World
The Philippines Toppled One Marcos. Now His Son May Become President.
MANILA — They bopped alongside to the beat of a martial legislation anthem up to date right into a pop tune. They cheered when an A-list superstar proclaimed that the spirit of Ferdinand E. Marcos, the previous dictator, was alive. And when Mr. Marcos’s son and namesake held up the peace signal made well-liked by his father a technology in the past, the shrieking crowds mirrored it in return.
It’s election season within the Philippines, and historical past is being rewritten, one marketing campaign rally at a time.
Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has spent many years defending his household’s title towards accusations of greed and corruption and downplaying the legacy of his father’s brutal rule. Throughout his presidential marketing campaign, he has portrayed himself as a unifier, whereas false narratives on-line reimagine his father’s regime as a “golden period” within the nation’s historical past.
Now, as patriarch of the Marcos dynasty, Mr. Marcos is anticipated to be the primary individual to win the presidential election within the Philippines by a majority in additional than three many years.
The race is being solid as a contest between those that bear in mind the previous and people who are accused of making an attempt to distort it, the final chapter in a brazen try to absolve the Marcoses of wrongdoing and quash any effort to carry the household accountable. 5 years of President Rodrigo Duterte — a powerful Marcos ally identified for his bloody struggle on medication and for jailing his critics — could have presaged a Marcos household comeback.
“It is going to decide not simply our future however our previous,” stated Maria Ressa, a journalist and Nobel Prize winner who’s an outspoken critic of each Mr. Duterte and Mr. Marcos.
The Marcoses are accused of looting as a lot as $10 billion from the federal government earlier than fleeing to Hawaii in 1986, when the peaceable “Folks Energy” protests toppled the Marcos regime. The household returned to the nation shortly after the demise of the elder Mr. Marcos in 1989.
Regardless of the exile, the Marcos title by no means actually left the political institution.
Mr. Marcos, identified by his boyhood nickname, “Bongbong,” served as vice governor, governor and congressman in Ilocos Norte, the household stronghold, for a lot of the interval between the Eighties and 2010. That 12 months, he entered the nationwide political scene when he was elected senator. Imelda Marcos, his 92-year-old mom, ran for president twice and misplaced within the Nineties.
Rehabilitating the household title has been a recurring theme. Over the many years, the Marcoses have sought to focus on younger voters with no reminiscence of martial legislation or the torture and killing of political prisoners. Fifty-six % of the voting inhabitants within the Philippines is aged between 18 and 41, and most didn’t witness the atrocities of the Marcos regime — splendid circumstances for the unfold of disinformation, opponents say.
In January, Twitter stated it had eliminated greater than 300 accounts selling Mr. Marcos’s presidential bid for violating guidelines on spam and manipulation. The influential Roman Catholic Church within the Philippines stated in an announcement that it was appalled by the “historic revisionism” within the election, and “the try to delete or destroy our collective reminiscence via the seeding of lies and false narratives.”
Mr. Marcos’s spokesman, Vic Rodriguez, stated there was “no certainty” that the Twitter accounts belonged to his supporters.
Final week, Meta, Fb’s mum or dad firm, stated it had suspended greater than 400 election-related accounts, pages and teams for violating its requirements. The corporate cited a video on Mr. Marcos’s official Fb web page that falsely accused his election rival, Leni Robredo, who’s vice chairman, of dishonest within the 2016 vice-presidential race. (The president and vice chairman are elected individually within the Philippines.)
A number of teams have sought to disqualify Mr. Marcos’s candidacy, pointing to a 1995 tax evasion conviction and the $3.9 billion in property taxes that his household nonetheless owes the federal government. Mr. Marcos, 64, has disregarded the assaults as “pretend information,” and refused to take part in almost all presidential debates.
At a rally in Las Piñas, Ella Mae Alipao, 15, stated that she received most of her information about Mr. Marcos from TikTok and Fb, and that she didn’t “consider a lot in books.” After Mr. Marcos’s father was ousted, Ms. Alipao stated, “the Filipinos came upon how good he was; that’s once they realized that they need to have made him president for an extended time.”
Mr. Marcos has made comparable feedback: “I’m not going to vindicate my father’s title as a result of his title doesn’t want vindication,” he stated in 1995. “I’m so assured that historical past will decide him nicely.”
Within the 36 years because the father was ousted, many Filipinos have turn out to be disillusioned with the nation’s democracy. Poverty is widespread, earnings inequality stays excessive and few individuals belief their elected leaders. When Mr. Duterte got here to energy, he promised radical change, ushering in a brand new period of strongman politics that has been embraced by many throughout the nation.
