Articles by Alfred W. McCoy

We found 3 results.


The Decline and Fall of It All? U.S. Empire in Crisis
Alfred W. McCoy | CounterPunch – TRANSCEND Media Service, 18 Mar 2024

14 Mar 2024 – Empires don’t just fall like toppled trees. Instead, they weaken slowly as a succession of crises drain their strength and confidence until they suddenly begin to disintegrate. So it was with the British, French, and Soviet empires; so it now is with imperial USA.

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Surveillance Blowback: The Making of the U.S. Surveillance State, 1898-2020
Alfred W. McCoy - TomDispatch, 22 Jul 2013

In 1898, Washington occupied the Philippines and in the years that followed pacified its rebellious people, in part by fashioning the world’s first full-scale “surveillance state” in a colonial land. The illiberal lessons learned there then migrated homeward, providing the basis for constructing America’s earliest internal security and surveillance apparatus during World War I.

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Impunity at Home, Rendition Abroad
Alfred W. McCoy – TomDispatch, 20 Aug 2012

How Two Administrations and Both Parties Made Illegality the American Way of Life – After a decade of fiery public debate and bare-knuckle partisan brawling, the United States has stumbled toward an ad hoc bipartisan compromise over the issue of torture that rests on two unsustainable policies: impunity at home and rendition abroad.

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