Why didn’t dictatorship work for us, when it did so well for Asia’s Tiger Economies?

This time of the year for 29 years now, in a kind of a ritual, government and the Yellow Media ask Filipinos to commemorate their purported day of deliverance from a dictatorship – the dawning, they say, from an era of darkness. The living heroes boast of their bravery during that time of revolution.

The narrative disseminated year after year is that the Philippines became poor because of the Marcos dictatorship, because of the greed of one man and his family, and his small cabal of cronies. Because the media since 1987 has been owned and run mostly by Marcos’ enemies and until the 1990s by journalists he put out of work in 1972, that good-vs-evil narrative has stuck.