Fake news on detentions, tortures and killings under Marcos
First of 4 parts
“AMNESTY International has estimated that about 70,000 people were imprisoned, 34,000 were tortured, and 3,257 were killed during the Marcos dictatorship.”
That statement, repeated hundreds of times verbatim in Yellow accounts of the martial law era is a classic instance of Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels’ technique of deception: “If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes accepted as truth.”
It is also a case study on how purportedly incontrovertible facts on martial law are complete lies, deliberately and methodically spread to demonize the strongman, Ferdinand Marcos.
The Amnesty International (AI) never made that statement attributed to it.
This was deliberately concocted by a virulently anti-Marcos US academic only in 2001 and spread by the Yellows, and especially the communists, since portraying Marcos as a bloody tyrant that had to be deposed had been their main propaganda thrust to justify their existence.
That sentence purportedly issued by the AI has been repeated so many times that many believe it’s true. It is indeed a testament to the fact that even our academics have been so biased against Marcos that they repeat that lie, throwing to the dustbin their training as meticulous fact-checkers. Every single mainstream newspaper (including several columnists in this paper) in the country has had articles repeating exactly that lie.
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