IT’S interesting that 9-11 is a list of significant dates that means different things to countries.
Our automatic response when we hear 9-11 is the attack on the Twin Towers in New York. Which kind of shows the impact of the US media to depict their histories and influence us. The thought that Americans were victims of terror, and Islam is the “enemy”.
But 9-11 for us Filipinos is the birthday of the late dictator President Ferdinand Marcos, and when the government social media came out with a description of his presidency, it was heavily pilloried for its revisionist history.
The history of that dark times continues to be part of our country’s discussions. The Marcos family that still rules Ilocos Sur and the current president wants Marcos’ remains to be buried in the Libingan ng mga Bayani. Survivors of Marcos’ Martial Law are now moving heaven and hell with their petitions at the Supreme Court to stop this burial.
The arguments against the burial is very relevant and moving, as they say how can we honor a person who has been deposed not just by law, but by the sovereign will of the people who rose up in protest to oust him in 1986.
How can we call Marcos a hero and at the same time honor the 70,000 Martial Law detainees and 35,000 tortured and 3,200 killed during his iron-fist rule. How can we take pride that we fought for our democracy and now go back to saying the dictatorship was something good at that time?
Somehow, those arguments matter to the making of our memories and significance as a country. It seems worrisome that young people have shown in past interviews that they hardly know of the horrors of the Marcos dictatorship, or the people who bravely fought Marcos and why Edsa took place.
Watching those interviews could give you a strange fit of laughter and crying how people do not know their history. Which I could not blame them totally, but blame is mostly pointed at history textbook writers, and teachers for failing to expound on this part of history, for glossing over the details of the disquiet and rage in the Marcos years.
In fact, many of our history pages have been glossed over. That when President Duterte mentioned the American War in the Philippines in 1900-1903, and the deaths of thousands in Bud Dajo and Bud Bagsak in in Jolo, Sulu, people hardly know those pages in history.
Duterte not only remembers those sins of the Americans in history, he said they are still doing it now in Mindanao. Nandito pa rin ang mga puti. Duterte described them as “puti” the way the masses describes the Americans.
The “puti” are the American troops, continuing the war of their 9-11 on Philippine soil, conducting war exercises, basing in military areas like Cotabato, Zamboanga, and General Santos and conducting other “social” and “humanitarian” activities all over Mindanao.
For Duterte, the US troops in Mindanao has to go, in the name of establishing an independent foreign policy, in the name of the memory of Moro people and their bloodied history.
Duterte scores points in remembering that part of history and trying to make us remember that too. He could have scored more if he carried that same zeal on the history of the Marcos dictatorship.
Sometimes politics do make revisions or glossing over on history. And it’s not just on Duterte, the Aquino administration as well, made the Edsa about the greatness of their family legacy. That is just as self-loathing as the Marcoses do now about their past.
One more significant thing about 9-11 was the creation of the League of Filipino Students in 1977 that fought Marcos and campaigned for the re-opening of student councils and campus papers in the name of freedom.
So history has to be remembered, so not to repeat the mistakes and to make offenders atone of the sins of their past.
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