of their Sky God rules of order until the fat ran thin.
That is also why South America and its lands, to this day, are not equal in the business and lifestyle of European and American rules-and-order lands. The Catholic Church kept them poor. Their Sky God Christ, in his human order, made sure it would stay that way.
The US Americans of the 1890s wanted Cuba. Boy, could there be profit on this land so near to the States. The journalists helped make this happen by creating the desire for the US to act. The news started constantly screaming in order to expose the injustices in Cuba. Note, it did not matter that the US had in their lands the same injustice. No, we point fingers and shift awareness very well.
The US papers promoted, as well as demanded, that the US do something about the Cuban crimes Spain was committing. By 1898, with the new bankers and big business in control of the press, the US was about to invade its first foreign land of European colonial rule. The Spanish-American War was in place to begin.
Philippines:
In 1887, a writer named José Rizal wrote and published a book called Touch Me Not. This book by this famous Filipino writer helped to awaken the national consciousness of the Philippines to the Spanish controlling order and the wrongs this order perpetuated to maintain order.
Rizal was a pacifist, and he wished for peace. This was not going to happen in the lands of the Catholic Church. So a new order for change called Katipunan was born, and this secret nationalistic order spoke and promoted armed revolution. The guerrilla warfare was now to begin on these islands in the southern Pacific, many miles away from the Spanish kings and Pope-led rules of order.
An American intellectual named Alfred T. Mahan wrote a book called The Influence of Sea Power Upon History. This book advocated the taking of the Caribbean islands, Hawaii, and the Philippine islands for bases to protect the growing commerce of the US Sadducee-led rulers. It also advocated the building of the canal to connect the Atlantic and the Pacific near US-owned lands. Finally, it spoke of the US need to build armor-plated battleships driven by steam power. Guess what we did: we followed this suggestive book and created our US imperialistic ruled world. This book became the US bible, which created our war of thought with no justification except the belief that we were created as the nation of man to rule the world with Christ on our living throne.
This book set the stage for the goals of our coming wartime leaders. The attack then was easy. Cuba continued to implode, and revolution was in the air. The patriot José Julián Martí y Pérez united Cubans living in New York, Philadelphia, Tampa, and Key West, the islands of the state of Florida, which are ninety miles from Cuba. In 1895, Martí, as he was known, went home to take control of the revolutionary warriors who wanted to end Spanish rule. Our President Cleveland, who wasn’t sure what the US was, be it pacifist or warrior, issued a proclamation declaring our neutrality in this affair.
The Instigators of the American Spanish Imperial War: The Media
In 1897, William Hearst of the Sadducee news-controlled papers started war fever in his New York Journal newspaper. He was followed by his partner in journalistic war-baiting, a Mr. Joseph Pulitzer, the owner of the New York Journal. Yes, he is where the Pulitzer Prize begins for fantastic journalistic stories of one person’s vision of truth.
They were pushing for war because it was good for business, as it sold papers and got the economy going. 1897 was when the businessman’s President McKinley and his controlling voice, Mark Hanna, got control of the US government. Hanna was the man admired by Bush II’s puppet master, Karl Rove. In 1999, I had a run-in with Rove, and he explained to me that he was the new Mark Hanna of the Republican Party and that he was in control. He was a fool, for he and all politicians today work for the Banksters. Then, the new rulers of today were not yet a separate class of ruling elite order. Big Monopolies who called themselves Business then controlled the bankers. The switch to Bankers went down only when the Big Business leaders got the Government to buy the concept of a Federal Reserve, and they, the Monopolies, went from Business to Banking.
McKinley did as he was told and brought in a warrior spirit of enlightened Christian values named Teddy Roosevelt to run the Navy. Roosevelt buys the stories of the navy intellect and started to build our US battleships.
In 1898, Spain saw the writing on its wall and granted limited autonomy to Cuba. This was not enough for our papers. We wanted war, and we would get it. On the 15th of February, our battleship Maine exploded in Havana Harbor. Why we were even there with a battleship was not reported, just that the ship exploded. An investigation ensued and, to no one’s surprise, a mine was the culprit. The mines created by that great humanitarian Alfred Nobel. Yes, the Nobel Peace Prize is a joke, for the man it is named after was nothing but a mass murderer for self-profit.
In Cuba, the mine that blew up the Battleship Maine was reported to have been planted by the Spanish. Our government used this incident as grounds to justify war. But if we had thought it through, where did the Spanish get the mine, and how was this the only arsenal of that nature in Cuba? Answer: we set it up.
Hearst, who owned the propaganda of his day, the Media, goes to war first and prints up one million copies of his paper asking for war. He did not stop and got the juices of the country to itch for war, war for revenge.
