Nation and forgetting

by Joy Icayan, http://www.3quarksdaily.com

Stepping inside the Marcos Museum in Batac, Ilocos feels like stepping into a different time capsule. The museum, which also houses the remains of the late dictator, resembles more a shrine for a person deemed half human, half god. The walls are decorated with framed notes, fragments of letters and Marcos’ personal history, intricately tied to the history of the country. Personal virtues and achievements are extolled, such as Marcos’ topping the bar exam. Everywhere one turns, there are pictures of Marcos the hero, sought after by ordinary folk—Marcos with peasants, Marcos with the arms of those outstretched, reaching out to him.

For every tear you shed, there will be victory, a plaque read.

On September 21, 1972, citing threats of communist insurgency and civil disobedience, then President Marcos declared Martial law, effectively suspending civil rights and what activists would then call ‘plunging the country into its darkest times’. What followed could not quite be described by the available statistics: 30,000 cases of human rights violations according to Commission of Human Rights, 21,000 documented cases by the nongovernmental organization Task Force Detainees of the Philippines. A country paralyzed by debt while its neighboring countries in Southeast Asia boomed economically. A country with its citizenship in constant mistrust of the government. The images and stories that haunt, haunt in their universality—a replica of a famous dissident’s cell in a museum in Quezon City—bunk beds and toilet cramped together, countless pictures of men and women in the streets being sprayed on by water cannons and tear gases, skeletons that still turn up in the most remote of regions, stories of friends, comrades dead, missing, families broken, the individual voices that speak of torture, loss.

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