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Chapter 1

THE FIRST QUARTER STORM

When Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in the Philippines on September 21, 1972, the country was on the cusp of a revolutionary upheaval. The economy was in crisis, exacerbating class divisions in a nation where 50 percent of the national wealth was concentrated in the hands of 5 percent of the population.¹ On the political front, the nation was still reeling from the staggering violence and fraud that attended the November 1969 elections, which saw Marcos reelected to an unprecedented second term. Meanwhile, a “special relationship” with the United States guaranteed Philippine support for America’s war in Vietnam and the country’s wholesale capitulation to the International Monetary Fund’s oppressive demands for drastic cuts in social expenditures. Against this dire political and economic backdrop, waves of strikes and demonstrations swept the nation’s capital, escalating to dramatically violent confrontations between the military and dissident groups during the first three months of 1970. Collectively dubbed the First Quarter Storm, these public dramatizations of urban unrest closely followed the steady advance of an underground guerrilla insurgency movement in the countryside. These two fronts of militant dissident action—one highly visible, the other covert—were mutually reinforcing features of an ascendant cult of revolutionism that Marcos ostensibly aimed to defuse by declaring martial law.

In his martial law declaration, Marcos alleged that “lawless elements” presented a “clear, present and grave” danger to the republic, threatening to undermine the government with acts of “rebellion and armed insurrection.” The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and its military arm, the New People’s Army (NPA), were specifically targeted as the principal instigators of the conflict. In the face of the enemy’s “well-trained, well-armed, highly indoctrinated and greatly expanded revolutionary force,” martial law was deemed a necessary corrective to the nation’s “state of political, social, psychological and economic instability.”²

Even as he condemned the upsurge of radical militant action in the nation as the immediate justification for establishing authoritarian rule, Marcos was deeply enamored of the cult of revolutionism generated by this militancy. Shortly before assuming his dictatorship, Marcos would write, “We live in a revolutionary era. It is an era of swift, violent and often disruptive change, and rather than lament this vainly, we have to decide whether we are the masters or victims of change.”³ The statement, issued in his 1971 political tract “Today’s Revolution: Democracy,” demonstrates Marcos’s readiness to appropriate the revolutionary feeling buoying his critics.⁴ As the New York Times reported in March 1970, the word revolution was becoming a byword for an ever-widening spectrum of oppositional groups in the country, including “workers, peasants, middle-class intellectuals, clergy, moderate students as well as radical revolutionary students.”⁵ “Today’s Revolution” paradoxically parrots the broad-based opposition’s calls for social reforms, even trying to outdo the populist bent of the opposition’s reformist agenda by demanding nothing less than radical social transformation.

In the Philippines, Marcos writes, “revolution is inevitable.”⁶ This inevitability is subtended by the utter failure of social reform in the face of a debased democracy. Marcos is quick to enumerate the symptomatic features of such a democracy: the unchecked political and economic power of the oligarchy, the sensational practices of the media, the rampant corruption in the public and private sectors, and the existence of private armies and political warlords.⁷ Reflecting a fundamentally flawed social contract, the nation’s flailing democracy demands that society itself must be radically transformed. Otherwise, Marcos argues, those to whom reforms are a necessity “have no other recourse but violent revolution.”⁸

For Marcos, what the nation needed was a democratic revolution: “The process we need—and want—is thus a revolution by democratic means, the only method of cleansing society and rescuing it from its ills.”⁹ What would make such social cleansing “democratic” was that the martial law declaration that occasioned it was perfectly legal, based on a constitutional provision guaranteeing the executive’s special powers under times of war. Marcos coined the phrase “constitutional authoritarianism” to describe his new dictatorial powers, which he claimed to be using in radical ways.¹⁰ By turns a reactionary and revolutionary concept, constitutional authoritarianism promised to create a working fit between two otherwise contradictory systems—dictatorial rule and democracy—with an eye to generating a more perfect society and, consequently, a purer social contract. But for this social experiment to be legitimate, at least on paper, the onus lay on Marcos to prove that the nation was in fact in a state of war, so much so that martial law had become a necessary and exigent measure.

The spectacular nature of the First Quarter Storm, aided in large part by sensational media coverage of the demonstrations, ironically worked to strengthen Marcos’s position regarding martial law. This was indeed significant because the president and the oligarchy-controlled media had been at loggerheads, at least since Marcos’s much-disputed reelection in 1969. In the months following his reelection, the media launched a de facto anti-Marcos campaign, feeding the public with a daily diet of anti-Marcos announcements from both the political right and left. Both ends of the political spectrum had charged the newly incumbent president with “seeking to perpetuate his power” and failing to “curb corruption, the private armies of warlord-politicians, and an obstructive Congress.”¹¹ During the fateful First Quarter Storm, oligarchs hostile to Marcos (most notably the Lopez family, who owned and controlled the powerful ABS-CBN television network and the national daily Manila Chronicle) used their vast media holdings to publicize the demonstrations, thus inadvertently aiding the leftist dissidents in their efforts to bring down the government through violent confrontation.

Marcos was quick to transform what would ordinarily amount to a political deficit into a golden opportunity. The First Quarter Storm, which had taken him by surprise in 1970, had taught him the invaluable lesson that the revolution was fundamentally governed by the dynamics of spectacle. But while his opponents labored to spectacularize national discontent in the hopes of discrediting his administration, Marcos, in an act of classic one-upmanship, would translate these spectacles of social disorder into a public drama justifying authoritarian social control. To fully understand this critical shift in the revolutionary momentum of the nation on the eve of martial law, we need to revisit the public drama that was the First Quarter Storm.

The January 26 Riot

The First Quarter Storm began on January 26, 1970, when fifty thousand students, workers, and peasants convened outside the Congress Building in downtown Manila. Carefully timed to coincide with the opening of Congress, the rally was a provocative parody of the official proceedings simultaneously taking place. Fiery speeches delivered by dissident leaders excoriated the government for the country’s social ills, which were traced back to three essential sources: imperialism, feudalism, and fascism. Blatantly referencing critical concepts in the ideology of the CPP, the speakers flouted the country’s 1950 Anti-Subversion Law (Republic Act no. 1700), which had declared communism illegal in the Philippines. And, as if to deliver communism from its shadowy existence underground, the streets were aflame with red banners bearing the taboo slogans Revolt Is Necessary and Welcome to the NPA.

