Andres Bonifacio’s letters that have come out of the woodwork have rekindled popular interest in the hero, who left us only with a faded photograph and a small collection of writings, and all to the good.
His letter to Emilio Jacinto on April 24, 1897, one of the three original letters that came from the collection of Epifanio de los Santos and were auctioned in March, reads like a page from a whodunit novel, both riveting and unsettling.
in my last blog i opined, in a spirit of reconciliation, that martial law was not all bad, and EDSA was not all good. let me qualify that. martial law was not all bad but it was mostly bad. EDSA was not all good but it was mostly good.
i came out of the enrile-bongbong tete-a-tete feeling a little dirty, complicit, because i stayed to listen kahit obvious naman that it was more of the same spin, painting marcos a super know-all president and cory a wicked know-nothing witch. i had been hoping against hope that the old man, for the sake of nation, would level up the discourse a little, get beyond insisting that everyone had a wonderful time noong martial law and finally admit that many gross mistakes were made on every front that continue to fester and rankle the body politic.
alas, the old man continues to disappoint (as does the silent FVR). read randy david‘s An interview in quest of an audience.
It … comes as no surprise that he would willingly lend himself to a project to rehabilitate Marcos in the public memory. Perhaps he thought he owed the Marcos family something for contributing to their downfall. Without sounding as though he regretted his participation at Edsa, it was obvious he was trying to patch up his relations with the family by praising the regime of which, after all, he had been very much a part. With the passage of more than four decades, many of his contemporaries who might convincingly contradict his recollection of events have passed on.
… This particular interview, videotaped and posted on social media to coincide with the 46th anniversary of the imposition of martial law, is barefaced propaganda aimed at “millennials,” who, having been born long after the actual events, are presumed to accept without question so-called eyewitness accounts of historical events. As a teacher, I would not take it seriously. Still, propaganda like this, formatted as public affairs material, offers important lessons on what to avoid in the teaching of history.
The impact could have been different, however, if an interview like this were to be conducted by a panel of respectable historians and journalists, and the principal subjects were individuals who had been detained and tortured or stripped of their properties by the regime but never allowed their sordid experience to cloud their view of events. I’m not saying that their accounts would be entirely free of bias. But a good impartial interviewer would have had greater success in teasing out the truth from personal narratives.
it was therefore a joy running into pop historian lourd de veyra‘s sept 20 special on my facebook feed. watch and listen and share Martial Law Myths Busted | History, exactly the kind of martial law info and assessment that i was wishing for from historians of the academe. de veyra should do a series, let’s hear what the economists and political and social scientists, the lawyers and the military, the artists, the communists, have to say. let’s not ask the trapos, of course.
EPISODE 2 of the tete a tete, like episode 1, was obviously edited down — time constraints? or did the old man tend to wander and say things inconsistent with, or unsupportive of, the official story? whatever, the EDSA episode is worth transcribing. it’s the first time ever that bongbong has said anything about the four days. the first time, too, (correct me if i’m wrong) that enrile has spoken up and rubber-stamped the claim that marcos did not give orders to shoot. sabay show ng TV footage of marcos forbidding ver from attacking crame.
it would be great if de veyra could focus on that question in a special episode for EDSA 2019. as far as i can tell from my own research for the EDSA books, marcos issued 3 kill-orders, as in, never mind kung madamay ang civilians — feb 23 tanks were ordered to ram through the crowd in ortigas (tadiar refused), feb 24 air force strike-wing gunships were ordered to bomb crame (sotelo defected instead); a few hours later marines positioned in aguinaldo were ordered to bomb crame with howitzers and other hardware (balbas managed not to, his family was among the people in EDSA) — this last around the time that marcos was on tv telling ver not to attack.
my theory is, marcos was just being his wily old self, making the best of a bad situation by pretending to be the good guy to ver’s bad cop, hoping to fool washington dc and the vatican, if not the filipino people, a little while longer.
and then, again, is it possible that the orders did not issue from marcos himself? then who issued them? ver? imelda? bongbong? all of the above?
time to get the story straight. #HindiPaTaposAngLaban
kakaiba ang timpla ng pro-marcos discourse, mas maanghang, mas palaban, mas mayabang. para kaya maipaabot sa, and impress upon the, supremes where (they think) public sentiments lie, in aid of bongbong winning his PET case and taking over as veep? next stop, the presidency?
sa social media, kaabang-abang ang tete-a-tete nina juan ponce enrile at ferdinand “bongbong” marcos. on sept 20 tungkol sa martial law, on sept 22 tungkol sa EDSA.
