The Marcoses are back because post-Marcos governments failed

By -


For 30 years we have written history according to a view that demonized the Marcoses.  We have a Constitution that even its framers admit to be an indictment of Marcos. Ninoy Aquino's widow and son became President.

And yet the Marcoses are back not only to power but in good standing in the electorate and in the Court. Marcos Jr. had to be cheated to prevent him from assuming the Vice Presidency.

And we say we have failed to teach our children the correct history.

I beg to disagree.

If there is a failure, it is not because we have not taught our children the horrors of Martial Law.

It is because our post-Marcos governments failed, thereby enabling people to look at the sins of the Marcoses in the context of the sins of the thirty years that we have to endure.

People are not stupid. They are wiser enough to know that regimes have good and bad sides, and in their calculations, the Marcos era was more bearable than the post-Marcos years.

And we should take notice that this view is held more by people who lived through both periods, and not by the young who tend to be more anti-Marcos and anti-Martial Law, if not apathetic.


-------------------------
Antonio Contreras as posted on Facebook.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular this week

Leni Robredo has become a sad mechanical puppet and an embarrassment to Filipinos

By -
Image
Guess who has taken over Leila de Lima’s place on the anti-Duterte international speaking circuit? Watch this video that Leni Robredo made for an international NGO event in Vienna tomorrow. Warning: this will REALLY make your blood boil. If you have vertigo, sit down and take a deep breath before watching. You know what’s really sickening about this video? It’s not even the lies and exaggerations that Robredo is saying about what’s going on in the Philippines and how Pinoys feel about it (as if she’s in any position to speak for the Filipino people, who mostly hate her guts). It’s the hollowness and emptiness of the way she mechanically reads from a script that obviously someone else wrote. She’s making huge claims about thousands of people being summarily killed by police, but her eyes and voice are absolutely empty of emotion or conviction. She’s just a puppet playing a role, who doesn’t even understand what she’s doing or saying, she’s just mindlessly following her owner’
Read more

Jose Rizal never had Tagalog in mind when he encouraged us to love our own language

By -
Image
Posted by a certain Chloe Santiago on the Facebook GRP Community Group : Jose Rizal died in 1896 and Tagalog was declared the official language of the Philippine only in 1937. This can only mean that Rizal wasn't really talking about Tagalog when he made this statement: "He who does not love his own language is worse than an animal and smelly fish." Indeed. Who made the arbitrary directive to make the Tagalog dialect the "National Language" to begin with? Furthermore, why have a "National Language" when Filipinos are already proficient in the global lingua franca of commerce and scientific achievement?
Read more

Poor people in the Philippines seem to prefer poverty over aspiring to be not poor

By -
Image
Sadly, a MAJORITY of the poor people here are bad people. That is WHY they are poor. They disrespect others, they disrespect themselves, and they disrespect God’s creation. Exactly how do they think they’ll be rewarded for that? If you genuinely had empathy, you would be able to get inside their heads and understand why they do these things, and perhaps know how to fix it. However, you are confusing “empathy” with “sympathy”. I have yet to meet a poor person who actually WANTS to do the things necessary to escape poverty. The funny thing is, everyone can see that I’m more successful than they are. They think this is because I’m “rich”. I’m sure a lot of them are full of jealousy (as benign0 describes) and sit around thinking “ha, it’s not fair, that foreigner is so rich and I’m so poor. I guess it’s OK if I steal his stuff”. Which they do. Regularly. I grew up poor. I know how it feels to be hungry, all the time, every day. I decided I didn’t like feeling like that. I’m successf
Read more

More conflicting and anomalous accounts on the plane crash that killed Sec. Jesse Robredo #salamatjesse

By -
Image
More questions are coming up as to what really happened in the minutes before the plane crash in which Secretary Jesse Robredo and two pilots died (and in which Robredo's aide Jun Abrazado survived). The Inquirer reported that Abrazado "embraced the secretary as they braced for impact but Abrazado lost consciousness when he hit his head on the back of the seat in front of him as they hit water". Does someone who loses consciousness as a result of a blow to the head remember the specific cause of his loss of consciousness? According to an article published by the American Association of Neurological Surgeons (AANS), people who suffer such a trauma or concussion "often cannot remember what happened immediately before or after the injury, and they may act confused." Furthermore, "a concussion can affect memory, judgment, reflexes, speech, balance and muscle coordination." According to the Inquirer report, this was what supposedly happened as the pla
Read more