fighter enacts a “countersubversive” fantasy. Like the frontiersman of the western myth, he “enters racially alien ground, regresses to primitivism in order to destroy the subversive and appropriate his power.”52 Political amnesia, then, constitutes a “cultural structure of motivated disavowal.” It implicates the audience, whose desire to experience the violence of the countersubversive scenario is matched by an equally powerful desire not to retain it in memory.
The specular form of the covert spectacle is crucial in this regard. In contrast to the subject-centered story of narrative, spectacles are “superficial, sensately intensified, short-lived and repeatable.” Spectacle, then, is the cultural form of amnesiac representation. It produces a sensory overstimulation that “disconnects from their objects and severs from memory those intensified, detailed shots of destruction, wholesaled on populations and retailed on body parts.”53 In the fragmented jumble of “interchangeable individuals, products and body parts” displayed in the covert spectacle, centrifugal threats—threats to the subject and threats to the state—are depicted in a manner conducive to containing as well as enjoying them.
But what is displayed and forgotten in the covert spectacle is the “historical content of American political demonology.” As Rogin has convincingly shown elsewhere, the covert spectacle may be traced back to an almost pathological fear of subversion subtending the nation’s political culture.54 This “countersubversive” tradition has historically played on fears of secret penetration and social contamination presented by an imagined alien power. Political demonology has been a concomitant feature of this tradition. It begins as a “rigid insistence on difference” that extends to “the inflation, stigmatization and dehumanization of political foes.”55 Such demonology provides the performative space within which the countersubversive might be allowed to indulge in forbidden desires. Or to put it another way, political demonology is what enables the countersubversive, in the name of battling the subversive, to imitate its enemy.
The covert spectacle constituted a form of symbolic recovery: their significance lay less in stopping the spread of communism than in convincing the public that the United States had the power to direct world events. In Rogin’s words,
Individual covert operations may serve specific corporate or national security-clique interests, and the operations themselves are often (like Iran/Contra) hidden from domestic subjects who might hold them to political account. But even where the particular operation is supposed to remain secret, the government wants it known it has the power, secretly to intervene. The payoff for many covert operations is their intended demonstration effect.56
The Cold War, it must be remembered, was fought mainly with symbols and surrogates—in the visible military buildup of weapons that function more as “symbols of intentions in war games rather than evidence of war-fighting capabilities; and in the invasion of private and public space by the fiction-making visual media.”57 Even the two fronts of Cold War military action—the nuclear-weapons race and the “low-intensity” anti-insurgency campaigns in the Third World—were aimed at demonstrating U.S. resolution without incurring substantial risks at home. They consigned foreign policy to pseudo-events staged for public consumption, but with one important caveat. The symbols thus produced for consumption at home and abroad “have all too much substance for the victims of those symbols, the participant-observers on the ground in the Third World.”58
It bears emphasizing that, to U.S. security strategists, the Philippines was an important outpost of the New Frontier. Indeed, it was here where the United States had first fought a counterinsurgency war in the name of defeating communism. In anticipation of the specular foreign policy inaugurated by the Kennedy era, Washington sent Edward G. Lansdale to crush the aforementioned Huks.59 Combining paramilitary operations, psychological warfare and the manipulation of electoral politics, Lansdale’s anti-Huk campaign would in fact serve as the blueprint for U.S. anticommunist counterinsurgency operations elsewhere—in Colombia, Venezuela, and Vietnam.
Because of his “pro-Western” stance, the CIA endorsed Marcos in the 1965 elections. He was touted as “Washington’s man in Asia,” not only because of his avowed anticommunist beliefs but also because he fit the mold of the “freedom fighter.” I return now to Marcos’s crisis management of the First Quarter Storm, which clearly echoed the crisis mongering and political demonology of Kennedy’s interventionist policies. But as we shall see in a moment, Marcos’s red-scare tactics were hardly subservient to Washington’s interests.
Marcos’s Countersubversive Performance
On his September 1966 state visit to the United States, Marcos spoke boldly about the need to stanch the communist threat in Vietnam. Ever mindful of the unpopularity of the war at home, however, he demurred when President Johnson requested more Filipino troops in Vietnam.60 A May 1969 report by the U.S. magazine New Republic cogently interpreted Marcos’s vacillation:
The president is judged by his own people according to the number of benefits and concessions he succeeds in wheedling from Washington, and by the extent to which he dares defy what may appear from time to time to be Washington’s wishes. On the first count, President Marcos got some favors from President Johnson by posing as LBJ’s “right hand in Asia.” . . . On the second count, President Marcos has sternly warned the United States that if it reduces its forces in Asia (meaning, if Washington cuts its military spending), he will feel compelled in prudence to seek a modus vivendi with Communist China. The warning can scarcely have frightened Washington and in any event was intended for domestic consumption.61
Marcos’s performance as Johnson’s “right hand in Asia” indeed had its compensations. In exchange for promising a two-thousand-man army engineering battalion to assist U.S. troops in 1966, he acquired $45 million in economic assistance, $31 million in settlement of Philippine veterans’ claims, and $3.5 million to assist the First Lady’s cultural projects.62 And yet, in subsequent negotiations for increased military aid, he repeatedly threatened to approach China should such assistance not be forthcoming. Simply put, Marcos was playing both sides. He used the Vietnam conflict to simultaneously curry favor with Washington and demonstrate to his critics at home that he was not a supplicant to U.S. interests. It was a foretaste of the opportunistic nature of the red-scare tactics that he would implement in the aftermath of the First Quarter Storm.
From January to April 1970, Marcos twice raised the possibility of martial law.63 This was a politically risky move, given that just a year before, during his reelection campaign, he had downplayed reports of stepped-up insurgency in the countryside, confidently assuring Washington and the Philippine public that his administration could “handle the Communist threat.” In May 1970 he predicted an “inevitable confrontation” with Maoist communists. His alarmist prognosis elicited bipartisan criticism in the Philippine Senate. A special committee headed by Senator Salvador Laurel, a Marcos opponent, asserted that there was “no clear and present danger of a Communist-inspired insurrection or rebellion,” and that NPA activity in the countryside posed “no real military threat to the security of the country.”64
The Department of National Defense and the communist media painted a drastically different picture. Based on secret intelligence gathered by the Armed Forces of the Philippines, Marcos announced in August 1971 that the NPA now had one thousand men on the frontline, with support troops of about fifty thousand. Reports from the CPP-NPA’s periodicals, Ang bayan (The nation) and Pulang bandila (Red flag), indicated that the well-equipped and highly mobile NPA was widening its operations in Central and southeastern Luzon. Closely monitoring the NPA’s progress were the Peking media, which had reported in December 1970 that the NPA had wiped out “more than 200 reactionary Philippine troops and police,” and fifteen U.S. military personnel in over eighty operations that year.65
The oligarchy-controlled media, on the other hand, took an overwhelmingly skeptical
