Closer Than Brothers: Manhood at the Philippine Military Academy

This is a good review of recent Philippine history and the martial law years. I was in the country then so I can really see the extensiveness and accuracy of Alfred McCoy's research. This book is also personally relevant to me as my Dad belonged to PMA Class 1944. He was professor at PMA when class 1971 were cadets and he knew each one of them. The father of Gringo Honasan was my Dad's upperclassman when he was a cadet. My Dad was also with the Hunters ROTC guerrillas.

I bought the book because I was researching the acceptance of torture within an organizational or military context, and for that it's very useful -- and extremely well-written. However, as I read McCoy's inspired exploration of military socialization to either support civilian primacy and rule of law (at the cost of the soldiers' lives), or to disdain and despise civilian values and to become the law (at the cost of civilian lives), I was tremendously impressed.He looks at how brutalization rather than civil socialization turns a military from our protectors to our terrorizers -- starting with harsh, degrading,even lethal hazing of cadets, on to ruthless interrogation of real enemies that creeps and then falls headlong into torture, then extra-legal detentions of civilian dissidents, then the torture and murder of civilians as a means of social repression and control, and with it coup attempts and martial law.In this process, the military organization ceases to understand and obey the absolute requirement for great self-restraint by those who wield great firepower. It begins to believe its own prideful hype, and particularly in learning the unique potency of torture to destroy human will and rip apart the social fabric, the military begins to feel all-powerful. It no longer pledges allegiance to a nation or to democratic or broad social values, but becomes politicized and dedicated to protect only a few partisan values, or no values other than power and control for their own sake.Read this book along with Mikey Weinstein's With God On Our Side, Scahill's Blackwater, and Lagouranis' Fear Up Harsh, and tell me you don't break into a cold sweat.

Professor McCoy has made hmself one of the handful of scholars with a deep understanding of fhe forces governing politics in a country of 70 million people who seem much easier to understand than others in Southeast Asia but who are influenced by Malay as well as Spanish and American customs and ideals. Today, as the Phililppine Armed Forces play another decisive role in their nation's history, this analysis is of immediate importance to those seeking to explore the role of armed, trained military leaders in countries whose democracies require support.

I may not be the first person to bring this matter about Mr. Alfred W. McCoy's book, particularly about the book cover. I do not know how authoritative he is about Philippine setting, but the display of the Philippine Flag on the book cover is WRONG. I have not read the book because I just chance upon it when I was browsing for another book. I hope this matter will be brought to the author's attention and that of the publisher as well. Joey G.....