were telling him” and asking the public to do the same.66 The Lopez-controlled Manila Chronicle, the most outspoken of the anti-Marcos dailies, would write, “Since the government cannot seem to stop the rising price of bread, it is apparently trying to offer us circuses as a diversion. And these in the form of endless warnings about the rise of subversion.”67
As his critics were quick to point out, Marcos’s counterinsurgency campaign was a public extravagance. It created an “imaginary” crisis, which ironically deflected attention away from “real” crisis conditions voiced by demonstrators in the streets. The spectral nature of the underground Maoists was crucial in this regard. The CPP-NPA seemed to invite fabulous portrayals and mystifications on the part of the government. As Eduardo Lachica put it in 1970,
If a Manilan does not read the newspapers, he would never suspect that a dissident struggle was going on in the countryside only 50 kilometers north of the capital. Most Manilans go through their daily rounds, completely unaffected by what is going on in Central Luzon. One sometimes wonders indeed whether the Huks are not just a convenient invention of the Armed Forces for purposes of raising their budget. . . . The Department of National Defense is the only legitimate source of day-to-day information about the Huks and one of the few agencies officially quotable on the subject. . . . The Huks thus carry on a strangely twilight existence on the front pages based entirely on what the AFP claims they are doing.68
In a series of dazzling pseudo-events that call to mind the covert operations described by Rogin, Marcos would produce “visible evidence” of the communist threat. His anticommunist performance was used not to protect “free institutions,” however, but to justify the imposition of martial law in the country.
Marcos’s uptake of the covert spectacle began with a public bloodbath. On August 21, 1971, at least three fragmentation grenades were hurled at the speaker’s stage at a Liberal Party rally in downtown Manila’s Plaza Miranda. Over ten thousand people were present to witness the presentation of candidates for the November congressional and local elections. Nine people were killed in the explosion. All the Liberal Party’s eight senatorial candidates were among the more than one hundred persons seriously injured. Broadcast before a live national audience, the attack was the most shocking political crime the country had ever seen, an event described by Gregg Jones as the “Philippine equivalent of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.”69
Marcos’s opponents widely believed that the president had himself ordered the massacre—a suspicion that acquired the status of fact until the 1988 confessions of top-ranking CPP-NPA officials revealed that Sison was the true mastermind behind the attack.70 Be that as it may, Marcos manipulated the trauma unleashed by the event for his own political purposes. Eerily reminiscent of Kennedy’s alarmist performance during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Marcos yet again played the role of heroic leader for the national audience, and in a highly dramatic televised address, declared a state of national emergency. Marcos’s televised message climaxed with his announcement that he had suspended the writ of habeas corpus.
As radical students and labor leaders were simultaneously being rounded up, Marcos dropped a second bombshell, announcing the discovery of the CPP-NPA’s “July-August plan” to burn Manila to the ground and assassinate government officials and prominent citizens.71 “Subversives have made this plan,” Marcos told the national audience. “We are aware of the fact that they have certain signals for their members, and these signals are supposed to then mark the initiation of aggressive action.”72
Six months later, an outbreak of terrorist bombings seemed to confirm Marcos’s claim that the communists were communicating by deadly “signals.” In March 1972 the target was the Arca Building; in April, it was the Filipinas Orient Airways office; in May, the porch of the South Vietnamese embassy; in June, the Philippine Trust Company; in July, the Philam Life Building. Later that month, after an American Express office was bombed, authorities discovered an unexploded bomb in the Senate’s publications office. The bombings continued almost daily throughout August, hitting the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company office, the Philippine Sugar Institute, and the Department of Social Welfare and Development, among others.73
The so-called terrorist attacks occurred late at night or early in the morning, when the bombing targets were virtually empty. In some cases, the explosives were discovered before they could be detonated. Except for the bombing of a department store, in which one woman was killed and forty-one persons injured, no serious injuries were reported.74 The well-timed attacks were clearly intended to amplify the national trauma generated by the Plaza Miranda massacre. To borrow Rogin’s terms, the attacks had become interchangeable parts in a string of crisis spectacles, each one producing a sensory overload that reduced to invisibility the corollary countersubversive measures taken by the state.
The Plaza Miranda massacre and the terrorist bombings were all conducive to spectacularization. Each event generated intense, short-lived, and repeatable images of apocalyptic violence that Marcos used to represent the invisible threat of “subversion” in the nation. Like the covert operations described by Rogin, these mass-mediated events were significant for their intended demonstration effect. Whether they were taken as evidence of the CPP-NPA’s strength (confirming Marcos’s warnings) or as signs of Marcos’s red-scare tactics (confirming his cunning), they made it abundantly clear that Marcos was in control—that he had the power to intervene.
Preparing for the Coup: A Propaganda Film
During the final countdown to martial law, the Marcos administration released a propaganda film that was a retrospective summary of the First Quarter Storm as well as a chilling preview of Marcos’s final coup.75 Designed as an anticommunist primer, the film speaks in the language of U.S. political demonology. And yet, in transforming Marcos’s covert operations into political spectacles, the film, titled The Threat—Communism, is also a self-reflexive commentary on the difficulties of representing what the president called subversion.
The film makes the case that the violent demonstrations of the First Quarter Storm were but surface manifestations of a deeper social evil that paradoxically defied visualization. The film opens with a disembodied voice intoning, “is the communist threat real or imaginary?” Standard pedagogical devices of the newsreel format—authoritative voice-over narration, expository titles, dramatic commentative music—are employed to weave horrific images of the demonstrations into an unequivocal argument for the affirmative. “The purpose of this documentary film,” the unseen narrator states, “is to show that the danger is real.” The narration traces a dramatic arc that begins with the capture in June 1969 of “communist documents” revealing a possible plot to overthrow the government,76 followed by the violent demonstrations of 1970, and ends with the recent wave of terrorism initiated by the Plaza Miranda bombings.
Conceding that visible signs of the state’s antisubversion military campaigns would seem too drastic to the average citizen, the film argues that anything less would open the floodgates to invisible subversive forces. Parroting the defensive nationalism of the Kennedy era, the film asks the citizen whose “apathy stems from a lack of knowledge of the gravity of the situation” to put his or her faith in “the president and the members of our military community who have access to classified information.”
As the primary target of the film’s message, the citizen is crucially invoked as an ethically incomplete subject whose fundamentally flawed knowledge of the political situation demands urgent attention. For in contrast to this cipher is a political savvy other, the subversive, which the film defines as one engaged in covert activities “calculated to undermine our national soil.” Photographs of CPP leaders fraternizing with “Chinese Communists” are repeatedly presented as evidence of the otherness of this estranged element of the national community.77
In casting the CPP-NPA as secret agents of
