A friend of mine posted a status recently about how the former dictator first tried to flirt with the military so that once they’re in the bag, “the tanks rolled on with ease.” There was no mention of names, but this post obviously alludes to former president Ferdinand Marcos and the current President Rodrigo Duterte, who recently went around the country to visit military camps.
Somebody, apparently a diehard Duterte supporter, posted a comment on that thread saying that, with 16 million votes behind him, Duterte clearly has the mandate of the people and “any attempt to unseat him will just fail.” It seems to suggest that nothing could stand in the way of the President now, even if he would declare Martial Law, since the majority would be there to defend him.
And it seems to be what is happening now. The President makes no hesitation, even with typical vulgarity, to make controversial statements on topics like the Marcos burial in the Libingan ng mga Bayani or plans for the Philippines to pull out of the United Nations. He is confident that his millions of supporters would not only support him but also take their own initiatives to attack his critics.
And the President need not issue the command to his civilian supporters, who apparently are well organized. They themselves initiate their own counterattacks, swarming on critics online with prepared memes and reposts from their own blogs and websites, many of them of dubious origins and apparently created only for that purpose: black propaganda.
Having posted some comments criticizing Duterte online, a few of them being reposted or shared by friends, I find myself suddenly attacked by diehard Digong fans. I have even been swarmed by friend requests from people I do not know who, judging from their profile and wall postings, seemed to be mostly diehard Digong keyboard warriors.
In fact, some friends sent me screenshots showing how common friends ridiculed and mocked me for my own political postings, directly mentioning me in their conversation that clearly was a form of cyberbullying.
Another friend, an artist who is now based abroad, told me that he and his wife also experiences the same thing after they posted a few yet biting remarks against the President in his own circle of mostly artist and writer friends from Mindanao, where he comes from. He told me that this is happening to many of our fellow artists who spoke openly or did public art against Digong.
Suddenly they are being bullied online and swarmed with friend requests from people they do not know. In fact, as in the case of TV5 journalist Ed Lingao during the election period, their social media accounts were reported as “offensive” or as “scam” in attempts to disable them or even hack them.
My friend suspects that this pattern shows that these are really orchestrated counterattacks by a huge network of keyboard warriors bent on really crushing Duterte critics. Some of them, he said, were established even before Duterte decided to run for president. In fact, the whole drama of him flip-flopping over his candidacy was one of the clever moves conspired by these online spindoctors.
This reminds me of the Kilusang Bagong Lipunan (KBL), the political party created by the Marcoses during their conjugal rule. The KBL wasn’t only a political party, it was really a people’s movement whose hardcore leaders were indoctrinated in Ferdinand Marcos’ vision of “New Society,” as he expounded it in his book, Democracy: Today’s Revolution.
Growing up in the 70s and the early 80s, I could still recall the disparity in our small community in Mindanao between people who were affiliated with the KBL and those who were not. The KBL members were mostly leaders in the community. They occupied key government and community positions.
By virtue of these positions, they displayed certain privileges: better homes, a vehicle privately owned or provided by government due to their work, better schools for their children, etc. They enjoyed important connections with the police, military, courts and other key branches of government bureaucracy. These gave them a sense of security and power that led many of them to abuses, even corruption.
When the nation became increasingly polarized in the wake of the assassination of Benigno Aquino in 1983 and the snap election in 1985, the KBL members were known as Marcos loyalists as they rabidly defended the regime against the rising opposition.
The rest was history that I could only recall in my own perspective as a child seeing the tension among relatives, friends and neighbors who were split and later fighting each other due to political differences during the dictatorship.
And so I worry that today’s increasing polarization in this country following the President’s divisive policies would lead us back to that era when some of us act like bullies just because they think they have Dear Leader on their side.
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