Month: September 2022

This page is under construction.

This page is under construction.

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In September 2018, Did a Marcos Lie Today? (DAMLT) went live online on Twitter and on Facebook. DAMLT, self-classified as an education website, is an effort by the Third World Studies Center’s Marcos Regime Research group to tell the truth about the Marcoses. Since the accounts became active, the social media accounts have been uploading material from various sources—including, but not limited to, declassified communications and assessments from the United States Department of State, studies by international financial institutions such as the World Bank, recently digitized records on Philippine guerillas (fake and genuine) from the United States National Archives, and recently accessible digitized versions of documents taken from Malacanang after the EDSA Revolution—to counter the lies that the Marcoses and their sycophantic followers kept regurgitating online or through mass media. The documents are at times uploaded unadorned, but were often incorporated into videos or transformed into memes—i.e., made palatable to the social media consumer. Or public history for those who have to navigate through tons of online clutter.

The project set out to examine the relationship of pro-Marcos disinformation disseminated online, the printed propaganda that preceded such disinformation, and, to a limited extent, the distorted memorialization of Ferdinand E. Marcos via physical museums and monuments. Our attempt to study these linkages started with gathering online disinformation in favor of the Marcoses as debunked by online fact checkers. Over a hundred distinct lies were gathered and entered into a database-in-progress. Concurrently, an attempt was made to understand the interconnections among those involved in the production of printed propaganda in favor of the Marcoses, with the intent of establishing links, if any, between “offline” and “online” propagandists. Network maps of these individuals/groups were constructed.

We found that 1) the heritage sites that the Marcoses built for their late patriarch in Ilocos Norte are built on propaganda books extolling Ferdinand Marcos’s greatness and that of his dictatorial regime; 2) the Marcoses, their loyalists, and other allies have been producing and reproducing propaganda all these years, with the intended effect of conferring a patina of well-researched scholarship to Marcos lies; 3) the verbiage produced by the pro-Marcos authors has a limited but important influence on the new forms of disinformation that pro-Marcos sites in social media are producing; and 4) the weak link between the current online disinformation and the supposed scholarly, or at the very least, journalistic reiteration of “Marcos truths” points to an important feature of Marcos propaganda production: the point is not to build on an existing lie or an outlandish claim but to saturate the audience with all sorts of information up to a point that the propaganda effort appears to be without an author, that the algorithm of the social media networks geared towards the new and the ridiculous hides the hands of the Marcoses themselves.

The study aims to definitively determine whether the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos profited from his involvement in the 1956 Reparations Agreement between Japan and the Philippines. The explores a bilateral anatomy of plunder—of how the Philippine dictator and his cronies, Japanese businessmen, and politicians colluded to loot Japanese war reparations—by revisiting the literature on kleptocracy, Marcos’s authoritarian rule, and issues of the reparations agreement, examining old and new sources that have recently become available (e.g., Philippine Reparations Commission reports, newspaper clippings, files from the Presidential Commission on Good Government, and declassified US intelligence reports), and consulting Filipino and Japanese scholars who previously worked on these subjects. Existing studies on Marcos and the reparations agreement did not reckon with the sources of information that this proposed research would like to examine, sources that will help untangle the complexities that the reparations agreement caused on both Japan and the Philippines.