The demonstrators and the public officials secreted in the building behind locked doors constituted two parallel congresses—one illicit, the other official. A one-way public address system allowed the demonstrators to hear the official proceedings, though their attention was riveted to the speakers among their ranks whom they could see.¹² Four hours into the demonstration, the president, unseen by the demonstrators, took to the microphone to deliver his state of the nation address. It was at this point that the two parallel congresses may be said to intersect. While Marcos delivered his speech, “National Discipline: The Key to Our Future,” the demonstrators became increasingly rowdy, as if to mock the president’s calls for sobriety and self-restraint. When the First Couple emerged from the Congress Building, the protestors burned three effigies in full view of the president: a coffin, to represent the death of democracy (an allusion to the violence of the last election); a crocodile, to represent the corrupt Congress; and a cardboard likeness of the president himself.¹³ The demonstrators hurled the flaming effigies at the visibly shaken couple, and then proceeded to pelt them with rocks and soda bottles. Within seconds, military police charged at the crowd, scattering the demonstrators with truncheons.

The majority of the demonstrators were forced to flee the rally grounds along Burgos Drive, but two thousand protestors stood their ground. As they proceeded to sing the communist anthem “Internationale,” the stragglers became marked men. Linking arms, the exposed communists openly defied the police and the riot squad, chanting a new slogan: “Makibaka! Huwag Matakot!” (Fight and fear not). A full battle then ensued between the police and the radical dissidents, who could no longer claim to belong to the more moderate political organizations present at the rally.

It must be remembered that all this time, news cameras were capturing the events for the television audience. The presence of the media seemed to invite dramatic acts of defiance from the dissidents, as when three lone students, facing an advancing contingent of police, silently held aloft a banner bearing the name Kabataang Makabayan, or Nationalist Youth (KM). The youth organization, by far the most radical in the country, was anathema to the police, who held back nothing in their frontal attack of the three students. Philippines Free Press reporter Jose Lacaba describes the alarming violence of the scene:

In full view of the horrified crowd, [the police] flailed away at the three. . . . The two kids holding the side poles [of the banner] either managed to flee or were hauled off to the legislative building to join everybody else who had the misfortune of being caught. The boy in the center crumpled to the ground and stayed there cringing, bundled up like a foetus. . . . The cops made a small tight circle around him, and then all that could be seen were the rattan sticks moving up and down and from side to side in seeming rhythm. When they were through, the cops walked away nonchalantly, leaving the boy on the ground. One cop, before leaving, gave one last aimless swing of his stick as a parting shot, hitting his target in the knees.¹⁴

The three students had raised the KM banner for the rest of the nation to see. The symbolic gesture created a spectacle with a veritable allegorical register. The ensuing actions of the police dramatized the failure of the rule of law in the country, and the presence of the media worked to make this and other spectacles of student dissidence and police brutality indelible in the public mind.

The battle of Burgos Drive, as the January 26 riot later came to be known, ended at eight o’clock that evening, a full seven hours after the demonstration had started. Rumors circulated that the dissidents, who had retreated or were chased into the walled city of Intramuros, were regrouping for an armed reprisal. The next day, the authorities and some concerned citizens made several public statements to account for the shocking turn of events.

In the words of Deputy Chief James Barbers of the Metropolitan Police Department, “the police acted swiftly at a particular time when the life of the President of the Republic—and that of the First Lady—was being endangered by the vicious and unscrupulous elements among student demonstrators.” Manila Mayor Antonio J. Villegas corroborated the statement, commending the police for their “exemplary behavior and courage.” For their part, the faculty of the University of the Philippines issued a joint statement denouncing “the use of brutal force by state authorities against the student demonstrators,” and supporting “unqualifiedly the students’ exercise of democratic rights in their struggle for revolutionary change.”¹⁵

Despite their political differences, all those commenting on the explosive events of January 26 shared the view that the resulting spectacle bore grave portent for the future of the nation. As the faculty of the Lyceum put it in their position statement:

Above the sadism and the inhumanity of the action of the police, we fear that the brutal treatment of the idealistic students has done irreparable harm to our society. For it is true that the skirmish was won by the policemen and riot soldiers. But if we view the battle in the correct perspective of the struggle for the hearts and minds of our youth, we cannot help but realize that the senseless, brutal, and uncalled-for acts of the police have forever alienated many of our young people from society. The police will have to realize that in winning the battles, they are losing the war for our society.¹⁶

The statement demands an allegorical reading of the January 26 riot as a Cold War drama. The struggle for “hearts and minds,” a clear reference to the ideological battle between the “free” and communist worlds, is the hermeneutic key for interpreting the emblematic actions of the students and the police in this national allegory. The statement must be seen in relation to what, for many middle-class Filipinos, was an alarming phenomenon: the dramatic upsurge of a radical youth movement in Manila’s college campuses, where more and more of the student population—numbering over half a million—were “discovering” Marxist ideology.¹⁷

The Diliman campus of the University of the Philippines was the epicenter of the radical student movement. At the time of the First Quarter Storm, student activism on campus focused on two key issues: the U.S. military bases in the country and the government’s neocolonial relations with the United States. International events like the ongoing Vietnam War and the rise of the Sukarno government in Indonesia radicalized students even more. For many, the leap from nationalism to Marxism was a natural progression.

