Caveat Emptor
- 10.10.2007 - 5:30 PMAre there people out there who take Wikipedia seriously as a source of objective information? There shouldn’t be, but unfortunately there are. In fact, lots of students use it a source of first resort. It’s so popular, that whenever you type almost any subject into Google, the first hit is usually for a Wikipedia entry.
Yet disinformation abounds, often motivated by animus or prejudice. There is, for instance, the by-now famous story of a former assistant to Robert F. Kennedy who was brazenly—and completely without foundation—accused on Wikipedia of complicity in the assassinations of both JFK and RFK. (For this sorry tale, see his article.)
A friend has now called my attention to another bizarre distortion, this one an attempt not to besmirch the character of one man but of an entire country. If you look up the Philippine War (1899-1902) you get this entry. And in the very first paragraph you get this statement: “The U.S. conquest of the Philippines has been described as a genocide, and resulted in the death of 1.4 million Filipinos (out of a total population of seven million).”
I was pretty startled to read this. I have written a whole chapter on the war in my book, The Savage Wars of Peace, and I have never once heard that the U.S. was guilty of genocide. How could it have entirely escaped my attention?
There is, needless to say, not a scintilla of evidence that Presidents McKinley and Roosevelt made any attempt to wipe out the population of the Philippines. There is no doubt that a lot of Filipinos died in the course of the war, but most of those deaths were the result of disease, not American bullets. In my book, I cite the generally accepted casualty totals: 4,234 American dead and, on the other side, 16,000 Filipinos killed in battle and another 200,000 civilians killed mainly by disease and famine. My sources for these estimates are books written by William Thaddeus Sexton, an historian writing in the 1930’s, and two more recent accounts written by Stanley Karnow and Walter LaFeber. Neither Karnow nor LaFeber is exactly an American imperialist; in fact, both are well-known liberals. Yet their casualty counts are seven times lower than those claimed by Wikipedia, and they make no mention of any genocide.
Where does the Wikipedia figure come from? The footnote refers to an online essay, “U.S. Genocide in the Philippines” by E. San Juan Jr., posted on an obscure website. The author is described as follows: “E. San Juan, Jr. was recently Fulbright Professor of American Studies at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, and visiting professor of literature and cultural studies at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan, Republic of China.” Not exactly a pedigree that instantly screams out that he has any special expertise on the Philippine War.
In his short essay (1,046 words), E. San Juan Jr. concedes that his claims of genocide and of 1.4 million dead do not come from any mainstream sources. He writes: “Among historians, only Howard Zinn and Gabriel Kolko have dwelt on the ‘genocidal’ character of the catastrophe.” But even these ultra-left-wing “revisionist” historians (who also have no expertise in the Philippine War) have, in his telling, cited no more than 600,000 dead Filipinos.
So whence the figure of 1.4 million? According to Mr. San Juan, “The first Filipino scholar to make a thorough documentation of the carnage is the late Luzviminda Francisco in her contribution to The Philippines: The End of An Illusion (London, 1973).” I confess to never having heard of Ms. Francisco (whose works are cataloged online by neither the Library of Congress nor the New York Public Library), but Amazon does contain a link for one of her books. It’s called Conspiracy for Empire: Big business, corruption, and the politics of imperialism in America, 1876-1907 and it was published in 1985 by something called the Foundation for Nationalist Studies, which doesn’t have a web page (or at least none that I could discover).
I am, to put it mildly, underwhelmed by the historical evidence gathered here to accuse the U.S. of having killed 1.4 million people in an attempted genocide. This is not the kind of finding that would be accepted for a second by any reputable scholar, regardless of political orientation. But it is the kind of pseudo-fact that is all too common on the world’s most schlocky wannabe “encyclopedia.” Caveat emptor.
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October 10th, 2007 at 5:59 PM
Did you amend the entry?
October 10th, 2007 at 6:12 PM
I am assuming you immediately removed the information replacing it with an scholarly account of the casualties including a couple respected footnotes?