Mr. Duterte shaped an alliance with the Marcoses early in his five-year presidential time period. In 2016, he organized for the daddy’s physique to be moved to the Philippines’ equal of Arlington Nationwide Cemetery, regardless of protests. And it was not till Sara Duterte, Ms. Duterte’s daughter, made the shock announcement that she would run for vice chairman as an alternative of president that Mr. Marcos gained his massive lead within the polls.
In current weeks, the opposition has been working furiously to counter the false narratives on-line concerning the Marcoses. Sergio Osmena III, a former political prisoner, senator and a grandson of the fourth president of the Philippines, stated he had employed 10,000 volunteers to wage a counteroffensive towards the Marcos marketing campaign by releasing movies on the financial devastation and human rights violations of the Marcos years.
“It’s in all probability too late,” he stated.
The Marcoses have been remarkably adept at avoiding jail time. Mr. Marcos was sentenced to as much as three years in jail in 1995 for tax-related convictions, however his sentence was overturned on attraction two years later, regardless that his conviction remained on the books. In 2018, his mom was sentenced to as much as 11 years in jail for creating personal foundations to cover her unexplained wealth. She posted bail, and the Supreme Courtroom continues to be reviewing her attraction.
The federal government has recovered simply $3.3 billion of the estimated $10 billion that the Marcoses are accused of stealing, however $2.4 billion in belongings are nonetheless beneath litigation, with varied teams tussling over them. Ought to Mr. Marcos win the presidency, many concern these proceedings, together with the $3.9 billion in property taxes, can be swept away, cementing the false concept that the Marcoses are harmless.
Amongst some younger voters, that view has already taken maintain. “If he’s a thief, how come he hasn’t been jailed?” requested Rjay Garcia, a 19-year-old rug salesman, at a current rally within the metropolis of Santa Rosa. Mr. Garcia stated that he believed the instances towards Mr. Marcos’s household have been meant “to destroy his repute,” and that he had “by no means heard” of the Folks Energy protests.
Even these with intimate reminiscences of the nation’s battle for democracy could really feel it’s time to transfer on.
Benjamin Abalos Jr., Mr. Marcos’s marketing campaign supervisor, led protests towards the Marcos regime as a pupil council officer of the Ateneo Legislation College. He stated he by no means talked about these days along with his candidate. “No matter justice was achieved in these 36 years, I feel that’s already sufficient,” he stated. “Maybe now it’s about shifting ahead.”
Such attitudes might sign {that a} full rehabilitation of the Marcos title could quickly be full. The household now features a governor, a senator, a mayor and a attainable congressman. Mr. Marcos’s eldest son, Ferdinand Alexander, 28, is working for a congressional seat in Ilocos Norte, the place his cousin, Matthew Marcos Manotoc, is governor.
Mr. Marcos has seized on his alliance with Ms. Duterte to current himself as a unifier who is able to lead, however his political monitor file is generally skinny.
Whereas in his six years within the Senate he helped go legal guidelines on defending older individuals and increasing emergency reduction to youngsters, almost 70 % of the 52 legal guidelines he pushed for have been on designating holidays and festivals, renaming highways and reapportioning provinces and cities, a assessment by The New York Occasions discovered.
An investigation in 2015 discovered that his résumé on the Senate web site had been embellished to incorporate a bachelor of arts from the College of Oxford. The college later stated he didn’t full his diploma, however obtained as an alternative a particular diploma in social research. Mr. Marcos has denied misrepresenting his schooling.
Although Mr. Marcos is seen because the front-runner within the Might 9 election, rallies for Ms. Robredo, the vice chairman, have drawn lots of of hundreds of younger supporters in current weeks. Hecklers have shouted “magnanakaw,” or “thief,” at Mr. Marcos’s motorcade, and the petitions to disqualify his candidacy are nonetheless beneath attraction, although specialists say they’re unlikely to succeed.
“The battle of man towards energy is the battle of reminiscence towards forgetting,” stated Ms. Ressa, the journalist, recalling a quote from the writer Milan Kundera. She described the election as a “microcosm of a worldwide battle for info.”
“If info don’t win,” she stated, “we’ll have a complete new historical past.”
Before the answers to life’s questions fit in our pocket, you used to have to turn a dial. If you were lucky, Phil Donahue would be on, ready to guide you toward enlightenment. In a stroke of deluxe good fortune, Dr. Ruth Westheimer might have stopped by to be the enlightenment. He was the search engine. She was a trusted result.
