Distortionists, revisionists, denialists

One of the things I did during the few weeks before the national elections, when I noticed the massive and deliberate ways historical facts were being distorted and revised to suit a particular candidate, was to pull out from my bookshelves the books on the martial law years under the Marcos dictatorship. Two of them are by me, and a couple of others had my pieces in them. I made quite a pile on the floor, minus those I could not immediately find on my bookshelves. I photographed the pile and posted it on Facebook.

I did get worried comments from friends who thought I should find a way to stow away my collection for safekeeping. No worries, I replied, without saying what I intended to do.

A Facebook friend, an award-winning author and lawyer (and antique books collector) based abroad, also later photographed his own pile and posted the photo he took. I gamely commented: “Paramihan tayo.” (Let’s see who has more.) The more the “many-er,” I thought.

Not long after, I thought of photographing each cover and also downloading from the internet the covers of the books I did not have. What an awesome gallery the book covers turned out to be! The cover designs, titles, and authors’ names made the gallery a magnet for virtual viewing and their pages for imagined perusal.

But a few years back, I already made a bibliography of books dealing with martial law and the dictatorship, something I realized some academics had already done. Many written and published abroad are hardly known hereabouts, but are worth reading for the kind of historical perspective they might offer.

I thought of posting the list on a website I would name “Dark Pages,” even while I was still thinking of the tagline to go with it. I hadn’t yet thought of the gallery of book covers at that time. Now I think I should seriously do a good job of this especially because…

Historical distortionists, revisionists, and denialists of that dark era eat your heart out. You could be better as contortionists of the third kind. No matter what you do to bash historians, their work will remain for all time. In this age of digitization, anything can be stored on some planet. Send mine to the dwarf planet Ceres.

I remember being asked by the late writer and icon Doreen Gamboa Fernandez to write for the 10-volume “Kasaysayan: The Story of the Filipino People.” It was to be on the “comfort women” who were sex slaves of the occupying Japanese soldiers. I had met and interviewed the last of them for articles in the Inquirer. I had even gone with them when they, along with other comfort women from several Asian countries, testified at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal in the late 1990s.

My piece for “Kasaysayan” is in volume 7 edited by historian Ricardo Jose, an expert on the Japanese occupation. Only later did I realize that my Filipino comfort women piece was the first to be in a history book! It had been a taboo topic until women’s groups drew these abused women out from their twilight zones, Rosa Henson among them.

Last June 30, survivors of the Marcos dictatorship took their oath “to guard against tyranny, falsehoods, and the trampling of people’s rights and freedoms” which coincided with the oath-taking of the Marcos son as the new president. It was held at the Bantayog ng mga Bayani, where names of heroes and martyrs are etched on the Wall of Remembrance. There rises the 45-foot tall Castrillo monument of a defiant mother holding a falling son.

A young person, a student, approached me to say she had read my piece in “Kasaysayan.” It took a second or two for it to click in my mind and give me a rush of joy. I pointed her to the table where books on the Marcos dictatorship were being snapped up by buyers. My own few remaining books were sold out. (Will ask the University of the Philippines Press to replenish.) “Presidential Plunder: The Quest for the Marcos Ill-Gotten Wealth” by former senator Jovito R. Salonga (former head of the Presidential Commission on Good Government) was selling like hotcakes (soft cover, 426 pages, at P150).

More on the “Dark Pages” project another time.

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