Alfred W. McCoy

A stunning exposé of official hypocrisy, The Politics of Heroin probes the failure of the U.S. “war on drugs” and meticulously documents CIA complicity in international drug trafficking both during and after the Cold War – in Afghanistan, Southeast Asia, Central America, and Latin America. The consequences of this complicity are evident today in an eruption of heroin trafficking worldwide, just as the legacy of the CIA’s covert wars is manifest in vast regions that have become black holes of global instability.After five U.S. drug wars at a cost of over $150 billion, production and consumption of narcotics are currently at record levels. Drug prosecutions in America have packed our prisons without curtailing drug use. This book confronts the utter failure of U.S. drug policy at home and abroad, and raises disturbing questions about the future role of the Central Intelligence Agency in U.S. foreign policy.

Philippine political cartoons gained full expression during the American era. Filipino artists recorded national attitudes toward the coming of the Americans as well as the changing mores and times. While the 377 cartoons compiled in this book speak for themselves, historian Alfred McCoy’s extensive research in Philippine and American archives provides a comprehensive background not only to the cartoons but to the turbulent period as well. Artist-writer Alfredo Roces, who designed the book, contributes an essay on Philippine graphic satire of the period.

In a completely original analysis, prize-winning historian Alfred W. McCoy explores America’s rise as a world power—from the 1890s through the Cold War—and its bid to extend its hegemony deep into the twenty-first century through a fusion of cyberwar, space warfare, trade pacts, and military alliances. McCoy then analyzes the marquee instruments of US hegemony—covert intervention, client elites, psychological torture, and worldwide surveillance. Peeling back layers of secrecy, McCoy exposes a military and economic battle for global domination fought in the shadows, largely unknown to those outside the highest rungs of power. Can the United States extend the “American Century” or will China guide the globe for the next hundred years? McCoy devotes his final chapter to these questions, boldly laying out a series of scenarios that could lead to the end of Washington’s world domination by 2030.

"An indispensable and riveting account" of the CIA's development and use of torture, from the cold war to Abu Ghraib and beyond (Naomi Klein, The Nation)In this revelatory account of the CIA's fifty-year effort to develop new forms of torture, historian Alfred W. McCoy locates the deep roots of recent scandals at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo in a long-standing, covert program of interrogation. A Question of Torture investigates the CIA's practice of "sensory deprivation" and "self-inflicted pain," in which techniques including isolation, hooding, hours of standing, and manipulation of time assault the victim's senses and destroy the basis of personal identity. McCoy traces the spread of these practices across the globe, from Vietnam to Iran to Central America, and argues that after 9/11, psychological torture became the weapon of choice in the CIA's global prisons, reinforced by "rendition" of detainees to "torture-friendly" countries. Finally, McCoy shows that information extracted by coercion is worthless, making a strong case for the FBI's legal methods of interrogation.Scrupulously documented and grippingly told, A Question of Torture is a devastating indictment of inhumane practices that have damaged America's laws, military, and international standing.

