Continuing history after Marcos

 

 

I recently read Raïssa Robles’ blog about the return of the Marcoses to power (http://raissarobles.com/2014/02/09/stopping-the-marcoses-from-erasing-their-crimes-from-history/)  and how certain of our cultural norms are enabling and helping them obliterate their crimes from the history of our country. It’s an interesting and a provocative piece of writing although I don’t fully subscribe to the author’s argument that our culture is partly responsible for the restoration of the Marcos political dynasty, and its recent resurgence because of persistent talks about the possibility of the former dictator’s son and namesake running for the presidency.

Former Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos and his wife, Imelda Romualdez-
Marcos, as the country's Marahas and Mapurot (ugly and undesirable).

What completely surprised me after reading Ms. Robles’ blog is the sorry state of history as a major field of study in university, which she rightly wrote is vital for a nation in documenting lessons from the past. Ms. Robles wrote: “to this day, The History of the Filipino People written by UP historians Teodoro Agoncillo and Milagros Guerrero – which a lot of schools continue to use as their history textbooks – has not been updated to include the Marcos years and the years afterward.”

 

I still have the 1974 edition of Agoncillo’s Introduction to Filipino History which we brought with us when we moved to Canada in 1987, a copy to remind us and our then- still-young children of our roots. The last chapter of the book was about the New Society, a phrase Agoncillo used only once in the book, perhaps revealing his great discomfort in using it, although the short chapter encapsulated the early crisis that Marcos alluded to from 1966 until he declared martial law in 1972 and changed the Constitution in 1973 to provide legitimacy to his dictatorship.

 

But Ms. Robles is on the correct side of history when she decried the lack of updating in Agoncillo’s book, or other history textbooks, to include the Marcos years and the years after his fall from disgrace. A saying from the philosopher George Santayana aptly reminds us why this is important: “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

 

It is not that there has been a great failure in documenting the events of the Marcos dictatorship which prevents their scholarly publication for use in the teaching of history and as a guide for us in remembering the past. There are plenty of written accounts in newspapers, magazines, local and foreign journals, archival reports, congressional and government records, and other influential books that can be used in accumulating the information needed to update our history. In addition, many survivors of the Marcos era are still alive and they can offer oral histories or personal accounts of what transpired during those repressive and cruel years of dictatorship.

 

In every transition from repression to freedom, many governments such as those in Argentina, Chile, and South Africa have established Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, not only for the purpose of documenting the repression the people have suffered under the old regime, but also to identify remedial measures which may be necessary. Unfortunately, the current president’s mother, former President Cory Aquino, put a brake on past efforts to create a similar commission after Marcos was driven to exile because of pressure from the military. The invisible hand of the United States’ government could also be partly responsible for this obvious ploy to expunge the memory of the Marcos dictatorship which it nurtured and supported.

 

Ms. Robles mentioned that Berlin has established a documentation centre of Nazi crimes during the war, as noted by her husband, journalist Alan Robles. Schoolchildren in Berlin are being taught of Hitler’s crimes to remind them of the horrors of the Nazi regime. Similarly, we also need to educate our children of the crimes of the Marcos’ martial law years and the rise of crony capitalism which continues to survive. My wife, who is also a writer and a classmate of Ms. Robles’ husband at the International Institute of Journalism in Berlin, was equally disturbed that Agoncillo’s book and other Philippine history books have not undergone an updating after the fall of the Marcos dictatorship considering we have so much archival information that can be used.

 

There are four cultural norms that Ms. Robles mentioned in her blog which she argued are being exploited by the Marcos’ political clan and their supporters in propagating their twisted version of reality. These are: respect your elders, do not speak ill of the dead, forgive your enemies, and do not bring the sins of the father on his children. All these so-called social practices are shallow and superficial and they only make light of the crimes committed by the Marcos dictatorship by reducing their culpability. We do not invoke such norms when confronted with the serious gravity of crimes committed against our people. We have long learned and appreciated the clear distinction between right and wrong, and these cultural norms that Ms. Robles mentioned do not by any means mitigate the crimes committed by a dictator against his own people.

 

Noam Chomsky wrote that memory and consciousness of what’s happening right in front of you must be repressed, because once the public comes to understand what’s being done in its name, they would resist and disallow it. This is what exactly was done during the martial law period, and Ms. Robles mentioned it in her blog. Marcos shepherded all the young intellectuals during that time and transformed them into propagandists and mouthpieces of the New Society. The Marcos propaganda machine took care and rewarded them well to crank out glowing and flattering accounts and achievements of the New Society. In other words, they were co-opted by the dictatorship. As soon as the Marcos regime had fallen, these intellectuals would cross the divide to become spokespersons and members of the government think-tank. Now they are either writing and regurgitating daily opinion columns for prestigious local newspapers or serving in the high echelons of government, and for whoever is elected president of the country. Loyalty seems so fungible that ethics or morality doesn’t even matter at all.