University of the Philippines instructor Jose Maria Sison founded the KM (Nationalist Youth) in 1964. Under the pen name Amado Guerrero (Beloved Warrior), he wrote “Philippine Society and Revolution,” a comprehensive Marxist analysis of Philippine history and society widely circulated in mimeographed form. Sison’s account argued for the necessity of a revolution along the lines of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. A clandestine meeting of a coterie of his brightest followers in an obscure barrio in Pangasinan Province resulted in the formation of the CPP, on December 26, 1968. The avowed purpose of this secret organization was the “overthrow of U.S. imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucratic capitalism,” and the “seizure of political power and its consolidation.”¹⁸ The NPA was created specifically for this purpose on March 29, 1969, when the CPP struck a decisive alliance with a group of peasant guerrillas under the leadership of “Commander Dante” (Bernabe Buscayno). Commander Dante was a Huk—a rebel fighter for the moribund Hukbong Magpalaya ng Bayan (People’s Liberation Army), the peasant-based guerrilla movement that threatened to seize state power in the early 1950s, but that, by the 1960s, had devolved into a gangster and racketeering organization.¹⁹

For those in the political mainstream, the recently consolidated CPP-NPA represented the “dark side” of the left. That the students at the January 26 demonstration could be irrevocably drawn to this dark side or, worse, be active agents carrying out its orders, was cause for alarm. The Philippine Collegian had in fact published Sison’s influential essay entitled “Student Power?” just days before the rally. The essay was a call to arms, exhorting student activists to enfold peasants and laborers into their movement.²⁰ The political inclusiveness of the demonstration and the ideological substance of many of the speeches and the slogans chanted that day would seem to indicate that Sison, who had been in hiding since 1969, was present at least in spirit at the demonstration. Rumors quickly spread that for his part, Commander Dante, who had a price of 90,000 pesos on his head, had managed to infiltrate enemy lines to personally attend the rally.²¹ Suffice it to say that in light of these developments, the January 26 demonstration represented a critical juncture for the radical Left. As clashes between the NPA and the Philippine Constabulary began to multiply in the hills and flatlands of Luzon, radical students had, it seemed, begun to take a new tack: provoking violent confrontation in the streets.²²

The students at the January 26 rally used mass action, or the threat of it, as their political weapon against the government. Theirs was a performative mode of politics that pivoted on the affective presentation of a collective identity—one based on their values and lifestyle as youths. Such a form of “identity politics” was colored by the politically calculated performance of nonnormative or abject identities. Consider the students’ slogans and shibboleths: “Their slogan was “Fight! Fear Not!” and they made a powerful incantation of it: Maki-BAKA! Huwag ma-TAKOT! They marched with arms linked together, baiting [the police], taunting them. “Pulis, pulis, titi mong matulis!” (Pigs, pigs, uncircumcised dicks!) . . . Baka magreyp pa kayo, lima-lima na ang asawa ninyo!” (You might be thinking of raping someone, you already have so many wives!), “Mano-mano lang, o!” (Let’s have it out, one on one!).”²³

The students, it must be pointed out, chose to stage the rally in Tagalog. It was a way of distancing their public sphere from the official business of Congress (carried out, as per political custom, in English). Their acts of defiance, though reminiscent of child play, aimed to transform the terms of political contestation in the nation. Vicente Rafael’s focus on the linguistic dimensions of the affective style of youth politics is instructive: “Rather than acknowledge authority as the giver of gifts, the language of the demonstrators negated the conventions of [official politics]. Taunts replaced respect, opening a gap between the language of the state and that of the students.”²⁴ As we shall see in a moment, however, the students’ tendentious language and performance of nonnormative conduct came at a price.

The January 30 Revolt

Student agitation resumed with a vengeance on January 30. Of the even more spectacular violence that erupted that day, a police officer would comment, “This is no longer a riot. This is an insurrection.” President Marcos, final arbiter on these matters, would call it a revolt—“a revolt by local Maoist Communists.”²⁵

The January 30 “revolt” began with simultaneous demonstrations held in front of the Congress Building and Malacañang, the presidential palace. By early evening, the two demonstrations merged. Exactly what triggered the battle that spread to other parts of the city and lasted till dawn the next day may never be known. Lacaba gives the following account:

The students who came in from Congress claim that, as they were approaching J. P. Laurel Street, they heard something that sounded like firecrackers going off. When they got to Malacañang, the crowd was getting to be unruly. It was growing dark, and the lamps on the Malacañang gates had not been turned on. There was a shout of Sindihin ang ilaw! Sindihin ang ilaw! (Turn on the lights! Turn on the lights!) Malacañang obliged, the lights went on, and then crash! a rock blasted out one of the lamps. One by one, the lights were put out by stones or sticks.²⁶

Lacaba’s report provides us with a highly symbolic incipit—or narrative opening—for the volatile events that would follow. The insistent demand for light, which, upon provision is immediately put out by persons unknown, paradoxically sets the stage for the most spectacular public drama to emerge out of the First Quarter Storm. It is indeed ironic that the January 30 “revolt” begins under the cover of darkness. It creates a gaping hole—an enigma—around exactly who or what precipitated the ensuing battle between the military and the dissidents. Despite this enigma—or maybe even because of it—the events of January 30 were highly sensationalized by the media, which followed the drama until its denouement the next day.

According to Lacaba’s report, chaos almost instantaneously erupted after the lights went out. Holding aloft CPP banners and crying “Dante for president,” hundreds of demonstrators surged into the palace grounds, lobbing homemade bombs at buildings and vehicles in the vicinity. The Presidential Guards Battalion came out to meet them in full force, firing bullets into the air. When the demonstrators refused to desist, they fired tear gas bombs at the charging crowd.

Reinforcements from the constabulary soon arrived. By 9:00 p.m., the students and the military had secured their own strongholds, each side “capturing” major city streets extending deep into the heart of Manila’s so-called university belt. The battle would reach its climax when constabulary troopers guarding the Mendiola Bridge faced two advancing “armies” of students. They opened fire on the students.

Immortalized by the media soon after as the battle of Mendiola Bridge, the incident performs a mythological function in the public record of the First Quarter Storm. Now designated by military terms (combatants, armies) the students have ceased to be activists, and have crossed the bridge—so to speak—into the war zone of the NPA insurgents. Profusely captured in print, radio, and television accounts, the legendary confrontation at the bridge created a spectacle in which two previously discrete phenomena—the recent wave of student agitation and the underground insurgency—appeared to overlap. The mythological quality of the resulting spectacle hinged on the instantaneous collapsibility of the two phenomena, a substitution that suddenly appeared natural and irrefutable. Buried in that spectacle was the seemingly irrelevant detail that authorities were shooting at unarmed civilians, most of whom were just teenagers.

