Voter education

WHETHER THE presidential race was a referendum on the performance of the P-Noy administration remains a disputed point among political analysts. That the vice presidential contest became a referendum on the historical record of Ferdinand Marcos seems clearer.

Bongbong Marcos made it so by: insisting that his father receive a hero’s burial at the Libingan ng mga Bayani, dismissing the claims of human rights victims of martial law as motivated by greed, and denying his and his family’s complicity in concealing the resources that the dictator plundered from the country.

The strategy nearly worked. It cost the Robredo Team and the Silent Majority much time and effort to debunk the glorification of Ferdinand Marcos’ World War II record and the assertion that the country achieved a “golden age” during his 14-year (1972-85) autocratic regime.

The Bongbong Marcos campaign initially benefited from three factors: the frustration among the A, B, and C economic sectors with the government’s inability to relieve the security and traffic problems in the cities; the nostalgia for the more tranquil time that the early years of “smiling martial law” appeared to those not directly involved in the struggle against the Marcos regime; and the general ignorance of the electorate about the context, causes and consequences of martial law in the Philippines.

But the strategy suffered from a fatal flaw: It lacked a foundation in reality. The evidence for the Marcos medals was a piece of fiction authored by Marcos himself and authoritatively exposed to the world over 30 years ago as fraudulent. The “golden age” was a myth that could be sustained by propaganda only over the short term, until it shattered against hard data, such as the Social Weather Stations files on Self-Rated Poverty (SRP) from 114 surveys stretching over more than three decades.

The latest SWS survey based on interviews completed in April 2016 reported that 46 percent of households considered themselves “poor.” Though sadly still too high, the 2016 SRP was lower than the full-year 2015 rate of 50 percent and approached the best we have ever recorded: 43 percent in March 1987 and in March 2010, and 45 percent in December 2011. The lowest SRP rate came during the Cory Aquino administration, the next best three under P-Noy.

The first SRP national survey, conducted in April 1983, before the crisis sparked by the airport assassination of Ninoy Aquino, recorded a 55-percent poverty rate. By July 1985, the accumulating burden of the assassination, cronyism, and Marcos plunder had plunged nearly three of every four Filipinos into poverty, with the record SRP low of 74 percent.

The Bongbong Marcos campaign miscalculated in two ways: first, in projecting the competing narrative of the martial law “golden age” and the 1986 People Power Revolution as a contest that concerned only the Marcos and the Aquino families; and, second, in allowing enough time for the victims of martial law to mobilize for the telling of their own stories.

But the blade-thin margin of Leni Robredo’s victory demonstrated that the education of the electorate remains an urgent task. The College Editors Guild of the Philippines is correctly concerned about the elimination in the new Department of Education curriculum of any Philippine history course after K10. This denies 60 percent of the youth who do not reach college the chance to understand the forces that shaped the course of modern Philippine political and economic history.

The Commission on Higher Education has recognized the vulnerability of a history-free basic education curriculum to politically-based historical revisionism. The issue is important because nation-building remains a work in progress. We remain a collection of tribes, choosing leaders because they come from the same clan or region or language grouping. The Philippines, as an imagined community for which Filipinos can willingly offer loyalty and life cannot consolidate if people tell conflicting stories about so critical an event as martial law.

The choice of the narrative must be dictated, not by political fiat, but by historical research that, once validated, must transcend personal or political preferences. Further research will add nuance, but the main contours of the martial law experience are already as clear as those of the Holocaust in Europe, where Holocaust-deniers can be brought to court.

A pope can insist that the sun orbits around the earth and order dissenters burned at the stake. A president may behave like a pope and canonize Ferdinand Marcos a hero—but to what purpose and at what cost? National unity cannot be based on a blatant lie, and on a lie that sides with the criminals against their victims.

President-elect Rodrigo Duterte has spoken about permitting Marcos’ burial at the Libingan. Perhaps, recognizing how this decision can perpetuate the miseducation of the public, he can consign his declaration among those “preposterous statements” he has warned the public not to believe.

Edilberto C. de Jesus (edcdejesus@gmail.com) is professor emeritus at the Asian Institute of Management. Prof. Rofel Brion’s Tagalog translation of this column and others earlier published, together with other commentaries, are in https://secondthoughts.ph.