This kind of crap happens all the time. It is generally because no one who cares takes the time to change it. If you need help with the wiki markup I can do that for you. If you ever see anything like that go ahead and delete it. Or edit it so there is {{cn}} after it. That will put a note that says [citation needed] in superscript next to it.
October 10th, 2007 at 6:31 PM
Indeed, any topic that can be bent to a leftist anti-American (redundant, I know) rant is bent out of shape pretty severely. Apparently there are people in the world whose lives are consumed by camping on various Wikipedia articles to insure their distortions remain intact.
Orwell wrote in 1984 of a government so powerful it could rewrite history on the fly. He couldn’t have foreseen the power of the internet which allows anyone with a computer to match the power of his tyrannical Big Brother.
October 10th, 2007 at 9:32 PM
I looked at the Wikipedia entry. The casualty numbers given in the article don’t match the first summary paragraph. Clear editorial incompetence.
October 10th, 2007 at 10:45 PM
This is more disreputable that Gore Vidal’s NYRB on a series of books about the Phillipine insurgency; including John Gates, “A Krag and School Books” which painted a more balanced version of the Phillipine insurgency Vidal made similar claims trying to tie Vietnam to the Phillipine conflict including one review of a muckraking duo of former West Point cadets’ virtual demolition of the school’s foundation, from 1807 on
October 11th, 2007 at 10:50 AM
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/6787
DEATH IN THE PHILIPPINES
By David Nielsen, Reply by Gore Vidal
To the Editors:
…I would like to know Vidal’s source for General Bell’s estimate that one-sixth of the population of Luzon was killed.
October 11th, 2007 at 11:20 AM
I once added to a Wikipedia entry on Bruce Franklin, the Melville expert, a teacher at Stanford and subsequently Rutgers. I wrote a few sentences about Franklin as leader, while in Palo Alto, of the Stalinist/Maoist Venceremos and how he lost his tenure in ‘72. My contribution vanished within days. But I do think the Franklin entry, as it now stands, seems fair.
In the overall I am a Wikipedia fan. It clearly needs safeguards against the kind of malicious fiddling Max Boot recounts, but it is an imaginative and positive undertaking. It probably should restrict editing access, at a minimum, to people willing to identify themselves in a verifiable and permanent way.
October 11th, 2007 at 3:52 PM
Sadly, there may be too many educated people who do take it seriously. I recently read a memorandum from the DoD Office of General Counsel that had two footnotes citing Wikipedia entries. The universal reaction of people to whom I bring this fact for their consideration is “you’re kidding!”
October 11th, 2007 at 11:51 PM
It’s interesting that Gore Vidal and his supposed subject of review can’t even agree; In the above mentioned “West Point; American’s Power Fraternity; the sources they cite are rather elliptical to say the least. The tell tale account of Gen. Bell is refracted through the eyes of William Pomeroy, a longtime supporter of the Huk Communist insurgents of the 40s & 50s in some obscure publication. (ch. 8, ft note 50-51) Another equivalent to “we had to destroy the village in order to save it” type of quote arises from
another suspect source, Stuart Miller, of Transaction. The Tell-Tale quote of Bernard Fall; which doubles the bodycount of the Wikipedia article to 3 million dead, which Vidal uses in his rebuttal to the NYRB, comes from Eqbal Ahmed, another suspect source on counter insurgency. This is the Oliver Stone’s Nixon form of scholarship that is involved here. Years later, in response to John Gate’s book, he would cite
Moorfield Storey as the definitive source; why didn’t they then he was a more significant contemporary source.
October 12th, 2007 at 1:29 AM
For non-controversial things, Wikipedia can be wonderful. It is great for biographies of artists and musicians for instance. It can also be good for summaries of scientific theories or philosophers’ ideas. The same desire that brings out the political crazies Mr. Boot talks about brings out the crazies who love some obscure composer enough to cite anecdotes you might not have heard of. It’s as if it were worth it solely for obscurantist info-tainment purposes. Nothing is really at stake so there is no reason to misinform.
But history? There I think the crazies might have an advantage of intensity over numbers, especially when it comes to relatively obscure history.