Alfred McCoy

1 month ago | juancole.com | Alfred McCoy |Juan Cole

( Tomdispatch.com ) – With the Oval Office looking more like a middle school classroom every day, let’s recall the way, once upon a time, we responded to childhood taunts from a playground bully. You remember how it goes. Your nemesis says mockingly that you’re a this-or-that and you shout back: “Takes one to know one!” Indeed, it does.

2 months ago | countercurrents.org | Alfred McCoy |Marwan Asmar |Sanjay N. Parate |Tom Engelhardt

Most of us can remember at least a few troubling scenes from George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984: the mandatory love demanded for the spectral dictator Big Brother; the malleability of facts at the Ministry of Truth; or the ruling party’s memorably grim slogans, “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery.” But for me, the most disturbing image of all — and I first read the book in high school — was the “Two Minutes Hate,” aroused among the public by threatening images on giant video screens.

2 months ago | juancole.com | Alfred McCoy |Juan Cole

( Tomdispatch.com ) – Most of us can remember at least a few troubling scenes from George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984: the mandatory love demanded for the spectral dictator Big Brother; the malleability of facts at the Ministry of Truth; or the ruling party’s memorably grim slogans, “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery.” But for me, the most disturbing image of all — and I first read the book in high school — was the “Two Minutes Hate,” aroused among the public by threatening images on giant...

Mar 5, 2025 | juancole.com | Alfred McCoy |Juan Cole

( Tomdispatch.com ) – In the weeks leading up to the recent presidential inauguration in Washington, this country and an anxious world expected many different things from what might be called, to borrow the title of a famed William Butler Yeats’s poem, “The Second Coming” of Donald J. Trump. But nobody expected this. Nobody at all.

Jan 27, 2025 | juancole.com | Alfred McCoy |Juan Cole

( Tomdispatch.com ) – It came upon a midnight clear, a vision both complete and quite specific — not from any of those “angels bending near the earth to touch their harps of gold,” as in the Christmas carol, but from a long line of trucks on the Indiana Toll Road. On that cold winter’s night about five years ago, the 18-wheelers were playing their usual game to stay awake, passing each other endlessly and slowing me down to 60 miles an hour when I wanted to do 70 or, I’ll admit it, 75.