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It has been called "The Forgotten War", but it's not forgotten by writer and director John Sayles, who is on the show to talk about his newest film about the Philippine-American war, "Amigo".
Mark Twain said, "There is the case of the Philippines. I have tried hard, and yet I cannot for the life of me comprehend how we got into that mess. Perhaps we could not have avoided it -- perhaps it was inevitable that we should come to be fighting the natives of those islands -- but I cannot understand it, and have never been able to get at the bottom of the origin of our antagonism to the natives. I thought we should act as their protector -- not try to get them under our heel. We were to relieve them from Spanish tyranny to enable them to set up a government of their own, and we were to stand by and see that it got a fair trial.
It was not to be a government according to our ideas, but a government that represented the feeling of the majority of the Filipinos, a government according to Filipino ideas. That would have been a worthy mission for the United States. But now -- why, we have got into a mess, a quagmire from which each fresh step renders the difficulty of extrication immensely greater. I'm sure I wish I could see what we were getting out of it, and all it means to us as a nation."
Sayles will introduce his film at Cinestudio (Trinity College campus) in Hartford on Wednesday night (October 26, 2011). He will begin his lecture at 5:30 and the movie airs at 7:30.
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