War Begins Against the Spanish:
Our Congress asked for the authorization to protect Cuba and then, in midstream, switched to ask for war in the Teller Amendment, so named for the Senator of Colorado who proposed the bill. We call our laws bills because each law will cost someone something. The Pope calls his orders bulls, as that is all that comes from his mouth. Bull. Funny how the name of legislation or decrees tells you what the purpose is for the new rules of order.
We had our war and, in doing so, we promised the world that we had no intention to exercise jurisdiction or control over Cuba except in a pacification role. We promised in this bill to leave the island as soon as the war was over. Sound familiar?
Teddy Roosevelt quit his navy slot and started the Rough Riders to fight this war as an independent cavalry financed by Teddy and his friends. The Rough Riders were a mercenary, thrill-seeking group led by Mr. Macho Man himself, Teddy in the flesh. This fraudster went so far as to take pictures of himself riding up hills and getting ready to fight the enemy, but in reality the pictures were taken on the wrong hill of the war. There was no fighting on this hill, just Teddy and his team riding up and down the wrong hill.
San Juan Hill was where the real battle was fought. Teddy and his Rough Riders went up Kettle Hill. This ride, when the ruse was discovered, was then sold to the American people as a planned attack, so the other side would respond and allow us to attack the right hill with our real army. This was nothing but photo opportunities for Roosevelt and his crew.
Roosevelt was a character, a dangerous one for the Republicans, as he was a self-promoter. So much so that, to get rid of him and his political yearnings of ruling the US, Hanna made McKinley choose him for VP in the 1900 election so his energy would be parked in this useless position. Useless only if the President lives. This one died, shot dead at the Temple of Music at the Buffalo, New York, World’s Fair of 1901. Roosevelt got his throne, and he, with his huge self-promoting ego, made the US the nation that we are today. If Teddy did not run for a third term in 1912, Wilson would have lost to Taft, and there would be no Federal Reserve or Prohibition, or maybe no income tax too.
Roosevelt had some legacy. Roosevelt, a fellow highwayman, a gamer, stole Panama from Colombia, the nation, and became the first President to leave the States while he was President. He went to Russia by boat to settle the Japanese-Russian War. This was the same time my grandfather was able to escape his hell, as he boarded the ship leaving Russia for NYC that, as he told me, took Roosevelt back to the States in 1905.
The Spanish-American War Peace Treaty:
The Spanish and the US in Paris signed the war treaty on December 10th, 1898. Spain renounced all rights to Cuba and allowed for an independent Cuba. They ceded the island of Puerto Rico and the island of Guam to the US. The Spanish gave up all its possessions in the West Indies, and they sold the US the Philippine Islands for $20,000,000. This money would be used for the Spanish royalty still living and breathing; the Spanish fiction of rule, so there was nothing for the people of their land. An interesting side note: Fidel Castro’s father came to Cuba as a war soldier in the King of Spain’s army and stayed on in Cuba after the war was over.
We won the war in Cuba in record time, and now we owned a piece of the island called Guantanamo Bay by a lease we made the nation give to us, and we controlled the rest of it. The US, on behalf of its businesses, for the next 61 years would control Cuba. That control, except Guantanamo Bay, ended with the Castro revolution.
The US Takeover of the Philippines:
These are lessons we as a land did not learn or understand, or we would have never attacked Iraq and invaded the way we did in 2003. It was not about terrorism; it was about business and control of the oil.
We freed the Philippine locals from their colonial rule. We did not promise in our declaration of war that we would not absorb the Philippines as we did with Cuba, so we did. The Philippines became one of our possessions. All we took as part of the States from Cuba was Guantanamo Bay.
On December 21st, 1898, the first day of winter, the US President issued his Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation, ceding the Philippines to the United States. Ceding? We gave the Spanish $20,000,000, let alone the $600 million spent fighting the war, for what purpose if we were not moving in?
Benevolent? Benevolent only because Darwin as a science of justification of ownership of fellow man still existed, and this was now the US white man’s burden. In this proclamation, the US Army was instructed to use whatever force necessary to impose American sovereignty over the Philippines. This was done even before the Senate ratified the peace treaty with Spain.
We then ended up at war with those, the community called the Philippines, that we agreed to free from colonial rules of order and control. The war ended in July of 1902. The war cost the lives of 4,200 American soldiers, 20,000 Filipino soldiers, and 20,000 Filipino civilians. But we had control of the islands, that was until the Japanese moved in during their war in the Pacific called the Pacific Theatre of World War II.
Why did we switch our position with the Philippines? Simple, for commerce. We wished to control the new market for rubber. Cars need tires, and those tires were made of rubber that could expand with air that results from the friction the car machine makes when running on the highway. We were becoming the Sadducee land of bank, corporate ownership and control that our current world is now.
This essay is excerpted from Steven Machat’s Highways of Man. Learn more about the book at StevenMachat.com.