Remembrance as resistance

“Doc, I think you should one day have your own public affairs talk show just like Randy David!”

Curiously, the “Doc” to whom I shared this fan mode suggestion was not a doctor of medicine. “Doc” Ramon C. Reyes was a doctor of philosophy who taught at Ateneo from 1965 to 2013. My gushing recommendation came on the heels of attending one of his classes in the early ‘90s. I can still remember his concluding lecture to this day. He began by asserting that despite Hitler’s Final Solution, Stalin’s Gulag and various unthinkable monstrosities, humanity has been steadily marching toward the truth. Women used to be regarded as second-class citizens. Today, there is no profession they cannot enter. Slavery used to be acceptable. It is no longer so today. What made all these and the like possible, according to Reyes, was the fact that human beings, particularly after the Enlightenment, somehow learned to engage in argumentation grounded in reason and conscience.

In 2018, Inquirer columnist and UP professor emeritus Randy David delivered a memorial lecture at Ateneo in which he paid homage to Reyes’ philosophical legacy.

I remembered all these after attending a virtual Mass in honor of Reyes last Sept. 1, his birthday. Jesuits, educators, and friends joined his family in sharing their fond remembrances of the man. Truly, we remember out of gratitude.

There is another kind of remembrance that proceeds from a sense of obligation. The philosopher Jürgen Habermas wrote of a sacred duty “to keep alive the memory of the suffering of those murdered… and we must keep this memory alive quite openly and not just in our own minds.” The Holocaust writer Elie Wiesel underlined this obligation when he exhorted his audience in 2002: “We must remember the old men and women whispering ancient prayers and the children, we must always remember the children, frightened and forlorn, all part of a nocturnal procession walking towards the flames, rising to the highest heavens.”

The third type of remembrance is anchored in gratitude and obligation. It is a kind of remembrance that resists attempts to revise and distort the past. I learned about such attempts when a number of my students last year shared how some of their teachers in high school allegedly referred to the Marcos years as the golden age of the Philippines. They were taught that the economy was in much better shape then given the peso-dollar exchange rate (P6.67) and that Filipinos were supposedly not as “pasaway” as they are today because they dreaded the MetroCom. Furthermore, many important infrastructures like the CCP, the PICC, the Lung Center, the National Kidney Institute, and the Philippine Heart Center were built during the time of Marcos. As for the Marcoses’ ill-gotten wealth, the students were told that those who came after Marcos were not exactly paragons of integrity and decency, either. Besides, did not the Sandiganbayan dismiss the civil case related to the Marcoses’ ill-gotten wealth amounting to P200 billion?

This narrative, however, skips what the historian Alfred McCoy called the “pyramid of terror, with 3,257 killed, an estimated 35,000 tortured, and some 70,000 arrested” during martial law. In February 1995, 9,539 martial law victims in a class suit against the Marcoses were awarded $1.96 billion worth of reparations by the US District Court of Hawaii.

The narrative also conveniently forgets that in November 2018, the Sandiganbayan found Imelda Marcos guilty of 7 counts of graft for earning around $200 million out of illegal foundations. Before that, in December 1990, the Swiss Federal Supreme Court ordered that the Marcoses’ $356 million worth of assets be returned to the Philippine government.

The young scholars and student leaders who turned their backs on a comfortable middle-class lifestyle to fight the Marcos dictatorship could not have known these facts in the ‘70s. What they did know then was that given what Reyes calls their physical, interpersonal, social, historical, and existential cross-points (i.e., limitations and possibilities), and their vision of a better future for our country, they chose to creatively harness their cross-points to bring about what they thought to be a much better alternative to the status quo. Among them were Edgar Jopson, Lorena Barros, Emmanuel Lacaba, Abraham Sarmiento Jr., Remberto dela Paz, Archimedes Trajano, and Liliosa Hilao.

This September, out of gratitude and obligation, we remember them and other Filipinos who gave their lives to rage against the dying of the light. More importantly, we remember them as we resist the ongoing revision and distortion of the Marcos past.

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Von Katindoy teaches and volunteers at Ateneo de Manila University.