Heraclitus, the Ancient Greek philosopher, despaired of men’s folly. Donkeys prefer rubbish to gold, he observed. That folly was starkly manifested in the recent elections.
The nation was faced with a stark choice. On one side was a lawyer promising honest government, transparency and a country where public servants are competent not corrupt. On the other a leader surrounded with propagandists and who kept real journalists at a distance, refusing to sit down to a proper interview and answer questions. And yet, the latter stormed to one of the largest electoral victories in the history of the country.
That victory was no surprise. All the polls predicted it. Only the scale of his victory was uncertain. As one prominent journalist commented, his victory “ends a well-oiled campaign that sought to bury the past and evade scrutiny”. That victory will no doubt be good news for his predecessor. The one who won so decisively is unlikely to respond to demands to prosecute the former leader or to co-operate with investigations into his alleged crimes.
That monumental victory was engineered mostly through circumvention of social media to distort the truth and re-invent historical narratives of his party’s time in power. Through extensive insidious manipulation on Facebook, the world’s largest distribution network of ‘news’, people’s opinions were swayed towards believing the historical revisionism engineered by his campaign.
While disinformation played a significant part in the glorious triumph, it cannot alone account for the massive scale of that victory. People’s attitudes have changed since the tide that delivered the sweeping changes of the late 1980s. The nation has developed a taste for illiberal rule. Opposing views are pounded into silence and the homogenous intolerant message of unity is what the people desire. These elections are emblematic of the impact of concerted operations of disinformation. They are models of how historical facts can be changed into an alternative reality.
Cambridge Analytica used the country to experiment with tactics of mass manipulation. They discovered that lies spread faster than facts. And then resorted to deploying those lies to manipulate public opinion to favour “strongman machismo” politics.
Nobody could foresee that thirty six years after the public rejected his father, the son would return to claim such a devastating victory. How could Filipinos elect another Ferdinand Marcos? How could years of brutal repression, savage murder and inhuman torture be so quickly forgotten? How did the memory of 70,000 jailed without trial, 40,000 tortured, 3250 executed fade without trace?
Ferdinand ‘Bongbong’ Marcos, the dictator’s son and newly elected president committed gross abuses too. He had families driven out of one of the islands so he could fill it with exotic animals and turn it into his private hunting ground. This was at a time when 4 million Filipino children couldn’t even afford schooling. He faces a US arrest warrant for failing to comply with a 2011 ruling of Hawaii’s court. He owes over 3.9 billion dollars in taxes. Yet none of this was held against him by an adoring public.
Neither were any of his father’s atrocities. His father’s name was synonymous with ostentatious corruption. He ruled the Philippines with an iron fist, implemented martial law and used the state as his personal piggy bank. He was convicted of murdering his own father’s political opponent, Julio Nalundasan, by shooting him in the head with a 22 caliber bullet while brushing his teeth. He used violence and intimidation to get elected President for a second term. When public protests threatened his Presidency, he ordered the military to crush them. He staged an assassination attempt of Juan Ponce Enrile, one of his ministers, to blame the Communists for it and use it as an excuse to declare martial law.
He subsequently snatched public assets and handed them over to his wife and her family. The country’s economy sagged under the weight of his cronies’ mismanagement. As patients were forced to share hospital beds, Marcos and his family looted billions of dollars from public funds.
When one of his main political adversaries, Benigno Aquino, finally returned to the Philippines in August 1983, after enduring a decade of imprisonment, exile and a suspended death sentence, Marcos was waiting. Aquino, the former senator, planned to fight for democracy. But as he stepped off his plane, before he even set foot on Filipino land, a gunshot rang out. The Senator’s head flipped back and he fell dead in a pool of blood. Aquino would be the last in a long list of assassinations orchestrated by Marcos.
In 1985 Marcos called an early election, planning to manipulate the result to regain control. He faced Corazon Aquino, the widow of the murdered Benigno. Her popularity was unprecedented. When Marcos declared victory, the people refused to accept his lies. The People Power Revolution had begun. Juan Ponce Enrile admitted that Marcos had staged his assassination attempt. As the military was sent to arrest the traitor, millions of Filipinos blockaded the streets. The United States withdrew its support. Marcos was humiliated and forced into exile. He took with him his wife, Imelda and his three children including Ferdinand ‘Bongbong’, his only son. With them they took millions of dollars’ worth of looted goods and boxfuls of cash. It is estimated that the Marcos family looted up to 10 billion dollars, only 5 billion of which have been retrieved.
Nobody ever imagined the Philippines would have another President Ferdinand Marcos. Nobody could predict that a nation so mercilessly abused and violated by one family, could return that family to power, especially with such a massive majority. But then, there was no social media. That weapon has transformed the toxic legacy of a murderous tyrant into a fictitious “golden age”.
If billions of stolen dollars, tens of thousands imprisoned and tortured, thousands murdered, thousands of bodies rudely dumped onto the streets counted for nothing, how could one journalist’s assassination make any difference?