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New Books

By Benjamin Moser

It’s morning again in America,” Ronald Reagan’s ad proclaimed, describing a dewy freshness eminently manifest in our amnesiac imperialism. Throughout the last century, the dust never settled from one “liberation” before a country perpetually at war embarked upon another, the previous incident forgotten, at least by Americans. In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the Dominican-American writer Junot Díaz asked: “You didn’t know [the Dominican Republic was] occupied twice in the twentieth century? Don’t worry, when you have kids they won’t know the U.S. occupied Iraq either.”

Nowhere is the national forgetfulness as complete as it is with regards to our involvement in the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century, a long and bloody colonial war that, Alfred W. McCoy insists in POLICING AMERICA’S EMPIRE: THE UNITED STATES, THE PHILIPPINES, AND THE RISE OF THE SURVEILLANCE STATE (Wisconsin, $29.95), would have enduring consequences for both nations. “The few American observers who crossed the Pacific were often surprised to discover a police state quite unlike anything back home,” McCoy writes of the government that emerged once the United States—whom the Filipinos first saw as allies in their long struggle to free themselves from Spain—crushed the nationalist rebellion, which erupted when the Filipinos realized that the Americans were intent on replacing one foreign occupation with another.

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SEE ALSO: Aesop's mirror: a love story (Book); McCoy, Alfred W.; Appetite city: a culinary history of New York (Book); Give my poor heart ease: voices of the Mississippi blues (Book); Huggins, Maryalice; Policing America's empire: the United States, the Philippines, and the rise of the surveillance state (Book); Grimes, William; Ferris, William R.

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