Donahue hailed from Cleveland. The windshield glasses, increasingly snowy thatch of hair, marble eyes, occasional pair of suspenders and obvious geniality said “card catalog,” “manager of the ’79 Reds,” “Stage Manager in a Chevy Motors production of ‘Our Town.’” Dr. Ruth was Donahue’s antonym, a step stool to his straight ladder. She kept her hair in a butterscotch helmet, fancied a uniform of jacket-blouse-skirt and came to our aid, via Germany, with a voice of crinkled tissue paper. Not even eight years separated them, yet so boyish was he and so seasoned was she that he read as her grandson. (She maybe reached his armpit.) Together and apart, they were public servants, American utilities.
Donahue was a journalist. His forum was the talk show, but some new strain in which the main attraction bypassed celebrities. People — every kind of them — lined up to witness other people being human, to experience Donahue’s radical conduit of edification, identification, curiosity, shock, wonder, outrage, surprise and dispute, all visible in the show’s televisual jackpot: cutaways to us, reacting, taking it all in, nodding, gasping. When a celebrity made it to the “Donahue” stage — Bill Clinton, say, La Toya Jackson, the Judds — they were expected to be human, too, to be accountable for their own humanity. From 1967 to 1996, for more than 6,000 episodes, he permitted us to be accountable to ourselves.
What Donahue knew was that we — women especially — were eager, desperate, to be understood, to learn and learn and learn. We call his job “host” when, really, the way he did it, running that microphone throughout the audience, racing up, down, around, sticking it here then here then over here, was closer to “switchboard operator.” It was “hot dog vendor at Madison Square Garden.” The man got his steps in. He let us do more of the questioning than he did — he would just edit, interpret, clarify. Egalitarianism ruled. Articulation, too. And anybody who needed the mic usually got it.
The show was about both what was on our mind and what had never once crossed it. Atheism. Naziism. Colorism. Childbirth. Prison. Rapists. AIDS. Chippendales, Chernobyl, Cher. Name a fetish, Phil Donahue tried to get to its bottom, sometimes by trying it himself. (Let us never forget the episode when he made his entrance in a long skirt, blouse and pussy bow for one of the show’s many cross-dressing studies.) Now’s the time to add that “Donahue” was a morning talk show. In Philadelphia, he arrived every weekday at 9 a.m., which meant that, in the summers, I could learn about compulsive shopping or shifting gender roles from the same kitchen TV set as my grandmother.
Sex and sexuality were the show’s prime subjects. There was so much that needed confessing, correction, corroboration, an ear lent. For that, Donahue needed an expert. Many times, the expert was Dr. Ruth, a godsend who didn’t land in this country until she was in her late 20s and didn’t land on television until she was in her 50s. Ruth Westheimer arrived to us from Germany, where she started as Karola Ruth Siegel and strapped in as her life corkscrewed, as it mocked fiction. Her family most likely perished in the Auschwitz death camps after she was whisked to the safety of a Swiss children’s home, where she was expected to clean. The twists include sniper training for one of the military outfits that would become the Israel Defense Forces, maiming by cannonball on her 20th birthday, doing research at a Planned Parenthood in Harlem, single motherhood and three husbands. She earned her doctorate from Columbia University, in education, and spent her postdoc researching human sexuality. And because her timing was perfect, she emerged at the dawn of the 1980s, an affable vector of an era’s craze for gnomic sages (Zelda Rubinstein, Linda Hunt, Yoda), masterpiece branding and the nasty.
Hers was the age of Mapplethorpe and Madonna, of Prince, Skinemax and 2 Live Crew. On her radio and television shows, in a raft of books and a Playgirl column and through her promiscuous approach to talk-show appearances, she aimed to purge sex of shame, to promote sexual literacy. Her feline accent and jolly innuendo pitched, among other stuff, the Honda Prelude, Pepsi, Sling TV and Herbal Essences. (“Hey!” she offers to a young elevator passenger. “This is where we get off.”) The instructions for Dr. Ruth’s Game of Good Sex says it can be played by up to four couples; the board is vulval and includes stops at “Yeast Infection,” “Chauvinism” and “Goose Him.”
