How Black Jack Pershing tortured Muslims
Posted by Moonage on 06 Sep 2006 | Tagged as: Conspiracy Theories
Got this via email, again:
There’s nothing to support this at all. In fact, the REAL accounts of Pershing, BY Pershing, lead to a 100% opposite conclusion:
There was never a moment during this investment of Bud Dajo when the Moros, including women, on top of the mountain, would not have fought to the death had they been given the opportunity. They had gone there to make a last stand on this, their sacred mountain, and they were determined to die
fighting . . . It was only by the greatest effort that their solid determination to fight it out could be broken. The fact is that they were completely surprised at the prompt and decisive action of the troops in cutting off supplies and preventing escape, and they were chagrined and disappointed in that they were not encouraged to die the death of Mohammedan fanatics.
Pershing’s actual strategy was to wait them out. It worked.
People, do just a LITTLE research before sending me this stuff!
However, for those that love this tale too much, it may have happened:
It was Colonel Alexander Rodgers of the 6th Cavalry who accomplished by taking advantage of religious prejudice what the bayonets and Krags had been unable to accomplish. Rodgers inaugurated a system of burying all dead juramentados in a common grave with the carcasses of slaughtered pigs. The Mohammedan religion forbids contact with pork; and this relatively simple device resulted in the withdrawal of juramentados to sections not containing a Rodgers. Other officers took up the principle, adding new refinements to make it additionally unattractive to the Moros. In some sections the Moro juramentado was beheaded after death and the head sewn inside the carcass of a pig. And so the rite of running juramentado, at least semi-religious in character, ceased to be in Sulu. The last cases of this religious mania occurred in the early decades of the century. The juramentados were replaced by the amucks. .. who were simply homicidal maniacs with no religious significance attaching to their acts.
Even this is discounted to some degree by Snopes.com, as the Muslim “fear” of pork is highly over-rated and some do in fact eat pork. So, although Rodgers’ methods may have been gruesome, I personally think the gruesomeness of the act had much more of an impact than the fact he used pigs. What he did, was proved to that particular bunch of fanatics that he could fight on their level. And that is not necessarily a bad thing.
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