THE MARCOS TRUMP PLAYBOOK

I started writing this blog 15 years ago. At the time I wrote about things that occurred on a particular day, usually the day on which I posted the piece. On the 25th February 2011 I noted that President Marcos of the Philippines fled that country in disgrace on the 25th February 1986. That was 40 years ago. He took with him a considerable amount of money that he had grafted from the State, mostly dollars that had been given to the Philippine Government by the United States. Indeed, the level of corruption by the Marcos family having apparently purloined between $5 billion to $10 billion is unsurpassed. There have been a variety of court case leading to convictions, garnishing of assets, repayments and appeals, some of which have yet to be finalised. There is apparently still an outstanding warrant in the United States, yet Marcos’s son, Bongbong Marcos, is current President of the Philippines. 

It is difficult to comprehend why the citizens of the Philippines continue to elected this family to public office, given their history of colossal graft, corruption and human rights abuses. Some monies have beed returned to the Philippine Government, but nothing like what it should get. 

Presidents of States have a history of enriching themselves. It is surprising how that can happen even in democratic countries; although, as regards the Philippines, it did not stay democratic for long.  During Ferdinand Marcos’ regime he soon declare Martial Law and ran the country under these conditions from 1972 to 1981.  He described his rule as ‘constitutional authoritarianism’ and granted himself additional powers under a new constitution in 1973.  

In looking over the Marcos playbook it would appear that the current President of the United States is closely following the agenda. Over inflated claims, illegal use of executive orders to impose tariffs and other unconstitutional schemes. Open corruption in receipts of foreign gifts and private enterprises promoted by the use of his office to sell bitcoins, bibles and other Trump sponsored knick-knacks. Appointment of unqualified  federal officials and deployment of same as terror troops. One could go on and on with the comparison. 

How long will it be before the American citizens get hold of themselves and move this man out of office. I have long held the view that Mr Trump is the same kind of gangster the country saw in Al Capone. The New York Times, I am told, has finally come round to that view. When will the rest of the country.

 

WHAT'S IN A HEADLINE

Listening to a Radio 4 discussion (I can’t now remember which or who said what) I heard the phrase “Families are like countries”. It is indeed a sentiment that I can relate to, although I would have placed the emphasis the other way round “Countries are like families”. Indeed, the preoccupations of a nation are reflected in media (newspapers, radio, television, internet) or perhaps promoted by that same media, just as there is always someone in the family who passes round information of births, successes, travel, engagements, marriages, fallings out, job changes, movements in general and deaths. The gamut of human activity within the family is discussed with various degrees of emphasis and importance, as well as who, or what, should be told. This will also included, on occasion, the trials and tribulations of close friends and acquaintances. What is happening in the rest of the world, at times, is quite secondary. 

It is not that the information isn’t there to be absorbed, it is merely a matter of what is holding our interest at the time.  The strike in Birmingham in relation to the collection of rubbish is an instance in point. We are made aware of it and its effects in Birmingham, but for those of us living in London, with no relatives or friends in that city, in may provoke some empathy but, on the whole, levels of concern will vary a great deal across the country. Similarly, what goes on in France, Germany, the Sudan, China and the Far East etc. will only become of notice and import depending on the nature and gravity of the event that brings it into world focus. I suppose that is only natural. 

What causes me, at this moment in time, to ponder on the question of emphasis, importance and relevance of information, is the current preoccupation with the royal family and the machinations of a member of that family. How is it that this event has been blown up to such proportions? I liken it to the notion that a butterfly fluttering its wings in the amazon can cause a storm in the North Atlantic. This is chaos theory in action. One very socially mobile rich man’s perversions in southern Florida several years ago, have caused ripples round the world. That storm seems to have had its greatest effect in the United Kingdom. Political careers have been aborted and lines of succession are being debated across the country. Possible acts of Parliament are being discussed.  The tragedies in middle Europe and in the Middle East have taken a back seat. Wars continue, health care is in serious financial difficulties, the costs of higher education are in turmoil, poverty and homelessness are still very much problems to be addressed, and the greatest threat to western democracy still sits in the White House in Washington.  The man who is mentioned over and over again, laced into the cocoon  of that Florida butterfly, is a major contributor to the current chaos. 

It all boils down to acquisitiveness. The relationships effectively revolved around information able to be used to acquire yet more wealth. The insider information available to people in influential positions close to imminent financial dealings involving vast sums off money. On the spot knowledge of substantial public and private investments in substantial public and private businesses, surreptitiously passed on to others by persons with a duty of care not to misuse the confidences with which they were entrusted. Therein lies the problem in the United Kingdom. I am not so sure that the underage sex will play any great part in the UK, except as a salacious backdrop.

