“MOVE on!” Or so says Imee Marcos, now a senator after years of political isolation, that convenience is sought now that her family is back in power.
“Not yet,” say the critics and the mostly aging members of the population who had been victims of abuses during Imee’s father’s long rule under and after martial law.
There were thousands, many of them were innocent, that justice is sought but it remains elusive, much more so that the Marcoses are back in power with the dictator Ferdinand Sr’s junior– Bongbong– was elected president of the republic.
Efforts to distort history have been made since the turn of the century. The advent of the Internet was the perfect platform for the Marcoses to give their “side of the story”.
Paid adverts have become prevalent when social media sites were making inroads into people’s consciousness.
They were the perfect vehicles for conditioning the minds of the young and titillating the sentiments of those who could not and refuse to remember.
Two decades later, Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. is now the president of the Philippines– the same country which repulsed his father and the Marcos family after two decades of iron-fisted rule enabled by the military; and wastage, abuse, and neglect by his cronies.
A film depicting “their story” was not sufficient, ineffective even to make the people forget. But continue rolling the tills and it will have the same effect as Hitler’s propaganda machine that made many Germans idiots and fools.
It could not have been Abe Lincoln who truly uttered that line about deceiving the people but credit should go to whoever he was who said the people can’t be fooled at all times.
Only that like him, the years have made many of the Marcos dictatorship victims anonymous, forgotten by some although the family’s excesses when they made themselves royals of the land were not.
It was also convenient for the president to have attended the United Nations General Assembly on the observance of the 50th year since Marcos declared martial law.
Imee insists martial law should now be put in the dustbins of history. Martial law, however, only served as his father’s tool to preserve his dictatorship. That dictatorship empowered him to plunder.
The world remembers. It will not forget.
The world leaders’ lukewarm reception– if they showed up, indeed– of Marcos Jr. was their statement.
There was no applause. There were mostly empty seats.
It’s like he has not come out the victor. Maybe not yet. Maybe never.
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