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A few thoughts on an idiotic psyop that may have killed innocent people and blown back against our own citizens.
In June, Reutersreported on a hitherto secret U.S. program connected with the Covid-19 pandemic. In the spring of 2020, as the coronavirus rapidly spread throughout the world, our government sought to respond to Chinese disinformation which attempted to deflect responsibility for the virus’s origin by claiming that it had originated in a biological research lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland. What was our government’s plan? To fight fire with fire.
This was at the same time that the then-president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, was making noises about a closer relationship to China, even hinting that if China prioritized sending vaccine to his country, he would cede territory in the South China Sea to Beijing. Simultaneously, an element within the U.S. military in the Pacific was agitating Washington about keeping the Philippines on side and fighting the deluge of Chinese propaganda.
As a result, the Pentagon authorized a covert disinformation campaign against China, focusing on discrediting Chinese vaccine and protective medical equipment like masks. The channels of propaganda would be Twitter (now X), Facebook, and other social media. The campaign appears to have worked: the Philippines ended up with a very low vaccination rate in international comparison (in spite of Duterte’s efforts), and a high death rate.
While it is generally acknowledged that the Chinese vaccine (known as CoronaVac or Sinovac) is less effective, it is hardly useless: typically a 60-70-percent effectiveness versus the roughly 90-percent effectiveness of Western vaccines. Thus, it could have saved lives in the Philippines but for the U.S. disinformation campaign.
It is one more reason why Trump and his appointees should never be entrusted with public office. Will Congress ever investigate this misbegotten operation and finally nail down the chain of events?
It’s all there in the Reuters article, and there is no need to expatiate on the obvious immorality of the operation, quite apart from its colossal stupidity—at the same time U.S. public health officials were tearing out their hair trying to combat domestic Covid-19 disinformation, and doctors and nurses were risking their lives caring for terminally ill vaccine refusers, their government was pumping the same ideological poison into the minds of innocent people abroad. The nonchalant statement of an unnamed Pentagon official says it all: “We weren’t looking at this from a public health perspective. We were looking at how we could drag China through the mud.”
The report left a few dangling lose ends, however, that deserve further investigation by Congress and the Pentagon inspector general.
Are U.S. special forces out of control? The report says that the program was initiated after persistent lobbying by the then-commander of Special Operations Command Pacific, General Jonathan Braga. The article implies that he pleaded directly to Washington. Did his superiors at U.S. Pacific Command in Hawaii know what he was doing? Did they approve? We know from Reuters that various U.S. ambassadors in Southeast Asia did not approve, and they would ordinarily have overruled the general because it was a stupid idea that could harm diplomatic relations. But because the then-Secretary of Defense Mark Esper designated the propaganda campaign as a de facto wartime action, the diplomats’ objections could be disregarded.
U.S. special forces were vastly expanded during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and were given greater operational flexibility. They have also tended to produce loose cannons throughout the ranks. General Stanley McChrystal was special forces commander at the height of the Iraq war and later became commander of all coalition forces in Afghanistan. His career came to grief when he had the bad judgment to insult President Obama and other civilian leaders in front of a Rolling Stone reporter. Apparently, the civilian pukes in Washington lacked the general’s gung-ho attitude that with just a little more door-kicking and pyrotechnics, Afghanistan would be pacified—something that hadn’t happened since the Mongol invasions.
This kinetic mentality can get out of hand, as it did in 2017. Four Navy SEALs who were posted to the U.S. embassy in Mali, in a “juvenile” attempt to haze an Army special forces soldier, killed him. Their court martial, in a strange display of leniency, sentenced the most culpable perpetrator to only 10 years in prison, while one of the four defendants did not even receive a punitive discharge. The 10-year sentence was later vacated, with the defendant hiring a Trump lawyer to try to get him off the hook.
Ironically, vaccine refusal was the cause of another special forces stunt. Personnel from the Navy Special Warfare Command, including SEALs, not only declined to be vaccinated, but sued the Department of Defense. Their venue-shopping landed them in the Fort Worth court room of U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor, a favorite destination for nutty conservative causes, and shockingly but not surprisingly, the judge ruled in favor of the plaintiffs. Ultimately, the Supreme Court blocked the judge’s ruling, but only insofar as it allowed the Navy to reassign, as opposed to discipline or discharge, the plaintiffs, while litigation continued.
What the personnel had done merited not merely reassignment or discharge, but potentially a court martial for the following: deliberately rendering themselves undeployable; endangering other service members; gross insubordination; and possibly even mutiny, as it was an organized action against their unit.
