Picture yourself waking up one morning and there’s no Youtube, Facebook or TikTok. Your WiFi and mobile won’t connect. After hours of fidgetting with your gadgets, you find out that your neighbors too have no signal. One of them arrives from night shift and narrates what he saw in the streets. Soldiers in full battle gear have set up checkpoints with machineguns and tanks. Civilians are made to alight from vehicles and frisked. Long hair of males and miniskirt hems of females are scissored there and then. Resisters are slapped, handcuffed and bundled off in cage vans. To where, nobody knows. Stay indoors, you advise each other, though unsure if that’s even safe. Fear sets in with the eerie realization that you’re cut off from the rest of the world.
Ferdinand Marcos in fact employed those shock tactics on Sep. 23, 1972. Filipinos awoke to dead radios, television and phones. No newspapers either. The unsuspecting who went about their usual ways were brutalized in the streets. Crack troops trained to fight communist and separatist rebels were deployed to the cities for maximum effect. Marcos schemed for a year to illegally extend his tenure via martial law, the opposition had warned. Nobody expected it to be that savage.
Only two days later did Marcos announce the martial law signing as of Sept. 21. He had padlocked Congress, all media outlets and selected civilian offices. Opposition lawmakers were arrested, along with labor and peasant leaders, civil rights lawyers, priests, professors and student activists. All were tagged as “conspiring with communists to burn the city of Manila.” Marcos proclaimed that he was going to save society. In the following years thousands were abducted, detained without charges, tortured, raped and murdered.
Today’s would-be authoritarians imitate Marcos’ playbook. Marcos alibied that the perennial deadlock between Malacañang and Congress forced him to abolish the latter. He also abolished the vice presidency because he was his own successor. For thought control, he confiscated ABS-CBN and gave it to a crony and government appointee. He assigned that same fraternity-mate to publish a state-controlled daily. Two other newspapers subsequently opened, one by Marcos’ brother-in-law, the other by his aide-de-camp.
Intolerant of state auditors, Marcos stripped them of independence and put them under his command. He packed the Comelec with his supporters and designated as chairman a partymate who lost in the previous senatorial election. The bureaucracy was made to swear by Marcos’ New Society or else be dismissed. He filled the Supreme Court as well with law school classmates. To make the message sink in, the Chief Justice was assigned to carry the First Lady’s parasol.
Having stifled dissent and established control of national and local governments, Marcos proceeded to the next stage of one-man rule. He parceled off to cronies the major industries: sugar, coconut, oil, mining, shipping, airlines, telecoms, construction. He borrowed left and right in the name of the government for crony businesses. Together with them, his conjugal dictatorship plundered the economy of $30 billion.
Authoritarianism can recur if citizens let down their guard. Democracy is a system that needs constant improving and protecting.
(Tune in to the four-day webinar, “Essential Truths on the Martial Law Years,” Sep. 21-24, 2021, 3-5 p.m. HRVVMC Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/hrvvmemcom. Guest lecturers include former Historical Commission chief Dr. Ma. Serena Diokno, former Human Rights’ Victims Claims Board Atty. Byron Bocar, torture victims and freedom fighters.)
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Yellow-ribbon tagging of COVID-19 infectees’ houses is dangerous. It will stigmatize them at a time when they need help the most. Such insensitive brute-force treatment is no different from cussing and ordering “shoot-on-sight” of non-vaccinees when there are hardly any doses available.
The better approach is one with heart. Barangay officials must determine what the quarantined infectees need. With charitable volunteers, they can then quietly deliver hot meals, fresh fruits, water, medicines, vitamins, soap, disinfectant, face masks, disposable diapers, trash bags and other basics.
Let the spirit of sharing reign. Emulate the community pantries, where neighbors gave what they could and took only what they needed.
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“Gotcha: An Exposé on the Philippine Government” is available as e-book and paperback. Get a free copy of “Chapter 1: Beijing’s Bullying and Duplicity”. Simply subscribe to my newsletter at: https://jariusbondoc.com/#subscribe. Book orders also accepted there.