American "exceptionalism" defined

wanton wholesale slaughter of tens of thousands of defenseless local natives

"Many thousand years ago our Aryan ancestors raised cattle, made a language, multiplied in numbers, and overflowed. By due process of expansion to the west they occupied Europe,

developed arts and sciences, and created a great civilization, which, separating into innumerable currents, inundated and fertilized the globe with blood and ideas, the primary bases of all human progress, incidently crossing the Atlantic and thereby reclaiming, populating, and civilizing a hemisphere.

blood and ideas

As to why the United States was in the Philippines, the broad actuating laws which underlie all these wonderful phenomena are still operating with relentless vigor and have recently forced one of the currents of this magnificent Aryan people across the Pacific -- that is to say, back almost to the cradle of the race -- thus initiating a stage of progressive social evolution which may reasonably be expected to result in substantial contributions on behalf of the unity of the race and the brotherhood of man".

... General Arthur MacArthur (1845-1912) justifying to the U.S. Senate the invasion and occupation of the Philippines at the turn of the 19th century when he was serving as military govenor of the Philippines, overseeing the wanton wholesale slaughter of tens of thousands of defenseless local natives. He was the father of General Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964) of WW2 fame.

Imperialism's legacy ... at least an important snippet

"genius is prolonged patience".

 

“The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.”

... Benjamin Disraeli (1804–81), British Prime Minister at the height of British Vistorian imperialism. Indeed, the man was idolized by Queen Victoria herself. It was also the heyday of the mechanical industrial revolution, but well before electric power grids, instant communications, and the car with its all pervasive infrastructure and inherent oil dependence. Even then, the very seeds of present day political turmoil in Asia and the Middle East are arguably linked directly to the policies of his government almost 150 years ago. Curiously the British at the time, yielding to imperialist prerogatives, were stridently meddling in Afghanistan with a massive invading contingent of some 30,000 troops, stultifying and dismantling the fledgling country's established order, deepening the fractious tribal nature of the region that persists to this day.

"I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land"

"I wanted the American eagle to go screaming into the Pacific ...Why not spread its wings over the Philippines, I asked myself? ... I said to myself, Here are a people who have suffered for three centuries. We can make them as free as ourselves, give them a government and country of their own, put a miniature of the American Constitution afloat in the Pacific, start a brand new republic to take its place among the free nations of the world. It seemed to me a great task to which we had addressed ourselves. But I have thought some more, since then, and I have read carefully the treaty of Paris which ended the Spanish-American War, and 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 those 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".

  ... Mark Twain (1835-1910) describes [in 1900] his political awakening from being "a red-hot imperialist'' in the context of the Philippine-American War.