On “Donahue,” she is direct, explicit, dispelling, humorous, clear, common-sensical, serious, vivid. A professional therapist. It was Donahue who handled the comedy. On one visit in 1987, a caller needs advice about a husband who cheats because he wants to have sex more often than she does. Dr. Ruth tells Donahue that if the caller wants to keep the marriage, and her husband wants to do it all the time, “then what she should do is to masturbate him. And it’s all right for him to masturbate himself also a few times.” The audience is hear-a-pin-drop rapt or maybe just squirmy. So Donahue reaches into his parochial-school-student war chest and pulls out the joke about the teacher who tells third-grade boys, “Don’t play with yourself, or you’ll go blind.” And Donahue raises his hand like a kid at the back of the classroom and asks, “Can I do it till I need glasses?” Westheimer giggles, maybe noticing the large pair on Donahue’s face. This was that day’s cold open.
They were children of salesmen, these two; his father was in the furniture business, hers sold what people in the garment industry call notions. They inherited a salesman’s facility for people and packaging. When a “Donahue” audience member asks Westheimer whether her own husband believes she practices what she preaches, she says this is why she never brings him anywhere. “He would tell you and Phil: ‘Do not listen to her. It’s all talk,’” which cracks the audience up.
But consider what she talked about — and consider how she said it. My favorite Dr. Ruth word was “pleasure.” From a German mouth, the word conveys what it lacks with an American tongue: sensual unfurling. She vowed to speak about sex to mass audiences using the proper terminology. Damn the euphemisms. People waited as long as a year and a half for tickets to “Donahue” so they could damn them, too. But of everything Westheimer pitched, of all the terms she precisely used, pleasure was her most cogent product, a gift she believed we could give to others, a gift she swore we owed ourselves.
I miss the talk show that Donahue reinvented. I miss the way Dr. Ruth talked about sex. It’s fitting somehow that this antidogmatic-yet-priestly Irish Catholic man would, on occasion, join forces with a carnal, lucky-to-be-alive Jew to urge the exploration of our bodies while demonstrating respect, civility, reciprocation. They believed in us, that we were all interesting, that we could be trustworthy panelists in the discourse of being alive. Trauma, triviality, tubal ligation: Let’s talk about it! Fear doesn’t seem to have occurred to them. Or if it did, it was never a deterrent. Boldly they went. — And with her encouragement, boldly we came.
Wesley Morris is a critic at large for The New York Times and a staff writer for the magazine.
A projectile launched into Israel from Yemen overnight into Saturday struck Tel Aviv, resulting in mild injuries to 16 people, according to Israeli officials.
Israel’s military said after sirens sounded in central Israel that the projectile landed in Tel Aviv’s southern Jaffa area following failed attempts to intercept.
“Following the sirens that sounded a short while ago in central Israel, one projectile launched from Yemen was identified and unsuccessful interception attempts were made,” the military said on Telegram.
ISRAELI AIRSTRIKES TARGET YEMEN’S HOUTHI-CONTROLLED CAPITAL OF SANAA, PORT CITY OF HODEIDA
Israeli emergency services work at the scene of a missile strike that, according to Israel’s military, was launched from Yemen and landed in Jaffa, south of Tel Aviv, Israel, December 21, 2024. (Reuters)
Iranian-backed Houthi rebels have repeatedly launched missile attacks from Yemen against Israel since the war in Gaza began in October of last year, but the incident overnight represents a rare instance in which Israel failed to intercept.
Israel has retaliated by striking multiple targets in areas in Yemen controlled by the Houthis.
HAMAS’ GAZA DEATH TOLL QUESTIONED AS NEW REPORT SAYS ITS LED TO ‘WIDESPREAD INACCURACIES AND DISTORTION’
People gather at the scene of a missile strike that, according to Israel’s military, was launched from Yemen and landed in Jaffa, south of Tel Aviv, Israel, December 21, 2024. (Reuters)
“A short time ago, reports were received of a weapon falling in one of the settlements within the Tel Aviv district,” Israeli police said Saturday.
On Thursday, the Israeli military said it intercepted a missile launched from Yemen, with shrapnel resulting in extensive damage to a school near Tel Aviv.
A 50-year-old man was arrested at the scene of the attack in Magdeburg on Friday evening, but as of Saturday, the reason behind his actions remained unclear.
At least five people, including a toddler, have been killed and dozens injured after a car ploughed into a crowd at a busy outdoor Christmas market in Magdeburg, a city in eastern Germany.
Authorities are describing the incident as a “deliberate attack.”
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser are at the scene of the attack in Magdeburg. Faeser has confirmed that federal police are actively supporting the investigation into the tragedy.
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