Celebrating Ninoy #21Aug83

Sharing this excerpt from an essay by my favorite historian following Ninoy’s assassination that captures the temper of, and expands the thinking on, those agitated times.  

ANCIENT HISTORY IN THE PRESENT CRISIS
by Reynaldo C. Ileto
15 November 1983

The Philippines gives the image nowadays of a people suddenly galvanized into action by Aquino’s murder. There have been demonstrations, boycotts, marches, and prayer rallies. As one would expect, these started in the universities and public plazas, recalling the student-dominated displays of pre-martial law days. But now churches are very much in the center of protest. Add to that business districts like Makati, and the slums. The workers are moving, and every day one hears of strikes by this or that union or association. Even at the village level there is much agitation.

While the release of mass energies is noted by the media, the usual explanations for it invariably lead away from the experience to the stresses presumably causing it and to the instability it threatens. Marcos’ authoritarian rule and a deepening economic crisis, to cite Time, is fostering “widespread apathy and cynicism and [driving] young Filipinos into the country’s small but increasingly troublesome Communist movement.” Implied here is that the crucial, non-violent center is crumbling. This goes for the “legitimate” opposition as well: the murder of Aquino created “a serious leadership vacuum in the opposition.” This all raises the spectre of a military take-over on one hand, and communism on the other. (Time, Sept. 5) Newsweek summed up its distance from popular sentiments by lamenting that “in the long run [Aquino’s] death could only hurt the cause for which he had sacrificed himself.” (Newsweek, Sept. 5)

It is clear that for the Western press, stability and order are the main concerns. Instability and disorder (both internal and regional) are threatened by the impending fall of the center– Marcos– and so most scenarios dwell on his possible successors, hopefully the restorers of order. The assassination and subsequent mass actions are seen as aberrations, or interruptions best pushed to the background as soon as possible.

From another perspective, however — and this includes that of the participants in the rallies — a very different notion of what is “normal” seems to prevail. To put it another way, recent events are very much part of a certain rhythm of Philippine history, comprehensible in its own terms, and not necessarily a minor partner to the assigned “stable” order of things. The Aquino affair and its sequel provide us with a set of events to illustrate this point.

Probe into Aquino’s background and you find no revolutionary. He was a politician, a member of the ilustrado political oligarchy that was nurtured under the American regime. His father had been the chairman of the Kalibapi, the mass political party that the Japanese organized in 1942. Ninoy himself is said to have had connections with the CIA during his early career as a journalist. He was an exile in the U.S., the former colonial power that backed his rival, Marcos. His wife, Cory, is the first cousin of a crony from the Marcos camp. And some have speculated that he was returning in order to bolster the faction to which he was connected by kinship. (McCoy, Sydney Morning Herald, Aug. 23)

Observers recognized that both protagonists emerged from the same scene, and were still playing the old game– thus the maze of contradictions surrounding the contest. According to a close Marcos aide, “Marcos and Ninoy were the most able intelligent pair of political strategists. There was a contest of wills between them. It was like the arms race. No one thinks that either side is capable of pulling the trigger. But they keep pushing each other to the limit, and suddenly it explodes.” It was “the tragic last act of a long, almost medieval drama.” (Time, Sept. 5)

The medieval drama is, indeed, a fitting analogy. Trouble is, attention has been fixed on the supposedly “real people” behind the masks and the costumes. What the study of Philippine politics often misses are the readings of the play by the various sections of the audience. Controversies in Philippine history have arisen out of the practice of locking events and personalities to singular, supposedly true and factual, meanings. Thus Rizal, to cite a well-known example, was the intellectual of Chinese-mestizo origin who inspired nationalism through his writings but condemned the armed uprising against Spain (thus speaking for order). We don’t see that Rizal was not always what he intended to signify, that he also was the magical curer and the Liberator returning from overseas, whose martyrdom inspired people to join the uprising. He is very much the emblem of disorder in this alternative reading of his life and work.

Aquino is just the latest in a series of figures whose meanings (not origins) have and will continue to inform popular responses to the present crisis. The fact that Marcos politics has been fundamentally de-centered (or de-stabilized) by the Aquino figure is more “normal” than it looks. Philippine history has generally been written in a linear fashion– it is the saga of a people coming into its own, discovering their identity through opposition to the various colonial powers.

