The Marcos Regime

In the last three decades, the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos has commanded the close scrutiny of scholars. These studies have focused on the political repression, human rights abuses, debt-driven growth model, and crony capitalism that defined Marcos’ so-called Democratic Revolution in the Philippines. But the relationship between the media and the regime’s public culture remains underexplored. In Passionate Revolutions, Talitha Espiritu evaluates the role of political emotions in the rise and fall of the Marcos government. Focusing on the sentimental narratives and melodramatic cultural politics of the press and the cinema from 1965 to 1986, she examines how aesthetics and messaging based on heightened feeling helped secure the dictator’s control while also galvanizing the popular struggles that culminated in “people power” and government overthrow in 1986. In analyzing news articles, feature films, cultural policy documents, and propaganda films as national allegories imbued with revolutionary power, Espiritu expands the critical discussion of dictatorships in general and Marcos’s in particular by placing Filipino popular media and the regime’s public culture in dialogue. Espiritu’s interdisciplinary approach in this illuminating case study of how melodrama and sentimentality shape political action breaks new ground in media studies, affect studies, and Southeast Asian studies.

Through a policy and legal analysis, this book shows how corruption facilitates money laundering, and vice versa. Furthermore, it demonstrates specifically how the responses developed to combat one type of financial crime can productively be employed in fighting the other.

The book provides an overview of the history of the Philippines from the period of Spanish colonial domination to the present and analyzes the twenty-year Marcos record and the causes of the downfall of the Marcos regime. The essays will greatly aid the general reader in understanding the Philippine-American relationship. Originally published in 1986. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Philippine dictatorship of Ferdinand E. Marcos was characterized by family-based rule and corruption. This sultanistic regime--in which the ruler exercised power freely, without loyalty to any ideology or institution--had to be brought down because Marcos would never step down. In this book Mark Thompson analyzes how Marcos' opponents in the political and economic elite coped with this situation and why their struggle resulted in a transition to democracy through "people power" rather than through violence and revolution. Based on 150 interviews that Thompson conducted with key participants and on unpublished materials collected during his five trips to the Philippines, the book sheds new light on the transition process. Thompson reveals how anti-Marcos politicians backed a terrorist campaign by social democrats and then, after its failure, joined a "united front" with the communists. But when opposition leader Benigno S. Aquino, Jr., was assassinated in 1983, the politicians were able to draw on public outrage and challenge Marcos at the polls. The opposition's "moral crusade" brought down Marcos and enabled the new president, Corazon C. Aquino, to consolidate democracy despite the troubling legacies of the dictatorship. Thompson argues that the Philippines' long-standing democratic tradition and the appeal that honest government had to the Filipinos were important elements in explaining the peaceful transition process.