161 ISSN 1655-1524 Print ISSN 2012-0796 Online SOCIAL SCIENCE DILIMAN 19:1 January–June 2023 REVIEW B O O K False Nostalgia: The Marcos “Golden Age” Myths and How to Debunk Them By JC Punongbayan Quezon City: Bughaw - Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2023, 377 pages ISBN: 9786214482467 Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels once said, “repeat a lie oſten enough and it becomes the truth.” Goebbels, who was Adolf Hitler’s one-man propaganda machine, oversaw creating not only lies for Nazi Germany but supervised the spread, through media, of “Hitler Lies” to gain political and social control. Psychologically speaking, if a lie is repeated oſten, it makes us believe and think it is the truth. It challenges not only our rationality but also our beliefs. A very good example of this, in the Philippine historical context, is the proliferation of what we may call “Marcosian Lies.” rough the help of social media personalities, mostly vloggers and influencers under a web of network disinformation, these Marcosian Lies became the essential truth for some Filipinos. Marcosian Lies are backed by historical facts and narratives, yet facts and narratives are perverted for a particular purpose or for propaganda’s sake. e crisis of being drowned in Marcosian Lies not only rests on the study of history but on the politics of memory—and this catastrophe was best seen when millions of Filipinos favored the return of the Marcoses to power. It makes us question, however, if it was Ferdinand Marcos Sr. and his dictatorship that spread this bag of lies as a form of state propaganda or were these fabrications only made in the post-EDSA era as a form of rebranding the Marcos image in preparation for their return to Malacañang. Economist JC Punongbayan, a graduate of the UP School of Economics and a public intellectual who regularly decodes issues of political economy for online news platform Rappler, siſted through some of these Marcosian Lies in his first book, False Nostalgia: e Marcos “Golden Age” Myths and How to Debunk em. Punongbayan’s primary focus is on SSD V19 N1_review_Nostalgia.indd 161 SSD V19 N1_review_Nostalgia.indd 161 8/4/2024 2:55:32 PM 8/4/2024 2:55:32 PM