In the United States however, the situation is reversed. There are outcries for prosecutions for sexual abuse by the so called ‘clients’ of Mr. Epstein, whilst the financial trading aspect is peripheral. What is bizarre is that people in the United States are pointing to the arrest and contemplations of prosecutions in the UK, and loudly proclaiming “Why aren’t we doing that here?” They seem to miss the point that the offences being contemplated in the UK are about misuse of position over financial dealings rather than sexual behaviour. Sadly, the traumas suffered by the victims of Epstein and his wealthy ‘clients’ are unlikely to see any retribution of any kind, unless, of course, there are substantial sums of money involved. Perhaps I am too cynical.

It is the prominence of these events that have pushed the lethal violence in the rest of the world out of the headlines. Just as, in a family, the death of a relative puts, the failure of someone’s passing an A level, in the shade, whilst an affair by a close relative with another might put the death of an elderly parent off the agenda for a while.  I really don’t know just how much attention one should pay to world events. Does having a specific knowledge of the affairs in other countries give us any greater insight? Does it help knowing the names and political affiliations of other leaders of state and their ministers in all African, Asian and European nations? Will we be better for having that knowledge? 

What I can say is that we are all facing the same problems. Health, housing, employment, food supply, education, security, culture and leisure are necessary for survival no matter where we are. Collecting waste, efficient plumbing, public and private transport along well maintained rail and roads are equally essential in the 21st century. How each state choses to provide these things for their citizens  is what matters most just as it is of concern to all families. Understanding how best to achieve this across the globe is not a bad thing to be aiming for. It doesn’t necessarily make headlines, but it is what should be the order of things. What does seem to make the papers at the moment is the chaos. Restoring order and freedom can be achieved either through democracy or dictatorship.

There was once a call for “Education, education, education” which somehow has transmogrified into “Brainwash, brainwash, brainwash”. That is what seems to be the trend, certainly from the leadership in the United States. I understand the concern for victims of Epstein, but turning the deaths of innocent protesters in Minnesota, into ‘dealing with domestic terrorists in self defence’, when the entire world has seen the videos, is beyond comprehension. That should be the greater outcry, the continuing headline; but, we live with what we have. It would be so nice to get back to democracy.

SHE KNOWS WHEREOF SHE SPEAKS

There is a piece in the Guardian from Sunday 8^th February 2026 by journalist Janine di Giovanni which is well worth a read, so I am posting it to share. It echoes a comment made by William Pitt the younger in a speech in the House of Commons on the 18^th November 1783, “Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves”.

After years spent documenting state terror, I know it when I see it. And I see it now in the US and Israel

Janine di Giovanni 

It’s chilling to watch as Trump and Netanyahu adopt the methods of regimes their countries once condemned

In Syria, where I worked during the years of Bashar al-Assad’s terror, people were often taken away to torture cells before dawn by masked men. The timing was deliberate. It disoriented them at their most vulnerable, ensuring the torture to come would be even more agonising. The testimonies I recorded from survivors almost always contained the same phrase: “The morning they came for me.” One young woman, shattered by rape and violence, later told me that her life had split in two – before and after the masked men came for her.

In Iraq, those who spoke against Saddam Hussein – even abroad, even casually –were punished in cruel ways by a vengeful leader determined to crush any hint of dissent.

In Egypt in 2016, Giulio Regeni, 28-year-old Italian academic researching labour unions, was abducted, beaten and tortured to death, it is thought, by president Abdel Fatah al-Sisi’s security services. His own mother had difficulty recognising his mutilated body.

During the second Chechen war, I met the journalist Anna Politkovskaya in Chechnya. She repeatedly attacked Vladimir Putin’s policies, documenting human rights abuses during Russia’s military campaigns. To punish her, a bullet was put in her brain on Putin’s birthday – a warning to other truth-seekers. Stay silent or die.

In the West Bank and Gaza, Israeli soldiers, masked and unmasked, kill, torture and imprison Palestinian doctors, journalists, teachers, activists and scholars not for what they have done – but because of who they are.

After decades of documenting state terror, I know how it starts. Governments begin to use words like security, order, deterrence. Every excuse for Benjamin Netanyahu’s conduct in Gaza is framed as “security”. ICE agents are trained in a language of order in which violence becomes procedure.

What happens when democratic states adopt the methods of the regimes they once condemned? Terror is not only masked men and arbitrary detention. It also operates through fear. Policies are designed to make people more compliant, more submissive. As the historian Timothy Snyder warned in his 2017 book, On Tyranny, this is how societies slide into danger: people obey in advance.

In Donald Trump’s US, I have watched CEOs, academics, journalists and government officials allow fear to override decency and moral authority. I have seen this pattern before. It begins with claims that certain people are dangerous. That ordinary legal safeguards should not apply to them. It ends with a society diminished – more compliant, more cynical, more brutal. State terror is rarely announced. In my experience, it becomes normalised. It seeps quietly into the machinery of government.

