Millennials: rendering judgment on martial law, choosing advocacies

This essay on martial law is particularly addressed to the millennials, although it is also for the general audience. It is both a personal and a political account. I will try to separate the personal from the political in this story. I will tackle both, but separately.

PERSONAL MATTERS

Since I was tortured by the Marcos military, martial law is obviously very personal for me. For years, I held the anger within. I wanted to write a full account for posterity, so I tried to keep every detail in memory. I did not want to forget anything. But the writing repeatedly got sidelined by more immediate demands of work and family. Perhaps as the memories tried to find a way to surface, I had nightmares about the ordeal. I would wake up in a silent scream or out of breath. Sometimes, the nightmares were vivid. At other times, they dissolved from memory as soon as I woke up.

It was like that for nearly 40 years, until the College Editors Guild of the Philippines (CEGP) Alumni Association 1968-1972 asked me to contribute a chapter in their martial law book project.

My personal account of the martial law years, the torture ordeal in particular, was published in 2014. It is now part of the public record. Anyone can read “Lest We Forget,” my particular piece of a giant puzzle, as people try to reconstruct the Marcos martial law years and render their historical judgment.

Having written the details down, I do not have to remember them anymore. I can now leave them behind. I can now allow myself to forget.

WHY FORGET?

Forgetting is my first step towards forgiving. (I can almost hear some of my dearest colleagues mumble, “No way!”)

I said this part was personal. I want to forgive. I need to forgive, not for the sake of the Marcoses, but for my own sake. For my own mental — and therefore physical — health. It is unhealthy to keep the anger and hate within for years. It is a cancer in the mind that consumes its victim. The cancer can define one’s entire life.

In fact, I am now ready to say in public that I have personally forgiven Ferdinand Marcos — may he rest in peace — for the ordeal I went through in the hands of his military, acting under his orders. I have personally forgiven my torturers too.

POLITICAL PERSPECTIVES

My personal perspective is not debatable. But my political perspective is. I welcome a debate on the following political perspective on martial law.

The 1972 martial law declaration was the product of the unique conditions of those times as well as the work of two major contending political forces.

Many factors obviously contributed to the declaration of martial law, such as international trends, economic crisis, and personal motivations. I will add an important one—we had national elections for three consecutive years. This is a truly unique incendiary condition which will not be repeated for a long time.

THE POLITICAL DANCE OF TWO FORCES THAT BOTH WANTED A DICTATORSHIP

That the political pot actually boiled over and culminated in the martial law declaration, however, was the conscious work of two major political forces.

The first was Ferdinand Marcos and his cronies. They were driven by insatiable greed as each took a big personal slice of the Philippine economy. The Marcos family got the biggest slice of all.

The other contributory political force was the Communist Party of the Philippines ( CPP) and its armed force, the New People’s Army. The CPP wanted to set up in the Philippines, through armed struggle, its own type of dictatorship, which it explicitly called a dictatorship of workers and peasants. The CPP would later turn this into a dictatorship of the proletariat, following similar models that had triumphed earlier in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.