‘After almost 40 years of being told how bad the Marcoses were/are, I am not averse to the idea of a Marcos doing what he can to prove that story wrong. Especially if it means doing his best to succeed in office.’
TAKE it from a man who deeply understood the value of who writes history, Sir Winston Churchill. England’s wartime Prime Minister is famous for many quotes but for our purposes today it is this one: “History will be kind to me because I intend to write it.”
And he was correct in many respects, because history overall has been kind to Churchill, weighing his errors as Lord of the Admiralty in an earlier war far less weighty in the face of his strong and forceful leadership as PM during World War II. And because he also wrote history books, Churchill knew what he was talking about. Winners write history, and unless losers have a chance for redemption it is possible we will never know their side of the story.
A significant and “noisy” segment of Philippine society (many of my friends included) are now agitated due to the recent (and massive) electoral victory of Ferdinand Marcos Jr. His victory comes 50 years after his father had declared Martial Law, thus extending his term of office far beyond the eight years allowed by the 1935 Constitution; more importantly, the victory comes 36 years after his father was ousted from office and evacuated and brought to exile Hawaii by elements of the American military.
Marcos Jr. now has a chance to rewrite the history of the Philippines, one that we have been told over the last four decades. As one journalist told me, “I have no issue with Marcos Jr. except for the fact that his campaign was built on a lie.” When I asked what the lie was, I was told: “That the Martial Law years were the best years of the Philippines.”
That Ferdinand Marcos Jr. claims that the Martial Law years were the best years is a claim he has all the right to make. It is a claim we must remember being made by a son about his father, and is one that neither you nor I can deny him.
But is he rewriting history?
History, I think, should never be the story only of one side because for sure you are missing out on the side of those unable to voice their point of view. That it is convenient to just have one narrative is undeniable. But convenience is not necessarily the best thing.
And what is convenient and what is factual can be two different things.
We are told, for example, that in the six years of Duterte, over 12,000 Filipinos succumbed to EJK. We are told by data from Task Force Detainees of the Philippines that during the 20-year reign of Marcos (particularly the Martial law years of 1972-1981) there were about 3,300 known EJKs, over 35,000 documented tortures and 70,000 incarcerations. So many human rights advocates are up in arms about these numbers and properly so. And, of course, they want to bring the perpetrators to account — all the way to the very top.
But at the same time, we have forgotten that in the three years of occupation in World War II (1942-1945) close to 1,000,000 Filipino civilians and 100,000 Filipino soldiers died. It was a period of time when a foreign power occupied us — and while many Filipinos opted to risk their lives and fight, a few chose to collaborate and thus aid and abet the occupation.
Guess what — we never held them to account. In fact, after the war had ended, we elected many of them back into office. Need I name names?!
Or let’s talk about social unrest in the countryside. Here’s one example: Much was made of the hardships encountered by the sugar workers in the 1970s at a time when our trade relations with America changed and our special status as a sugar exporter ended.
Government was wanting in its efforts to help that industry — but it also was an industry that had been coddled for so long it was no longer competitive — as it seems it is to this day!
It also was an industry borne out of a regime of land ownership that traces its unjust roots to the Spanish colonial era, especially when fiat lands were established and Filipinos evicted from the property they had occupied for years. This was what Rizal was writing about, remember? But, of course, you’ll never hear it discussed in history classes in the universities being run by the religious orders!
Let a hundred flowers bloom, one Asian revolutionary leader once said. After almost 40 years of being told how bad the Marcoses were/are, I am not averse to the idea of a Marcos doing what he can to prove that story wrong. Especially if it means doing his best to succeed in office.
Let’s debate what is debatable as one hundred schools of thought contend. Let’s talk real history and expose angles, those that have been suppressed for so long by the previous “winners.”
And then maybe we have to return UST campus to the heirs of Rajah Solomon, or maybe Lakandula!
