Passionate Revolutions. Talitha Espiritu
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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 communist China, the film presents a version of political demonology to draw rigid boundaries between citizens and subversives. 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,