They want to keep Marcos alive

The Marcoses and their supporters insist that they want to bury the remains of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos in the Libingan ng mga Bayani so as to finally allow him to rest in peace and so that Filipinos can all achieve closure and move on.

But in fact, they do not actually want to bury Marcos. They want to keep him alive.

The goal of their efforts to secure a “hero’s burial” is clear: They want to raise the dictator back from the dead—not as the vile, hated, murderous kleptocrat that he lived as, but as the beloved, glorious “Father of the Nation” that the Marcoses and their supporters project him to be.

They want to reconstruct the Marcos brand for new and future generations of Filipinos in order to buttress the family’s resurgent and strengthening political clout.

They want to efface the sign of the beast stamped on the forehead of the Marcoses, to wash the blood off their hands, to dispel the stench of murder that clings to the House of Marcos.

This, many have pointed out, is clearly about reclaiming Malacañang. It is part of Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s early presidential campaign for 2022—and perhaps even Sandro Marcos’ campaign in the not-so-distant future.

The caravan of hundreds, if not thousands, that the Marcoses and their supporters will likely organize to accompany the dictator’s remains from Batac, Ilocos Norte, to the Libingan ng mga Bayani in Taguig City will be an early show of force, an advance miting de avance, announcing Marcos Jr.’s bid for his father’s old post.

But it is also about much more. Marcos, after all, was a dictator who, faced with fractious parasitic dynasties and resurgent communist and separatist movements, sought but failed to “modernize” Philippine capitalism by introducing and propagating his own fascist ideology: the idea that there are no conflicting classes in the Philippines, just one proud “nation,” and that all should just unite behind him and agree to be disciplined by the state in order to create a new society, the “Bagong Lipunan.”

Parading his remains from Batac to Taguig, burying him as a “hero” and rewriting the history books are also about resuscitating and propagating this once-dominant ideology.

In short, it’s not just about rehabilitating the Marcos brand, it is also about reviving Marcos values and visions. It’s about reviving fascism.

Seen from this perspective, it becomes easier to understand why President Duterte has been so intent on granting the Marcoses’ request for interment at the Libingan.

He wants to bury Marcos as a “hero,” not just because he wants to repay his campaign financiers but also because he, too, espouses Marcos values and visions. After all, he seeks to achieve very similar goals in the face of conditions very similar to those that Marcos faced.

Mr. Duterte, too, seeks to “modernize” a society that continues to be bled dry by dynastic, parasitic elite families; he, too, seeks to pacify active (if relatively weaker) resistance movements. So he, too, has been propagating an ideology very similar to what Marcos propagated: the need for class compromise, the importance of discipline and law and order, the vision of the “Bagong Lipunan.”

Marcos’ planned burial in the Libingan ng mga Bayani is therefore not simply a ritual to achieve closure or to pay off debts. It is one more moment in a concerted and protracted political mobilization to create the social and ideological preconditions for fascism. It is about “rewriting history,” not to change the past, but to rule out a more democratic future.

Herbert Docena, a PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, says he intends to take part in the planned mass nonviolent civil disobedience actions to #BlockMarcos.