ON NOT BURYING HISTORICAL MEMORIES

WHAT IS BLACKMAIL?

Have the Filipino people ever succumbed to blackmail?

The great problem now of the people is how to face those who are blackmailing us. You give this and we will give this to you. You do this and you will earn this much. You follow me and you will live in heaven.

So, after so many years of being a captive of an administration, which, in order to exist “legally” had to blackmail the State protectors, number one, and legislators, number two, who would render her election legitimate, our folks now have imbibed or are being made to imbibe a value system that puts pragmatism over all principles of decency, true democracy, and respect for human rights.

This is now one big problem for us: how to erase that value system and allow us as a people to exist with dignity.

Why should we face this problem now? We are at a crossroads of having to choose our own pride and dignity over a blackmail system which would render us inutile, and real “drugged mules” in history. Why should we say “drugged?” Because it is quite heady to know that we could earn trillions just by signing that deed to declare a dictator that we deposed a hero right in our own shores.

Should we erase our world reputation as the people who started it all: that revolution to revert back to democracy, boot out a dictator bloodlessly, install a woman president who was not a politician but who possessed all the virtues of helping to regain our pride as a people to the world, and restore legally that free expression of our rights, whether through the press, radio, tv, film or assembly, among other rights? How short our memory is if we do.

Is history created by a people or a few individuals? Who moves a society to act in totality, to alter systems and to restore first of all what is called humanity? No, majority of our people have braved living in foreign shores to help their families earn a more than a decent lifestyle here. They ventured out to foreign lands, strange cultures and sometimes overly arrogant and aristocratic superiors just to work and earn funds that they could remit back home to their loved ones.They were welcomed because they came from a country that taught the world how people power can be a tool for acquiring dignity and respect in society.

So for some quarters to blackmail those who have been left behind to sign that “death sentence” to declare a dictator a hero is not only erasing our national image as noble advocates for free expression, which by the way has become a model for imitation in all other parts of the world, albeit not successful in some, like Germany, Russia, Poland, Hong Kong, and now, in African and the Middle East countries. Rather, it is creating cretins of us all, unable to withstand financial blackmail, unworthy of all the sacrifices of all our martyrs for our country to earn its equal status in the world as a democratic nation during the anti-colonial periods and beyond.

Worse of worsts, is it not a strange suggestion to declare a dictator a hero in even one square inch of soil in our country? A dictator is a dictator is a dictator just like Hitler, Ghaddafy, that Yemen president and that fake president we had for 9 years. They are in their posts in order to kill all protests against their holding on to power. They will use all means – even bomb out of existence their own people, kill their political opponents, journalists and media practitioners who write and speak against them, in order to be installed, as well as to maintain themselves in power for life. And that happened right here in our country which we pray and hope would not happen again.

Not a square inch
Why should we not give even a square of an inch or millimeter to declare a dictator a hero, military and otherwise? Why, because every square millimeter of soil in our country should be treated as sacred. Our true heroes and heroines shed their blood, sacrificed their whole lives here on this soil in order to make our country shine equally among all nations. They organized and led movements to show to all colonizers and the world that we are a people that have principles and ideals, that the brown race is equal to all races in the world. Hence, we are the first country in Asia to be freed from colonial rule, and the first in the world to successfully launch a people power movement.

Now what are the consequences of giving military honors to a dictator? First of all, was he a soldier at all? Don’t we know that all his medals were fake? And his being a commander-in-chief then was forced upon on the people? That he did not earn his presidency (which carries with it that title of being a commander-in-chief) through legitimate means? So why give honors at all? What would be the basis for that? Honors are given by a people and for us to have been subjected to dictatorial rule, then to make us honor that dictator makes us the laughing stock of everyone.

Spitting on our people power image
By having a part of our country be declared as a “heroic” place for the burial of dictator is to teach our children that they could follow his life – rule as a dictator, kill as many people as you want, and then ask to be declared a hero. It means writing and re-writing all elementary and high school books to make them carry the message that people power was a queer phenomenon and that now we are spitting on that 1986 image of ours. It also means telling the countries of the world, “Hey Folks, we are back to square one as if 1986 never happened at all. Sorry about that but we need money. Money makes the world go round, you know.” And so, we should return all those accolades that we received from them after we had booted out the dictator, his family and his cohorts.

Those who are pushing for the declaration of a dictator as a hero are advancing a nightmarish future for our children and our children’s children. They are pressuring us to erase all books that have written him as a dictator. They want us to eat what we have vomited. They are labeling all the democratic intellectuals of the land as stupid idiots whose idealism makes them all quixotic, out of their minds because they cannot eat their ideals. They are making a mockery of all the women who supported Cory because the dictator had said, "All women are fit for the bedroom only," during the snap presidential election campaign.

The consequences of that move to make a fake president a hero is to treat all his cohorts who propped him up as heroes also, including those military generals who ordered the shooting of demonstrators, the killing of protesters, etc. The list is endless and it is almost as if 1986 never happened at all.

Flipflopping definitions
Hence, for us to have a decent democratic life, and not a kind of democracy where flipflopping on historical definitions becomes a great pastime, let us strengthen our moral fiber and face all blackmailers together to make them retreat from their posturings as lovers of our country. No they do not love our country but themselves, their plans for rising up the political ladder in this country, to rule and for people to bow down to them. Those are not the leaders that we need in our country.

Let us reflect again and again on what we truly are. We are a people whose spiritual strength is being eroded day in and day out by the kind of occurrences in our country – from a divided south, to environmental degradation of fishkills and landslides, a Church that refuses to see the realities of women’s and couples’ burden of feeding huge families by insisting on its stand against reproductive health and who insist on their forgetting what sex with love means, to an economic system that allows the rich to get richer and the poor get poorer -- that makes the Central Bank a patsy while banks deduct and deduct from and up to the last centavo of the depositors’ savings; a Central Bank that allows pawnshops to rig their charges, as they make pawned renewals a chance to impose service charges again instead of just interests; and so forth and so on. Our financial system is truly a boggling maze of closed and open fists.

Actually, we need nurturing to carry on living so as not to resort to violent means that will render our country a battleground between the haves and the have-nots. We need leaders who have that moral strength to resist the residual effects of a dictatorial rule in this country. We need them to make us remember and not bury our great noble historical memories.

We also need to make our definitions of heroism clearer to the youth so that they would grow up knowing that a hero or heroine is not only someone who would die for the country, but one who knows how to bring the country through a noble path that is corrupt-free and a genuine server of the peoples’ needs.

Lastly, Third World countries like ours could be an easy captive for affluent groups that are out to destroy all the respect for human rights in order to make a profit and gain political power. Hence, let us ask the United Nations to put up a covenant among all nations on how to define heroism and how to honor heroes and heroines. By having a UN covenant, all countries would be on alert against allowing neo-Nazis and pro-dictators to exist, rise up and gain power again.

A lifetime is not really enough to strengthen true democracy as a way of life. Hence the struggle remains and we need to face it squarely and strongly, morally speaking.