'IT WAS BETTER DURING MARCOS TIME'

By Philip M. Lustre Jr.

Author's Notes: I posted the following commentary 30 months ago mainly to address the sudden proliferation of Marcos loyalist trolls in social media, particularly FB. These trolls have been posting messages and memes that seek to revise history and argue that the ousted dictator Ferdinand Marcos was the best thing that ever happened in Philippine history. Of course, this is an absolute hogwash. Although Bongbong Marcos had lost in his vice presidential run, these Marcos trolls are still around. They are very vicious. Of course, they are making their last hurrah, hoping that BBM will get a Cabinet post after the one year ban on defeated candidates and run for president in 2022.

As if on cue, social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and the like have been flooded over the last two years by posts that present the Marcos regime as autocratic but somewhat better than the current restored democracy. 

It is not difficult to believe that those posts have been launched by people, or trolls, who quietly worked for Bongbong Marcos ill-fated vice presidential run in 2016. They are still around. They are still vicious, hoping that they could sway public opinion through organized negative campaign.

Their propaganda line is simple: "Mabuti pa noong panahon ni Marcos (it was better during Marcos time)."

Those trolls do not present arguments to justify any semblance of superiority in logic and reason, but they have kept on repeating it over the last two years as a sort of mantra against the restored democracy. They believe that by constantly pummeling that line into the people's consciousness, the people would accept it as a gospel truth.

People who are subjected to the same lies would later believe them as truth, according to Adolf Hitler's propaganda minister. But they do not know that what Joseph Goebbels had preached at the height of Nazi Germany could not be true in this age of social media. Times have changed.

The Marcos sympathizers, or trolls, could be taking advantage of the perceived weaknesses of the outgoing Aquino administration by presenting the Marcos regime as the exact opposite. Of course, they could not base it on historical realities because they know that the Marcos was not in any way better than the present, particularly the outgoing administration.

They are just banking on pure hope that Bongbong Marcos will get a Cabinet post in 2017 and, henceforth, work to pursue the elusive dream to become the next president in 2022.

On the contrary, the Marcos regime is far worse than anyone could imagine. It was a dictatorship. The Filipino people kicked Ferdinand Marcos out of power.

The political mantra was definitely a means to influence the millennials, who comprised almost three-fourths of all votes in the just concluded 2016 presidential polls. It was a way to strengthen the unsuccessful vice presidential run of the dictator's son.

Although BBM lost, he showed considerable strength. The political mantra has worked as he has reached out to voters, or millennials, who have little memory of the past. His candidacy took advantage of what American critic James Fallows earlier said that the Filipinos generally lack a sense of history, or a sense of nationhood.

His vice presidential run, although ill-fated, took advantage of Fallows's observation that Filipinos have a "damaged culture." It was a candidacy premised on everything wrong in the Filipinos.

Bongbong Marcos knew history would not give him the victory in his vice presidential run. But demographics would. He knew the past would haunt him because of his family's continued inability and refusal to issue a public apology for the excesses of the martial law regime. It did as typified by anti-Marcos groups that mushroomed during the height of the political campaign.

He knew history was not on his side because the Filipino people ousted his father in a near bloodless 1986 EDSA People Power Revolution. He knew no amount of revisionism could ever alter what is a historical reality.

But Marcos knew fully well that by 2016, 75 percent of all voters would be 40 years and below. He was banking on demographics as the basis of his vice residential run. By reaching out to that "ignorant" 75 percent, Bongbong Marcos hoped to alter the course of the political wind.

By banking on that mantra, voters could be swayed and blinded by the political illusion that Bongbong was the man of the hour, the savior, who would take the country to the promise land.

It was inconceivable that the older generation would not speak out its collective mind against the martial law regime and its excesses. For sure, grandparents, parents, and older people would educate the younger people about the evils of the martial law regime. Indeed, this happened to deprive the Marcos family of the desired political redemption.

In fact, many people remembered - and they would never forget - the image of an infantile, long-haired son in fatigue uniform, who together with Gen. Fabian Ver, was egging his dictator father in Manila to bomb the throngs of humanity along EDSA during the waning days of the Marcos dictatorship.

