enrile’s endgame

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