MANILA
Imelda Marcos says her husband Ferdinand’s martial-law regime was the best thing to happen to the Philippines. Because we Filipinos have short memories and a careless attitude toward history, we run the risk of making Imelda’s deluded statement the accepted truth by default.
(This year is the 42nd anniversary of the imposition of martial law in the Philippines.)
How many of us Filipinos take time to think of the martial-law period from 1972 to 1986 and its consequences to our nation? We are notorious for paying scant attention to history and its ramifications to our current lives. There seems to be a prevalent attitude that, well, it happened and that’s that. Worse, many of today’s younger generation know or care very little about the horrors of the dictatorship.
The most ironic fact is that those who figured prominently in carrying out the orders of dictator Marcos are still very much around, unmarked by the stigma of the despotism that they had inflicted on the people and the nation. Indeed they’ve managed to stick around, having waited out the immediate storm of anger, hatred and rancor felt by a people oppressed for many years. They’re still around, unrepentant and feeling guiltless over what they had done.
The Marcoses have rehabilitated themselves in politics and are again in power in various parts of the country. Imelda, pleading penury, parades in her gowns and jewelry, still trying to convince the people that her husband saved the country from ruin. Martial law saved the nation, she pronounces with a straight face. With our silence we acquiesce to her revisionism.
At least Sen. Juan Ponce Enrile is in hospital arrest. He was martial law’s chief administrator, Marcos’ coordinator of their diabolic experiment in terror and oppression. Because he’s wily he’s managed, like the others, to go with the flow and survive the tides of history.
And the many others who are still alive? They, too, are around, beneficiaries of the Filipinos’ high threshold for tolerance and lack of permanent outrage. Why didn’t the people brand these people’s foreheads with lifetime scars pronouncing their guilt as accomplices of the despot?
Out recently is a book about the second highest official during Marcos’ time, prime minister and finance minister Cesar Virata, who naively thought he could temper Marcos’ diabolical designs. He didn’t, and hasn’t realized that he was abetting a dictator’s ruthless subjugation of a resilient but infinitely tolerant people, the millions of “cowards” that a foreign observer once described.
Marcos, Imelda and their myrmidons bragged, and continue to brag, that they built kilometers of roads, built edifices that impressed all observers, and electrified remote barrios. For heaven’s sake, do we need martial law to build roads and light electric bulbs? Did we need to kill thousands of people to be able to construct edifices?
And at what cost? Cronies, generals and sundry business people had a field day lining their pockets with the people’s money constructing those projects they now boast about.
Does it make sense that to this day there are Marcos fans out there? (As I’m writing this, Sen. Francis Escudero wants Marcos to be buried at the Libingan ng mga Bayani. People’s true colors will show sooner or later.) We understand why there are people who still admire Marcos by knowing that Hitler, too, had many fans during his murderous run.
Many lives were wasted. Many Filipinos, women and men, many of them not even in the prime of their youth yet, were tortured out of their minds, making their loved ones — parents, siblings — victims too. And what about the many who just disappeared and up to this day no one knows where they’re buried? What a costly way to build roads.
It’s an alibi. Those who were complicit to Marcos’ deeds use the building of roads and hotels to justify the imposition of martial law. It’s a shameless excuse that should make us all angry over again when we hear them saying it.
It’s 2014 and they’re still all over the place. Marcos’ family members are very much in the thick of things, the same way remnants of his pals have stayed around (like, for another example, a foreign sports commentator with a thick accent who unabashedly admired and defended Marcos and is still very much around).
With our tolerance and silence we’ve allowed them to keep their places in society and politics. Pretty soon they may succeed in wangling higher seats of power while we’re not looking. We have a bad habit of looking away when the bad among us play tricks on us.
Remember, they haven’t apologized. None of them, from the Marcoses to their lowliest functionaries, has come forward to say sorry. In fact, they say they did the country a favor by putting it under the yoke of martial law.
With our silence and forgetfulness we allow them to distort history.
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