I have written before how religion is bandied about for political advantage by people whose own religious faith is ludicrously insincere. The justification of the SEALs—whose profession is to kill people—was a risible claim that deep Christian devotion prompted their refusal, advancing the heretofore undiscovered theological tenet that modification of their bodies by vaccine is an “affront to their Creator.” Apparently that doctrine exempts steroid abuse, which is common in the Navy’s special warfare community.
Even the military has begun to recognize that special forces may have become the tail that wags the dog—too big (bigger than the entire German army), diluted in quality, often operating outside the regular chain of command, and infected with a cowboy mentality. The mindless popular adulation, particularly of SEALs, has according to some observers had an adverse impact on civil-military relations. Perhaps we will always need door-kickers, but should they be overruling ambassadors in order to execute a cruel and asinine operation in a friendly country?
Who ultimately ordered the covert operation? The Reuters piece noted that Esper signed the directive to conduct the operation. The legality of his action rested on a provision in the 2019 defense authorization act permitting the military to conduct clandestine influence operations against other countries, including “outside of areas of active hostilities.”
This only raises more questions. Were the defense and intelligence committees of Congress, then controlled by the Democrats, duly notified of the disinformation campaign? If so, did the notification simply state that a covert psychological operation was underway, or did it provide enough details to make it clear that it was based on lies that could endanger the population of a friendly country? What was the reaction of Congress?
Perhaps we will always need door-kickers, but should they be overruling ambassadors in order to execute a cruel and asinine operation in a friendly country?
It seems unlikely that even as powerful a bureaucratic actor as the secretary of defense would order such a sensitive operation in defiance of the State Department without the guidance of those above him, or at least as a result of their signing off on his plan. The rules of Washington normally impel a person like Esper to seek cover for his actions. Accordingly, it is probable that he either notified the president directly or through the national security council of his order.
Then-President Trump had already directed the CIA in 2019 to conduct covert psychological operations inside China, so it is hardly a stretch to speculate that he would have had no problem approving DoD’s covert operation in the Philippines. It is one more reason why Trump and his appointees should never be entrusted with public office. Will Congress ever investigate this misbegotten operation and finally nail down the chain of events?
How do we know the operation did not blow back on the United States? The military is prohibited by law from conducting propaganda campaigns in the United States. But given the instant global connectedness of the internet, how could the Pentagon be so sure that its black propaganda campaigns in other countries wouldn’t leak back to the American population? They were, after all, using Twitter and Facebook accounts.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the Filipino population in the United States was 4.4 million in 2020, the third-largest Asian-American group. It is inconceivable that none of them would have had contact with friends and relatives in the Philippines who might have been gulled by the American disinformation. Had their contacts made them vaccine-hesitant, it would have exacerbated the already epidemic anti-vaccine movement here.
Why did it take so long to shut down the program? Shortly after the inauguration, representatives from Facebook arranged a meeting with incoming Biden administration officials to complain about the covert program, which contradicted the company’s policy against spreading vaccine disinformation. The officials were properly horrified, but again, there are loose ends to the Reuters story.
Why hadn’t the new administration learned about the program through Pentagon channels already during the transition? Why did it take until the spring of 2021 to order DoD to shut it down? And in spite of the order, why did the program linger through the summer? Was the Biden administration lax in its follow-up, or was the Pentagon out of control?
Over the decades, the U.S. military has conducted numerous programs of breathtaking stupidity: the above-ground nuclear tests of the 1950s that exposed draftees to atomic radiation, dumping thousands of tons of Agent Orange defoliant over Indochina during the 1960s, the toxic burn pits of the Iraq war. Civilian leadership in this country needs to shed its adolescent awe of martial exploits and gain firm control over a very dangerous weapon.As a progressive activist, I am dismayed at the election of Ferdinand Marcos Jr., son of the former dictator, by a landslide in the recent Philippine presidential election. But as a sociologist, I can understand why.
The vote for Duterte and the even larger vote for Marcos were propelled by widespread resentment at the persistence of gross inequality.
I am not referring to the malfunction, intended or unintended, of 1,000-plus voting machines. I am not alluding to the massive release of billions of pesos for vote buying that made the 2022 elections one of the dirtiest in recent years. Nor do I have in mind the decade-long online campaign of disinformation that transmogrified the nightmare years of martial law during the senior Marcos's rule into a "golden age."