Many spectators found they could no longer passively watch the volatile turn of events. As Lacaba points out, students “found doors being opened to them, or people at second-floor windows warning them with gestures about the presence of soldiers in alleys.”²⁷ The lines separating spectacle and spectator had effectively collapsed. The phenomenon was a microcosm of the revolutionary feeling gripping the nation at large. In Lacaba’s words:

In many a middle-class home, parents could only shake their heads in sorrow and bewilderment, no my child was not a part of it, my child was an innocent bystander, my child was never an activist. But that night of January 30 no one who did not belong to the camp of the enemy could remain a bystander; anyone who was not a minion of the state became instantly an activist, even if only for a moment. Every soul who had ever experienced poverty and oppression found himself linked to his neighbor in those hours of turmoil, welded tightly by a shared fate. . . . A spirit was abroad that night, and the streets spoke of it in whispers: the revolution has arrived. . . . And indeed, the revolution was on everybody’s mind, before everybody’s eyes. Mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and friends sat by the radio throughout that sleepless night, all on edge, thinking of the revolution.²⁸

Media coverage of the revolt allowed spectators to see themselves as actors in a public drama. Their lack of political indoctrination notwithstanding, subaltern groups, who rose to the occasion by aiding dissidents, became temporary “activists.” Meanwhile, Manila’s most powerful families, certain that their homes would be “set afire by an avenging people,” made ghost towns of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods. The next day, the nation took stock of the night’s events. Four students were reported killed. Untold numbers sustained injuries. Almost 300 were arrested and detained at Camp Crame. As it turned out, the revolution had not yet arrived. The public drama of the January 30 revolt was nonetheless a foretaste of that crucial threshold where spectacle ends, and where the revolution might begin. It was an object lesson for Marcos, who would appropriate that spectacle in order to begin foisting a revolution of his own.

In the aftermath of the January 30 “revolt,” Marcos appeared on national television to mythologize the identities of the so-called rebels in a manner that would suit his political interests. The mob that attacked Malacañang, he said, was not a mob of students. Performing an allegorical reading of the media spectacles of the night before, he identified the key visual and auditory cues indicating that the perpetrators of the palace bombings were communist subversives. These mysterious men, he said, waved red banners, carried the Philippine flag with the red field up,²⁹ called the streets they occupied “liberated areas,” and chanted “Dante for president.” These cues proved that the perpetrators were not a group of rowdy youths but a highly organized army acting with the clear intent of seizing state power. Marcos statement was tantamount to a public erasure of the student demonstrators from the January 30 revolt. The spontaneous eruption of mob violence, which was captured by the news media, was thus transformed into a carefully orchestrated attack by urban guerrillas.

Marcos proceeded to defend the brutal actions of the police and the military: “The nonparticipants of that tragic night (read: spectators) could easily accuse the military and the police of ‘fascist’ and ‘repressive’ methods, but what was apparent to the participants was the beginning of a ‘revolutionary’ confrontation stage-managed by a determined minority.”³⁰ Likening the night’s events to a stage play, Marcos would describe the melodramatic logic of its mise-en-scène:

The cries of “revolution” . . . indicated that [the demonstrations] were experiments in . . . overthrowing a duly constituted regime. . . . The strategy of the nihilist radicals and leftists should . . . be clear. By provoking the military and police authorities into acts of violence, they hoped to show before society—before all people—that the government is “fascistic” and undemocratic. This is the reason behind the repetitious charges of “fascism” against the duly constituted authority: to deprive it of its legitimacy.³¹

The president’s public statements produced a true transfer of power, as responsibility for the public drama of January 30 shifted from the student demonstrators—whose presence was vividly captured by the media—to the backstage “Maoist Communists” who had presumably masterminded the conflict. This mystification, which relied on red-scare tactics to conjure an invisible threat to society, paradoxically played a critical role in Marcos’s efforts to demystify the spectacle of January 30. In effect warning the public not to believe its own eyes, Marcos would deflate the spectacle of the January 30 by asking his public to believe in what it could not see. And, keenly aware of the surprisingly sophisticated use the demonstrators had made of the media during the First Quarter Storm, Marcos would launch his own “revolution” by playing a role—that of the heroic leader—for the national audience.

Heroic Leadership and Political-Image Building

Marcos’s self-presentation as heroic leader necessitated the recuperation of his political image, which had since been tarnished by the 1969 elections. I shall analyze the stigma of the 1969 elections in greater detail in chapter 3, but for now, it behooves us to note that no other president before Marcos—and none since—had as commanding a presence before the camera. In fact, Marcos’s overwhelming popularity during his first presidential run, in 1965, was a part of the melodramatic theatricality of his political career, which was closely followed by the print, film, and broadcast media.

Ferdinand Marcos first entered the public consciousness as a defendant charged with murdering his father’s rival in their home province of Ilocos Norte just after the 1935 legislative elections. He had turned eighteen nine days before the proclaimed winner, Julio Nalundasan, was shot dead by an unknown assailant on the night of September 20, 1935. In December 1938 authorities arrested Ferdinand, who at the time was a law student at the University of the Philippines, about to graduate as class valedictorian. After a much-publicized trial, the twenty-one-year-old Marcos was found guilty and was sentenced to seventeen years in prison. He managed to top the bar exams while under state custody and later served as his own counsel when his case went to the Supreme Court. Displaying the oratorical skills that would come to define his political style, he persuaded the court to reverse the conviction. The stunning reversal led the Philippines Free Press to put his photo on the cover and declare him a public hero.³²

If Marcos’s charisma and oratorical style had saved him from a crisis at the beginning of his career, there was no reason to suspect that they would fail him now. Particularly in crises, the media-savvy Marcos had proven himself time and again to be adept at political-image building. His polished public image, which combined equal parts glamour and crisis mongering, seemed to have been carefully modeled after the U.S. president who had singularly captured the symbiotic relationship between the two—John F. Kennedy. Like Kennedy before him, Marcos was most in his element in front of the camera. Like Kennedy, he had a beautiful “aristocratic” wife who would charm the public and function as the essential ornament to his political career. But above all, like Kennedy, he was a political leader much of whose power derived from being both seen and heard.

