Passionate Revolutions. Talitha Espiritu

Marcos’s televised address after the Plaza Miranda bombings captures the film’s overall solution to this dilemma. “I am the president,” Marcos says, directly addressing the camera. “I am sworn under my oath of office to protect our people and execute the law. Rather than wait for this rebellion to be initiated, and to wait for our people to be massacred in the fighting between the military and the subversives, I would rather stop that rebellion now.” Proffered as the authorial voice of the film, this address plays a performative function: it allows Marcos to present himself as a heroic leader with the requisite power to exert social control over all things seen and unseen. In that performance, Marcos himself enacts what Rogin describes as the “fiction of a center.” The trope of a center is here employed to make Marcos’s opportunistic red-scare tactics jibe with U.S. Cold War national security interests. To be more precise, Marcos’s performance rests on blurring the distinction between the two. He thus presents himself as “freedom fighter” in a world of secret agents “at once connected to a directing power and also able to act heroically on their own.”⁸⁰

      In “indigenizing” the covert spectacles of U.S. foreign policy, the film channels the racial violence underpinning the countersubversive tradition in U.S. political culture and applies it to the CPP-NPA—herewith depicted as agents of an alien power. But insofar as political demonology simultaneously reflects the countersubversive’s fear of, and identification with, the subversive, the film cannot help but portray the symbiotic relationship between Marcos and his avowed nemesis. As Jones reminds us, Marcos needed the communist rebellion just as much as the CPP-NPA needed him: without the communist rebellion, Marcos might have found the public less than acquiescent to the prospect of martial law; and without Marcos’s repressive tactics, the CPP-NPA might not have acquired its romantic, revolutionary aura.⁸¹

      Positioned at the end of the film, Marcos’s address brings meaning and order to balance the spectacles of social breakdown with which the film begins. The nation will have nothing to fear, Marcos suggests, if only citizens place their absolute trust in the government’s covert operations. Thus inviting citizens to participate vicariously in the government’s invisible war, the film exhorts each citizen to identify with an increasingly powerful surveillance state.

       Zero Hour: Martial Law

      Marcos’s propaganda film underscored the need for secret planning “accountable to no one and to no standard of truth outside itself.”⁸² This recourse to secrecy parroted the “national security” principles underpinning the crisis spectacles of the Kennedy era. Marcos’s countersubversive performance had in fact earned the approval of Washington. U.S. diplomats and intelligence officers stationed in Manila at the time believed that strong governmental action was needed to restore order to the nation and that Marcos was the man to do it. As a U.S. embassy political officer put it, “The Philippines needs a strong man, a man on horseback to get the country organized and going again.”⁸³

      In August 1972, Marcos frequently met with U.S. ambassador Henry A. Byroade to discuss the possibility of martial law. Byroade at first counseled Marcos of the undesirability of martial law, which was sure to trigger a backlash in the U.S. Congress. Marcos, the “freedom fighter,” put pressure on the ambassador to check with President Nixon. After meeting with Nixon and Kissinger in the White House, Byroade delivered Washington’s new policy: “If martial law were needed to put down the Communist insurgency, then Washington would back the Philippine president.”⁸⁴

      At 9:00 p.m. on September 22, 1972, Marcos signed the order implementing martial law.⁸⁵ Marcos’s military moved with alarming precision to arrest the president’s political enemies, beginning with Senator Benigno Aquino, Jr., Marcos’s political archrival within the oligarchy.⁸⁶ By 4:00 a.m., scores of prominent citizens—politicians, journalists, priests, and students—had been seized. Radio and television stations were padlocked, newspaper presses closed down.

      In the months following martial law, the Department of National Defense perfected its surveillance techniques against suspected communists. Marcos, who in 1965 had placed all four of the military’s services under presidential control, completely reorganized the nation’s military and security forces. This new command structure gave him personal control over an emerging national security state. Substantial resources were funneled into the Presidential Security Command (PSC) and the National Intelligence Coordinating Agency (NICA). The PSC, originally a small security force, grew to about fifteen thousand men with responsibilities for both domestic and foreign intelligence. Marcos’s secret police were given the responsibility of ferreting out information, not so much on the state’s enemies as on Marcos’s political foes.⁸⁷

      The atmosphere of heightened surveillance engendered by Marcos’s martial-law declaration was a Third World reflection of the political culture of surveillance that peaked in the United States at the height of the Cold War. In Rogin’s words, “Political repression went underground, intimidating by its invisibility. Surveillance worked by concealing the identity of its actors but letting the existence of its network be known. Like warders in Jeremy Bentham’s model prison, the panopticon, the surveillants planted in subversive organizations could see without being seen. The political activist . . . was always to wonder whether he or she was being observed.”⁸⁸

      In likening the surveillance state to Bentham’s panopticon, Rogin provocatively gestures at the links between “national security” and cultural policy, understood as the process whereby a population’s modes of thought, feeling, and behavior are targeted for transformation. The linchpin between the two is governmentality: modes of self-surveillance that function to mold a citizenry who, under the constant threat of being secretly observed, learns to comport itself accordingly. Marcos sought to recalibrate social conduct as a necessary first step toward building a new social order (see chapter 2). However, his so-called New Society belied deep tensions between the regime’s espousal of U.S.-sponsored modernization theory and its co-optation of the discourse of national liberation from the young dissidents of the First Quarter Storm. Borrowing from both discourses, the New Society’s cultural policies would do damage to both.

      Chapter 2

      SOCIAL CONDUCT AND THE NEW SOCIETY

      Sa ikauunlad ng bayan, disiplina ang kailangan (For national development, what we need is discipline). The founding motto of the New Society, which citizens were to learn by rote upon the declaration of martial law, encapsulated the Marcos regime’s concerted efforts to place social conduct within the purview of state policy.¹ In his Notes on the New Society of the Philippines, Marcos explains the martial-law state’s abiding interest in national discipline. Like its counterparts in the decolonizing world, the Philippines, Marcos averred, was a “transitional society” preoccupied with the intertwined problems of fostering a national identity and achieving rapid social and economic development. Contradictory values and institutions undermined these goals, thus underscoring the importance of regimenting social conduct.²

      Marcos, whose countersubversive performance blurred the boundaries between U.S. foreign policy and his own personal political agendas, yet again subjected the Philippines to the discourse of U.S. political demonology. This time, however, he assumed the voice of U.S. social theorists whose Washington-funded research “analyzed a foreign world in ways that stressed their own nation’s historical virtue, continuing superiority, and right of benevolent intervention.”³ Modernization, the grand narrative of the Cold War, posited the United States as the model society that Third World nations should seek to emulate. It was believed that the replication of the “consensual” framework of the United States—its capitalist economy, “liberal” media and modern values—could drive “traditional” societies through the difficult transitional process.

      As a former U.S. colony, the Philippines was in fact one of the earliest laboratories of modernization. It was touted as the “showcase of democracy” in Asia. It had five television stations, 190 movie theaters, and twenty-six daily newspapers in Manila alone—placing it well ahead of most Southeast Asian countries in terms of mass media outlets. Unlike its Asian neighbors, which had responded