Intimacy and Annihilation: Approaching the Enforcement of U.S. Colonial Rule in the Southern Philippines through a Private Photograph Collection

In 1903, however, the U.S. government decided to suspend the treaty and bring the local population under direct control.8 To achieve this goal, the Second Philippine Commission created the so-called “Moro Province” and placed it under the command of a Major General (or: military governor), who held both military and civil authority. [...]1914, a succession of military governors (Leonard Wood, Tasker Bliss, and John J. Pershing) attempted to establish U.S. colonial rule by a double-sided approach. [...]many reports of U.S. army officials invoked more of less favorable comparisons between the “Moro” and the Apache, Sioux, and other Native American Nations.14 As in the case of Native Americans, U.S. military officials labeled the Muslim Filipino as inherently deceitful and untrustworthy and took this racial-biologism as a rational for the application of extreme force15 The widespread acceptance of this notion was not surprising. [...]those attacks received great attention by U.S. military officials and U.S. newspapers, although there is no evidence that they occurred in a regular manner and were capable of challenging U.S. colonial power in the region.20 In their assessment of the general condition in the newly established Moro Province, U.S. military officials conflated tropes of racial and religious otherness with a scenario of lawlessness and disorder that threatened the lives and well being of peaceful Muslim and Christian Filipinos, as well as American colonialists. [...]there could be no other reaction on part of the U.S. troops than resort to annihilating force.34 U.S. Army officials, interviewed by the New York Times, offered concurring explanations in their responses to the public criticism: “The Moros killed in Fort Dajo were members of predatory bands that had been robbing and pillaging their own people on the Islands of Jolo for a long time, and the ordinary police forces had been unable to constrain them.