Kinutil
He wonders: What would I do if my children should say to me: The years of martial law were the golden years of the Philippines?
I would certainly feel quite a bit of pain. But I would not be shocked. History is not written in indelible black and white. The text must be fought for continually, generation by generation. But at that moment in time, there would be a line to divide my children and I. That line would be the love of freedom. Can a generation who grew up inside it ever love freedom as much as those who had to fight for it?
The Marcoses have resources we cannot even begin to countenance. A revision of history would benefit not just the Marcoses but a big number of people now in power. There are fundamental assertions that must be contended with, issues that were never fully resolved in 1986 when people power closed a dark chapter in our history.
Before martial law in 1972 there was political strife. The big issues were mass poverty amidst blatant corruption and general abuse by the people who held power.
The old post-World War II oligarchies were falling apart and fighting with each other. Warlordism was everywhere. Political contests became violent and dangerous.
Martial law had a centralizing effect that eased the strife to some extent. Marcos picked his own warlords and stymied everyone else. But when martial law began there were quite a number of well-meaning Filipinos who collaborated with it thinking this would indeed be the new golden age.
It was a bad time in international politics. The price of oil skyrocketed after an oil embargo and actions by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to control the price of oil. Things got really bad for everyone. But even so, most of us justified our sufferings thinking they were inevitable.
Martial law instituted a harsh sense of order. We tolerated it thinking it was better than other alternatives. But the moral dissonance was inescapable. There were rumors of people, young people, detained, tortured and extra-judicially executed. But we could not know for sure because media was muzzled. We knew there were many respected pre-martial law leaders who were in jail who refused to collaborate with Marcos’ government.
True, quite a lot of infrastructure was being built everywhere and proudly announced. But these were funded by World Bank loans. Loans we are still paying off to this day. And who can even begin to estimate how much money from these ended up in the hands of the martial law cronies, the Marcos oligarchy?
In time, we would all learn how the truth cannot be hidden away indefinitely. There were other ways to get at it despite a muzzled press. And there were people in media who risked all to tell the truth beyond what the Marcoses allowed. By the 1980s a new standard of heroic resistance was establishing itself. These were indeed the golden years of our country; not because of martial law, but against it. People stood up against the dictator.
One would think that the profound sacrifice of freedom required from us by martial law would ease our suffering. But the overall easing of suffering was practically insignificant. The Philippine economy slid down to unprecedented lows. We continued to suffer; in the end, only to find out how Marcos’ oligarchy had raided the national coffers practically at will. By 1986, all these would come to an end. But it was something of an open-ended ending.
More than two decades of struggle against martial law left most of us war-weary. People power was fought. It was won. After that, we went home thinking we could now go back to our lives, finally to live out the remainder of our youth inside the bliss of a dawning new age of freedom. How wrong we were. How many people were sent to jail or punished for the sins of martial law? Hardly anyone! What of mass poverty? What of corruption?
And what of the Marcos oligarchy? They are still there hoping to return to power eventually, hoping to keep in their arsenal the power to declare martial law; something to remind us of a line by Bertolt Bretch:
“Don’t rejoyce in his defeat, you men!
Although the world stood up and stopped the bastard,
The bitch that bore him is in heat again.”
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