Media
REINVENTING MARCOS
From dictator to hero.
Social media disinformation has transformed former Philippine president, Ferdinand E. Marcos into a hero. But former foreign correspondent, Keith Dalton remembers a dictator.
Marcos held power for 21-years and lost power in four days. What happened and why is recounted in this book by Keith Dalton, a former foreign correspondent in the Philippines for 10 years. Marcos, regarded as one of the twentieth century’s most corrupt and ruthless leaders – responsible for more than 100,000 deaths, imprisonments, torture, and ‘disappearances’ – was overthrown in a People Power revolution in 1986.
Marcos died a dictator. But today, on social media, Marcos is portrayed a hero. Years of social media disinformation have whitewashed Marcos, sanitized his regime, transformed him into a man he never was. This reinvented Marcos – the Philippines ‘best-ever’ president who ruled over a ‘golden age’ – was the false legacy that helped his son, Ferdinand ‘Bongbong’ Marcos Jr. become president in 2022.
Bongbong’s electoral victory, 36 years after his father was deposed, was a victory for the power of social media to rewrite history, deny facts, distort reality. Social media has mythologised and propagandised the Marcos name. It was able to do so because in the Philippines – where the median age is 25 – most Filipinos were not alive when Ferdinand Marcos ruled.
Filipinos are among the world’s top Internet users (eight hours and 52 minutes per day) according to Meltwater, an international online media monitoring company. Those aged 16 to 24 spend three hours and 34 minutes each day on social media, more than an hour longer than the world average. Today, most Filipinos believe the counterfactual ‘Marcosian’ version of history peddled by social media. And that makes the Philippines a world ‘case study’ in how social media disinformation and manipulation helped win a presidential election.
This is a book Dalton says he never intended to write, until he had to. He needed to set the record straight, to refute the scurrilous lies that have replaced irrefutable facts about the Marcos regime. He knows what happened because he was a foreign correspondent in the Philippines for half of Marcos’s 21 years in power.
This book reveals how one man, with his sycophants and acolytes, was able to capture a nation and build an empire of greed through despotism, nepotism, and corruption until a People Power revolution toppled him from power in 1986.
Dalton writes a sobering account of the Marcos years; provides a compelling testimony of what it takes to become a self-made freelance foreign correspondent; and recalls a fascinating two-year journey alone through Southeast Asia. He took truck-like buses, cargo ships, dodgy planes, and dilapidated trains on an island-hopping, mind-expanding trip through Southeast Asia. In the Borneo jungle, he ventured four days upriver in a canoe where he came upon ex-headhunters whose children had never seen a white man before. When shown a radio, they tried to shake the voices out. In Indonesia, he got kidney stones. Malaria in Brunei. Dysentery in Burma. Gout in the Philippines.
When Dalton flew into Manila, he knew what to expect: a totalitarian government, martial law, endemic corruption, human rights abuses, a communist revolt, and an Islamic insurrection. Dalton arrived with a typewriter in his backpack. Mobile phones, laptop computers, and the Internet had not been invented. In his early days in the Philippines, he recorded radio reports on a cassette recorder inside a converted wardrobe lined on all sides with sound-deadening egg cartons and illuminated by a dangling light bulb fed through a drilled hole in the wardrobe ceiling so that he could read the script while sitting in his underpants on a child’s wooden stool in heat so stifling that sweat formed little pools at his feet.
His first ‘wardrobe’ report was for Radio Australia. One station soon became 10 radio stations and three newspapers, including the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), and The Times; Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), Radio Australia, The Sydney Morning Herald, and The Australian; American Broadcasting Company (ABC), National Public Radio (NPR), and Mutual Broadcasting System (MBS); Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC); Radio Netherlands; Radio New Zealand; and Radio Television Hong Kong.
Dalton was a self-made foreign correspondent. He did it the hard way. Alone. He arrived in the Philippines without knowing anyone, no local contacts, no office, no work colleagues, no one to tell him the dos and don’ts. As a novice freelance foreign correspondent, Dalton was entirely on his own – a jeans and T-shirt newsgatherer – learning on the job. Luckily, he was a fast learner. He needed to be. They were dangerous times. Once, he was subjected to a mock Russian roulette act of intimidation by government soldiers. Another time, he was caught in a mortar attack on a communist guerrilla camp. Then, there was the time he escaped unhurt from one of Manila’s bloodiest street demonstrations. At other times, he was threatened, knifed, spied upon, and followed.
But Dalton was there because he chose to be. Filipinos had no choice. They suffered under Marcos’s lust for power and the willingness of others to support him. Dalton writes a revealing potted history of the Marcos era, and an on-the-scenes account of the revolution that toppled him, but it’s the 12 harrowing stories he tells – most for the first time – of victims and survivors of the Marcos regime, that sets this book apart. Dalton vividly recalls Marcos’s authoritarian rule, recounts the heroism of ordinary people, the life-sacrifices of others, and the extraordinary People Power revolution that toppled Marcos and drove him into exile.
Dalton – who wanted to be a foreign correspondent when he was 10 and became one at 25 – has written an informative, often harrowing, sometimes humorous book. He has written of a life well worth telling. His first-hand accounts of what he saw and experienced are written to set the record straight, to refute the history deniers, to reinforce the truth that Marcos was a dictator, not a hero who presided over a ‘bloody’ age not a ‘golden’ age.