I don’t know your name even, but I feel about you so strongly that only an epistolary form of expression will suffice.

You must be so lucky.

Because you seem so near even when you’re actually the opposite. For that one person who never far.

You must be so lucky, because you do not even need to try.

You don’t have to spend sleepless nights thinking what to do, mulling over if this is the right decision or that one, crying over the anxious feeling that comes with making a risk. You don’t even have to take a risk even, because for that one person, you’re all that it takes to sweep her off. You don’t have to think of unique ways to get her attention, or bamboozling ways to win her over, because your existence enough is alone for her. It’s already magic and chance rolled into one.

You must be so lucky.

Because even when you rarely talk these days, her mind races over you, while mine races over her.

You don’t have to spend some unexpected vacation and be distracted by the question of what you can bring for her. You don’t have to spend long nights just to be with her. You don’t have to think of rushing to where she is whenever she says, tara, or drop everything at a drop of a hot because you’re thinking it may be the only chance you’ll get in the meantime to laugh with her. Because even if you can’t do that, in the slightest chance that you also want to, your existence is enough to get her by.

You must be so lucky, because even if you don’t have an invisible string theory kind of story, you’re that one chapter in her book of stories that’ll always be her favorite.

You must be so lucky.

Because even if she might not run to you to ask for serious stuff, you’re that one memory she easily goes back to when things get tough. Or when things are steady. Or both. You might not easily be able to help her when she needed it the most — and probably I could — but it matters little, because in the first place, you might not even need to do anything to matter this much in her headspace.

You must be so lucky, because even if you’re not anywhere beside her, you’re not even out of her league. Probably, within that pantheon, you’re the last one standing.

You must be so lucky.

And I could only wonder, how does it feel like to be as lucky as you are?

To be that lingering notion that doesn’t go away, to be that eternal thought that not even tears could wash off, to be that long-lasting memory that she’ll hold dearest to her heart.

You must be so lucky, indeed.

(6/12/24)

It felt so peaceful to do so that I decided to write this short note at this ungodly hour.

Every day, all of us face different crossroads in life upon which a decision needs to be made. Should we reach out again to that old friend with whom we parted ways, for whatever reason? Should we assert our voice in a crowd that tries to drown us out? Should we raise our fists in protest over the continuous depredation of our nation? Should we spend our first salary on fancy food, on the newest iPhone model, or on a well-deserved Baguio vacation? Should we quit from this job or that organization, or continue to do the work?

And so on.

Every day, we face the most crucial questions, the toughest battles, the hardest conversations. Or, at the very least, we face the possibility of facing them — if that makes sense. Oftentimes, whether we like to admit it or not, fear overtakes us, particularly if the situation is volatile, if the choices are blurred, if the future is uncertain.

We now live in a time where most of us are not keen anymore on taking huge leaps, and for the longest time, that crowd includes myself. It’s not bad to wish that a safety net be prepared for us to fall on in case anyone jumps the gun but fails. But the magic of a huge leap lies at the heart of the leap itself.

Risk is fearsome, but it’s also risk that allows us to discover the manifold wonders of life — and of ourselves, too. Risk may often appear as a scarecrow, but it’s also a fuel that pushes us to go beyond the scare itself. Risk can be overwhelmingly unnerving, but it’s also that one aspect of our existence that could calm our nerves.

It’s cliche at this point, but it’s often argued that the only constant thing in the world is change. Nothing is set in stone, nor anything is 100% certain. One of my favorite activist songs, Kontradiksyon, drives the point home: “Kontradiksyon ang pangalan ng ating mundo / sa panahong tiyak palagi ang pagbabago.” What is true today may be false tomorrow, or vice versa. What is accepted today may suddenly be ruled out the next day. What was said today might be withdrawn after.

Uncertainty is a pebble under everyone’s shoe. It’s a huge firewall that prevents decisions to emerge, or to be delayed. For a generation that boasts of social media but lives through high decibels of anxiety, an uncertain circumstance is almost always an invitation to run, to walk back, to choose the ‘flight’ in the fight-or-flight response.

Why spend a fraction of our limited time on something that has no, or only a slim, chance of being a reality?

Here’s what I realized. Certainty does not fall from the sky, to paraphrase Mao. It does not rise from a vacuum. It does not emanate from wishful thinking, or silent murmurs, or quiet musings made in front of the sea during a chilly evening. We can never seek certainty without giving it ourselves, for the quicksand of the certain-and-uncertain cycle cannot be untangled without a decisive affirmation of our own certainty (or even uncertainty?) about something. Or someone.

Faced with the most difficult decisions, we often ask ourselves if any affirmative action would be worth the shot. Is it worthwhile to risk a huge part of ourselves, our emotions, or even our little fortunes on something, or someone, that is unsure? By asking that question over and over again, however, we miss out the little wonders of discovery, of slow processes, of life’s twists and turns themselves.

