Former Philippine president, Ferdinand E. Marcos died a dictator. But today, on social media, Marcos is a hero.
Social media disinformation has turned Marcos into a man he never was, whitewashed his dictatorship, and concocted a false legacy that helped his son become the nation's second President Marcos.
Former foreign correspondent, Keith Dalton, remembers the real Marcos before the social media makeover.
Keith Dalton began his career as a foreign correspondent in the Philippines inside a wardrobe. In his underpants. Sitting on a child's stool. A lightbulb, fed through a drilled hole in the wardrobe ceiling, allowed him to read his radio script. Empty egg cartons nailed to the inside of the wardrobe deadened the sounds of the dogs, the planes, and the cars outside. Often, Dalton was so hot – even in his underpants – sweat trickled down his body and formed little pools beneath the stool.
'Home' was a converted garage. When he first applied for a telephone, Dalton was told he would have to wait 15 years. Mobile phones, laptop computers, and the Internet had not yet been invented.
This was Manila in 1977. Dalton – a 25-year-old Australian journalist – had just arrived in the Philippines' capital after journeying alone for almost 18 months through Southeast Asia. Along the way, he suffered malaria, dysentery, kidney stones, and gout. Four days upriver in the remote jungles of Borneo, he was the first white man seen by the children of ex-headhunters.
Dalton was a traveller – with a typewriter in his backpack – who chose Southeast Asia as his 'journalistic baptism'. Writing as he went, he travelled by bus, train, truck, cargo ship, and canoe through Malaysia, Thailand, Burma, Singapore, Indonesia, and Borneo on his way to the Philippines, his chosen destination.
It was in the Philippines – with its totalitarian government, martial law, endemic corruption, human rights abuses, a communist revolt, and an Islamic insurrection – that Dalton believed he could become the self-made foreign correspondent he had always wanted to be.
It was hard. He was alone in a land of 55 million Filipinos. He knew no one, had no local contacts, no office, no work colleagues, no one to tell him the 'dos and don'ts'. He learned fast. A big bribe got him that telephone within a week, not 15 years.
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), and occasionally The Washington Post; Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC); Radio Netherlands; Radio New Zealand; and Radio Television Hong Kong.
Dalton stayed 10 years – 1977 to 1987 – regarded as probably the most tumultuous decade in modern Philippine history. He arrived when President Ferdinand E. Marcos was at the height of his martial law powers. And he was there when Marcos was deposed in a People Power revolution in 1986.
Marcos was regarded as one of the twentieth century's most corrupt and ruthless leaders – responsible for more than 100,000 deaths, imprisonments, torture, and 'disappearances'. But a concerted social media disinformation campaign has upturned history and transformed Marcos from 'dictator' to 'hero'. Most Filipinos today believe this false legacy. That's what jolted Dalton out of retirement.
It was not his intention to write this book. He didn't want to, until he had to. He needed to tell his first-hand accounts of the Marcos regime. He needed to set the record straight, to refute the scurrilous lies that have replaced irrefutable facts about the Marcos regime. Dalton remembers Marcos 'the autocrat' who politically gutted and economically plundered the Philippines
Social media disinformation has mythologised and propagandised Marcos, whitewashed his regime, and fabricated a blemish-free account of his despotic rule. Social media has 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. 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. The Philippines is a 'case study' in how social media disinformation and manipulation helped win a presidential election.
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 was 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 that 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-spot 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 has written an informative, often harrowing 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.
Keith Dalton was for 20 years a journalist and a foreign correspondent. Then, for another 20 years he was a speechwriter, a press secretary, and a corporate communications manager (Westpac Bank 1993-96) and the Special Broadcasting Service, SBS (Australia's multilingual and multicultural national broadcaster - 1996-2007).