Undoubtedly, each of these factors played a role in the electoral result. But 31 million plus votes--59 percent of the electorate--is simply too massive to attribute to them alone.
The truth is the Marcos victory was largely a democratic outcome in the narrow electoral sense. The challenge for progressives is to understand why a runaway majority of the Philippine electorate voted to bring an unrepentant, thieving family back to power after 36 years.
How could democracy produce such a wayward outcome?
Illiberalism Is Popular
No matter how slick or sophisticated the internet campaign was, it would have made little impact had there not already been a receptive audience for it.
While the Marcos revisionist message also drew support from among the middle and upper classes, that audience was in absolute numbers largely working class. It was also a largely youth audience, more than half of whom were either small children during the late martial law period or born after the 1986 uprising that ousted Marcos--better known as the "EDSA Revolution."
That audience had no direct experience of the Marcos years. But what they had a direct experience of was the gap between the extravagant rhetoric of democratic restoration and a just and egalitarian future of the EDSA Uprising and the hard realities of continuing inequality and poverty and frustration of the last 36 years.
That gap can be called the "hypocrisy gap," and it's one that created greater and greater resentment every year the EDSA establishment celebrated the uprising on February 25 or mourned the imposition of martial law on September 21. Seen from this angle, the Marcos vote can be interpreted as being largely a protest vote that first surfaced in a dramatic fashion in the 2016 elections that propelled Rodrigo Duterte to the presidency.
Though probably inchoate and diffuse at the level of conscious motivation, the vote for Duterte and the even larger vote for Marcos were propelled by widespread resentment at the persistence of gross inequality in a country where less than 5 percent of the population corners over 50 percent of the wealth. It was a protest against the extreme poverty that engulfs 25 percent of the people and the poverty, broadly defined, that has about 40 percent of them in its clutches.
Against the loss of decent jobs and livelihoods owing to the destruction of our manufacturing sector and our agriculture by the policies imposed on us by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization, and the United States.
Against the despair and cynicism that engulf the youth of the working masses who grow up in a society where they learn that the only way to get a decent job that allows you to get ahead in life is to go abroad.
Against the daily blows to one's dignity inflicted by a rotten public transport system in a country where 95 percent of the population doesn't own a car.
These are the conditions that most working class voters experienced directly, not the horrors of the Marcos period, and their subjective resentment primed them for the seductive appeals of a return to a fictive "Golden Age."
In the presidential elections, the full force of this resentment against the EDSA status quo was directed at Marcos's main opponent, Vice President Leni Robredo. Unfairly, since she is a woman of great personal integrity.
The problem is that in the eyes of the marginalized and the poor that went for Marcos, Robredo was not able to separate her image from its associations with the Liberal Party, the conservative neoliberal Makati Business Club, the family of the assassinated Benigno Aquino, Jr., the double standards on corruption that rendered Benigno Aquino III's "where there is no corruption, there is no poverty" slogan an object of ridicule, and--above all-- with the devastating failure of the 36 year old EDSA Republic to deliver.
The rhetoric of "good governance" may have resonated with Robredo's middle class and elite base, but for the masa (masses) it smacked of the same old hypocrisy. Good governance or "tapat na papamalakad" sounded in their ears much like the Liberals' painting themselves as the "gente decente" or "decent people" that led to their rout in the 2016 elections and the ascendancy of Rodrigo Duterte.
Moreover, the Marcos base was not a passive, inert mass. Fed with lies by the Marcos troll machinery, a very large number of them eagerly battled on the internet with the Robredo camp, the media, historians, the left--with all those that dared to question their certainties. They plastered the comment sections of news sites with pro-Marcos propaganda, much of it memes either glorifying Marcos or unfairly satirizing Robredo.
Generational Rebellion
This protest against the EDSA Republic had a generational component.
Now, it is not unusual that a new generation sets itself against that which the old generation holds dear. But it is usually the case that the younger generation rebels in the service of a vision of the future, of a more just order of things.
What was unusual with the millennial and Gen Z generations of the working masses was that they were not inspired by a vision of the future but by a fabricated image of the past--the persuasiveness of which was enhanced by what sociologists like Nicole Curato have called the "toxic positivity" of Marcos Junior's online persona. He was reconstructed by cybersurgery to come across as a normal, indeed benign, fellow who simply wanted the best for everyone.
From the French Revolution to the Philippine Revolution to the Chinese Revolution to the global anti-war movement of the 1960's to the First Quarter Storm, it was the left that usually offered the vision that youth latched on to to express their generational rebellion.
