The Philippines has long been something of an exception in Southeast Asia. Colonised in a somewhat desultory fashion by the Spanish from the mid-16th century it was acquired by the US after a short and bloody war with Spain in 1898, in the last great bout of US imperialism.
Catholic and with high rates of fluent English speakers, the Philippines looks in some ways more familiar than say Indonesia to a Western perspective. Granted independence after World War II, they adopted a US style presidential system. Ferdinand Marcos was elected President in 1965 and declared martial law in 1972. He was ousted by a popular uprising in 1986.
Keith Dalton was a journalist based in Manilla during most of this period. In Reinventing Marcos he seeks to remind us that Marcos was a corrupt and murderous dictator and that the attempts of his son, Bong Bong, elected President in 2022, to rehabilitate his old man, should be taken with several kilos of salt. Dalton’s assessment of the Marcos government and Marcos himself is scathing.
Marcos’s career was littered with lies – from a fake military career through to unrealistic promises on electrification of rural areas. Along the way he systematically pillaged the nation of an estimated $10 billion. Given all this, it makes Bong Bong’s election in 2022 hard to understand. Notwithstanding its title, however, Reinventing Marcos does not attempt to analyse how this could happen beyond references in its prologue to the power of social media in the post-truth age. In this regard at least the Philippines is no exception.
Reviewed by Grant Hansen
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