“Move on” and “Never forget”: history, memory, and Marcos
On 23 September 1972, the Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos officially announced that two days ago, on the twenty-first, he’d signed Proclamation 1081 which placed the country under martial law, ostensibly in response to mounting unrest and threats from campus radicals and a nascent communist rebellion; Enrile, the defense secretary, had even been ambushed by unknown assailants, his official vehicle convoy sprayed with bullets. Because of these clear and present dangers to the state, therefore, the country had to be placed under martial law.
So said the postage stamp-sized chapter on martial law in my high school Philippine history textbook. But my grandfather remembered things differently, as did his daughter, my mother.
They were living in the province at the time, far away from Manila. They’d heard rumors of everything going on, whispered in hushed tones— everyone had heard of them. But those things happened elsewhere. History was elsewhere.
My grandfather remembered martial law coming suddenly, like one of the criminals in the night that it was supposed to protect ordinary citizens like himself from. Most working-class people like them didn’t have their own TV or radio, so they didn’t hear the official announcement for themselves. They heard about it through the talk in the town and the Philippine Constabulary patrolmen who swaggered on the streets with their M-16 rifles in greater numbers than usual, poking around and asking questions of passers-by— sort of like the Japanese soldiers he’d seen as a young boy.
He remembered how the curfew had made raising his family a little more difficult than before, and he remembered being detained by police twice. Once after being caught making his way home after work during curfew hours, and a second time after getting into a scrap with an arrogant off-duty militiaman.
On the other hand, my mother remembers that from elementary to college, the only president she knew was Marcos. He was in his first term when she was a grade-schooler, and when she got to college in the eighties, he was still in office. She remembers going to school one morning and learning that they had to learn a new song, the “theme song” of Marcos’s New Society. She remembers a college class that always seemed to coincide with some sort of protest action, and how her friend at the time would get her to come along since she was dating one of the student leaders; my mother says she never understood what she saw in him, since he honestly wasn’t that good-looking 😀 She remembers a long-haired relative who had to go into hiding when the family learned he was suspected of being involved in the underground movement. She never did find out if he actually was, though.
Why am I telling you all this?
History and memory are interesting things, intersecting and affecting each other. This leads to the current trend of positive narratives and sometimes even outright conspiracy theories around Marcos and the martial law period on social media. On one side of the issue stand the supporters, old and new, who say “Move on,” while on the other stand the opposition, old and new, who insist, “Never forget.”
So we’re here today to reflect on history and memory, and on what it means, in this context, both to move on from and not to forget this chapter of history.
Continue reading “Forgetting and Un-Forgetting”
Aletheia Observatory 