“The greatest threat to freedom is the shortness of human memory” (Olaguer vs. Military Commission, G.R. No. L-54558 May 22, 1987).
Today, we commemorate the 51st anniversary of the Martial Law Declaration of former dictator, Ferdinand E. Marcos Sr. which presaged one of the darkest periods of our history, sweeping in a single blow our country’s gradual process to democratic consolidation.
Veiled within the pretext of suppressing lawless rebellion, the martial law regime led to a world-class plunder and the worst forms of human rights violations with recorded 3,257 extrajudicial killings, 35,000 documented tortures, 77 forced disappearances, and 70,000 incarcerations. Despite some claims justifying the violence, the Supreme Court ruled in Aberca vs. Ver (G.R. No. L-69866 April 15, 1988), that “the duty to prevent or suppress lawless violence, insurrection, rebellion and subversion xxx cannot be construed as a blanket license or a roving commission untrammeled by any constitutional restraint, to disregard or transgress upon the rights and liberties of the individual citizen enshrined in and protected by the Constitution.” The end will never justify the means.
More than half a century later, the ghost of martial law continues to haunt us. A ghost that knows no apology, no repentance, nor attempt at restitution. Amidst the present attempt to distort and whitewash history, the human memory becomes a new battleground. With signals and temper of democratic backsliding, we must remember now more than ever, that authoritarianism thrives in normalization and must resist the temptation of narratives normalizing the horrors of martial law. A philosophy professor whose parents fled Nazi Germany once wrote, “What normalization does is to transform the morally extraordinary into the ordinary. It makes us able to tolerate what was once intolerable by making it seem as if this is the way things have always been.”
The number of victims is not just mere statistics; these are people who have names. One of them for example was Trinidad Herrera, whose lawyer revealed what had been done to her by the Military Intelligence and Security Group: “She was ordered to remove all her clothes until she was completely naked; then she was made to attach and wind, by herself, around her left nipple, the end of one of two electrode wires. While the electric shock was being applied on her nipple, one of the torturers was holding the other electrode in front of her vagina—uttering threats that if she still would not ‘cooperate,’ he would attach [the] wire to her vagina.” Every single victim has their story, and we must remember.
No burial in hallowed grounds can exonerate the sins that were never acknowledged. Just as Dostoevsky wrote that a hundred rabbits don’t make a horse; a thousand lies, even if repeated a thousand times, cannot supplant a fact. Remembrance is an act of both love and resistance. We remember to honor the memory of the “unforgettable and noble sacrifices of the countless brave and patriotic men and women who fell as martyrs and victims during the long dark years of the deposed regime” (supra). We remember because we know this: those who cannot remember are condemned to repeat their past.
Never forget. Never again.
