“If the martial law veterans want the next generation to remember, they should produce more history books, short stories, novels and documentaries on that dark period. The kids’ brains today are wired differently. The oldies did propaganda work in black-and-white via Gestetner stencils and mimeographing machines. The kids today need videos, with music and vivid color, posted instantaneously on the web. The oldies thought in terms of competing dogma. The kids start with reality, raw and undigested - they prefer to do the digesting themselves.”—
Raul C. Pangalangan, Forgetting Martial Law, The Philippine Daily Inquirer
I do agree with the good Dean. We certainly need narratives from that period as things are now fast slipping from memory. Sad though that it is those favored in those dark days who are now adapting to current technology (e.g. Youtube videos, websites, etc), than those who suffered much.
A few years ago I had a discussion with a prominent writer who now resides abroad about this very subject. He had an excellent point. Simply that the fault for our Martial Law amnesia is in large part because many of the academe and intelligensia, who are still in positions of influence, collaborated vigorously with Marcos. They helped write his manufactured ‘histories’, they wrote his speeches, they helped lay the intellectual foundation for his so called New Society.
Now, at the fall of Martial Law these people remained in position and, he argued, purposefully tried to ignore the ML period because of their role. For every Anding Roces or Chino Roces, or Teddy Locsin Sr you had a collaborator. For every F Sionil Jose or Nick Joaquin or Pete Lacaba you had an academic ghostwriting his speeches, or questionable histories.
So, it filters down. These so-called nationalisms in the academe and intelligensia not only agreed with Marcos, they collaborated with him to build that great and wonderful New Society. They now teach our students, the youth of the nation, and they learned nothing from their dalliance with the dark side. If anything, men of that ilk still maintain that we need a strong leader. They sit in their ivory towers, railing against a culture and society they loathe and detest; they look down on the Filipino and his history. Thus, the ‘defenders’ of Pinoy culture and the preservers of our historical memory, inevitably eviscerate our collective memory in favor of their preferred narrative.
Nationalists? Please.
