It would be helpful to recall Rogin’s take on the countersubversive tradition in U.S. political culture. Pivoting on fears of secret penetration and social contamination, U.S. political demonology has historically relied on visible markers of otherness to perpetuate an image of a “self-making people, engaged in a national purifying mission.” But the anticommunist moment in the history of U.S. countersubversion marks a critical shift. Because the subversives in question are no longer identified along clear racial and ethnic lines, it is now imperative to discover exactly who is under foreign control—hence the central importance of the surveillance state.78 The film borrows the form, if not the content, of political demonology to legitimize the amassment of secret intelligence by the Department of National Defense to profile the CPP-NPA and decimate its ranks. In doing so, it implicitly presents state efforts to weed out the Maoist threat as a mirror image, if not an extension of, the anticommunist mission of the United States.
The binary opposition between citizens and subversives is secured by a series of stylistic moves. Handheld, high-contrast black-and-white footage of the First Quarter Storm captures the iconography of student dissidence. The students are shown engaging in now-legendary acts of defiance—provoking police with lascivious slogans, torching an effigy of the president, hurling rocks at military personnel, setting fire to buildings and cars. We cut to daytime shots of random citizens navigating a bustling city in the light of day. These normative shots of a disciplined citizenry clearly stand in stark contrast to the nighttime shots of students “chanting communist slogans” against the backdrop of a burning city. The film thus co-opts the students’ affective performance of nonnormative conduct to present radical youths as a savage, anarchic force flouting the codes of emotional restraint that diacritically define the public sphere. The association of the dissidents with darkness and their identification with animalistic drives and regressive tendencies are the cinematic correlates of political demonology. The film uses these stock tropes to stigmatize and dehumanize the students.79
As the film proceeds to trace the mounting escalation of political violence in 1971, the “subversives” in question ironically become more and more invisible. The visual traces of their personhood become increasingly rare, in inverse proportion to the tally of their offenses. Thus, police procedural photographs of bombsites and captured weapons gradually replace the news footage of the First Quarter Storm with which the film begins. The viewer is asked to make a leap of faith, to connect the fully embodied representations of the demonstrations with these disembodied symbols of “terrorism” at the film’s climax. One such photograph presents an array of carefully labeled explosives (“nitrogen liquid, pill boxes, Molotov bombs”), presumably the subversives’ weapons of choice. The pithy caption reads: “Are these legitimate tools of dissent?” By fiat, objects like these are made to stand in for the absent subversives, who are ultimately knowable to the citizen only from the trail of destruction they are alleged to leave behind.
While self-consciously drawing attention to the authenticity of the images (“all the events depicted here are actual happenings”), the documentary grapples with an inescapable problem: how to represent subversion. All but sensationalizing the First Quarter Storm, the film has a decidedly alarmist tone calculated to convince the incredulous citizen that a full-scale urban guerrilla war was not far from happening. And yet, the film insists that evidence of this war can come to light only if subversive forces are allowed to gain ground. The government is thus placed in the untenable position of making this invisible threat manifest to the citizen and, at the same time, of defusing it. In this zero-sum game, the subversives in question are either allowed too much power or none at all.
A clip of President Marcos’s televised address after the Plaza Miranda bombings captures the film’s overall solution to this dilemma. “I am the president,” Marcos says, directly addressing the camera. “I am sworn under my oath of office to protect our people and execute the law. Rather than wait for this rebellion to be initiated, and to wait for our people to be massacred in the fighting between the military and the subversives, I would rather stop that rebellion now.” Proffered as the authorial voice of the film, this address plays a performative function: it allows Marcos to present himself as a heroic leader with the requisite power to exert social control over all things seen and unseen. In that performance, Marcos himself enacts what Rogin describes as the “fiction of a center.” The trope of a center is here employed to make Marcos’s opportunistic red-scare tactics jibe with U.S. Cold War national security interests. To be more precise, Marcos’s performance rests on blurring the distinction between the two. He thus presents himself as “freedom fighter” in a world of secret agents “at once connected to a directing power and also able to act heroically on their own.”80
In “indigenizing” the covert spectacles of U.S. foreign policy, the film channels the racial violence underpinning the countersubversive tradition in U.S. political culture and applies it to the CPP-NPA—herewith depicted as agents of an alien power. But insofar as political demonology simultaneously reflects the countersubversive’s fear of, and identification with, the subversive, the film cannot help but portray the symbiotic relationship between Marcos and his avowed nemesis. As Jones reminds us, Marcos needed the communist rebellion just as much as the CPP-NPA needed him: without the communist rebellion, Marcos might have found the public less than acquiescent to the prospect of martial law; and without Marcos’s repressive tactics, the CPP-NPA might not have acquired its romantic, revolutionary aura.81
Positioned at the end of the film, Marcos’s address brings meaning and order to balance the spectacles of social breakdown with which the film begins. The nation will have nothing to fear, Marcos suggests, if only citizens place their absolute trust in the government’s covert operations. Thus inviting citizens to participate vicariously in the government’s invisible war, the film exhorts each citizen to identify with an increasingly powerful surveillance state.
Zero Hour: Martial Law
Marcos’s propaganda film underscored the need for secret planning “accountable to no one and to no standard of truth outside itself.”82 This recourse to secrecy parroted the “national security” principles underpinning the crisis spectacles of the Kennedy era. Marcos’s countersubversive performance had in fact earned the approval of Washington. U.S. diplomats and intelligence officers stationed in Manila at the time believed that strong governmental action was needed to restore order to the nation and that Marcos was the man to do it. As a U.S. embassy political officer put it, “The Philippines needs a strong man, a man on horseback to get the country organized and going again.”83
In August 1972, Marcos frequently met with U.S. ambassador Henry A. Byroade to discuss the possibility of martial law. Byroade at first counseled Marcos of the undesirability of martial law, which was sure to trigger a backlash in the U.S. Congress. Marcos, the “freedom fighter,” put pressure on the ambassador to check with President Nixon. After meeting with Nixon and Kissinger in the White House, Byroade delivered Washington’s new policy: “If martial law were needed to put down the Communist insurgency, then Washington would back the Philippine president.”84
At 9:00 p.m. on September 22, 1972, Marcos signed the order implementing martial law.85 Marcos’s military moved with alarming precision to arrest the president’s political enemies, beginning with Senator Benigno Aquino, Jr., Marcos’s political archrival within the oligarchy.86 By 4:00 a.m., scores of prominent citizens—politicians, journalists, priests, and students—had been seized. Radio and television stations were padlocked, newspaper presses closed down.
In the months following martial law, the Department of National Defense perfected its surveillance techniques against suspected communists. Marcos, who in 1965 had placed all four of the military’s services under presidential control, completely reorganized the nation’s military and security forces. This new command structure gave him personal control over an emerging national security state. Substantial resources were funneled into the Presidential Security Command (PSC) and the National Intelligence Coordinating Agency (NICA). The PSC, originally