Marcos in his multi-volume history Tadhana (Destiny) has himself rewritten this history in order to install himself as the successor to the series of fighters for freedom from the 16th century Lapulapu on. However, for each nationalist figure that appears dominant (and to which Marcos links himself) in this history, one can put forth either a contrary reading of this figure or another figure in opposition to it.

For example, during the American period dominated by “compadre colonial politics” opposition was represented in the schoolteacher and former revolutionary general Artemio Ricarte. Exiled in Hongkong, he promised to return as the liberator, he preached independence through struggle, and criticized the dominant politics as false and deceptive. His opponent in the drama was Manuel Quezon, the American protege who succeeded in 1916 (with the passage of the Jones Law) in displacing Ricarte as the Liberator who would gain independence. Historical writing, however, largely suppresses Ricarte, the radical “other” of Quezon. So does it suppress other figures who emerged to succeed Ricarte– some of whom were executed or given long jail sentences for “banditry.” The net effect is a coherent history dominated by first by nationalist rebels, then parliamentary politics, and progressing from the first or Malolos Republic, to the Philippine Assembly, the Commonwealth, and on to the New Society.

How does the Aquino affair relate to all this? It has thrust into the foreground a meaningful politics which previously appeared only in the gaps of this linear history. This politics represents an alternative to “pulitika” or the jockeying for positions among the old political oligarchy. To assert itself today, it has had to co-opt a traditional politician, Ninoy himself, and turn him inside out. Death made this possible. The old suspicion that somehow a politician’s fine words are not matched by sincerity and action, has melted in Ninoy’s case.

Ninez Olivares, viewing Aquino’s body recalled what Ninoy had said to her in New York: “And you doubt it?” According to her: “I doubted that because Aquino was a politician, he may not have had the interests of the Filipino at heart; that he may not have loved his country and our people. I looked at his ashen face, the bullet wound, and the blood all over hs shirt. No, Ninoy, I said to myself. I have no more doubts. You loved your country and your people. God be with you, always, wherever you may be.”

Words like these are usually thrown out by analysts because they belong to the realm of the sentimental or religious rather than real politics. But if the history of the 1896 revolution is at all useful as a guide, the break with Spain began precisely with a tearful, sentimental dialogue, expressed in popular poems and songs, between Mother Spain and daughter Filipinas over the bodies of three executed reformist priests. Andres Bonifacio terminated the dialogue by declaring Inang Bayan as the true mother. The spread of the Katipunan was facilitated by the appeal to remember and pity the suffering Inang Bayan. Something like this is happening today. After the common grief over Ninoy’s death, it appears that the bulk of the Filipino people have shifted their loyalties and are preparing for the next move. The memory of Ninoy is a crucial factor.

Like Rizal in the 1890’s, Ninoy scattered statements and signs that would become meaningful in the light of his death. “It’s time,” he said, “to be home with our people and suffer with them. And if you’ll remember, when I left home, I promised to return. I’ll be keeping that promise.” Then came his remark, said half-jokingly at that time: “I would rather die a glorious death than be killed by a Boston taxicab.” The imprisoned Rizal did something similar when he sent a sketch of the “Agony in the Garden” to his family, with the note “this is but the first station.”

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The construction of Aquino the martyr was almost too easily done. Quite common are passages like the following:

“Mourners comment on his smile and the sweetness of the face and the kindness there. That face with its singularly haunting look and the smudges that the final violence left on it will haunt the Filipino people for a long time. Like Jose Rizal’s final act of trying to defeat his killers by turning towards the sun and their bullets just before death, Ninoy’s enigmatic look may well be his final victory.” (H. Paredes, Mr&Ms, Sept. 9)

In a way this is literary overkill. But the reference to Rizal is not at all forced. For all the anting-anting (magical power) stories woven around him, Marcos has never aspired to Rizal status. Aquino has succeeded on this point. The juxtaposition is clear in the portraits of Rizal and Aquino carried side by side in street demonstrations underscored by the words “Great Men Sacrifice their Lives for Freedom.”

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