Propaganda. Photo courtesy of love unrefined.

Erasing memory and consciousness is the main reason for propaganda. Otherwise, there’s no point to it. Those in systems of control and power never tell the truth, if they can get away with it.

 

The only alternative in bridging this gap between the Marcos years and the present is in scholarship and the academe. Not that academia is totally resilient or immune to government influence, but there is hardly any place left to start this odyssey of reconnecting the past and the present but in the halls of the university. There is a need to fund such scholarship, perhaps through a foundation composed of the survivors of the martial law era and those who do not wish to repeat the past.

 

Ms. Robles’ blog must stir at least the consciousness of those who still yearn for a society that treasures freedom and dignity more than any materialistic achievement. Perhaps, it’s also time to create a new breed of intellectuals to replace the old generation who has betrayed the public.

 

In his book, Necessary Illusions, Chomsky wrote that citizens of democratic societies should “undertake a course of intellectual self-defence to protect themselves from manipulation and control.” In other words, we need to train ourselves to ask the obvious questions, and learn how to be skeptical. For example, if all political commentators are all in agreement with President Noynoy Aquino’s crusade against corruption but differ only on the means of achieving this noble goal, we should instinctively take a few minutes of our reflection to see that this can’t possibly be true. If everyone takes for granted something that cannot possibly be true, what does that make of our value systems and culture as a whole?

 

Any government is founded on opinion, and this extends to the most despotic and most militaristic governments, as well as to the most free and most popular. Rulers rely on consent, whether a state is democratic or totalitarian. The state must ensure that the people do not understand that they actually have the power. To Chomsky, this is the fundamental principle of government.

 

There are many ways by which the government can control the governed. We don’t need special skills to figure what these are.

Marcos redux

 

 

Noted Filipino historian Teodoro Agoncillo once wrote that the Japanese occupation of the Philippines during World War II caused a big spike in crimes. Due to the harshness of the economic conditions, many Filipinos were driven to criminal activities, which continued even with the restoration of the Commonwealth government and the inauguration of the Republic in 1946.

 

Agoncillo observed that “morality had gone down since many people did not care whether they violated the laws of the country provided they earned enough money. Also, relatives and friends of unscrupulous politicians were not afraid to commit crimes because they knew their political-friends would protect them.”

 

When Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law on September 21, 1972, it was the same lame excuse that he used to justify his decision – rise in criminality including crimes of rebellion and insurrection. The promise of the New Society that Marcos peddled around, however, did not solve or mitigate the upswing in criminality. Instead, criminal behaviour was accelerated by his own dictatorship and crimes against the people. He sheltered and protected his business cronies from prosecution of the law so they prospered at the same time that his family amassed their stolen wealth.

Philippine Independence Day as traditionally celebrated on June 12.

Modern-day Philippine independence should be celebrated from the day the Marcos dictatorship ended, which seems to offer a better and clearer perspective of national freedom. Never mind the 1898 declaration of Philippine Independence that was outlived by American colonization at the turn of the 20th century. Besides being a mere aspirational quest for self-determination, the Philippines never really became independent after the Philippine-American War nor during the brief Japanese occupation from 1942 to 1945.

 

Ferdinand Marcos disturbed the peace of the independence years from 1946 to 1972 with his dictatorial rule, which, as a matter of historical fact, was merely a period of nominal independence from American colonial rule.

 

To reckon our independence from the time Marcos was forced out of Malacañang is indeed a more significant celebration of the triumph of people power. It also sends a strong message to the Marcos loyalists that their political era is just a sad chapter in Philippine history, a miserable interregnum that brought large-scale oppression of civil liberties and gave almost a license for those involved with the dictatorship to ransack the country of its wealth with impunity.

 

If history is to be taught so that important lessons can be learned, we should start teaching our children that modern-day Philippine independence commenced from the struggle against the Marcos dictatorship until democracy was restored in 1987. It may not be the ideal democracy the people wanted, but it was the stepping stone of our country’s struggle for genuine political and economic rights.

