When: Monday, May 28 – 1:00 PM

Where : Gates of Heaven 302 E. Gorham St., Madison WI – James Madison Park

Speaker: Author and Historian, Alfred W. McCoy

Momentous changes resulting from U.S. hegemony in the world will be described during this May 28 peace rally – sponsored by Chapter 25 Veterans For Peace in Madison.

The program at Gates of Heaven will include an invocation by priest, former Madison police chief, and Veterans For Peace (VFP) member David Couper. Student scholarship winners will be noted, the band Old Cool will perform, and Progressive magazine publisher Norman Stockwell will describe a recent visit to Viet Nam. Bagpipe dirges by Sean Michael Dargan will end the Peace Rally program. Audience members will receive red carnations to place at the nearby Abraham Lincoln Brigade marker in James Madison Park. Veterans for Peace Chapter 25 namesake Clarence Kailin was a volunteer in the Lincoln Brigade fighting fascism in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War.

Main speaker McCoy’s expertise is widely recognized to include U.S. foreign policy, colonial empires in Southeast Asia, illicit drug trafficking, CIA covert operations and modern Philippine history. He will draw upon his most recent book, In the Shadows of the American Century, to explain the effect of declining U.S. hegemony on the world.

McCoy holds the Harrington Chair in History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of numerous books, including The Politics of Heroin (New York, 2003), A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror (New York, 2006), Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (Madison, 2009), and, most recently, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power (Chicago, 2017).

Additionally, Veterans For Peace Chapter 25 will be setting up over 6000 tombstone replicas (The Memorial Mile) at Olbrich Park for Memorial Day weekend to remember those who have died in in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  The display will be set up on May 26th and taken down on June 2nd.