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Policing America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State
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
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
672 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2009
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774 people want to read
About the author
Alfred W. McCoy
31 books346 followersDr Alfred W. McCoy is professor of SE Asian History at the U. of Wisconsin at Madison where he also serves as director of the Center for SE Asian Studies, a federally-funded National Resource Center. He's spent the past quarter-century writing about the politics & history of the opium trade. In addition to publications, he serves as a correspondent for the Observatoire Geopolitique des Drogues in Paris & was plenary speaker at their '92 conference in Paris sponsored by the European Community. In '93, he presented a paper on the Mafia & the Asian heroin trade at the Conference in Honor of Giovanni Falcone in Palermo, Sicily. In 3/96, he was the plenary speaker at the 7th International Conference on Drug Harm Reduction in Hobart, Australia. He's served as expert witness & consultant to the Canadian Commission of Inquiry into the Non-Medical use of Drugs, the Australian Royal Commission of Inquiry into Drugs, the Minister of Administrative Services, Victoria State Parliament, & the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Drug Enforcement Policy & Support in the Office of the US Secretary of Defense. Recently, he worked as consultant & commentator for a tv documentary on the global heroin traffic produced by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, accompanying the crew to locations in Burma, Thailand, Vietnam & Laos.
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December 22, 2021
This book details the history of US colonial policing and US-sponsored counterinsurgency in the Philippines and how this shaped the police state in the US, proving Aime Cesaire's sharp insight on the colonial roots of fascism: "Before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples."
August 27, 2012
This ambitious book focuses on the role of criminal syndicates and clandestine services in modern political life, taking the US policing of its Philippine imperial outpost as its focus. Its conclusion is simple and clear: technologies that are first developed to police the empire are often if not always reimported for policing back home -- which is why Americans should care very much about how we run our empire. Quotes:
* "Many social historians have escaped the nation-state's hegemony through studies of popular movements.... but few have looked at the state long and hard from its sordid underside--an interstice that is the sum of addiction, avarice, blackmail, cowardice, scandal, torture, venality, and violence." (12)
* The techniques that were first developed by the American imperialists became the basis for rule in post-independence Philippines. "After Philippine independence in 1946, the national police remained a key instrument of both legal and extralegal presidential power" (16) - the ability of politicians to collect secret, scandalous files on rivals and to leak them selectively became the core source of political power.
* "Security techniques bred in the tropical hothouse of colonial governance were not contained at the periphery of American power. Through the invisible capiaries of empire, these innovations percolated homeward to implant both personnel and policies inside the Federal bureaucracy for the formation of a new internal security apparatus. During the social crisis surrounding World War I, a small cadre of colonial police veterans created a clandestine capacity within the US Army, establishing military police for the occupation of a war-torn Europe as well as Military Intelligence for both surveillance at home and espionage abroad." (17)
* This was part of a larger process of bureaucratic modernization of the police function, that drew on a variety of foreign sources, including American imperial technique, as well as innovations taking place among European police departments. Different countries made breakthroughs in different sorts of techniques: "Russia's state police proved deft at agent provocateur and penetration operations. Britains Special Branch started its political surveillance in 1884. Italy established a centralized fingerprint bureau in 1908. Germany excelled in scientific detection and resident registration." (26) This was the policing dimension of Daniel Rodgers' trans-Atlantic progressive movement.
* Dealing with the Philippine insurgency proved a particular hothouse for the development of new techniques. "So strong was this resistance, and so sophisticated Filipino counterintelligence, that the US pacification campaign was pushed beyond the limits of contemporary knowledge. The Americans were forced to develop techniques for which there were no names: psychological profiling was an academic discipline and disinformation before information was a military doctrine." (34)
* "Empire, any empire, makes its metropole more self-conscious, more calculating in the application of power. Just as war transforms technology and industry, so colonialism plays a comparable role for government, producing innovations, particularly in the use of coercive controls, with a profound impact on its bureaucracies both home and abroad." (37)
* One of the things that distinguished the American way of empire from its European rivals was the revolving-door nature of imperial appointments: "Instead of career colonials such as the legendary British or Dutch savants who gave their lives to empire, American overseas rule relied on short-term secondment of consultants and contractors--rotating military officers between continental and colonial service, and dispatching experts such as urban planner Daniel K. Burnham and forrester Gifford Pinchot to frame templates for colonial rule." (43) One artifact of this, though McCoy doesn't say so himself, was the tendency of American colonial officials to conceive of their rule in terms of abstractions and general-application models, rather than in terms of the concrete particularities of places they developed deep familiarity with. Unlike with European orientalists, Americans had no drive for deep "Verstehen" of the colonial other, only for "information" that could be fed into the models.
