Like wildfire, our generation has spawned new strains of Marcos loyalists and apologists. What’s odd is that they are impassioned, ablaze with righteous anger, even though many of them have never lived through a single day under martial law or were hardly aware back then. They rabidly criticize the government on social media, and blame the Aquino family for all the wrongs that ail the country today — two things which, ironically, one could not do to any of the Marcoses during the 242 months of the dictator’s rule.
To add even greater irony, advocates of democracy would rather sit tight and be satisfied with the line, “They’re entitled to their own opinion.” No, those who have lived in a democracy for all 29 years (or less) of their existence would not call out neo-Marcosians on their obliviousness, citing it as uncouth to do so. Perhaps those who enjoy democracy today have accepted that wide-scale ignorance is one price we simply have to pay for our right to free speech. Unfortunately, it seems that another cost of freedom is apathy from those who bask in this unripe form of democracy, or what many label with the oxymoron, “selective democracy.”
Wishing for a political strongman
The problem is double edged. With an Aquino in power, and this Aquino — according to critics — failing miserably in his job as president, people fall into the trap of wishing for his exact inverse: a political strongman, someone wise and confident in his words… someone who’s not-Aquino and, therefore, a Marcos. So to answer that need, the specter of Ferdinand Marcos is raised from his grave and made readily available on social media to those hungry for someone to school our current President. And true to the Aquino brand of necropolitics, Macoy is idealized via an easily digestible grocery list of all his achievements after ruling for 21 years (which are meager, considering that he was in power — and swimming in truckloads of borrowed foreign currency — far longer than any other president).
But many miss the fact that the Marcoses and Aquinos are merely two sides of the same coin, and it is not necessary to side with one against the other. In fact, we can opt to go against both; it is a choice that democracy grants us. Politics is never meant to be a crystal clear, black and white science, so there is nothing wrong with taking in facts and churning out a dynamic conclusion. In the age of postmodernism, when the singularity of Truth (with a capital “T”) is discredited and multiple truths abound, gaining nuance has become essential to survival and evolution. In short, there are both good and bad things in both Marcos and Aquino administrations — that much is undeniable. Distilling their years in power as simply good or outright bad only creates rifts and leads to greater misunderstanding. Its effects are most tangible now with Philippine politics polarized into two bourgeois clans naively waging war à la the Montagues and Capulets, at the expense of no one else but the average Filipino.
‘Kulang sa disiplina!’
Discipline is a virtue neo-Marcosians harp on time and time again. The Draconian values under Marcos rule are made the ultimate rationale for a return to martial law which, they claim, would somehow orchestrate the country’s return to glory. But what many of these neo-Marcosians conveniently leave out is the fact that this so-called discipline came with a hefty price tag.
Amando Doronilla’s 200-page MA thesis entitled “The State, Economic Transformation, and Political Change in the Philippines, 1946-1972” offers a unique explanation as to why and how Marcos came to declare martial law. Briefly put, Doronilla posited that Marcos’ declaration of martial law was the inevitable conclusion of almost two decades of social, political, and economic unrest — not merely an act done by an individual. The veteran journalist traced the roots of martial law as far back as the opening of partial trade with the United States. From there, he discussed critical points in our history which aided in the shift of powers away from the judicial and legislative branches and towards a monolithic executive power (which is still a distinct feature of our political system today).
Staggering debt and cronyism
One could say that from 1946 to Sept. 21, 1972, the grave political economic insecurity and instability snowballed, and an equally insecure and unstable president thought he could stop it by taking matters into his own hands. He planned to do this by mimicking what other presidents had done before him: borrow money from foreign banks and ingratiate the military — the only arm of government that seemed to work for him. But unlike past presidents, Marcos borrowed amounts that were twice or thrice the size of the country’s already-accumulated debts. Much of this money went to his favored men in the military and his cronies in government — people who (if we were to take his word for it) Marcos trusted to build industries and to ensure peace and order. We all know now how many of them grew mind-numbingly rich and how many they had to silence and kill. Ultimately, these were the monetary and non-monetary costs of Marcos’ “discipline.”
Whenever people say that discipline is all we need to progress, I smile and shrug. Not only is it ironic that Marcos — the murderer and plunderer — has become the model for discipline, but I despair at knowing that many of us still think of the presidency as a mere throne from which to give orders. We fail to see that with every order, there is a need for money to flow, for patronage to be bestowed, and for power to be brokered; that, indeed, a dictatorship is a system and not simply the “benevolent” whims of an individual.
The spine-chilling implication of Doronilla’s thesis is that the problem does not end with the expulsion of Marcos from the presidency. When we view the dictator’s acts for what they were and not for the fact that Marcos initiated them, we see that the Aquinos were and are also capable of making the same mistakes. We see that the two Aquino administrations have, indeed, managed our deficit unscrupulously, with Cory doing “the honorable thing” for the World Bank, and with Noynoy acting as the military’s number one fan and yellow-faced mascot. And just as divisive as the Marcos’ conjugal dictatorship, the mother-and-son Aquino tandem has kept the power among themselves.
But thankfully, now — as opposed to then — we can criticize. Now we can protest. Now we can fight back.
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