 

The former enemies of Philippine society are now resurrecting the bankrupt ideals of the new society under Marcos. They are attempting to rewrite history to portray Marcos as a benevolent dictator who cared for the Filipino masses, who built more roads and bridges, hospitals, schools, and centres of culture and entertainment than any of his predecessors and successors combined. As if his achievements in concrete are the best measure of his greatness, when the truth is, these infrastructure projects bound our people with debts so enormous that people wallowed in poverty not only during his presidency and continue to do so to this day.

 

They are spreading the big lie that Marcos instilled discipline and a genuine respect for the law when the honest truth is that his cronies and friends ignored the law for their own personal benefit without fear of apprehension. Those who opposed his government became victims of repression.

 

They crow about his oratorical skills and decisiveness compared to the bungling incumbent in Malacañang who could not even stand up against his fellow leaders in the region. That he would never have allowed our neighbours to bully us just because we are a smaller nation.

 

The biggest enemy our country has faced in its struggle for independence was not its colonizers, whether it was Spain, the United States or Japan. Its biggest enemy was within and one of its own.

A caricature of former president Ferdinand E. Marcos, first and only
dictator of the Philippines, 1973 to 1986.

An American writer visiting the Philippines during the early period of struggle against martial law in 1984 interviewed a plantation owner in Mindanao who happened to be a former supporter of Marcos. The plantation owner said: “The most humiliating thing about dictatorship is not the repression; it is that you wind up a collaborator yourself. It all seems so easy at first. You smile; you say nothing; you give money when they ask for it. Then something happens that makes you see the truth. I realized three things: that the whole Marcos system was rotten, that I was as much a part of the system as any soldier or spy, and that enough was enough. I had to do something.”

 

Many others have suffered their private humiliation at the hands of Marcos and his agents and turned their fear into loathing the government. That kind of outrage was enough to galvanize an entire nation, to transform the private humiliations of millions into a national upheaval of defiance and pride. That moment happened when millions marched on EDSA to demand Marcos to step down, braving a convoy of soldiers and tanks and aircraft hovering above. That should be the day we should commemorate our independence.

 

But instead, we choose to continue to celebrate our independence from Spain, reducing the rite into a symbol without substance and meaning. We stage marches and parades, hold festivities like fiestas and beauty pageants, which do not give full meaning and significance to our celebration.

 

To many of us, our independence day celebration has become shallow and empty. The declaration of independence by our revolutionary heroes in Kawit was not the culmination of our national struggle for self-determination. American colonization made it impossible for us to be a free nation. Japan gave us “independence” when its army drove the Americans to win the sympathy of Filipinos, to show that they were better than the Americans. When the Americans finally granted our independence in 1946, they tied us to a string of dependency that allowed them full rights to exploit our natural resources and used our waters for their military bases.

 

Then Ferdinand Marcos took our freedoms away in 1972. He was worse than a colonial ruler or a modern-day monarch. When the people drove him away to the islands of Hawaii in 1986, it marked the first time that we were free again to restore our democratic rights. But the nature of politics that we inherited from the colonial past and the tight control of the economy by our oligarchic elite remain the biggest stumbling blocks to the full realization of our democracy.

 

We may not be totally free as what a genuinely free society should be. But at least, we should be free to choose a date when to celebrate this freedom, a time to remind us that our freedoms are still fragile, that we cannot be complacent in the face of a significant threat from collaborators of the Marcos dictatorship in our midst to attempt a comeback.

 

Our history has been hitherto a history of one oppression after the other. Rizal’s death transformed him into a national hero and triggered a rebellion against the Spanish autocracy. Two years after Rizal's execution, the Spanish-American War broke out, and U.S. forces quickly ended more than 300 years of Spanish rule in the islands.

 

The Americans proclaimed themselves liberators; they turned out to be oppressors. After having conquered the Philippines, the United States decided it had no stomach for empire. In 1935, the islands were granted commonwealth status, and the United States promised the Filipinos independence within ten years. The Japanese, too, said they came as liberators when they invaded the Philippines in 1941. Finally, we became an independent republic in 1946, only to be shattered once again in 1972.

 

Ferdinand Marcos destroyed the country’s democratic institutions. But then Marcos was repeating an old Philippine pattern. Proven or not as to his complicity with the assassination of Benigno Aquino, he made possible the rise of another nationalist icon like Rizal that would be responsible for inspiring mass demonstrations and protests leading to his downfall in 1986.

 

Now the stirrings of a comeback of the Marcos era are just beginning. Our national independence is being threatened again.

 

Never again, we should say to this cabal of Marcos loyalists. What better time is there to express our collective will as a nation but during this independence day celebration.