* Americans did engage in a downward delegation of the state's "natural functions" to non-state and quasi-state intermediaries, who could surve as "surrogates of the state." "This extralegal devolution of coercive authority also allows these Philippine variants of MAx Weber's "autonomous functionaries" to privatize policy power, producing recurring incidents of spectacular abuse that have periodically culminated in crises of legitimacy for administrations or entire regimes." (50)
* "The hidden sector of commercial vice--gambling, prostitution, and addictive drugs--is not simply the realm of derelicts and deviants. It is the meeting ground of high and low, a leveling marketplace where the privileged and the underprivileged exchange goods and services otherwise prohibited by moral and legal sanctions. Thought methods legal and extralegal, police regulate this informal marketplace where high caste and outcast trade illicit goods and illegal services, where society's formal laws and informal imperatives are discretely mediated." (51)
* "After years of pacifying an overseas empire where race was the frame for perception and action, colonial veterans came home to turn the same lens on America, seeing its ethnic communities not as fellow citizens but as internal colonies requiring coercive controls." (294) The people who built Woodrow Wilson's internal surveillance apparatus were overwhelming drawn from people with colonial experience, and the techniques were carbon-copied from the colonial templates: covert operations; an ethnic or racial template for perceiving threat; mass relocation of suspect populations; the systematic use of scandalous disinformation to deter political adversaries; etc. "In this process of imperial mimesis, a state such as the United States that creates a colony with circumscribed civil liberties and pervasive policing soon shows many of those same coercive features in its own society. As the metropole's internal security apparatus starts to resemble the imperial, so its domestic politics begin to exhibit many attributes of the colonial." (295) The ultimate culmination of this pattern was the Japanese internment during World War I, which borrowed its rationale and technique directly from the template laid down 40 years earlier in the Philippines.
* McCoy also shows the domestic face of Erez Manela's "Wilsonian Moment." Just as the Mid-East, India, & SE Asia were roiled by postwar demands for self-determination, so did American subalterns issue such demands, as 1919 saw waterfront strikes in NYC & Seattle, race riots in Chicago & DC, violent strikes by MT & WV miners & anarchist bombings in 8 cities. What these protestors worldwide shared was a strident rejection of political establishments that the course & outcome of the war had delegitimated.
* "Many social historians have escaped the nation-state's hegemony through studies of popular movements.... but few have looked at the state long and hard from its sordid underside--an interstice that is the sum of addiction, avarice, blackmail, cowardice, scandal, torture, venality, and violence." (12)
* The techniques that were first developed by the American imperialists became the basis for rule in post-independence Philippines. "After Philippine independence in 1946, the national police remained a key instrument of both legal and extralegal presidential power" (16) - the ability of politicians to collect secret, scandalous files on rivals and to leak them selectively became the core source of political power.
* "Security techniques bred in the tropical hothouse of colonial governance were not contained at the periphery of American power. Through the invisible capiaries of empire, these innovations percolated homeward to implant both personnel and policies inside the Federal bureaucracy for the formation of a new internal security apparatus. During the social crisis surrounding World War I, a small cadre of colonial police veterans created a clandestine capacity within the US Army, establishing military police for the occupation of a war-torn Europe as well as Military Intelligence for both surveillance at home and espionage abroad." (17)
* This was part of a larger process of bureaucratic modernization of the police function, that drew on a variety of foreign sources, including American imperial technique, as well as innovations taking place among European police departments. Different countries made breakthroughs in different sorts of techniques: "Russia's state police proved deft at agent provocateur and penetration operations. Britains Special Branch started its political surveillance in 1884. Italy established a centralized fingerprint bureau in 1908. Germany excelled in scientific detection and resident registration." (26) This was the policing dimension of Daniel Rodgers' trans-Atlantic progressive movement.