Marcos’s inauguration, on December 30, 1965, was reported as the “coming of Camelot to the Philippines.” His inaugural speech, “A Mandate for Greatness,” made representatives of the U.S. media experience a “[flash back] to JFK’s inaugural a few years earlier.”³³ Interrupted nineteen times by applause (the loudest when he declared that he had been given a “mandate of greatness”), Marcos’s speech so impressed Jack Valenti, future president of the Motion Picture Association of America, that his memorandum to President Lyndon B. Johnson described Marcos as “one of the most magnetic speakers you have ever heard.” The speech, Valenti wrote, was “perfectly timed, ingeniously shaped, in a voice that must tritely be compared only to an organ.” Aside from being “enormously intelligent,” Marcos was “tough,” and “had guts,” Valenti wrote.³⁴

Valenti’s comments cast Marcos as a composite of the Hollywood leading man—one who combined the civility of the cosmopolitan easterner with the rugged individualism of the western hero. Such observations meshed with the U.S. endorsement of “heroic leadership” in the Third World during this period. As formulated by Kennedy adviser Arthur Schlesinger in his essay “On Heroic Leadership and the Dilemma of Strong Men and Weak People,” the doctrine of heroic leadership postulated that the political grooming of strong leaders in the Third World was the “most effective means of charging semi-literate people with a sense of national and social purpose.”³⁵ Thus hitched to the Cold War project of inculcating Third World peoples with the culture and values of the United States, heroic leadership, as Hoberman points out, was defined in particular by the culture and values disseminated by Hollywood.³⁶

Marcos’s transfiguration as heroic leader was experienced as a national ceremony—a feat made all the more remarkable by the absence of the necessary communications infrastructure for “wiring the nation.” With approximately 600,000 radio receivers (at 19 sets per 1,000 people), 120,000 television sets (3.8 sets per 1,000 people) and 776 cinema screens (2.6 seats per 100 people), the Philippines in 1965 was not nearly as internally colonized by the media as the United States was.³⁷ Indeed, Marcos would hold the “modernization” of the media to be among the New Society’s top priorities. The dictator would ostensibly make good this promise with the importation of satellite and computer-based technologies by the late 1970s.³⁸ In anticipation of this dramatic media expansion, however, Marcos had enlisted the country’s available media resources, however modest, to mold himself as the “Philippine JFK.” The Kennedy campaign was a tough act to follow. But follow Marcos did, releasing a biography, inspiring a feature film, and having his every move on the campaign trail followed by the press.

That Marcos’s role as heroic leader could piggyback on the one created a few years earlier by Kennedy points to the global spread of what Daniel Boorstin, in 1962, termed the pseudo-event: a mass-mediated public drama that functions as a “press release writ large.”³⁹ In the U.S. context, the pseudo-event was characterized by a tendency to proliferate, becoming increasingly self-reflexive and self-conscious. In Boorstin’s words, “One interview comments on another; one television show spoofs another; novel, television show, radio program, movie, comic book, and the way we think of ourselves, all become merged into mutual reflections.”⁴⁰

Boorstin’s observations anticipated Jean Baudrillard’s theorization of simulation and simulacra as distinctively postmodern phenomena. No longer representations of an objective reality, the simulations produced by the media do not refer to anything other than the intertextual relations underpinning them. A media text, according to this view, “has no relation to reality whatsoever; it is its own pure simulacrum.”⁴¹

For Hoberman, the pseudo-event and the discursive continuum extending it were part and parcel of the nation’s “dream life,” in which “images themselves were shadows cast by shadows and mirrors of mirrors.” The purpose of this image-driven totality, as Hoberman puts it, was to sell an ideal image of American identity back to America.⁴² This “dream life” acquired a particular urgency within the atmosphere of heightened anxiety attending Kennedy’s management of the Cold War. If at the beginning of his presidency, Marcos inspired “flashbacks” to Kennedy, it could very well have been because Americans desired a Third World simulacrum of Kennedy, or at the very least, a congenial image of heroic leadership that the United States could disseminate as a symbolic weapon against communist incursion in the Third World.

Cold War Western: The United States and Third World Nationalism

For a United States struggling to preserve its post–World War II position as the world’s greatest economic and military power, so much was perceived to be at stake in Marcos’s bailiwick—the so-called Third World. This blanket term for the numerous “new states” engendered by the collapse of European empires at the end of World War II underscored the precarious balance of power opened up by decolonization.⁴³ U.S. strategists feared that the political and economic instability engendered by decolonization could not but lead to the spread of revolutionary movements linking Marxism with the force of nationalist aspirations. At issue was the apparent clash between Third World nationalism and what was then coming to the fore as a defensive U.S. nationalism.

On the occasion of his first televised State of the Union address, on January 30, 1961, the newly elected Kennedy conjured the specters of the Cuban revolution, Ngo Dinh Diem’s faltering hold over South Vietnam and the escalating war in the Congo. “Today, the crises multiply,” he warned. “Each day, their solution grows more difficult. Each day, we draw nearer the hour of maximum danger.”⁴⁴ The alarmist tones of Kennedy’s speech exemplified the crisis mongering that would come to define his administration’s foreign policy. Simply put, the public had to be conditioned to support America’s war on communism—for what was at stake, as political theorist Walt Whitman Rostow put it, was nothing less than the survival of the nation and its defining values.⁴⁵

The Truman administration’s famous military document, NSC-68, presciently expressed Kennedy’s posture of a defensive nationalism when it warned that the United States might be “crippled by internal weakness at the moment of its greatest strength.”⁴⁶ In the intervening years the worry that the American public would not support the nation’s postwar economic and security roles was a persistent one, and the permanent mobilization of the population (to support foreign aid and military interventions in the decolonizing world) posed chronic problems.

The specter of public apathy found a powerful solution in the covert military operation, which was closely intertwined with public anticommunist mobilizations.⁴⁷ In the early Cold War years, the former served the interests of military elites while the latter engaged the masses. The lines separating the two became increasingly hazy with Kennedy, for whom the “theory and practice of foreign interventions served less to preserve imperial interests than to demonstrate the firmness of American will.”⁴⁸

With the New Frontier as his campaign signature, Kennedy had at his disposal a powerful set of symbols to “summon the nation as a whole to undertake (or at least support) a heroic engagement in the ‘long twilight struggle’ against Communism.”⁴⁹ In particular, he resurrected the frontiersman whose rugged individualism, self-sacrifice, and constant vigilance had figured prominently in the nation’s expansionist history. Kennedy’s New Frontier glamorized this violent history, and it did so by making covert military operations in the Third World function as spectacle.

