President-Elect Bongbong Marcos and Vice President-Elect Sara Duterte. INQUIRER FILE
NEW YORK—Some friends have pointed out that the allegations of electoral fraud conducted by the Marcos-Duterte campaign are credible enough to possibly render the results invalid. There are reports in widely disparate regions of the country where such manipulation seems to have been exercised in order to decisively swing the vote in favor of BBM and Sara Duterte.
The Commission on Elections, being packed by Duterte appointees, is unlikely to seriously investigate such allegations, much less overturn the results. Nevertheless by highlighting the possibility of massive cheating the opposition keeps the spotlight on the dubious moral and ethical character of the incoming administration.
We do need to accept that the strategic and well-funded use of social media by the Marcos-Duterte campaign, as stated in my previous column, did persuade the voters who hadn’t been born during the martial law era, or if they were, were too young to remember its brutal rule, that those two decades of Marcos’s rule were indeed a “golden age” or at the very least view the well-documented history of Marcosian plunder and human rights abuses with a skeptical eye.
The arena of social media right now is essentially Wild West territory, i.e., no reliable laws exist to mandate responsible behavior, where the fastest gunslingers need not fear any sheriff—non-existent to begin with. If there is no agreement on facts, proven by innumerable records and eyewitness accounts, then history can be and has been rewritten to fit narrow agendas. History itself becomes a victim, a desaparecido.
BBM’s claim that the martial-law years under his late father’s dictatorial rule was a “golden age” simply goes against the facts. By incessantly promoting this canard, and having that canard multiplied by so-called influencers, the truth gets drowned out, validating Goebbels’ observation that a lie repeated often enough takes on the appearance of truth. In addition, the BBM-Duterte trolls spread false and vicious rumors about Vice-President Leni Robredo, BBM’s main rival whose integrity is unimpeachable.
In the topsy-turvy world that the Internet makes possible, everything is up for grabs, what may be true today may be rendered false tomorrow. And clearly the incoming administration intends to continue rewriting history: Sara Duterte is set to become the Department of Education Secretary. The books that bear her department’s imprimatur will each be a Trojan Horse, giving a rosy tint to the years under Ferdinand Marcos, and conversely, in all probability, portraying the 1986 People Power uprising as an overblown staged attempt by a dedicated coterie of left-wingers, rather than a nationwide cri de coeur so eloquently expressed by the slogan at that time: Tama Na! Sobra Na! Palitan Na! (Enough! Too Much Already! Time for Change!)
And you can bet that the orgies of extrajudicial killings carried out under the watch of her father, Rodrigo Roa Duterte, will continue to be downplayed, even whitewashed.
Will official history under the younger Duterte obfuscate how the country’s foreign debt had ballooned to $26 billion by the time Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos and their family fled to Hawaii—a 4,300 percent increase of the debt that in 1965 was a very manageable $600 million? How will her education department portray the institutionalization of crony capitalism that made well-placed friends of the conjugal dictators fabulously wealthy—friends such as Eduardo “Danding” Cojuangco, Roberto Benedicto, Antonio Floreindo, and Lucio Tan, allowing them monopolies on the coconut, sugar, banana, and tobacco industries respectively, with not a single one of them spending a day in jail? At the same time, the Marcos regime engineered the takeover of conglomerates headed by opposition figures, the prime example being country’s biggest energy company Meralco, controlled by the old-money, Visayas-based Lopez family.
These are but a partial enumeration of the multitude of sins committed against the body politic. Will the wholesale effort to scrub history of these be even possible? That remains to be seen, but certainly over the next six years enough of that period, and the period under Duterte père, will either be completely written out or recast in a more positive light to fit the false narrative of a “golden age.”
The enfeebled state of Philippine democracy, such as it is, cannot be solely ascribed to the Marcoses and the Dutertes. There is much blame to be shared in a political landscape dominated by family dynasties. In varying degrees, all of them have been complicit in seeing to it that the promise of democratic space held out by the 1986 uprising never fully bloomed.
(To be continued)
Copyright L.H. Francia 2022
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