* Dealing with the Philippine insurgency proved a particular hothouse for the development of new techniques. "So strong was this resistance, and so sophisticated Filipino counterintelligence, that the US pacification campaign was pushed beyond the limits of contemporary knowledge. The Americans were forced to develop techniques for which there were no names: psychological profiling was an academic discipline and disinformation before information was a military doctrine." (34)
* "Empire, any empire, makes its metropole more self-conscious, more calculating in the application of power. Just as war transforms technology and industry, so colonialism plays a comparable role for government, producing innovations, particularly in the use of coercive controls, with a profound impact on its bureaucracies both home and abroad." (37)
* One of the things that distinguished the American way of empire from its European rivals was the revolving-door nature of imperial appointments: "Instead of career colonials such as the legendary British or Dutch savants who gave their lives to empire, American overseas rule relied on short-term secondment of consultants and contractors--rotating military officers between continental and colonial service, and dispatching experts such as urban planner Daniel K. Burnham and forrester Gifford Pinchot to frame templates for colonial rule." (43) One artifact of this, though McCoy doesn't say so himself, was the tendency of American colonial officials to conceive of their rule in terms of abstractions and general-application models, rather than in terms of the concrete particularities of places they developed deep familiarity with. Unlike with European orientalists, Americans had no drive for deep "Verstehen" of the colonial other, only for "information" that could be fed into the models.
* Americans did engage in a downward delegation of the state's "natural functions" to non-state and quasi-state intermediaries, who could surve as "surrogates of the state." "This extralegal devolution of coercive authority also allows these Philippine variants of MAx Weber's "autonomous functionaries" to privatize policy power, producing recurring incidents of spectacular abuse that have periodically culminated in crises of legitimacy for administrations or entire regimes." (50)
* "The hidden sector of commercial vice--gambling, prostitution, and addictive drugs--is not simply the realm of derelicts and deviants. It is the meeting ground of high and low, a leveling marketplace where the privileged and the underprivileged exchange goods and services otherwise prohibited by moral and legal sanctions. Thought methods legal and extralegal, police regulate this informal marketplace where high caste and outcast trade illicit goods and illegal services, where society's formal laws and informal imperatives are discretely mediated." (51)
* "After years of pacifying an overseas empire where race was the frame for perception and action, colonial veterans came home to turn the same lens on America, seeing its ethnic communities not as fellow citizens but as internal colonies requiring coercive controls." (294) The people who built Woodrow Wilson's internal surveillance apparatus were overwhelming drawn from people with colonial experience, and the techniques were carbon-copied from the colonial templates: covert operations; an ethnic or racial template for perceiving threat; mass relocation of suspect populations; the systematic use of scandalous disinformation to deter political adversaries; etc. "In this process of imperial mimesis, a state such as the United States that creates a colony with circumscribed civil liberties and pervasive policing soon shows many of those same coercive features in its own society. As the metropole's internal security apparatus starts to resemble the imperial, so its domestic politics begin to exhibit many attributes of the colonial." (295) The ultimate culmination of this pattern was the Japanese internment during World War I, which borrowed its rationale and technique directly from the template laid down 40 years earlier in the Philippines.
* McCoy also shows the domestic face of Erez Manela's "Wilsonian Moment." Just as the Mid-East, India, & SE Asia were roiled by postwar demands for self-determination, so did American subalterns issue such demands, as 1919 saw waterfront strikes in NYC & Seattle, race riots in Chicago & DC, violent strikes by MT & WV miners & anarchist bombings in 8 cities. What these protestors worldwide shared was a strident rejection of political establishments that the course & outcome of the war had delegitimated.
October 10, 2022
McCoy frames this book as a revelation of how the United States’ imperial adventures abroad have brought back to its soils a pernicious police and surveillance apparatus, with a particular focus on the development of these in the Philippines. Underlying all of this is the irony that in the name of spreading democracy and civilization to foreign nations, over the past century the U.S. has created, perpetuated, and mastered the exact same mechanisms that have continued to undermine democracy around the world to this day. Under this lens I think that this ambitious tome falls short of its lofty goals, but it provides a lot of useful information when approached in a manner different from its proposed intentions: as a history of the development of the Philippines’ police state and its rampant criminality. In this sense it’s an absolutely essential read.
