brian speaks

and dredges up another excellent piece of evidence that there is nothing new under the sun:

You have sacrificed nearly ten thousand American lives—the flower of our
youth. You have devastated provinces. You have slain uncounted thousands of the
people you desire to benefit. You have established reconcentration camps. Your
generals are coming home from their harvest bringing sheaves with them, in the
shape of other thousands of sick and wounded and insane to drag out miserable
lives, wrecked in body and mind. You make the American flag in the eyes of a
numerous people the emblem of sacrilege in Christian churches, and of the
burning of human dwellings, and of the horror of the water torture. Your
practical statesmanship which disdains to take George Washington and Abraham
Lincoln or the soldiers of the Revolution or of the Civil War as models, has
looked in some cases to Spain for your example. I believe—nay, I know—that in general our officers and soldiers are humane. But in some cases they have
carried on your warfare with a mixture of American ingenuity and Castilian
cruelty

that was mass. senator george frisbie hoar, berating the country in 1902--