In the first installment of Peter Jackson’s motion picture rendition of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings,” the voice of the character Galadriel that actress Cate Blanchett played introduces viewers to Middle Earth, describing it as a place where “Much that once was is lost; for none now live who remember it.”
I remembered the prologue to “The Fellowship of the Ring” while thinking of the impending burial of the late Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos at the Libingan ng mga Bayani or Heroes’ Cemetery. In a way, the mythic narrative of the country’s recent history in which Marcos is chief antagonist has been shattered because to paraphrase the Lady Galadriel, few now live who remember the strongman and his family’s misrule.
Those who survived the Marcos regime that tortured, killed or caused the disappearance of tens of thousands, however, have not been remiss in keeping alive the memory of the struggle against Marcosian despotism. Long before his passing, former Senate president Jovito Salonga founded Bantayog ng mga Bayani, a nongovernment organization for promoting remembrance of those who dedicated themselves to the eventual restoration of Philippine democracy in 1986.
The foundation’s website contains articles about personalities like former president Corazon Aquino (she whose family declined the offer of a state funeral and hero’s burial for her), whose seventh death anniversary we commemorated at the beginning of August and the poet Emmanuel Lacaba, whose verse roused the imagination of a generation of youngsters for social justice. I look forward to visiting the physical Bantayog the next time I go to Manila. For sure it will not only be a poignant encounter with the past but also nourishment for my sense of nation.
As long as the dwindling number of those who remember the dark days manage, like Salonga did to relay their stories, I have reason to hope that the last half-century of Philippine history will not be mangled into a perverse celebration of tyranny. Crucial to this is the willingness of the old and the young to engage one another in truthful dialogue about the past.
A couple of years ago, then mass communication students Sean Timothy Salvador and Peter Romanillos of the University of the Philippines (UP) Cebu wrote a thesis examining, among other things, pro-Marcos representations of history that pseudonymous users uploaded to YouTube. Research motivated these youths to fly to Manila and interview some of those who faced the horrors of the dictatorship. The interviewees refuted the videos’ messianic depiction of Marcos and the study generated enough material for a video rebutting the Marcos propaganda.
Peter and Sean were preceded on the path of appropriating history for their contemporaries by the lawyer Euvic Ferrer and his friends. Their thesis for UP Cebu’s political science program documented various forms of torture to which Cebu’s political dissidents were exposed in totalitarian days. With torturers’ sadism, one could be forgiven for thinking of the martial era as a time warp that sucked the country into the dark ages. In their academic work, Peter, Sean, Euvic and others who were born post-martial law suggest in millennials a politically potent openness to correct memory. Beyond the academe, Carlo Cabatingan, a twentyish member of Akbayan and others with him recently came up with a creative commemoration of martial law victims, writing on stones the names of desaparecidos, the murdered and the unjustly incarcerated.
Marcos and his immediate family have not been unjustly rehabilitated given the youth’s alleged lack of interest in history. Ferdinand Marcos Jr. failed to capture the vice presidency in the May 9, 2016 elections. His bid’s unraveling went hand-in-hand with late but spirited negative campaigning in the streets and on the internet — the millennial generation’s haunt — by victims of martial law in movements like the Campaign Against the Return of the Marcoses to Malacañang.
A Philippine Star poll shows that more than half of Filipinos do not recognize Marcos as a hero and oppose a hero’s interment for his remains. The National Historical Commission of the Philippines has registered its objection to such an undertaking, citing Marcos’ falsification of his war records, an act that insulted the sacrifices of genuine veterans. The current dispensation, nevertheless, insists on having its own way, solicitous as Malacañang’s occupant is about the feelings of the younger Marcos. It refuses to heed the people’s voice.
The worst is underway.
Let the Palace perform the secular equivalent to canonization for a torturer- and plunderer-in chief.
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