Memory holes

Did the 14th President of the Philippines mimic the 13th (and booted-out) President?

That question stems from the firestorm President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo set off by prescribing, for national reconciliation, a hefty dose of amnesia. “Forget Edsa Two”, she urged. Induced loss of memory would “heal wounds.” Was the lady being even original?

Play back the September 1999 Latin American state visit by her predecessor. When Joseph Estrada touched down in Santiago , people here marked the 13th anniversary of Esda One. In a Chile , grappling with remnants of caudillo dictatorship, the press published reports on Filipino “People Power”.

“Why do we commemorate ‘dark spots” in our history?” Erap snapped. “Dapat, ang mga pangit at nakalapis (ugly parts of our past), like martial law, ought to be forgotten.” Why dawdle over the unpleasant. “We should move on” – now repeated by President Arroyo.

Come to think of it. Isn't this the same tune communists here play when asked about their purges of the late 80s? Over 1,400 were slaughtered in these paranoid pogroms: from ‘Cadena de Amor', in Bicol-Quezon zone, in 1982 to “ Olympia ” in Metro Manila in 1989.

A “Cannibal Revolution” devoured its own children, noted Inquirer's Jan. 2, 2004 editorial. Innocent “comrades” were killed without pretense of trials. Their remains molder today in unmarked graves, reminiscent as of Poland 's Katyn forest and Cambodia 's “killing fields. Some executioners today are button-down bourgeois executives in air-conditioned Metro Manila offices.

“Why remember the CCP purges?” groused the Communist Party of the Philippines in an article published in Inquirer's Opinion Page (Feb. 1, 2004). “The Party already condemned the abuses,” wrote Anne Buenaventura of the party's information bureau. It “rectified” this mistake.

But the party shredded names of the victims and location of their graves. They didn't bother to notify us, answered relatives in an Inquirer open letter: “We should not stop remembering and reminding.”

“All of us must remember…and open our hearts to human memory,” Nobel Laureate Elie Weisel insisted at memorial rites in the Gestapo death camp: Auschwitz-Birkeneau where he had been imprisoned. “I do not want my past to become the future…of our children's generation.”

Filipinos have “a very special problem” in recalling, Ateneo University president Bienvenido Nebres SJ observes. “It is not just wrong memories. It is the lack of a national memory…The consequence is we tend to live in a perpetual present. We have little collective memory of the past and thus we can not see well into the future ….”

In his novel “1984”, George Orwell depicted a country where citizens thrust into a “memory hole” anything that crossed the whim of rulers. As “memory holes” shredded remembrance, wrong became right. Lies replaced truth. And freedom turned into slavery.

Like malign genies, blotted-out memories don't stay bottled up. They deform daily life. Thus, Imelda insists: the Marcos dictatorship was the “most democratic period in our history.” The communists claim that “majority of (pogrom) victims decided to continue their work”, even praising the carnage.

Erap? Well, some days, he can't recall if his name is Jose Velarde. Pampanga Governor Eduardo Panlilio revealed a Malacañang staffer thrust P500,000 into his hands. Officials who attended the same meeting couldn't recollect anything – or return a handbag.

Induced amnesia institutionalizes injustice. It results in the “ultimate perversion”: evil is called good. Spinmmiesters muscle aside historians as guardians of memory. And history's falsification invites repeated abuse, clotting reconciliation.

A Cebu columnist Simeon Dumdum recalls that the historian Milan Hublas stressed: “The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory.” (Look at how the Marcoses support projects to rewrite the history of People Power).

“Tyrants fear memory,” wrote Dumdum, now a judge. “For as long as people remember their abasement at the hands of tyrants, there is little chance of tyranny reappearing.” Thus, we ignore, at our peril, forgetfulness that stems from senility of the spirit.

Indeed, “The Philippines seems caught in a long nightmare between remembering and forgetting”, Alfred McCoy told the Ateneo-Wisconsion Universities conference on “Memory, Truth-Telling and the Pursuit of Justice”. The country locked itself into a state of denial by obliterating memories.

This enabled “torturers of Marcos era to rise within police and intelligence agencies, allowing the pervasive brutality of martial law to persist. Under impunity, culture and politics are recasting the past, turning cronies into statesmen, torturers into legislators and killers into generals”, he wrote.

“Beneath the surface of a restored democracy, the Philippines still suffers… from the collective trauma of martial law and an ingrained institutional habit of human rights abuse”. Today's increasing resort to the writ of amparo is a consequence.

Arroyo and Estrada urge us to flush Edsa down memory hole. “They're twins,” Inquirer's Randy David explains. But it result in giving up “the quest for accountable governance”. Is that why the 14th President of the Philippines sounds exactly like the 13th (and booted-out) President?*

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