In a tempestuous narrative that sweeps across five continents and seven centuries, this book explains how a succession of catastrophes—from the devastating Black Death of 1350 through the coming climate crisis of 2050—has produced a relentless succession of rising empires and fading world orders. During the long centuries of Iberian and British imperial rule, the quest for new forms of energy led to the development of the colonial sugar plantation as a uniquely profitable kind of commerce. In a time when issues of race and social justice have arisen with pressing urgency, the book explains how the plantation’s extraordinary profitability relied on a production system that literally worked the slaves to death, creating an insatiable appetite for new captives that made the African slave trade a central feature of modern capitalism for over four centuries. After surveying past centuries roiled by imperial wars, national revolutions, and the struggle for human rights, the closing chapters use those hard-won insights to peer through the present and into the future. By rendering often-opaque environmental science in lucid prose, the book explains how climate change and changing world orders will shape the life opportunities for younger generations, born at the start of this century, during the coming decades that will serve as the signposts of their lives—2030, 2050, 2070, and beyond.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, the U.S. Army swiftly occupied Manila and then plunged into a decade-long pacification campaign with striking parallels to today’s war in Iraq. Armed with cutting-edge technology from America’s first information revolution, the U.S. colonial regime created the most modern police and intelligence units anywhere under the American flag. In Policing America’s Empire Alfred W. McCoy shows how this imperial panopticon slowly crushed the Filipino revolutionary movement with a lethal mix of firepower, surveillance, and incriminating information. Even after Washington freed its colony and won global power in 1945, it would intervene in the Philippines periodically for the next half-century—using the country as a laboratory for counterinsurgency and rearming local security forces for repression. In trying to create a democracy in the Philippines, the United States unleashed profoundly undemocratic forces that persist to the present day. But security techniques bred in the tropical hothouse of colonial rule were not contained, McCoy shows, at this remote periphery of American power. Migrating homeward through both personnel and policies, these innovations helped shape a new federal security apparatus during World War I. Once established under the pressures of wartime mobilization, this distinctively American system of public-private surveillance persisted in various forms for the next fifty years, as an omnipresent, sub rosa matrix that honeycombed U.S. society with active informers, secretive civilian organizations, and government counterintelligence agencies. In each succeeding global crisis, this covert nexus expanded its domestic operations, producing new contraventions of civil liberties—from the harassment of labor activists and ethnic communities during World War I, to the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, all the way to the secret blacklisting of suspected communists during the Cold War.“With a breathtaking sweep of archival research, McCoy shows how repressive techniques developed in the colonial Philippines migrated back to the United States for use against people of color, aliens, and really any heterodox challenge to American power. This book proves Mark Twain’s adage that you cannot have an empire abroad and a republic at home.”—Bruce Cumings, University of Chicago “This book lays the Philippine body politic on the examination table to reveal the disease that lies within—crime, clandestine policing, and political scandal. But McCoy also draws the line from Manila to Baghdad, arguing that the seeds of controversial counterinsurgency tactics used in Iraq were sown in the anti-guerrilla operations in the Philippines. His arguments are forceful.”—Sheila S. Coronel, Columbia University “Conclusively, McCoy’s Policing America’s Empire is an impressive historical piece of research that appeals not only to Southeast Asianists but also to those interested in examining the historical embedding and institutional ontogenesis of post-colonial states’ police power apparatuses and their apparently inherent propensity to implement illiberal practices of surveillance and repression.”—Salvador Santino F. Regilme, Jr., Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs “McCoy’s remarkable book . . . does justice both to its author’s deep knowledge of Philippine history as well as to his rare expertise in unmasking the seamy undersides of state power.”—POLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review Winner, George McT. Kahin Prize, Southeast Asian Council of the Association for Asian Studies

Many Americans have condemned the "enhanced interrogation" techniques used in the War on Terror as a transgression of human rights. But the United States has done almost nothing to prosecute past abuses or prevent future violations. Tracing this knotty contradiction from the 1950s to the present, historian Alfred W. McCoy probes the political and cultural dynamics that have made impunity for torture a bipartisan policy of the U.S. government.During the Cold War, McCoy argues, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency covertly funded psychological experiments designed to weaken a subject's resistance to interrogation. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the CIA revived these harsh methods, while U.S. media was flooded with seductive images that normalized torture for many Americans. Ten years later, the U.S. had failed to punish the perpetrators or the powerful who commanded them, and continued to exploit intelligence extracted under torture by surrogates from Somalia to Afghanistan. Although Washington has publicly distanced itself from torture, disturbing images from the prisons at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are seared into human memory, doing lasting damage to America's moral authority as a world leader.

In this innovative analysis of the military and political history of the Philippines, Alfred W. McCoy compares two generations of graduates from the Philippine Military Academy-the classes of 1940 and 1971. Fundamental differences in the academic socialization and ascent to power of the two groups of officers provide important insights into war and peace in the Philippines and in other parts of the world.

From back cover - This is an outstanding collection - comprehensive, coherent, thematically integrated and theoretically informed. No other Southeast Asian country may now boast of a collection comparable to this one in intellectual range and sheer historical and ethnographic density. (Description by http-mart)

The CIA’s interest in effective methods of torture began in the 1950s, in the early years of the Cold War. At first the objective was “defensive”—to find a way to combat communist “brainwashing,” which appeared to be the cause of confessions of guilt by captured American pilots during the Korean War. But the CIA’s quest soon turned to “offensive” measures that could be used to break Soviet spies and other enemies. Two major sources of aid came to the agency’s investigations. The first was a trove of information gleaned by the Nazis during World War II from concentration-camp experiments and similar testing—many of whose researchers were still around to act as advisers. The second was the cooperation of professional psychologists, many with leading university positions, who proved to be remarkably pliable in conducting questionably ethical experiments. Their aim was to show how prisoners might be tortured and broken through psychological rather than physical means. Alfred McCoy, a leading historian in the field, here explores the sordid and often outrageous practices of the CIA and its helpmates.

