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<img src="https://cdn.kahimyang.com/resources-15/marcos-new-society-sm.webp" alt="President Marcos speaks on New Society" loading="lazy" />
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<p>
Marcos critics and political opponents invariably remember September 1972 today for martial law because of FM's use of emergency executive powers to stop the then raging communist insurgency, abolish Congress, and overhaul the bureaucracy.
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<p>
Other people remember that time more for the founding of the New Society and what it engendered — the pervasive and deep-seated changes in the nation's social, political, economic and cultural life.
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<h3>
No better witness
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<p>
The New Society, more than the martial law proclamation, has had an enduring impact on the country.
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<p>
No one perhaps can bear truer and better witness to this than  Francisco "Kit" Tatad, the former two-term senator and information minister of President Ferdinand E. Marcos during that time. He saw what happened, he helped make it happen, and he has luckily lived to tell the tale.
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<h3>
Building a reformed society
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<p>
In September 10, 2022, on the invitation of a group that calls itself the University of the Philippines Leadership Forum, Kit delivered a speech at the BGC in Taguig on the subject of "building a new reformed society."
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<p>
Believing that he was asked to speak because of his 10-year experience in the Cabinet of Ferdinand Marcos, Kit turned his address into a recollection and reflection on his work in government and the period of martial law and social change in the 1970s.
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<div class="book-extract">
<p>
"From 1969 to 1980, I served as presidential spokesman and secretary/minister of public information to President Ferdinand E. Marcos. In that capacity, I did many things. The most notable though, for our purpose this afternoon, is that on September 23, 1972, I read to the nation the President's Proclamation 1081, suspending the privilege of habeas corpus and proclaiming martial law all over the Philippines. That official document was dated September 21, 1972, but it was made public two days later. It was accompanied by the President's historic address.
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<p>
"In that address, President Marcos declared he was suspending the privilege of the writ and proclaiming martial law all over the country to save the Republic from the communist insurgency and to create a New Society. Thus the proclamation of martial law became known as the birth of the New Society. It triggered the highest expectations.
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<p>
"As spokesman for the New Society, I spoke about it at every turn, until I left the Cabinet in 1980, six years before the so-called EDSA revolt. 
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<h3>
Creative and historic achievements
</h3>
<p>
"The New Society provided the most exciting part of my Cabinet experience. It also mobilized President Marcos' best creative faculties. It enabled him to post many historic achievements, some of which have endured to this day. The institutionalization of the barangay as the nation's smallest political subdivision is one such achievement; our network of diplomatic ties with the world powers on both sides of the Cold War, which ended in 1991, is another.
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<p>
"The government wrote and codified a panoply of laws and programs that served as ramparts of the New Society.
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<p>
"As information minister, I was deeply encouraged to launch a highly successful information program that replaced government-controlled media with a self-regulated one, and a national discipline campaign under the auspices of the Mabuhay ang Pilipino movement.
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<p>
"The building of the New Society was at its peak when I left the Cabinet in 1980. But it came to a full stop when President Marcos agreed to vacate Malacañang and accept foreign exile in Hawaii to avert a bloody resolution of the EDSA demonstrations in February 1986. In so doing, President Marcos avoided the catastrophic tragedy that descended on Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 1989, when the Chinese military crushed the students-led pro-democracy demonstrations and wasted thousands of Chinese protesters.
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<p>
"History will long remember that peaceful withdrawal by President Marcos at the height of his power as a genuine act of the highest statesmanship, which we have not seen either before or since. ...
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<h3>
Systematic destruction of everything Marcos
</h3>
<p>
"After that, came the full-scale and systematic destruction of everything associated with Marcos and the celebration of everything associated with his foes. The main thrust of Cory Aquino's presidency from 1986 to 1992, and her son B.S. Aquino 3rd's presidency from 2010 to 2016, was to cancel everything mentionable about Marcos and to mythologize everything related to the Aquinos.
</p>
<p>
"At the end of her revolutionary regime, Cory installed herself as president for the next six years on the false and invalid claim that she was "elected" in the Feb. 7, 1986 snap presidential election to a term of six years. This claim had no factual or constitutional basis either. Marcos was the one elected in that election, but Cory refused to accept its results, and the mutinous military generals installed her as 'revolutionary president.' Cory's questionable assumption of the office was never questioned in court, in Congress or even in the court of public opinion.
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<p>
"Under Marcos, the nation went through two severe international energy shocks in the 1970s. The nation survived both, in large measure because of the President's diplomatic initiatives with the Arab members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and his creation of the Department of Energy under then Secretary Geronimo Velasco. After Cory took over, she quickly abolished this department for no apparent reason other than that it was a Marcos creation, even though by then the energy crisis had not yet fully abated. She also allowed the government's entire energy program to dissipate, thereby creating 10 to 12 hours of daily power outages.
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<p>
"Under Noynoy Aquino, the government virtually became a 'de facto government' — Noynoy had his immediate predecessor, former president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, jailed on trumped-up charges, and Supreme Court Chief Justice Renato Corona impeached and removed, first by pressuring 188 congressmen to impeach him without reading the Articles of Impeachment, and then by bribing 19 senator-judges of the Senate impeachment court to convict and remove him on one solitary charge supported by illegally procured evidence, after seven of the eight original charges had been dropped for lack of evidence.
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<p>
"At the Senate impeachment trial, only three senator-judges were untouched by the bribe money of P50 million to P100 million each. Some of the corrupted are still in the Senate today.
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<p>
"From 1986 onward, our history was written by 'the victors.' They wrote whatever they pleased and then accused former president Ferdinand Marcos of historical revisionism.
</p>
<p>
"There were no details and consequently no proof of this alleged revisionism. Extra abundant rather were the fake claims which for 36 years the Marcoses had to endure at great cost.
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<p>
"Among these was the longstanding libel in the Guinness Book of World Records accusing President and Mrs. Marcos of 'the greatest robbery of a foreign government.'
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<p>
"This was not supported by any verifiable detail or evidence. But after BBM's phenomenal triumph in the elections this year; Guinness quickly withdrew its libel, by deleting it from its websites for lack of evidence, with belated apologies to all Filipinos.
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<p>
"Guinness could not do otherwise with the unbelievable size of BBM's vote. It was the biggest electoral majority of any Filipino president since independence — 31.6 million votes, or 58.7 percent of the total votes counted. His closest rival got less than half of his votes. This completely drowned out the triumphant racket of the EDSA crowd that had forced the old man Marcos to relinquish the presidency in 1986."
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<h3>
Change or transformation
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<p>
Kit Tatad's address is much longer than is recounted here.
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Marcos proclamation of martial law and the launch of the New Society