Speak memory

Awakening of consciousness is a series of spaced splashes… until bright blocks of perception are formed… affording memory a slippery hold,” novelist Valdimir Nabokov wrote  in his book “Speak Memory.”

That aptly sums up  the 42nd  anniversary of martial law’s  imposition Sunday. Creeping amnesia  is blotting  out memory.

“One of the best things that happened.” “Tayo ang nagligtas ng demokrasya”, insists Imelda Marcos, now 85. (We saved democracy.)   The  Marcoses try to scrub blank a nation’s memory.  Amnesia anchors  Marcos  Jr.’s  hints that he may run  in 2016.

The Marcos regime’s  3,257 extra-judicial killings   exceeds  the 2,115 extra-judicial deaths under General Pinochet in Chile, University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Alfred McCoy told the   Conference on Legacies of  Marcos Dictatorship at Ateneo de Manila.

Here,  35,000 were  tortured and over 70,000 imprisoned, he adds in his paper “Dark Legacy.” Add 737 Filipinos desaparecidos or the disappeared, including  Cebu Redemptorist priest Rudy Romano.
Marcos’ regime intimidated by random displays of torture victims — becoming  a theater state of terror. This had   a profound impact upon the military (think Gen. Jovito Palparan)  and society.

The  military was the fist of authoritarian rule. The 5th Constabulary Security Unit and  Metrocom Intelligence and Security Group developed  “a distinctive theatrical torture.”
Call it “social inversion”, McCoy suggests.  Through psychological manipulation and sexual torture, young officers broke their social superiors, priests and professors. “They  gained  a sense that they’d remake the social order at will.

Exhibit One is Philippine Military Academy’s Class of 1971, among them Lt. Panfilo Lacson, in  elite anti-subversive units. ‘Torture became duty, and officers spent years in a daily routine of terror.”

The  experience became central to their socialization and “an inflated belief in the efficacy of violence”. They  morphed  “from servants of the state into  would-be masters.”.
At the 5th CSU, Lt. Aguinaldo (PMA ’72) worked with classmate Billy Bibit and Vic Batac (’71), beating victims together and forging bonds that later knitted into the Reform Armed Forces movement. At  MISG, Colonel Abadilla,  Robert Ortega and Panfilo Lacson tortured together for over a decade, forming a tight faction that’d rise together within the police after Marcos’ downfall.

RAM  colonels drilled  in inflicting pain emerged in the late 1980s.  Egged on by cashiered Juan Ponce Enrile, they launched six coup attempts. “No other military in the world launched so many coups with so little success”. They got away scot-free.

Freed from judicial review, the torturers of the Marcos era have continued to rise within the police and intelligence bureaucracies, allowing the pervasive brutality of martial law to persist.
Impunity is a little understood process with far-reaching ramifications, the  VI International Symposium on Torture at Buenos Aires noted.   To cope with a traumatic past, South Africa created a non-punitive Truth Commission. South Korea imposed harsh prison terms on former presidents.  Argentina  was forced to form  a truth commission that produced the famed report Nunca Mas (Never Again).

Battered by coups,  President Corazon Aquino abandoned attempts to prosecute the military. President Fidel Ramos “transformed impunity from a de facto to de jure status.” In boozy till-dawn sessions, Joseph Estrada let the rot continue.

Impunity left what UP  historian Maris Diokno called an “entrenched legacy—a lingering collective malaise that, subtlety but directly, shapes and distorts the nation’s political process.
In September 1992, the US District Court in Honolulu ruled  Marcos guilty of systematic torture. It held his estate liable for damages to all 9,541 victims and awarded  nearly $2 billion in damages. It’s  the biggest personal injury verdict in legal history. And in 2013, President Benigno Aquino III signed the Human Rights Reparation Act.

The trauma of Marcos’ terror remains deeply imbedded within society’s collective memory and institutional fabric. “The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory,” historian Milan Hubl cautions.

Has  memory of  “death from a thousand cuts” been  smudged out?   Is evening of September 21, 1972 beyond our capacity to remember?  Majority of students today, surveys tell us, have the  sketchiest notions of Marcos’ “unanimity of the graveyard”. The sense of stewardship, for nurturing, restored, freedoms is patchy.”

So, we recall,  maybe compulsively especially for those too young to remember. Many of us, who  were first brutalized, are now   coming  to our life span’s  end.

Impunity here  recast killers into politicians. Despite veneer of a restored democracy, an ingrained institutional habit of human rights abuse  hobbles the country still. Those who coddle Gen. Palparan & Co. seem emboldened by crumbling of Vice President Jeojomar Binay’s reputation, Mar Roxas’  paralysis — and next door Thailand’s rule by junta.

As the  country  grows economically, it must  recover its full fund of social capital by  remembering, recording, and, ultimately, reconciling, McCoy adds. A society cannot grow without a sense of justice.

Hence, the crucial role played by today’s trials of  the pork scam, as underpinned by a President,  Ombudsman and Commission on Audit, flawed by errors, yet bearing  impeccable credentials  that buttress ongoing trials.

So, speak memory.