In Kennedy’s time the hero of the frontier myth metamorphosed into the covert operator, also known as the freedom fighter. This new and improved icon of the nation’s expansionist-cum-anticommunist foreign policy was invoked—literally or metaphorically—in a series of media spectaculars, most notably the Bay of Pigs invasion (Operation Zapata; April 14, 1961) and the Cuban Missile Crisis (October 16–28, 1962). As Hoberman points out, these pseudo-events began as top-secret happenings, “scripted, produced and directed by the CIA” with the full participation of the president.⁵⁰ Whether by design or by happenstance, these events were thrust into the nation’s living rooms and daily papers. This development pointed to the increasingly permeable border between public spectacle and covert operations; a phenomenon that, Rogin points out, has since become a characteristic feature of the “postmodern American empire.”⁵¹

Rogin convincingly argues that covert military interventions derive from the imperatives of spectacle. Furthermore, they owe their invisibility not to secrecy but to something else entirely—political amnesia. As a form of “motivated forgetting,” political amnesia is the phenomenon whereby “that which is insistently represented becomes, by being normalized to invisibility, absent and disappeared.” In the covert spectacle, the freedom fighter enacts a “countersubversive” fantasy. Like the frontiersman of the western myth, he “enters racially alien ground, regresses to primitivism in order to destroy the subversive and appropriate his power.”⁵² Political amnesia, then, constitutes a “cultural structure of motivated disavowal.” It implicates the audience, whose desire to experience the violence of the countersubversive scenario is matched by an equally powerful desire not to retain it in memory.

The specular form of the covert spectacle is crucial in this regard. In contrast to the subject-centered story of narrative, spectacles are “superficial, sensately intensified, short-lived and repeatable.” Spectacle, then, is the cultural form of amnesiac representation. It produces a sensory overstimulation that “disconnects from their objects and severs from memory those intensified, detailed shots of destruction, wholesaled on populations and retailed on body parts.”⁵³ In the fragmented jumble of “interchangeable individuals, products and body parts” displayed in the covert spectacle, centrifugal threats—threats to the subject and threats to the state—are depicted in a manner conducive to containing as well as enjoying them.

But what is displayed and forgotten in the covert spectacle is the “historical content of American political demonology.” As Rogin has convincingly shown elsewhere, the covert spectacle may be traced back to an almost pathological fear of subversion subtending the nation’s political culture.⁵⁴ This “countersubversive” tradition has historically played on fears of secret penetration and social contamination presented by an imagined alien power. Political demonology has been a concomitant feature of this tradition. It begins as a “rigid insistence on difference” that extends to “the inflation, stigmatization and dehumanization of political foes.”⁵⁵ Such demonology provides the performative space within which the countersubversive might be allowed to indulge in forbidden desires. Or to put it another way, political demonology is what enables the countersubversive, in the name of battling the subversive, to imitate its enemy.

The covert spectacle constituted a form of symbolic recovery: their significance lay less in stopping the spread of communism than in convincing the public that the United States had the power to direct world events. In Rogin’s words,

Individual covert operations may serve specific corporate or national security-clique interests, and the operations themselves are often (like Iran/Contra) hidden from domestic subjects who might hold them to political account. But even where the particular operation is supposed to remain secret, the government wants it known it has the power, secretly to intervene. The payoff for many covert operations is their intended demonstration effect.⁵⁶

The Cold War, it must be remembered, was fought mainly with symbols and surrogates—in the visible military buildup of weapons that function more as “symbols of intentions in war games rather than evidence of war-fighting capabilities; and in the invasion of private and public space by the fiction-making visual media.”⁵⁷ Even the two fronts of Cold War military action—the nuclear-weapons race and the “low-intensity” anti-insurgency campaigns in the Third World—were aimed at demonstrating U.S. resolution without incurring substantial risks at home. They consigned foreign policy to pseudo-events staged for public consumption, but with one important caveat. The symbols thus produced for consumption at home and abroad “have all too much substance for the victims of those symbols, the participant-observers on the ground in the Third World.”⁵⁸

It bears emphasizing that, to U.S. security strategists, the Philippines was an important outpost of the New Frontier. Indeed, it was here where the United States had first fought a counterinsurgency war in the name of defeating communism. In anticipation of the specular foreign policy inaugurated by the Kennedy era, Washington sent Edward G. Lansdale to crush the aforementioned Huks.⁵⁹ Combining paramilitary operations, psychological warfare and the manipulation of electoral politics, Lansdale’s anti-Huk campaign would in fact serve as the blueprint for U.S. anticommunist counterinsurgency operations elsewhere—in Colombia, Venezuela, and Vietnam.

Because of his “pro-Western” stance, the CIA endorsed Marcos in the 1965 elections. He was touted as “Washington’s man in Asia,” not only because of his avowed anticommunist beliefs but also because he fit the mold of the “freedom fighter.” I return now to Marcos’s crisis management of the First Quarter Storm, which clearly echoed the crisis mongering and political demonology of Kennedy’s interventionist policies. But as we shall see in a moment, Marcos’s red-scare tactics were hardly subservient to Washington’s interests.

Marcos’s Countersubversive Performance

On his September 1966 state visit to the United States, Marcos spoke boldly about the need to stanch the communist threat in Vietnam. Ever mindful of the unpopularity of the war at home, however, he demurred when President Johnson requested more Filipino troops in Vietnam.⁶⁰ A May 1969 report by the U.S. magazine New Republic cogently interpreted Marcos’s vacillation:

The president is judged by his own people according to the number of benefits and concessions he succeeds in wheedling from Washington, and by the extent to which he dares defy what may appear from time to time to be Washington’s wishes. On the first count, President Marcos got some favors from President Johnson by posing as LBJ’s “right hand in Asia.” . . . On the second count, President Marcos has sternly warned the United States that if it reduces its forces in Asia (meaning, if Washington cuts its military spending), he will feel compelled in prudence to seek a modus vivendi with Communist China. The warning can scarcely have frightened Washington and in any event was intended for domestic consumption.⁶¹

Marcos’s performance as Johnson’s “right hand in Asia” indeed had its compensations. In exchange for promising a two-thousand-man army engineering battalion to assist U.S. troops in 1966, he acquired $45 million in economic assistance, $31 million in settlement of Philippine veterans’ claims, and $3.5 million to assist the First Lady’s cultural projects.⁶² And yet, in subsequent negotiations for increased military aid, he repeatedly threatened to approach China should such assistance not be forthcoming. Simply put, Marcos was playing both sides. He used the Vietnam conflict to simultaneously curry favor with Washington and demonstrate to his critics at home that he was not a supplicant to U.S. interests. It was a foretaste of the opportunistic nature of the red-scare tactics that he would implement in the aftermath of the First Quarter Storm.