i expect that the exercise is meant to glorify martial law and to villify EDSA. it would be nice though if the two could be a little more candid and and even-handed. just as we, who are all set to scream revisionism!!! need to get a better handle on martial law and EDSA. martial law was not all bad just as EDSA was not all good.
a question i hope is addressed in da tete-a-tete: so, anong nangyari? bakit pabagsak na ang ekonomiya by 1982, even before ninoy’s assassination?
sabihin pa natin, for the sake of argument, that marcos did all the right things re infrastructure (except for a lemon or two) and he was able to electrify almost half the archipelago (not all of it, not even close) and he got uncle sam to pay rent for the US bases (kahit binarat tayo nang katakut-takot) atbp, not to speak of how culture and the arts kinda blossomed because of (and despite) imelda: bakit hindi na-sustain ang “progress”? bakit biglang ayaw nang magpautang ng mga bangko? bakit di tayo nakabayad ng mga utang? bakit ba talaga hindi naging isang singapore ang pinas?
it would be great to hear nationalists in the academe — the historians, the political scientists, the economists — having tv tete-a-tetes with the populace and sharing their findings on questions like these. we need answers based on facts, figures, records, documents. so we all — the elected and the electorate alike — can learn the lessons we need to learn, so we can correct our mistakes, so we can move forward.
the last thing we need is a conference of historians perorating on a notion of “public history” (now ongoing 20-22 sept) that i fear would legitimize, validate fictional (partisan, and/or “creative”) accounts of historical events, among other historical and cultural horrors.
bakit wala silang criteria of any kind? ano ito, let’s just be glad that we’re talking history, even if reeking of fiction and propaganda? i would sit in judgment: is the opinion sound and balanced? is it based on facts? the slightest whiff of fiction should be red-flagged and merit automatic rejection from the annals of public history.
it’s not as if our historians have nothing else to do. every september and february we hear it repeated that marcos did not give shoot orders that would have harmed civilians in EDSA. credible eyewitness and first-person accounts say he did. so who’s revising history? our historians, academic or “public”, should be weighing in. otherwise, anong silbi nila?
kung sabagay, antihero naman silang tatlo in real life. as in, lacking truly heroic attributes. for all their dramatics in reel life, neither luna nor goyo nor quezon is in the league of jose rizal and andres bonifacio.
one thing, however, that rizal and bonifacio, luna and goyo have in common is that they were killed, they died, for country in the prime of their revolutionary lives. rizal in 1896, bonifacio in 1897, luna and goyo in 1899. freedom was non-negotiable.
quezon, who was 3 years younger than goyo and lived to a relatively ripe old age of 66, did not take part in the 1896 revolution (his family in baler is said to have remained loyal to mother spain), hardly engaged in military battle in the fil-am war, and post-fil-am war was principal collaborator in the, sadly, successful campaign to suppress the nationalist clamor for immediate independence from america. [Michael Cullinane. Ilustrado Politics: Filipino Elite Responses to American Rule 1898 to 1908. Ateneo de Manila Press, 2003; Alfred W. McCoy. Policing America’s Empire: The United States, The Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State. University of Wisconsin Press, 2009]
kumbaga, quezon was america’s boy all through the american occupation and the commonwealth — he came to dominate and shape local and national politics to his liking, creating the template for political ops, with the approval, of course, if not with some maneuvering on the part, of imperial america. this is not to say that quezon does not deserve a film, he absolutely does, he was quite a colorful figure, on so many levels. but he belongs to another time in our history. he belongs in a different trilogy. or puwede ring stand-alone.
but wait. the quezon film daw will cover the 1935 elections where quezon trounced aguinaldo in the run for president of the commonwealth. so, iyun na mismo ang thread of the trilogy? a three-punch swing at aguinaldo for ordering the execution of bonifacio, i suppose, and for selling out to spain with the pact of biak na bato, i guess, and for naively trusting that the americans would withdraw once the battle against spain was won?
in fairness, after luna and goyo, aguinaldo deserves his day in court. let’s hear his side of the story. why did he have to have bonifacio killed? why was it so difficult giving bonfiacio credit where credit was due him. what made it so impossible for him and bonifacio to get their act together, that is, to work conspire fight together against a common enemy? what was he thinking when he agreed to stop fighting spain? how surprised was he by the treaty of paris whereby america bought the philippines from spain for $20M?
we don’t need more historical fiction. we need facts and intelligent conjecture. we need to learn from our history — not just from juicy details but from the big picture that reveals the patterns we need to break away from so we can blaze new trails.