Resist attempts to rewrite history, journalist urges Filipinos

Sheila Coronel

MANILA, Philippines — Filipinos must push back against another attempt to rewrite history to allow themselves to make informed decisions and not be misled by disinformation, as the country is at the cusp of another election that will choose its leaders for the next six years, veteran journalist and professor Sheila Coronel said on Saturday.

Speaking at this year’s Adrian Cristobal Lecture Series, Coronel cited in detail the supposed attempts of a well-funded disinformation machinery to mislead Filipinos and make them forget the reasons for the popular uprising 36 years ago that led to the ouster of a dictator, former President Ferdinand Marcos.

“‘Make history,’ Marcos wrote in his diary in 1971, ‘and then, write it.’ We made history and we can do so again, and this time we should make sure we write it. We should make sure we right it,” she said.

Speaking through virtual appearance from the United States, Coronel, who is a journalism professor at Columbia University, cited the resemblance of the strategies that the former dictator used to shape the minds of Filipinos and perpetrate himself to power for 35 years.

According to Coronel, the prospects of another Marcos presidency has been giving her nightmares, and likened the late strongman to a “hungry ghost” that “domains our dreams, lays claim to our memories and feeds on our hopes.”

‘World class plunder’

“It is time to hush this ghost. A Marcos return is inevitable only if we believe it to be; if we surrender our power and agency; if we accept explanation instead of action,” she said.

“I am sleepless because of what the Marcoses say. World-class plunder, torture and murder with no acknowledgement, no apology, no repentance, no attempt at restitution, not even taxes paid on inherited stolen wells,” she said.

She expressed concern that Filipinos are once again enamored to the Marcoses, and that the country is on the cusp of another Marcos presidency, by “propagating the myth of his electoral invincibility and the inevitability of his presidency,” supposedly with the use of disinformation as their main weapon.

“If Marcos has such a hold on our collective imagination, it is in part because of the lies and half-truths. He and his courtiers have told over and over again until they were accepted as fact,” he said.

‘Marcoses selling fantasy’

The Marcos propaganda machinery has “sown so much confusion over the facts, so that even now truth seems elusive,” Coronel said at the lecture series, established by the Cristobal family in collaboration with Unyon ng mga Manunulat sa Pilipinas, or the Writers’ Union of the Philippines.

Coronel offered a number of reasons why presidential aspirant Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., who is leading in recent surveys of presidential preferences, supposedly “paint[ing] an unflattering picture of Filipinos as passive receptacles of Marcos propaganda and social media manipulation.”

“We’ve either been conned or seduced by the Marcoses or we are pawns of a history not of our own making,” she said.

She said the Marcoses had managed to crawl back and stay in power supposedly because of the failure to hold the dictator’s family to account.

“We did not de-Marcosify the country. We send the Marcoses to exile and then welcome them back,” she said.

The country’s political elite may also be partly blamed, Coronel said, as they supposedly helped restore the Marcoses and their allies to power through previous elections, quoting from a paper published by Dela Salle University professor Julian Teehankee.

The Philippines’ “weak” political party system has also supposedly allowed for the “authoritarian contamination of [Filipinos’] political life.”

“Sociologist Jayeel Cornelio of the Ateneo de Manila University says the Marcoses are masters at selling fantasy and the promise of restoring greatness,” she said.

According to Coronel, Marcos Jr. has become popular again among Filipinos supposedly because of “money, [propaganda] machine and social media.”