From January to April 1970, Marcos twice raised the possibility of martial law.⁶³ This was a politically risky move, given that just a year before, during his reelection campaign, he had downplayed reports of stepped-up insurgency in the countryside, confidently assuring Washington and the Philippine public that his administration could “handle the Communist threat.” In May 1970 he predicted an “inevitable confrontation” with Maoist communists. His alarmist prognosis elicited bipartisan criticism in the Philippine Senate. A special committee headed by Senator Salvador Laurel, a Marcos opponent, asserted that there was “no clear and present danger of a Communist-inspired insurrection or rebellion,” and that NPA activity in the countryside posed “no real military threat to the security of the country.”⁶⁴

The Department of National Defense and the communist media painted a drastically different picture. Based on secret intelligence gathered by the Armed Forces of the Philippines, Marcos announced in August 1971 that the NPA now had one thousand men on the frontline, with support troops of about fifty thousand. Reports from the CPP-NPA’s periodicals, Ang bayan (The nation) and Pulang bandila (Red flag), indicated that the well-equipped and highly mobile NPA was widening its operations in Central and southeastern Luzon. Closely monitoring the NPA’s progress were the Peking media, which had reported in December 1970 that the NPA had wiped out “more than 200 reactionary Philippine troops and police,” and fifteen U.S. military personnel in over eighty operations that year.⁶⁵

The oligarchy-controlled media, on the other hand, took an overwhelmingly skeptical position, accusing Marcos of sensationalizing the Maoist threat. They accused him of “swallowing all that military commanders were telling him” and asking the public to do the same.⁶⁶ The Lopez-controlled Manila Chronicle, the most outspoken of the anti-Marcos dailies, would write, “Since the government cannot seem to stop the rising price of bread, it is apparently trying to offer us circuses as a diversion. And these in the form of endless warnings about the rise of subversion.”⁶⁷

As his critics were quick to point out, Marcos’s counterinsurgency campaign was a public extravagance. It created an “imaginary” crisis, which ironically deflected attention away from “real” crisis conditions voiced by demonstrators in the streets. The spectral nature of the underground Maoists was crucial in this regard. The CPP-NPA seemed to invite fabulous portrayals and mystifications on the part of the government. As Eduardo Lachica put it in 1970,

If a Manilan does not read the newspapers, he would never suspect that a dissident struggle was going on in the countryside only 50 kilometers north of the capital. Most Manilans go through their daily rounds, completely unaffected by what is going on in Central Luzon. One sometimes wonders indeed whether the Huks are not just a convenient invention of the Armed Forces for purposes of raising their budget. . . . The Department of National Defense is the only legitimate source of day-to-day information about the Huks and one of the few agencies officially quotable on the subject. . . . The Huks thus carry on a strangely twilight existence on the front pages based entirely on what the AFP claims they are doing.⁶⁸

In a series of dazzling pseudo-events that call to mind the covert operations described by Rogin, Marcos would produce “visible evidence” of the communist threat. His anticommunist performance was used not to protect “free institutions,” however, but to justify the imposition of martial law in the country.

Marcos’s uptake of the covert spectacle began with a public bloodbath. On August 21, 1971, at least three fragmentation grenades were hurled at the speaker’s stage at a Liberal Party rally in downtown Manila’s Plaza Miranda. Over ten thousand people were present to witness the presentation of candidates for the November congressional and local elections. Nine people were killed in the explosion. All the Liberal Party’s eight senatorial candidates were among the more than one hundred persons seriously injured. Broadcast before a live national audience, the attack was the most shocking political crime the country had ever seen, an event described by Gregg Jones as the “Philippine equivalent of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.”⁶⁹

Marcos’s opponents widely believed that the president had himself ordered the massacre—a suspicion that acquired the status of fact until the 1988 confessions of top-ranking CPP-NPA officials revealed that Sison was the true mastermind behind the attack.⁷⁰ Be that as it may, Marcos manipulated the trauma unleashed by the event for his own political purposes. Eerily reminiscent of Kennedy’s alarmist performance during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Marcos yet again played the role of heroic leader for the national audience, and in a highly dramatic televised address, declared a state of national emergency. Marcos’s televised message climaxed with his announcement that he had suspended the writ of habeas corpus.

As radical students and labor leaders were simultaneously being rounded up, Marcos dropped a second bombshell, announcing the discovery of the CPP-NPA’s “July-August plan” to burn Manila to the ground and assassinate government officials and prominent citizens.⁷¹ “Subversives have made this plan,” Marcos told the national audience. “We are aware of the fact that they have certain signals for their members, and these signals are supposed to then mark the initiation of aggressive action.”⁷²

Six months later, an outbreak of terrorist bombings seemed to confirm Marcos’s claim that the communists were communicating by deadly “signals.” In March 1972 the target was the Arca Building; in April, it was the Filipinas Orient Airways office; in May, the porch of the South Vietnamese embassy; in June, the Philippine Trust Company; in July, the Philam Life Building. Later that month, after an American Express office was bombed, authorities discovered an unexploded bomb in the Senate’s publications office. The bombings continued almost daily throughout August, hitting the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company office, the Philippine Sugar Institute, and the Department of Social Welfare and Development, among others.⁷³

The so-called terrorist attacks occurred late at night or early in the morning, when the bombing targets were virtually empty. In some cases, the explosives were discovered before they could be detonated. Except for the bombing of a department store, in which one woman was killed and forty-one persons injured, no serious injuries were reported.⁷⁴ The well-timed attacks were clearly intended to amplify the national trauma generated by the Plaza Miranda massacre. To borrow Rogin’s terms, the attacks had become interchangeable parts in a string of crisis spectacles, each one producing a sensory overload that reduced to invisibility the corollary countersubversive measures taken by the state.