Unfortunately, in the case of the Philippines, the left has simply been unable to offer that dream of a future order worth fighting for. Ever since it failed to influence the course of events in 1986 by assuming the role of bystander during the EDSA Uprising, the left has failed to recapture the dynamism that made it so attractive to youth during martial law.
The left's decision to deliberately sideline itself during the EDSA Uprising led to the splintering of the progressive movement in the early 1990s. Moreover, socialism, which had served as the beacon for generations since the late 19th century, was badly tarnished by the collapse of the centralized socialist bureaucracies in Eastern Europe.
But perhaps most damaging was a failure of political imagination. The left failed to offer an attractive alternative to the neoliberal order that reigned from the late 1980s on, with its presence on the national scene being reduced to a voice yapping at the failures and abuses of successive administrations.
This failure of vision was coupled with the incapacity to come up with a discourse that would capture and express people's deepest needs, with its continued reliance on stilted, formulaic phrases from the 1970s that simply came across as noise in the new era. There was also the continuing influence of a "vanguardist" mass organizing strategy that might have been appropriate under a dictatorship but was disconnected from people's desire for genuine participation in a more open democratic system.
The times called for Gramsci, but much of the left here stuck with Lenin.
This vanguardism in mass organizing was coupled, paradoxically, with an electoral strategy that de-emphasized class rhetoric, threw overboard practically all references to socialism, and satisfied itself with being a mini partner in elections with contending factions of the capitalist elite. To be sure, one cannot overemphasize significant state repression exercised against some sectors of the left, but what was decisive was the perception that the left was irrelevant or, worse, a nuisance by large sectors of the population as memories of its heroic role during martial law faded away.
Nature abhors a vacuum, as they say, and when it came to capturing the generational energy of working class youth in the late EDSA period, that vacuum was filled by the Marcos revisionist myth.
The Coming Instability
This is the history against which the 2016 and 2022 elections unfolded. But the great thing about history is that it is open-ended and to a great extent indeterminate.
As one philosopher observed, women and men make history, but not under conditions of their own choosing. The ruling elite may strive for control of where society is headed, but this is often frustrated by the emergence of contradictions that create the space for the subordinate sectors to intervene and influence the direction of history.
The Marcos-Duterte camp is currently gloating behind the facade of calls for "burying the hatchet," and we should expect this froth to overflow in the period leading up to June 30. Beginning that date, when it formally assumes power, reality will catch up with this gang.
The Marcos-Duterte alliance, or what is now the circle of multiple political dynasties around the Marcos-Duterte axis, is a connivance of convenience among powerful families. Like most alliances of this type, which are built purely on the sharing of spoils, it will prove to be very unstable.
One would not be surprised if after a year, the Marcoses and Dutertes will be at each other's throats--something that might be foreshadowed by Vice President-elect Sara Duterte's being denied the powerful post of chief of the Department of National Defense and given instead the relatively powerless position of Education Secretary.
This inevitable struggle for power will unfold against a backdrop of millions realizing they have not been led to the promised land of milk and honey and the 20 pesos per kilo of rice, disarray in a business sector that still has memories of the crony capitalism of the Marcos Sr. years, and splits in a military that will have to work overtime to contain the instability triggered by the return of a controversial dynasty that the military itself--or a faction of which--contributed to overthrowing in 1986.
But probably the most important element in this volatile scenario is a large sector, indeed millions, who are determined not to provide the slightest legitimacy to a gang that have cheated and lied and stolen and bribed their way to power.
In voting for Marcos, 31 million people voted for six years of instability. That is unfortunate. But that is also the silver lining in this otherwise bleak scenario. One of the world's most successful organizers of change observed, "There is great disorder under the Heavens but, hey guys, the situation is excellent."
The inevitable crises of the Marcos-Duterte regime offer opportunities to organize for an alternative future, and this time we Filipino progressives better get it right.
Amnesty International on Tuesday said the election of Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr. and Sara Duterte--the son of a former U.S.-backed dictator and daughter of the current president--as president and vice president of the Philippines points to an "ominous moment for human rights."
"The new government should make a dramatic course correction and move away from the past six years under Rodrigo Duterte."
With an initial tally nearly finished, Marcos, the son of former President Ferdinand Marcos, has secured more than 50% of the vote and enjoys an insurmountable lead over his nearest rival, liberal candidate Leni Robredo.
Meanwhile, Sara Duterte--a former two-term mayor of Davao City and daughter of current President Rodrigo Duterte--has won her separate election for the vice presidency in a landslide.