The Marcos martial law regime was a failed experiment in constitutional authoritarianism. Using the 1973 Constitution, Marcos launched a dictatorship that only resulted in mass poverty and human misery. The martial law experience had resulted in the following: first, over-centralization of corruption in government; second, crony capitalism; and third, massive violations of human rights violations.

They comprise the dreaded Marcos legacy.

Finding a loophole in the 1935 Constitution that allowed him to declare martial law and used the martial law powers without letup, Marcos imposed one-man rule. He suspended the 1935 Constitution and replaced it by the 1973 Constitution, abolished Congress, closed critical media outfits, muzzled press freedom, wrote finis to our democratic traditions, and launched the country into the uncharted waters of dictatorship.

But Marcos used the martial law regime to his full advantage. He perpetuated himself in power. Absolute power made him absolutely corrupt.

Marcos became susceptible to many abuses, which included cornering those big ticket government contracts, including those that involved foreign contractors and suppliers. He took huge cuts from those projects and deposited them in foreign banks, using fictitious names and foundations.

His fault was that he left plenty of incriminating pieces of evidence in Malacanang when the people's wrath toppled the Marcos regime and drove him and his family to exile in a near bloodless revolution.

Those pieces of evidence they left in Malacanang do not just make him less of a thief. They have confirmed his grand thievery. His regime has been heralded as a kleptocracy, where he and wife Imelda have been regarded as world class kleptocats.

Marcos did not only steal for himself. He created a stable of friends and cronies, who worked with him in his unparalleled and unprecedented raid of the national coffers. He and his cronies created monopolies and controlled various big ticket projects to the utter detriment of the Filipino people.

Roberto Benedicto had the sugar monopoly; Cojuangco, the coconut monopoly; and Lucio Tan, the monopoly of cigarette production, just to mention a few. Other cronies like Rodolfo Cuenca, Herminio Disini, among others had access to the behest loans from government financial institutions, particularly the Development Bank of the Philippines and the Philippine National Bank, or those hundreds of millions of pesos of loans, which were never paid by those cronies and, ergo, went to their pockets.

Marcos also prostituted the military establishment and created his favored coterie of military generals, whom he used to stifle dissent and promote massive human rights violations. Because of the generals' complacency, support, and cooperation, Marcos arrested without court-issued warrants tens of thousands of student activists, political and religious leaders, community workers, peasants, and workers, jailed them indefinitely without any charges, and released them without any explanation.

Marcos also caused the torture of many activists and critics, their summary executions, and their perpetual disappearance from the face of the earth. At no time in history did this kind of human rights violations happened except during the martial law era.

It was an absolute mistake to believe that prices of goods were cheaper during the martial law era, as what those Marcos trolls have been promoting without moral compunction and due diligence.

Because of the profligacy of the Marcos regime and its unabated procurement of foreign credits, particularly commercial ones, to promote big ticket projects, the Marcos government went bankrupt by 1983 and declared it could not pay its billions of dollars of foreign debt.

Because of the decision of the Marcos martial law government to impose a unilateral moratorium on the repayment of its foreign debt, the entire country could not import the needed inputs for production, as many firms could not open letters of credit in the world market and, ergo , had to close shop.

This decision had far reaching, lasting negative consequences for the economy. Many people became jobless; production stood at a standstill; prices soared high. Makati executives, who enjoyed middle-class lifestyle, sold copies of the encyclopedia to eke out a living.

The decline stopped when the people kicked the Marcoses out of power and restored democracy in 1986. It was the people's decision, plain and simple. Hence, it is an absolute mistake to glorify Marcos and his ilk.

His ouster does not mean anything lofty; it is a historical reality that stares every Filipino on his face.

Hence, it is a fatal mistake to compare the Marcos regime and the current restored democracy. There is no point of comparison.

A lot could be said on the imperfections of our restored democracy. But it should not be compared to the rapacity, greed, corruption, and everything evil associated with the Marcos martial law regime.

Hence, those people who say "mabuti pa noong panahon ni Marcos (it was better during the Marcos era)" should be totally ignored. They are paid hacks, who earn a living by shoveling tons of shit, and people, who have holes in their heads. Their mantra is an absolute bull ...