THE government’s most recent pakulo,”Oplan Tambay,” had me thinking again of the opening lines of Karl Marx’s “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.” “Hegel remarks somewhere,” Marx wrote, “that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”
One would not understand that line without going to this rather lengthy explanation from Marx:
“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.”
This article isn’t a social or historical analysis. Indeed, we are products of our past, which in turn guides our present and future actions, thus the seeming repetition of “great world-historic facts and personages.” But my only interest in that line by Marx is the seeming attempt by the administration of President Rodrigo Duterte to borrow policies from the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos. The old one was a tragedy, the present one is becoming a farce.
I used to describe my generation as the guinea pig generation of the ‘70s, the period when Marcos seized total political control of the country and did whatever he willed. We were the recipients of his experiment in social engineering, which included the attempt at subjugation through the slogan, “Sa ikauunlad ng bayan, disiplina ang kailangan.”
Marcos ordered the confiscation of firearms owned by civilians or their voluntary surrender to the government. Curfew was instituted and a certain hairstyle was favored (long hair was out). It was during that time that the word “salvaging” (for summary execution) became popular. In short, harsh action was used to instill discipline.
Those policies apparently shaped the thinking of the young Duterte because the same harsh actions are being resorted to under his presidency. The war against illegal drugs popularized a new term, extra-judicial killing (EJK), which is but “salvaging” being done roughly. In place of the curfew, which shooed away people from the streets, we now have “Oplan Tambay,” whose intention is the same.
I know what it was like to live under those harsh times. We lived in fear. When the siren was sounded, we rushed back to our homes because one didn’t know what would happen once we got caught by law enforcers patrolling the streets. We bartered our freedoms for the nebulous promise of the government making us secure.
Indeed, “great world-historic facts and personages” appear twice. Under Marcos, it was a tragedy. Under the present dispensation, it is nothing but a farce.