The hearts bleed of the remnant aging patriots who fought Marcos’ plundering dictatorship. His corpse is to be transferred soon to the Libingan ng mga Bayani. The reason for it supposedly is plain: he was a President and soldier. Yet the implications are profound. Never mind if, due to exigencies of the times, it is convenient to forget their hardships, the old patriots concede. It hurts of course that their self-denial of safety or bearing of torture, and the sacrifice of lives by their comrades are set aside. But it is an abomination that one so undeserving would be buried at the Cemetery of Heroes. This is the national shrine where lie the greatest of the race. It is reserved for martyrs against tyranny and for freedom. Filipinos need to keep the grounds sacred.
Marcos rose to fame by fabricating war medals and guerrilla exploits. He then abused the power of the President. He imposed one-man rule, jailing, torturing, and slaying tens of thousands of dissenters. He enriched his family at the expense of the national coffers and random victims. The bad soldier later debased the Presidency. Entombing him in the midst of the 32,000 heroes of the Death March of 1942 would be to insult their memory.
With Marcos’ untold wealth, his family would be unable to resist the temptation to erect a tomb to upstage all the rest. There would be no streamer to qualify that he is there merely as a past President and soldier, much more to remind of what he did to high office and noble soldiery. His tomb’s rise in expected opulence would tend to overshadow the true, if forgotten heroes of ages past.
Marcos at the Libingan would be the beginning of the revising of history. International tribunals had unearthed parts of his ill-gotten wealth. Domestic counterparts traced those to the government treasury, and to his appropriation of private companies for kin and cronies. His loot was estimated to reach $10 billion. That would now be forgotten. No one buried at the Libingan would have committed such crimes, the version eventually would emerge.
Absurdity has a way of becoming acceptable. The revising of the past would affect the present. What a spectacle it would be for the government to have to return to the Marcoses $4 billion so far recovered from them and cronies. Or for thousands of victims of Marcos atrocities to be forced to retract their life stories. After which, they too would be made to return to the Marcos estate the partial recompense they belatedly received in recent years. The Philippine state would have to make representations with the United States Department of Justice and the Honolulu Court to reverse findings of Marcos’ plunder. Same with the authorities of Switzerland who had ruled to restitute Marcos’ secret deposits to the Filipino people.
All historical accounts of Marcos abuses would have to be burned or shredded. It would be unseemly for the country to keep such records of one now esteemed to earn a place at the Libingan. In the end Congress would have to repeal the law that makes a holiday of February 25. That culminating day of the 1986 People Power Revolution would have to be expunged from the memory of the remnant millions of participants. No such commemoration shall henceforth be held of the final push to oust from power one now buried among heroes. People Power would become a quirk of world accounts, no longer as a Filipino event that other oppressed peoples emulated. That example would have to be erased from the histories too of Korea, Thailand, and Eastern Europe that followed the 1986 action.
The minds of the remaining old patriots also wonder. Why had their grandparents forsaken comforts and sacrificed their lives for freedom from invaders? Why had their parents inculcated in them love for and readiness to serve the country? Why had they fought Marcos in the farms and the factories, and eventually at EDSA and many other public squares? Was it all worth it?
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