Alfred W. McCoy on Academic Court Historians and the State


One of my central areas of exploration at LRC has been the theme of Hidden History: Where Organized Crime and Government Meet. I have sought to acquaint our readership through the investigative framework of power elite analysis or Establishment Studies to see history and the present world around them in a different light. An understanding of power elite analysis is the “litmus test” separating real libertarians from alternative lifestyle dilettantes dabbling in free market theory. This examination of causal relationships regarding the nature and scope of political power, who has it and how it is exercised, is crucial to understanding the State as organized crime. Crucial to this endeavor have been the seminal works of the distinguished scholar Alfred W. McCoy, J. R. W. Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, prolific author of such classics as The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia; (later revised and updated as The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade); A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror; Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation; Priests on Trial; A History of the Philippines; Endless Empire: Spain’s Retreat, Europe’s Eclipse, America’s Decline; Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American Stateand Anarchy of Families: State and Family in the Philippines. In the excerpt below from his powerful and illuminating masterwork, Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State, Dr. McCoy elucidates on this theme of how conventional academic court historians have treated the State, neglecting its true exploitative and criminal nature. The video lecture presentation above is a brief synopsis of this remarkable volume:

If the fruits of this fusion are so rich, one might ask why scholars have been so slow to incorporate the criminal and covert margins of society into the history of modern nation-states. Here we can only speculate. Most fundamentally, historians need sources to study. History is thus shaped to a surprising degree by the randomness of the documents that survive war and revolution, fire and flood. Armies usually preserve their papers for posterity while police and secret services tend to conceal or destroy their records. Military histories can quote first-person sources, battlefield dispatches, and staff studies while the far fewer police histories often rely on secondary sources, many of a critical or even adversarial provenance such as court cases or commissions of inquiry. Military history, with its heroism and accessible archives, fills academic journals and library shelves with tens of thousands of volumes; the police, with their sordid aura and sealed dossiers, are thus much less studied.

By ignoring the substantial role of criminal syndicates and clandestine services in modern political life, academic historians have often relegated these unseemly matters, by default, to the lower registers of vocational education or popular entertainment in film, pulp fiction, or tabloid expose’. Soldiers and sailors are integral to national narratives; police, prison guards, syndicate bosses, informers, and spies are much less so. Workers who strike are carefully studied, but the private detectives and secret services that plot their defeat and even their deaths receive brief mention at best. In the writing of national history, society’s shadowy interstices and those who inhabit them often remain obscure.

Certainly, there are serious scholarly studies of the criminal and clandestine milieu. In recent years, as the study of globalization and its borderlands has drawn social scientists to the transnational trafficking in illicit goods, their insights have been hampered by what the editors of a seminal volume call “the difficulty of thinking outside the conceptual and material grasp of the modern state.” Even this research is still, at this writing, overwhelmed by the sheer mass of dissertations, monographs, histories, textbooks, documentaries, monuments, and museums whose unstated, unwilling air is to affirm state authority. Through the sum of these endeavors, historians have encircled the nation-state with a sacral barrier that precludes cognizance of its profane margins: systemic violence, institutional corruption, extralegal security operations, and, most important, syndicated vice. Many social historians have escaped the nation-state’s hegemony through studies of popular movements among workers, women, or minorities. 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. As acolytes of the nation-state, conventional historians turn away from such a disconcerting dimension and often adopt a positive, at times celebratory view of their polity that discourages consideration of the influence of the informal on the formal, the criminal on the powerful, or, in some cases, the colonized on the colonizer.

Understanding how the state operates is a problem of critical import for ordinary citizens who have to function in a social rather than represented reality. These topics omitted from formal scholarship have become subjects of endless popular fascination in fiction and films, from D. W. Griffith’s racist epic Birth of a Nation to Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather. Academic historians usually find their carefully crafted monographs read in graduate seminars with perhaps a dozen students, while historical films about America’s dark underside have become a revisionist curriculum for a worldwide audience of millions.

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4:29 am on June 22, 2015