At the Ibong Adorno launch of Kult 3, there was a panel discussion with different organizations on the various ways in which they have dealt with the Duterte government’s consistent and constant attacks on the people and on nation’s institutions. The issues and ways were expectedly diverse, from using platforms to engage with issues of urban poor displacement, immersion and publishing focused on marginalized sectors and workers’ and farmers’ rights, from alternative media work to organizing cultural workers towards more critical resistance work.
I was the only one who carried my name as individual, although I was tagged as someone who has maintained CurrentsPH (on Facebook) since 2017, which originally was to be a website (a beta version is still up here). But as I said in the introduction to my quick talk, it took only the first year of Duterte to realize that there is little value in talking facts and doing timelines at a time when the truth doesn’t matter and no one is spending time fleshing out issues — or even talking issues, really.
The battle in fact is one that’s about propaganda. We are faced with a well-strategized Duterte propaganda program, one that we have been unable to even make a dent on, one that we have been unable to win against, the past three years. I’ve talked about this often enough with friends and peers, and when I’m asked how to beat it, my answer is simple: first we admit we’re in over our heads.
These are strange, difficult, confusing, exhausting times, and the old tools don’t work in exactly the same way. We are weakened by this Duterte machinery, manipulated to forget bigger pictures as we are made to contend with the smaller but real attacks against us. How to move forward? One, admit our weaknesses; two, understand this propaganda strategy; so that three, we can actually figure out how to beat it.
Here, an effort at doing numbers 1 and 2.
Divide and conquer (the discourse). Duterte strategy has successfully fuelled the divide between the Left and the Liberals, which it imagines are the two sides that might lead a real resistance versus government. It’s no surprise that it’s had an easy time doing this. To begin with, this divide is a strong one, weighed down by historical baggage that few understand, with many personalities on both sides refusing to go beyond differences. All Duterte’s propaganda machine has to do is ensure that it constantly and consistently fans the flames of this divide, raising issues that highlight the fundamental differences, and ultimately reveal the general inability of one side to take the cause of the other, and vice versa.
Case in point: the attacks on the Left have been primarily left to the Left; even as the Left has been able to take on the battles of the Liberals such as the jailing of Senator Leila de Lima, the inclusion of Liberal personalities in that bogus Bikoy matrix, ad infinitum. But of course the Left has its share of rabid anti-Liberals, who will not, cannot set aside (even for a moment, or in the meantime) its own fundamental disagreements with the liberal ideology and its own complicity in redtagging and anti-activism.
It’s easy to see how this is a vicious cycle. A Left-said Liberal-said situation, where the only who gains is Duterte.
Undo Democracy. The Duterte government has undone democracy completely. It takes loopholes in our laws, shamelessly uses these to serve the interests of cronies, allies, and public officials, and when the public gets wind of it, the President shrugs: “the laws allow it,” and then “we should revise our laws,” and then “this is why we need to change the Constitution.”
The shrug-dismiss-evade strategy is one that has been consistent the past three years, and we see it still with say, the release of convicted murderer and rapist Antonio Sanchez and four convicted Chinese drug lords. It’s one of the more effective strategies to keep Duterte afloat: he is never at fault, even when it is clear that it is under his leadership that massive corruption is happening.
Meanwhile, his propaganda machinery ensures that the institutions that are supposed to provide the checks and balances we need, the ones who should function as watchdogs, are either (1) too scared to say anything, or (2) plain discredited. There’s Duterte’s control over Congress, and now the Senate; as there is the utter silence of the business sector about the travesty that is this government’s utter incompetence.
Then there’s the media, the fourth estate, the one that should be able to navigate government propaganda and reveal it for what it is. But instead media has been relegated to doing nothing but report every red herring government throws our way, not at all fleshing out issues but only really lapping up what Duterte and his men expect them to.
Is media scared? Of course they are: a product of the first two years when Duterte showed what he could do to entities that he declares as enemies, from Rappler to ABS-CBN to the Philippine Daily Inquirer. Is media complicit? In as much as it is big business and owned by oligarchs loyal to (or scared of) Duterte, then yes. And yet there is pushback from the unlikeliest sources: Preen and CNN Philippines Life, sometimes even Philstar Supreme, have been spaces that provide some alternative reading that dares talk issues from and for a specifically lifestyle/young/millennial perspective.
The realization though is this: We cannot depend on (a scared) media, and so we are on our own.
Tag The Left. Tagging the Left is not just about redtagging, as it is about blaming the Left, the activists, for everything that is wrong with nation. That is, everything that it does not-cannot blame on the Liberals (see Raze The Elite). It became clear of course the moment the token Leftists in the Cabinet did not get appointed that the love affair was falling apart — after all, it also signalled the unraveling of Duterte, shifting as he did from someone who sought peace, to someone who was just going to give in to the whims of the anti-Left military. Duterte himself signalled the shift of the propaganda machinery with declarations of bombing Lumad schools and shooting women fighters in the vagina; not long after, his propagandists were out to get the Left, shifting across organizations, hate-campaigning versus progressives. The irony of course is that these kinds of attacks — not to mention the state of the nation — has historically been proven to strengthen the Left and grow its numbers. And so the goal has been to ensure that fewer people will join the Left, and they do so by sowing fear, as they escalate attacks. ***