The book is split into two halves: the first follows the development of U.S. Colonial Police from the end of the 19th century up to 1935 and the second follows Manuel Quezon’s Commonwealth government up to the presidency of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo in the 2000s. Each administration is exposed for its connections to the criminal underworld and how these were weaponized in order to maintain their political power. Reading the book one observes just how embedded U.S.-funded and trained police and military might have been in the Philippines’ history, a lot of which (especially for the first decades of occupation) was completely new to me and felt like information uniquely unearthed and exposed through decades of meticulous research. McCoy weaves it all into a consistent grand narrative that is a genuine marvel to behold.
The research is at its most impressive in the first half, with McCoy scavenging through thousands of declassified primary source materials to reveal Manila’s sordid underbelly that reads as if straight out of a ‘40s pulp noir. However, as the book progresses and approaches the present day, more and more of its citations are reduced to newspaper clippings from the Philippine Daily Inquirer. There’s nothing wrong with that on its own and I still learned a lot from these sections of the book, but noticing how the information was sourced made me feel like McCoy’s authoritative voice should have sounded less certain about its conclusions. Nevertheless, it’s greatly piqued my interest in the post-Marcos administrations, particularly that of Fidel V. Ramos and Joseph Estrada.
I also felt like the book doesn’t stick its landing in making the broader argument that the Philippine scenario directly affected how the United States is policed today, or how it has been done in other countries that have had direct American intervention such as Vietnam and Iraq. It doesn’t seem to me that McCoy is wrong in claiming that its roots can be observed in the Philippine case, but it never felt like this was all concretely tied together. In order to complete the argument I think a third section of the book would have been needed to solidify those connections even further.
What’s most concerning is the knowledge that America’s empire extends much further beyond the Philippines and reaches every corner of the globe. This book can therefore probably be remade and reformulated everywhere the United States has had a history of C.I.A. and military intervention. The bigger story is much broader than the Philippine case and collecting these histories will be a gargantuan task for the next generation of historians around the world following McCoy’s example here.
Policing America’s Empire is still an incredibly informative book that has changed the way I’ve been thinking about the Philippines and the many problems that continue to afflict it. It’s especially impressive just how much of this research breaks new ground for future studies of the country. It’s original, brave, and iconoclastic. Thank you, Professor McCoy. The example is inspiring.
The book is split into two halves: the first follows the development of U.S. Colonial Police from the end of the 19th century up to 1935 and the second follows Manuel Quezon’s Commonwealth government up to the presidency of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo in the 2000s. Each administration is exposed for its connections to the criminal underworld and how these were weaponized in order to maintain their political power. Reading the book one observes just how embedded U.S.-funded and trained police and military might have been in the Philippines’ history, a lot of which (especially for the first decades of occupation) was completely new to me and felt like information uniquely unearthed and exposed through decades of meticulous research. McCoy weaves it all into a consistent grand narrative that is a genuine marvel to behold.
The research is at its most impressive in the first half, with McCoy scavenging through thousands of declassified primary source materials to reveal Manila’s sordid underbelly that reads as if straight out of a ‘40s pulp noir. However, as the book progresses and approaches the present day, more and more of its citations are reduced to newspaper clippings from the Philippine Daily Inquirer. There’s nothing wrong with that on its own and I still learned a lot from these sections of the book, but noticing how the information was sourced made me feel like McCoy’s authoritative voice should have sounded less certain about its conclusions. Nevertheless, it’s greatly piqued my interest in the post-Marcos administrations, particularly that of Fidel V. Ramos and Joseph Estrada.
I also felt like the book doesn’t stick its landing in making the broader argument that the Philippine scenario directly affected how the United States is policed today, or how it has been done in other countries that have had direct American intervention such as Vietnam and Iraq. It doesn’t seem to me that McCoy is wrong in claiming that its roots can be observed in the Philippine case, but it never felt like this was all concretely tied together. In order to complete the argument I think a third section of the book would have been needed to solidify those connections even further.
