In 1901, Mark Twain published a satirical indictment of America’s war in the Philippines. His title told the whole story: “To the Person Sitting in Darkness.”

That’s the way many Americans imagined Filipinos. And it supposedly gave us the right to rule them, until they were sufficiently enlightened to govern themselves.

We also claimed to have liberated them from Spain, which had colonized the Philippines for hundreds of years. But as Twain argued, our real motive was much more selfish: “to take their land away from them and keep it.” 

More than a century later, the Trump administration has revived that quest. Sometimes, as in the case of Greenland and Panama, it has demanded the actual ceding of territory to the United States. In Venezuela and Iran, by contrast, the White House seems more interested in what lies underneath the land: oil.

So we need another Twain, to mock our imperial pretensions. “There are many humorous things in the world,” Twain quipped, “among them the white man’s notion that he is less savage than the other savages.”

Some of the worst savagery took place in the Philippines, after the United States acquired it in 1898. Roughly 20,000 Filipino combatants died in a vain effort to dislodge their new American rulers, who tortured suspected guerrillas and placed others in concentration camps. Meanwhile, about 200,000 Filipino civilians died from violence, famine, or disease.

Twain condemned these horrors with his characteristic mixture of outrage and wit. “We abolished them utterly, leaving not even a baby alive to cry for its dead mother,” he wrote after American soldiers gunned down 600 members of the Moro tribe, who were armed only with knives and clubs. “This is incomparably the greatest victory that was ever achieved by the Christian soldiers of the United States.”

It’s hard to make fun of something so horrible, because you risk making light of it. And the Trump administration has made it even harder, by its explicit embrace of modern-day imperialism. How do you mock somebody for a crime when they have already confessed to it?

Recall that President Trump’s 2025 inaugural address praised William McKinley, the president who spearheaded our acquisition of the Philippines in 1898. And last month, at the Munich Security Conference, Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered a speech openly celebrating Western imperialism.

“For five centuries, before the end of the Second World War, the West had been expanding — its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers pouring out from its shores to cross oceans, settle new continents, build vast empires extending out across the globe,” Rubio declared.

But after that, Rubio complained, the West lost its mojo to “anti-colonial uprisings” that “would drape the red hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map.” Got that? Never mind the millions enslaved and murdered by imperialism. We had a good thing going, until those anti-colonial Reds got in the way.

This is the kind of thing that cries out for satire. Last week’s “Saturday Night Live” made a good start, featuring Colin Jost as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Nodding to Hegseth’s past issues with alcohol, Jost/Hegseth boasted that he was treating Iran “like the breathalyzer in my car and blowing it the hell up.”

Too soon, just days after an American missile likely killed 175 people at a girls school in Iran? Twain would say it’s right on time. And he would be right about that.

Zimmerman teaches history and education at the University of Pennsylvania and serves on the advisory board of the Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest.

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