The Plaza Miranda massacre and the terrorist bombings were all conducive to spectacularization. Each event generated intense, short-lived, and repeatable images of apocalyptic violence that Marcos used to represent the invisible threat of “subversion” in the nation. Like the covert operations described by Rogin, these mass-mediated events were significant for their intended demonstration effect. Whether they were taken as evidence of the CPP-NPA’s strength (confirming Marcos’s warnings) or as signs of Marcos’s red-scare tactics (confirming his cunning), they made it abundantly clear that Marcos was in control—that he had the power to intervene.

Preparing for the Coup: A Propaganda Film

During the final countdown to martial law, the Marcos administration released a propaganda film that was a retrospective summary of the First Quarter Storm as well as a chilling preview of Marcos’s final coup.⁷⁵ Designed as an anticommunist primer, the film speaks in the language of U.S. political demonology. And yet, in transforming Marcos’s covert operations into political spectacles, the film, titled The Threat—Communism, is also a self-reflexive commentary on the difficulties of representing what the president called subversion.

The film makes the case that the violent demonstrations of the First Quarter Storm were but surface manifestations of a deeper social evil that paradoxically defied visualization. The film opens with a disembodied voice intoning, “is the communist threat real or imaginary?” Standard pedagogical devices of the newsreel format—authoritative voice-over narration, expository titles, dramatic commentative music—are employed to weave horrific images of the demonstrations into an unequivocal argument for the affirmative. “The purpose of this documentary film,” the unseen narrator states, “is to show that the danger is real.” The narration traces a dramatic arc that begins with the capture in June 1969 of “communist documents” revealing a possible plot to overthrow the government,⁷⁶ followed by the violent demonstrations of 1970, and ends with the recent wave of terrorism initiated by the Plaza Miranda bombings.

Conceding that visible signs of the state’s antisubversion military campaigns would seem too drastic to the average citizen, the film argues that anything less would open the floodgates to invisible subversive forces. Parroting the defensive nationalism of the Kennedy era, the film asks the citizen whose “apathy stems from a lack of knowledge of the gravity of the situation” to put his or her faith in “the president and the members of our military community who have access to classified information.”

As the primary target of the film’s message, the citizen is crucially invoked as an ethically incomplete subject whose fundamentally flawed knowledge of the political situation demands urgent attention. For in contrast to this cipher is a political savvy other, the subversive, which the film defines as one engaged in covert activities “calculated to undermine our national soil.” Photographs of CPP leaders fraternizing with “Chinese Communists” are repeatedly presented as evidence of the otherness of this estranged element of the national community.⁷⁷

In casting the CPP-NPA as secret agents of communist China, the film presents a version of political demonology to draw rigid boundaries between citizens and subversives. It would be helpful to recall Rogin’s take on the countersubversive tradition in U.S. political culture. Pivoting on fears of secret penetration and social contamination, U.S. political demonology has historically relied on visible markers of otherness to perpetuate an image of a “self-making people, engaged in a national purifying mission.” But the anticommunist moment in the history of U.S. countersubversion marks a critical shift. Because the subversives in question are no longer identified along clear racial and ethnic lines, it is now imperative to discover exactly who is under foreign control—hence the central importance of the surveillance state.⁷⁸ The film borrows the form, if not the content, of political demonology to legitimize the amassment of secret intelligence by the Department of National Defense to profile the CPP-NPA and decimate its ranks. In doing so, it implicitly presents state efforts to weed out the Maoist threat as a mirror image, if not an extension of, the anticommunist mission of the United States.

The binary opposition between citizens and subversives is secured by a series of stylistic moves. Handheld, high-contrast black-and-white footage of the First Quarter Storm captures the iconography of student dissidence. The students are shown engaging in now-legendary acts of defiance—provoking police with lascivious slogans, torching an effigy of the president, hurling rocks at military personnel, setting fire to buildings and cars. We cut to daytime shots of random citizens navigating a bustling city in the light of day. These normative shots of a disciplined citizenry clearly stand in stark contrast to the nighttime shots of students “chanting communist slogans” against the backdrop of a burning city. The film thus co-opts the students’ affective performance of nonnormative conduct to present radical youths as a savage, anarchic force flouting the codes of emotional restraint that diacritically define the public sphere. The association of the dissidents with darkness and their identification with animalistic drives and regressive tendencies are the cinematic correlates of political demonology. The film uses these stock tropes to stigmatize and dehumanize the students.⁷⁹

As the film proceeds to trace the mounting escalation of political violence in 1971, the “subversives” in question ironically become more and more invisible. The visual traces of their personhood become increasingly rare, in inverse proportion to the tally of their offenses. Thus, police procedural photographs of bombsites and captured weapons gradually replace the news footage of the First Quarter Storm with which the film begins. The viewer is asked to make a leap of faith, to connect the fully embodied representations of the demonstrations with these disembodied symbols of “terrorism” at the film’s climax. One such photograph presents an array of carefully labeled explosives (“nitrogen liquid, pill boxes, Molotov bombs”), presumably the subversives’ weapons of choice. The pithy caption reads: “Are these legitimate tools of dissent?” By fiat, objects like these are made to stand in for the absent subversives, who are ultimately knowable to the citizen only from the trail of destruction they are alleged to leave behind.

While self-consciously drawing attention to the authenticity of the images (“all the events depicted here are actual happenings”), the documentary grapples with an inescapable problem: how to represent subversion. All but sensationalizing the First Quarter Storm, the film has a decidedly alarmist tone calculated to convince the incredulous citizen that a full-scale urban guerrilla war was not far from happening. And yet, the film insists that evidence of this war can come to light only if subversive forces are allowed to gain ground. The government is thus placed in the untenable position of making this invisible threat manifest to the citizen and, at the same time, of defusing it. In this zero-sum game, the subversives in question are either allowed too much power or none at all.

A clip of President 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.