What’s most concerning is the knowledge that America’s empire extends much further beyond the Philippines and reaches every corner of the globe. This book can therefore probably be remade and reformulated everywhere the United States has had a history of C.I.A. and military intervention. The bigger story is much broader than the Philippine case and collecting these histories will be a gargantuan task for the next generation of historians around the world following McCoy’s example here.
Policing America’s Empire is still an incredibly informative book that has changed the way I’ve been thinking about the Philippines and the many problems that continue to afflict it. It’s especially impressive just how much of this research breaks new ground for future studies of the country. It’s original, brave, and iconoclastic. Thank you, Professor McCoy. The example is inspiring.
December 31, 2016
McCoy reminds us of Max Weber’s definition of the state: “A state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of force within a given territory.” The modern state had moved from extreme physical punishment (political control through terror) to social control which was developed in the lab environment of the Philippines. There, future President William Howard Taft created a secret police force “for extralegal action” and enacted the strictest libel and sedition laws on the planet there, including one year in jail for merely advocating the independence of the Philippines. Pacification required a permanent garrison of 47,000 troops (18,000 of which were U.S. Army) to subjugate six million impoverished Filipinos. The clear brutality led Mark Twain to write, “Trampling upon the helpless abroad had taught her, by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home.” Colonial veterans came home to turn the same lens on America, seeing it’s ethnic communities not as fellow citizens but as internal colonies requiring coercive controls.” The U.S. realized the potential of the Philippine control information system sent to the mainland. Just as the Philippines system developed and relied on a matrix of informers, so then did the American Protective League, created in 1917 to ‘honeycomb’ American society. The lesson learned by military occupations from Burma in 1880’s on had been: “forced demobilization of a defeated army without conciliation or compensation may well be the key factor in promoting protracted resistance.” With Saddam’s defeated army, we ignored that lesson to terrible consequences. However, earlier in the Philippines in 1901, U.S. General Arthur MacArthur did it right and gave surrendering Aguinaldo an immediate pardon and gave his other veterans roles in the government and police force. In return the US could control the Philippines (originally wanted as coaling stations) for the better part of a century creating and refining the surveillance system that would be brought back to the United States to use against its own citizens (which is McCoy’s thesis). After Independence was achieved in 1946, massive US bases were kept there for another 50 years. Under President Marcos (1966-1986), 3,257 are killed, 35,000 are tortured, and 70,000 arrested. Marcos loses legitimacy and is replaced by Corazon Aquino. Aquino sells out the people by “stifling the legal struggle for land distribution” and launching an anti-communist campaign to secure deep American funding “for raw repression”. Arroyo follows Aquino next in power and has “gunned down seven hundred prominent political activists in broad daylight assassinations.” This hell hole for activists can thank the U.S. government for 100 years of meddling and leaving it in tatters (Ah, tatters - think the U.S. with Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Iraq, etc.). Alfred McCoy once again brilliantly exposes another facet of American Foreign Policy gone very wrong…
February 1, 2016
The first part of this book is awesome, arguing that intelligence and policing techniques used in Phillipines occupation were eventually transfered back to make trhe security states in the USA during and after WWI. The second part of the book is much more of a stretch and looks at the role of police in the Phillipines as a prooving ground for counterinsurgency techniques, among other things.
December 24, 2024
Thorough to a fault in its historical details, Policing America's Empire is a quintessential piece of Philippine history literature. I first encountered Alfred McCoy because of a History of the Philippines class. Our prof made us read McCoy's article on Manuel Quezon and his authoritarian legacy. Mind opening text that shows the ugly side of Philippine history. This book is even more infuriating to read, revealing how the Philippine state has been fucked up since the beginning -- and how the United States has a lot to answer for. This is a must read for any Filipino
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August 18, 2022McCoy provides a remarkably detailed and coherent account of how the US empire designed, deployed and innovated the essential framework for our current hegemonic security apparatus around the world.
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December 13, 2024Second read, for territoriality article
December 18, 2013
Would strongly recommend for anyone interested in civil liberties challenges.
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April 13, 2019Read my review of Policing America's Empire on Rapid Transmission:
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews