The shocking, disturbing DOGE revelations concerning USAID and the sinister dark side of the deep state have their predecessor. For decades Alfred W. McCoy has led the way in exposing this infamy, duplicity, and egregious conduct.
Alfred McCoy – Surveillance State: The Making of the U.S. Internal Security Apparatus
Check out this amazing presentation by Alfred W. McCoy, PhD, on the “Surveillance State: Philippine Pacification & the Making of the U.S. Internal Security Apparatus” given April 23, 2010 and sponsored by the SE Asia Center at the Jackson School at the University of Washington.
Just days earlier I had the opportunity see Professor McCoy deliver the University of Tulsa’s Settle/Cadenhead Memorial Lecture, “The Surveillance State, Foreign Wars and the Rise of the U. S. Internal Security Apparatus.” They are essentially identical presentations. Afterwords I had an opportunity to discuss these cogent remarks with him.
This fascinating lecture confirmed in spades everything I have learned from Garet Garrett, Murray Rothbard, Ron Paul, Peter Dale Scott, Chalmers Johnson, and Stephen Kinzer about the American Imperial State — about the decline of the republic and the rise of empire.
McCoy outlined the birth of the Surveillance State in the information technology revolution of the 1870s and 1880s (invention of the telephone, typewriter, widespread photographic film processing, electrical and telegraph networks, punch cards, and biometrics such as fingerprinting) and its later convergence with the imperatives of empire in the American colonial occupation of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War.
It was during the Philippine Insurrection that modern police and military intelligence techniques and data collection technology emerged, later becoming the key component of the National Security State. McCoy particularly pointed to the ongoing seminal role Ralph Henry Van Deman played in this process.
From suppressing the Filipino Insurrection following the Spanish-American War to the destructive counterinsurgency campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, these martial exercises in unlawful, extra-constitutional behavior have continued unabated.
His spell-binding presentation was largely based upon his two authoritative books, Policing the Empire: The United States, The Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State; and Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State, edited by McCoy and Francisco A. Scarano.
And as the impeccable, encyclopedic chronicler Mike Benz and DOGE has revealed concerning these nefarious, supposedly foreign-directed interventions and machinations, like the prodigal son of New Testament scriptures, they have come home.
2:48 am on February 14, 2025
