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BY HERBERT VEGO
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Sunday, July 2, 2017
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ONE YEAR has passed since Rodrigo Duterte assumed office as the President of the Philippines who would effect change. Has change come?
To be a bit sarcastic, change has come to Marawi City in the last month of the first year of the Duterte administration. No thanks to the government-versus-ISIS war that has wrecked infrastructure and snuffed out hundreds of lives, thus driving away some 350,000 natives who now face uncertainty. To the cynical, it’s like burning one’s own house to kill rats, cockroaches and other pests thereat.
I am tempted to recall the last paragraph of my previous column where I quoted the first lines of Ramon Magsaysay’s campaign jingle while running for President in 1953:
“Everywhere that you would look, was a bandit or a crook. Peace and order was a joke till Magsaysay pumasok!”
Magsaysay, an auto-mechanic from Iba, Zambalez packaged as “man of the masses,” bested re-electionist Elpidio Quirino on the issue of graft and corruption. The trivial but most potent propaganda that floored Quirino was his having bought a “golden urinal” for himself.
If truth be told, the problems on graft and corruption and peace and order are graver today than they were in Magsaysay’s time when shabu and other illegal drugs were unknown.
Nevertheless I see parallelism between Magsaysay’s and Duterte’s reliance on propaganda as tool to win votes and public adulation – what with the former doing it via radio jingle and the latter via modern media, notably the hitherto unheard-of Internet.
His vow to eradicate illegal drugs was what motivated 16 million out of 54 million voters to vote for Duterte, who won by plurality against four other presidential candidates.
As to whether Duterte has fulfilled his promise to crush the illegal drug industry within three to six months, obviously he has not despite the thousands of alleged drug users and pushers sacrificed to extrajudicial killings.
Despite that, “die-hards” have turned Duterte into a cult figure. Criticize the man and Facebook trolls will get back at you, irrationally cussing and cursing – Gangnam… err… Digong style.
To duck their fire and brimstone, I would rather not comment on whether Duterte has fared or failed in his first year in power. Since many other columnists have already are tackled that issue, I beg off with this time-honored quote: “If you can’t say good of anybody, say nothing.”
How could someone get away with calling Pope Francis “son of a prostitute” before a predominantly Roman Catholic audience? It’s a paradox induced by well-oiled propaganda machinery, though not without precedent in world history.
Why, for instance, did the German people idolize dictator Adolf Hitler between 1933 and the early 1940s?
Hitler tasked chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels to promote their kind as the Arian race destined to rule the world. The Germans could only read, see and hear what Hitler wanted them to read, see and hear. Each family was given a free radio set. Black-and-white television, still in its infancy, was only available in public places.
To Goebbels is attributed this quotation: “If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself.”
Going back to Philippine setting, the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) has declassified a list of 29 Internet websites that propagate “fake news.” Some of them peddle stories hailing the President and “helling” opposition politicians.
In fact, the only reason why President Duterte hired sexy dancer and blogger Mocha Uson as assistant secretary at the Presidential Communications Operations Office (PCOO) at a monthly salary of P106,454 was because she could persuade people to idolize him. (hvego31@gmail.com/PN)
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