Authoritarian regimes make no serious claim to moral legitimacy. Their violence is explicit. Saddam did not apologise when he killed 182,000 Kurds during the Anfal campaign. Sisi did not apologise when about 1,000 Muslim Brotherhood supporters were mowed down in Rabaa and al-Nahda squares in central Cairo. Hafez al-Assad never acknowledged the tens of thousands killed in Hama in 1982. (To this day, the exact numbers remain unknown and the disappeared unaccounted for. The regime cynically built hotels over mass graves).

Democracies operate in an entirely different way. Their actions are often technically above the law. Constitutions are invoked and obscure laws brought back to defend aggressive policies. Governments talk of “necessary action”. They point to courts that still function, a press that is still somewhat free, elections that still take place – even as all of these institutions disintegrate. This is how democracies begin to resemble the regimes they once condemned. It is a subtle, devastating shift.

The tools are familiar. A journalist whose reporting aligns closely with the political interests of the US president and the Israeli prime minister is installed to lead CBS, once one of the most respected networks in the US. On university campuses, surveillance now includes photographing students who attend or lead pro-Palestinian demonstrations, and are deemed troublemakers. I was told by one student at an Ivy League university that some are quietly warned they will never find work on Wall Street, at the best law firms, or in government offices if they continue. Other student activists are removed from their homes, illegally detained and threatened with deportation.

Academic deans face threats of punitive funding cuts unless they impose requirements that constrain academic freedom. At Northwestern University in Chicago, students were forced to complete antisemitism training that they said was inaccurate and biased in favour of Israel before they could enrol in classes.

Instructors are quietly told to toe the line. Journalists are disciplined through language that is carefully crafted as editorial policy – then some of them are arrested. Those who resist are increasingly labelled enemies of the state.

ICE tactics themselves are not new. They have long been used disproportionately against political radicals, Muslims, Black Americans and migrants. What has changed is their visibility – and increasingly, their acceptance. Today, ICE mirrors the same patterns of state terror I have documented for decades: arbitrary detention, secret evidence, militarised policing. The criminalisation of dissent. All of this is justified by the guardians of legality: the White House, the Knesset, the office of the prime minister.

Bit by bit, lists are drawn up. Loyalty tests reminiscent of the red scare have returned. Dual citizens are facing pressure to choose a country of “loyalty”. Immigration enforcement is reframed as a hunt for “criminals” rather than a legal process. Activists, NGOs and humanitarians are punished. In Gaza, organisations such as Doctors Without Borders are told that unless they provide lists of healthcare workers – placing those staff at grave risk – they will not be allowed to operate.

The United Nations, founded to prevent the scourge of war, is rendered toothless. Then side-lined and derided.

True, the US and Israel are not Russia or North Korea. But democracies erode. The early stages are not just the national guard on the street, but legal arguments over definitions. Judges deferring to power. Congress taking money from powerful lobbying groups, then using social media to spread propaganda. Disinformation acts as a weapon of truth. Good men and women look away, fearful they will lose jobs, visas, publishing contracts, social standing.

The most chilling thing is what happens to society, but also to individuals. Fear becomes internalised, and we begin to censor our own thoughts. We wonder if the law will actually protect us if they come for us one day.

The true irony is, state terror does not make a state safer. When democratic states adopt the methods of tyrannies, they become weaker. Their global credibility frays. They sacrifice the legitimacy they once held that distinguishes them from the regimes they claim to oppose.

I know state terror when I see it. It is not just Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, Russia’s FSB or Egypt’s National Security Agency. It’s lawyers in suits and bureaucrats at desks and journalists spinning a narrative so the truth is distorted. It’s ICE agents breaking car windows and shooting unarmed citizens. It is militarised borders; family separations and deportations without due process. It is turning fear into a policy, a goal.

We should be listening, urgently, to all of those who have lived through it. The hundreds of testimonies I have taken over the years from those haunted voices are an early warning signal we cannot afford to ignore.

·       Janine di Giovanni is a war correspondent and the executive director of The Reckoning Project, a war crimes unit in Ukraine, Sudan and Gaza. She is the author of The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches from Syria.

 

 

BACK IN 1964

In 1964, or thereabouts, Harold Wilson said “A week is a long time in politics.” In October of that year Harold Wilson lead the Labour Party to win the UK General Election after the Conservatives had been in power for thirteen years. In November of 1964, Lyndon Johnson, who had become President on the assassination of John F Kennedy a year before, was elected President defeating Republican Senator Barry Goldwater. Under his presidency the United States Civil Rights of 1964 was enacted. At the same time, the Vietnam War was building up in intensity. At that time there were supposedly only US Military Advisers in Vietnam, and the United States sent 5000 more advisers on the 27th July bringing the total to 21,000. This would increase to over 500,000 by 1968. That’s an increase of 2500% over four years.  That’s not a Trumpian exaggeration. 