Describes the clash between Catholic missionaries and wealthy plantation owners in the Philippines, and explains how world opinion forced the government to drop its falsified murder charges against a group of priests and missionaries

Since the United States declared its "war on drugs" in the early 1980s, cocaine addiction rates have increased, "crack wars" have become an urban phenomenon, heroin use has multiplied, U.S. prisons have become overstuffed with convicted street users, and the Third World's production of narcotics has skyrocketed. U.S. drug policy failures are legion, and the essays in this volume explain why. One of the most pervasive reasons, which is addressed by several contributors to this book, is that U.S. intelligence organizations have long abetted the international traffic in narcotics as they carried out their cold-war missions. This point is rigorously argued and documented in the essays focusing on Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Pakistan.Among other themes explored is the notion that drug policy has been formulated without paying sufficient attention to the history of narcotics as a global commodity subject to the same stimuli as other goods produced in some of the world's most impoverished nations. In addition, U.S. trade policy has been almost willfully counter-productive. Closing U.S. markets to licit agricultural goods from these nations often stimulates the production of narcotics.With contributions from historians, criminologists, sociologists, political scientists, journalists, and policy analysts, the book provides a complete survey of U.S. narcotics policy in relation to Latin America's cocaine traffic and Asia's heroin trade.

Finalist for the 2016 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award in the Regional categoryFor more than a century, New York City was the brewing capital of America, with more breweries producing more beer than any other city, including Milwaukee and St. Louis. In Beer of Broadway Fame , Alfred W. McCoy traces the hundred-year history of the prominent Brooklyn brewery, Piel Bros., and provides an intimate portrait of the company's German American family. Through quality and innovation Piel Bros. grew from Brooklyn's smallest brewery in 1884, producing only 850 kegs, into the sixteenth-largest brewery in America, brewing over a million barrels by 1952.Through a narrative spanning three generations, McCoy examines the demoralizing impact of pervasive US state surveillance during World War I and the Cold War, as well as the forced assimilation that virtually erased German American identity from public life after World War I. McCoy traces Piel Bros.'s changing fortunes from its early struggle to survive in New York's Gilded Age beer market, the travails of Prohibition with police raids and gangster death threats, to the crushing competition from the big national brands after World War II. Through a fusion of corporate records with intimate personal correspondence, McCoy reveals the social forces that changed a great city, the US brewing industry, and the country's economy.

This book examines the lives of the men and women who emerged from the margins of Philippine society to mobilize a mass following. Instead of focusing on national heroes, this volume follows an unexplored path by studying the lives of Filipinos ordinary an obscure. Drawing on extensive field and archival research, this volume's authors treat the men and women who emerged from the margins of Philippine society to mobilize a mass following. Some may have been predators or opportunists. A few mixed cunning and violence with charisma and courage. But most acted as self-conscious agents of change who led their constituents in a struggle for social justice. Almost all failed, ending their careers marginalized, impoverished, or imprisoned. By looking at the Philippine past though the prism of their lives, we can glimpse worlds now obscured at the country’s margins Cebu’s underworld, Iloilo’s waterfront, Muslim Mindanao, the plantations of Negros, and the villages of Central Luzon. This innovative collection allows a fuller view of the processes of change and raises new questions about the character of the Philippine polity. The state’s capacity to compromise or marginalize the popular resistance revealed in these biographies indicates an extraordinary resilience, a supple power, and raises doubts about the dominant view of the Philippines as a “weak state.”Distributed for the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Wisconsin–Madison

The Cold War on Five Continents offers an original, provocative analysis of the Cold War, which was nothing less than the largest, longest, and most consequential conflict in modern world history.Instead of focusing on the doings of leaders in Moscow and Washington that fill most conventional accounts, this book uses a bottom-up, outside-in approach to explore the surrogate wars on five continents that caused at least 20 million deaths. Not only did these regional wars in Africa, Asia, and Latin America transform their Cold War battlegrounds into veritable wastelands, but they also left behind a legacy of collective trauma and social conflict that persisted for decades, often right to the present.McCoy offers intimate personal portraits of both the battle-hardened World War II generation who conducted covert operations on the disparate frontiers of empire and the younger activists who mobilized millions of citizens for long years of antiwar protests that helped end this global conflict. Through such a novel multi-generational analysis, this account humanizes the history of the Cold War, which has too often been told in terms of impersonal elements like economic growth, nuclear arsenals, or diplomatic ententes.By showing how otherwise ordinary individuals fought this monumental war and brought its threat of nuclear holocaust to an end, this account has important lessons about the possibilities of change for today’s younger generations, who are facing the challenge of climate change in a world where the great powers are devoting humanity’s scarce resources to a “new cold war.”