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Thank you, Supreme Court
WHAT shall we tell our children now?
It’s okay to plunder the country’s resources, to be corrupt, to violate human rights. You’re a hero.
Crimes against the nation should be tolerated and taken lightly, or better yet, ignored altogether. It’s okay to violently suppress political dissent. It’s heroic. The 3,257 killed, 35,000 tortured, 70,000 incarcerated, the 737 Filipinos who “disappeared” from 1976 to 1983 during martial law? They were nothing. Many were tortured, mutilated and dumped on roadsides for public display to create widespread fear. Just forget about them.
And so what, too, if millions of Filipinos overthrew the Marcos dictatorship and drove it out of power? You know what is heroic? It is ruling the country for 20 years from 1966 to 1986 and plunging the economy into a spiralling crisis weighed down by heavy foreign borrowings and profligate spending for the benefit of the family and cronies.
Hoarding ill-gotten wealth at between $5 billion to $10 billion is cool. It’s perfectly all right to live a lavish and over-the-top lifestyle built upon the poverty of the people. Plunder pa more!
It’s okay to fake war-hero claims, too. So what if the elaborate tale that then soldier Ferdinand Marcos Sr. led the “Maharlika guerrilla unit” during the Japanese occupation was exposed as a fictitious story by American historian Alfred McCoy? So what if an official United States military investigation made right after the war already declared the tale a fraud?
Clearly, a heroes’ burial for Marcos is not a travesty of history. It is not an insult to the patriotic Filipinos’ sacrifices and struggle fighting the dictatorship for freedom and democracy. It is not a mockery of the horrors that the Filipino people endured during his reign of terror. Thanks a lot, Supreme Court.
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