At the beginning of 1964, the Winter Olympic were held in Innsbruck, Austria, just over the hill, so to speak, from Cortina d’Ampezzo in Italy where the current Winter Olympics are taking place. Also in the first week in January, there were armed clashes between United States troops and Panamanian civilians in the Panama Canal Zone precipitating a major international crisis, resulting in the deaths of 21 Panamanians and 4 U.S. soldiers.

Also in that year, in South Africa, the Rivonia Trial had begun and Nelson Mandela made his “I am prepared to die” speech. He and seven others were later sentenced to life imprisonment. Martin Luther King received the Novel Peace Prize. The bodies of two hitchhikers, who were kidnapped and killed by the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi, were found during the search for three civil rights activists who had also been killed by the KKK in Mississippi. There were race riots in Philadelphia and in Jacksonville, Florida, during a tour of the United States, John Lennon announced that the Beatles will not play to a segregated audience. The Charter of the Palestine Liberation Organisation       (PLO) is released by the Arab League and Nikita Khrushchev is deposed as leader of the Soviet Union; Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin assume power. The last judicial hangings in the United Kingdom are executed. 

All in all, in 1964 there were a lot of problems, and events, not too dissimilar to the current year. I was 21, going on 22, demonstrating against the House un-American Activities Committee who had arrived as a result of the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkley campus where Police had arrested 800 students. I could see FBI agents (easily recognisable) taking pictures of the demonstrators, and I presume there is a photo of me in an FBI archive. That’s another story.  

So getting back to this opening week of February 2026, where does one begin? A week in politics is indeed quite a long time. Many people going from hero to zero and some people, already at zero, plummeting to even greater depths. Political leadership seems to be at rock bottom. In the United Kingdom, mistakes are made, and the general public is disenchanted. Yet the polls indicate an extraordinary attention being paid to the most vile side of current British politics in the shape of the Reform Party, run by a ex public school bully bigot, who has been outed by numbers of his fellow students. In the light of this obviously hateful background, how is it he can possibly be supported? If  Peter Mandelson, a gay man, can be so vilified for just knowing Mr Epstein, how is it Mr Farage is excused such aggressive venality in his youth, which has clearly stayed with him, given how he refuses to apologise and sticks with denials. 

What can people possibly be thinking when answering pollsters with positive support for Reform? Has the British Public lost perspective? Has it somehow lost all sense of decency or shame? Does what is happening in the heartland of the United States, the killing of civilians protesters for standing up for civil rights, have no effect? Do they not see that our own civil rights are being endangered by a Trump supporting mouthy clown? What is happening? There are so many questions and  unhealthy disturbing distractions, that it seems impossible to find ways to cope. On the one hand the destruction continuing in Ukraine, Middle East, Middle America and Africa and on the other hand, as a British Citizen, domestic politics in the UK over budgets, inflation, immigration, health service, health care, housing, racism, misogyny and representative leadership, gives one pause for thought. Is there anything to worry about?

It appears the collection of one disgraced man’s papers and memorabilia has catapulted public resentment and anger over two continents. His deceit, proclivities and, seemingly, close associations with pubic figures and influencers has these same figures scurrying around like rats deserting a sinking ship. Many, if not most, are being protected by the sycophancy of the United States Department of Justice towards one particular well publicised and close associate (who claims to have dissociated himself from Epstein long ago). In order to protect him they dare not reveal other prominent and influential individuals for fear of the entire structure falling down around them.  So they dissemble and lie to the public claiming they are transparent and upholding the Constitution of the United States. 

Yet, Donald Trump is already a convicted felon and adjudicated sex offender. How is it that all is forgotten and set aside? His association with another sex offender is hardly surprising. Like Farage’s bullying bigotry, Putin’s and Netanyahu’s barbarism, all is dismissed as if it never happened. I would love to be told that I have got it all wrong and that I have misrepresented and completely misunderstood what is going on. I am eager for another rational point of view. 

I confess I had belief back in Los Angeles of 1964, although it was cracking after the assassination of John F Kennedy. There was a sense of hope watching those press conferences with him, during which he answered questions with respect and articulate thought. A president who may have dodged a question now and again but never attacked or vilified the questioner. Indeed, despite the difficulties one could understand the press corps saying “Thank you Mr President” at the end of a briefing, and they meant it. The loss of grace, humour and simple intelligence in that office or any political office is sorely missed. It may surface now and again, but rarely. Mind you, some of the press might roll back a bit of the arrogance. 

The following are, in my view, well worth a listen. In particular the meeting in Paris (second film - conference 12).