In a statement, Amnesty International (AI) Asia-Pacific deputy regional director Emerlynne Gil called the victorious candidates' unwillingness to address human rights violations in the Philippines "deeply concerning."
"During the campaign period, it seemed that they were deliberately refusing to take a position on past and present violations," she said, "including those committed under martial law in the 1970s and early 1980s, and in the context of the Rodrigo Duterte administration's 'war on drugs.'"
\u201cIf confirmed, Marcos Jr will face a wide array of urgent human rights challenges. It is only through genuine commitment to justice, truth & accountability that Ph can move forward in building respect for the rule of law and human rights. \n\nRead full quote. https://t.co/z8zZFOhTOP\u201d— Amnesty Philippines (@Amnesty Philippines) 1652163643
"If confirmed, the Marcos Jr. administration will face a wide array of urgent human rights challenges," Gil continued. "The new government should make a dramatic course correction and move away from the past six years under Rodrigo Duterte, when authorities increased attacks against political opponents and human rights defenders, cracked down on press freedom, and oversaw widespread and systemic killings in the so-called war on drugs."
"The widespread arbitrary arrests and detentions, torture, and extrajudicial killings that occurred in the martial law era and violations committed more recently during the Duterte administration must never be allowed to happen again," she stressed.
"It is only through a genuine commitment to justice, truth, and accountability for such violations," Gil added, "that the Philippines can move forward in building respect for the rule of law and human rights."
While campaigning for president in 2016 on an extreme law-and-order platform, Rodrigo Duterte, the former "death squad mayor" of Davao City, promised to kill 100,000 criminals. Human rights groups estimate that as many as 30,000 people have been killed during his anti-drug campaign, many of them in vigilante slayings.
Last September, the International Criminal Court authorized an investigation into possible crimes against humanity perpetrated during Duterte's rule.
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According to AI's 2021 country report on the Philippines, "lack of accountability continued to facilitate unlawful killings and other human rights violations under the government's 'war on drugs' campaign... Human rights defenders, political activists, and politicians were subjected to unlawful killings, arbitrary arrest and detention, and harassment. Indigenous peoples were the target of attacks by the authorities and unknown assailants."
Dozens of human rights defenders and at least 10 journalists have been murdered during Duterte's rule.
"It is only through a genuine commitment to justice, truth, and accountability for such violations that the Philippines can move forward in building respect for the rule of law and human rights."
The 1965 election of Ferdinand Marcos was the culmination of two decades of American interference in the internal politics of the Philippines, a former U.S. colony. After Marcos declared martial law and his regime jailed, tortured, and murdered thousands of people, successive U.S. administrations--seeking to stop the spread of communism and maintain U.S. hegemony--supported the dictatorship with billions of dollars in aid and diplomatic cover.
Bilateral relations, already seriously strained, collapsed during the Reagan administration as Marcos sought to renegotiate the status of key U.S. military bases in the Philippines. In 1986, Marcos was ousted in the People Power Revolution that sent him and his family fleeing to Hawaii.
Marcos' kleptocratic rule bankrupted the Philippines. By the end of his tenure, his family had allegedly embezzled $5 to $10 billion from the country's central bank. Meanwhile, 70% of Filipinos were living in poverty, compared with 28% in 1965.
However, many Filipinos--especially those too young to remember Marcos' rule--believe martial law was good for the country.
Washington Post reporters Regine Cabato and Shibani Mahtani explained last month that Marcos Jr.'s popularity "has benefited from a yearslong, carefully crafted campaign to rewrite history, harnessing the power of social media to blur the lines between fact and fiction" in a nation with the world's highest internet usage rate.
"In the global war on the truth, the Philippines is especially vulnerable," they wrote. "About 99% of its population is online, and over half find it difficult to spot fake news."
\u201cThere is a huge campaign of disinformation aimed at whitewashing the Marcos regime, ahead of the Philippines\u2019 upcoming general elections on May 9.\nhttps://t.co/Yb2XvLnqxA\u201d— The Diplomat (@The Diplomat) 1651741383
"Pro-Marcos propaganda is now proliferating on platforms like TikTok and YouTube that appeal primarily to Gen Z," the reporters noted, "ushering in a new era of fun, hip, glossily edited content that is harder to regulate online."
"The old dictatorship is now being upgraded and modernized, peppered with songs and emoji," they added. "Through the power of social media, one of the Philippines' most despised families is being rehabilitated into one of its most revered."