MANILA, Philippines?It?s good to see that within a relatively short period of time, people have begun to wean themselves away from Sept. 21 as the date for recalling martial law. While there remains another debate?should it be Sept. 22, when Ferdinand E. Marcos actually signed Proclamation 1081, or Sept. 23, when the nation awoke to find media shut down and dissidents placed under arrest?one thing is sure. Martial law only began on Sept. 21, 1972 by legal fiction. Accepting it as the anniversary of martial law is to validate the proclamation in the first place.

To be sure, besides the appropriate date for commemorating martial law?loyalists loyally sticking to the numerological significance of Sept. 21; lawyers, to the date it was signed, Sept. 22; the reality and tragedy of it actually dawning on everyone on Sept. 23, the date I advocate for commemoration?the Marcos and martial law years leave many loose ends that still need to be tied up. Did the nation embrace martial law with relief and even enthusiasm, as Marcos himself argued?

On Sept. 27, 1972, he wrote in his diary: ?Everybody is saying how swiftly the peaceful revolution was accomplished. John Nance told Imelda ?You did not expect it to be so neatly done.?? And rhetorically?there was never any question posed by whim which hadn?t already been answered in his own mind??Will it be said by history that the communist threat was just a legal justification for a legal use of force?? To which he loftily told himself (and posterity), ?Then let it also be said that it was a constitutional revolution?And that it was necessary to reform society?to convert a ?sick society? into the ?New Society.??

Apropos of the passing of Adrian Cristobal, I?d suggested that the most significant legacy of Marcos was the belief that there could be a ?New Society,? and that it required a revolutionary break with the evolution of Philippine democracy and government up to that point. This was not, of course, uniquely Marcos? brainchild or even that of the intellectuals who gravitated to him; it was the flowering of a seed implanted as far back as the end of World War II, when those who?d collaborated with the Japanese justified their actions by calling into question the Commonwealth and the Philippine Republic that tried them for treason. Understanding Marcos as a thinker and a strategist requires examining the political thought that justified the republic established under the auspices of the Japanese: KBL was heir of the Kalibapi, the Batasan Pambansa was heir to the Japanese-era National Assembly, the creation of a Metro Manila as administrative heir of the wartime Greater Manila, the use of martial law and the portrayal of the presidency as the fulcrum of a regimented national life was vintage wartime Laurel. These are just some of many parallels between Occupation-era Philippines and that of the New Society.

The collaboration-era thinking had also inspired the setting aside of the evolutionary model for the Philippines in the early 1960s, in a clumsy effort to appropriate the Malolos Republic so as to provide more fashionable credentials for the government: not least because Filipino Marxists had taken a cue from collaboration-era thinkers and were looking back to the Revolution of 1896 for inspiration while rejecting the peaceful independence efforts that had borne fruit in 1946. Marcos appropriated this effort, both as antidote to the Marxists and in order to erase public memory of the so-called ?Third Republic? (in reality, the second: but that attribution was given to the Japanese-era republic to further confuse the public).

If the so-called ?Second Republic? could be at par with the improperly named ?Third Republic,? then no distinction between de facto and de jure was necessary: a convenient assertion for Marcos? New Society which fully intended to be de facto and in the fullness of time, make everything it did de jure by mere presidential decree. We continue to suffer from this blurring of lines, and the ambiguities it has introduced into our understanding of the story of our nation.

And so, young Filipinos such as those trying to edit entries in the free online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, furiously debate what, precisely, the period from Sept. 21 (or 22, or 23), 1972 to June 30, 1981, should be called. Some call it the ?second dictatorship,? the first being Aguinaldo?s government until the foundation of the Malolos Republic; others say it should be the New Society (which is what Marcos himself called it); still others, armed with what Marcos himself would have called arguments based on ?technical legalism,? insist that the ?Fourth Republic? was born with the ?ratification? of the 1973 Constitution: while ignoring how the government of the day did not proclaim the existence of that republic until Marcos? inauguration in 1981. And so, the confusion continues: including the recognition, by the Office of the Vice President of the Philippines, abolished under Marcos, of both Mariano Trias as the first vice president (but if our First Republic was that of Malolos, which didn?t have a vice-presidency, and if Trias bore the title because of the Tejeros Convention, doesn?t that mean Tejeros was actually our ?First Republic?? This is what happens when our official historians throw common sense out the window to try to be inclusive) and Arturo Tolentino as, briefly, vice president: and so, Edsa never happened, or was a crudely illegal power grab?

So many questions; but on this day, it would do well to revisit what Marcos himself wrote for posterity in his diary.

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YOU can visit The Philippine Diary Project online at http://philippinediaryproject.wordpress. com/ to see Marcos? diary entries from 1971 to 1981. If you are a student or with extra time on your hands, and would like to help with the encoding required for the project, drop me a line at mlquezon3@gmail.com