Martial Law

[Newspoint] Martial law by any other name (strike 3)

Vergel O. Santos

This is AI generated summarization, which may have errors. For context, always refer to the full article.

[Newspoint] Martial law by any other name (strike 3)
With another Marcos taking over from Duterte from here, not to mention another Duterte first in the line of succession to him, it looks like a compounding arranged in their own dark heaven

The title of this piece came to me borne on the wings of an omen. It is in fact the title’s second appearance in this column, the earlier one for a commentary on the shutdown of ABS-CBN, in May 2020. It had appeared earlier still actually, but elsewhere and also thought of not by me but by the editors of an article I published in a foreign journal for journalists, in 1977, five years into Ferdinand Marcos’s martial law, nine years going to its full run. That article earned me an “invitation for questioning” by uniformed interrogators, who tried to hang me on this passage:

About the only types of news published in Manila these days are positive news, meaning, news that makes everybody happy, and passive news, meaning, news that makes nobody unhappy.

They judged the passage tendentious, and, for the most part of our evening, lectured me on my own job as a journalist. I held my peace, and, obviously, lived.

Since then I have kept myself alert to signals of any emergency on about the order of martial law coming down. Call me paranoid, but I feel clearer-minded and actually calmer in that condition. After all, everyone was blindsided by Marcos with his Martial Law. Even as the phrase played on his lips for all to read and hear, no one thought him serious.

For instance, amid all that saber rattling, Jose W. Diokno, the late senator and patriot, remarked, “Marcos can create a throne of bayonets, but can he sit on them?” He was, of course, picked up on the very first night of Martial Law, held in prison for two years, for the most part in isolation, deprived even family visit, and put under house arrest for the next twelve years – while Marcos, as I wrote, “sat on his prickly throne.”

Do I now know any better? I can only say, for myself, that it’s better to be paranoid than sorry.

In 2016, five months into Rodrigo Duterte’s presidency, I published, in another foreign publication, an opinion piece that, instead of developing the other way around, as is the normal order, grew out of a title, one I myself take responsibility for: “Descent into authoritarianism.” After checking out things said and written about Duterte and looking if they squared with his threatening utterances, I thought I had reason to be properly paranoid. Diokno’s own son Chel, the human-rights lawyer, may not appreciate my sense of paranoia, but neither is he one so sanguine as his father. Reacting to Duterte’s warning that the writ of habeas corpus might be suspended, he himself told me, “The train may have left the station.”

That train may not have martial law written on it, but, piloted by a Marcos idolater, it has run basically the same route as Marcos’ train – autocracy, militarization, murder, repression, plunder, cronyism, consorting with a foreign adversary. And, with another Marcos taking over from Duterte from here, not to mention another Duterte first in the line of succession to him, it looks like a compounding arranged in their own dark heaven.

Indeed, even before the two heirs can assume office, I already feel overwhelmed with grim signs to process. For my limited turn and our immediate purpose here, let me focus on one, just one, sign bearer. I single her out for her audacity, an audacity so immoderate and so freely deployed it seems to me to carry the highest imprimatur. That sign bearer is Trixie Angeles, the incoming press secretary, whose office we journalists will have to deal with to get to her president. She wants martial law debated. Does she mean martial law as a concept or martial law in the context of our own experience (1972-1981)? 

In any case, there seems to me no point debating martial law in either sense. In the first place, Angeles has no moral right to even suggest that even the slightest consideration be given a measure so extreme it calls for the murder of freedom, of democracy itself: Here, after all, is the chief apologist and promoter of the boy whose own father ruled as a dictator and who is now president himself.

But what decisively precludes such a debate as Angeles is promoting is that all arguments for martial law have been, in our case, demolished by historical and judicial records that attest factually to the wholesale torture, murder, and thievery under Ferdinand Marcos Sr.’s regime. If anything ought to be done about martial law it is to destroy all the falsehoods the Marcoses and their cronies and trolls have been propagating about it in order to fool us into believing that martial law did us a great good, to which end, by the way, two claims to achievement – one in road building, the other in rice production – are insistently made although factually, resoundingly debunked. 

While it may be true that all that road building has set a record, metric-wise anyway, two insidious factors were at play in it: first, having been in power the longest – dictator for 14 of his 20 presidential years – Ferdinand Sr. had the most time, and necessarily the opportunity, to do all that building, indeed to do what he pleased; second, more building means more kickback potentially. 

As for the much ballyhooed Masagana 99 program – which aimed at that number of cavans of rice harvested per hectare – you’d be a fool to take the word of Marcos’ daughter Imee, the senator, for it. She claims that the program not only met the national need for the staple but even left some for export. Truth is, not only was self-sufficiency, never mind exporting, not achieved, not even remotely, hundreds of rural banks enlisted on the program went bankrupt, left with unpaid loans to farmers guaranteed by the Martial Law regime.

And comes now Junior appearing to style himself like his father – a leader precisely suited for an emergency, which is possibly the cue Angeles has picked up. It certainly looks like it is in perpetuation of the myth of Masagana 99 that he is making himself agriculture secretary concurrently, promising on his part to bring down the price of rice to P20 a kilo (the price is now being raised to less and less implausible levels, which is a long way to go still).

On the lips of any Marcos, we simply cannot take the idea of “emergency” in any benign sense without putting ourselves in the gravest peril. As I point out every chance I get – and I do because it is something that bears repeating, to death – Junior was raised on the false virtues of martial law and soaked up in a sense of impunity. Why do you think he lies as egregiously as he does? Why do you think he won’t meet the unprompted, un-kept legitimate press? Why do you think he persists in dismissing a court ruling convicting him of tax avoidance and refusing to pay the P203-billion he owes in estate taxes? Indeed, why be so numbed in the face of a national economic crisis that could be precisely appreciably alleviated if only he paid up?

Through mere residual influence, his mother, the living half of the conjugal dictatorship that produced and raised him, has managed to stay out of prison, despite being convicted of graft herself, on seven counts. Now, with her son president and a daughter in the Senate, and, not to forget, a favorite nephew presiding in the other house of Congress, I dread to think what murder the family will get away with this second time around. – Rappler.com

This piece has been adapted from a talk the writer gave at the 18th edition, on June 24, 2022, of Media Nation, the annual forum on press freedom and related issues. And, with the Securities and Exchange Commission’s affirmation, four days later, of its own order closing Rappler – thus effectively denying it its constitutional freedom – over a mere ownership-rule issue, in fact one yet unresolved and remediable if found necessary by final judgment, the piece becomes even more ominously relevant.

Add a comment

Sort by

There are no comments yet. Add your comment to start the conversation.

Summarize this article with AI

How does this make you feel?

Loading
Download the Rappler App!