I agree, we are all afraid to take a chance and fail. Who wants to fail, anyway? Who wants to assert themselves in a situation, only to be or get lost? Who wants to love without being loved back? Only sociopaths could perhaps relish this turn of events. Pero sabi nga minsan ng iba, kung suntok sa buwan na lang din ang isang bagay — o tao, bakit hindi ka pa sumubok na sumuntok? Right?

One time, I came across an Instagram post saying that grief is the price we pay for love. I’d like to add more: it’s also the price we must pay for risk, for chance, for the mere act of trying. We can always try, but there will never be a certain guarantee if the attempt would or could be successful. We can lock and load a gun and it may still not go off. The nouveau riche can make huge bets on Okada or some other casino, and there might even be no return of investment. We can start a business, initiate an action, push forward a noble cause, and the specter of failure is still very much on the table. Why even try, right?

We try because it’s always majestic to take a shot on what we believe in.

Skepticism is a healthy way of grounding ourselves when expectations and signs and everything else that amalgamates little hopes elevate us to improbable proportions, but isn’t hoping always a much better alternative than resigning ourselves to our current vantage point? The world is in a constant flux. Life also is. Isn’t it magical to imagine partaking in the shaping of tomorrow?

Risk is the enemy of the afraid, but it’s also the most solid refuge of the terrified. It allows our frantic selves to look forward for broader horizons, to imagine new possibilities that we would otherwise not even dare to think of, to view a future beyond what our puny selves could understand. We are not inside a static existence. Why not gamble on an uncertain future if only to turn it into a certain tomorrow?

You may ask, what if one strives to risk, but it does not work out? Well, what if it does? It’s a likelihood, too. But that will remain a question unless you do give it a try, regardless of what the result might be. No one will ever be 100% prepared for any decision, but as activists tell each other, kapasyahan palagi bago ang kahandaan.

Sometimes, certainty is asked of us, not something we must ask. Without hope, we would be living a ‘living dead’ existence. Without risk, we would be confident with the mediocre and the prosaic and the bare minimums of life. Without a gamble, we would condemn ourselves to a lifetime of regret and lingering.

We should not fear death, but the fear of death, the Greeks said once. Let me amend that: We should not fear the uncertain, but the fear of uncertainty. We must be more afraid when all that we could feel is fear. Petrified of what the future might bring to our lives, we would be content with what’s present. Is it not sad to carry the notion of our inability to imagine a better tomorrow?

Taking a risk brings us closer to making our life, our relationships, the very core of our world certain. No one but us holds the capacity to struggle dreams into realization, to put ideas into practice, to make our impossible dreams possible. It permits us to take part in creating new realities that could very well end up in our favor. It behooves us to proactively build new directions and connections. Without risks, life would remain an almost endless cycle of terror, of fear, of uncertainty itself; isn’t that a gloomy forecast for us?

Do it. Take that chance, or shot, or risk. Push life to its limits. Take a leap of faith. Jump the gun. You can still do them afraid. You can do all of it with all the anxieties one could muster. The primordial factor, after all, is that you do it. We do it, anyway, against all odds. We hope against hope. We make a difficult, or dreadful, choice with all our heart.

Pondering over the idea of returning to Manila after three years in Boston, amid a bleak future for our nation, Ninoy Aquino once said: “I will never be able to forgive myself if I will have to live with the knowledge that I could have done something, and I did not do anything.” I agree. The biggest sin is to be so immobilized as to forget our innate fascination with the notion of risk. Would anyone else be able to forgive themselves if they live a life rife with ‘what ifs?’

What if we just try and leap and risk it all, then?

November 30: The birth anniversary of the Great Plebeian and working class hero, Andres Bonifacio. In 1964, Kabataang Makabayan was established. In 1998, the comprehensive national democratic youth organization Anakbayan was born. In 2022, however, soldiers would put an end to Ericson Acosta’s life.

I was at the Bantayog ng mga Bayani when the news broke out. Many others were in Liwasang Bonifacio, observing the Supremo’s birthday with a protest action against the increase of prices of basic commodities while wages remain dismal. How tragic, I thought, that Ericson perished on the day Bonifacio was born. But revolutions are rife with beginnings and endings, with countless start-and-ends.

And, as another revolutionary from another time, Salud Algabre, once declared, “No revolution ever fails. Each is a step in the right direction.”

State mercenaries did the dastardly act around 2:00 AM. Elements from the 94th and 47th Infantry Battalion captured him and Joseph Jimenes, a peasant organizer and his companion, alive. The military snatched away their lives by strafing the house of the Francisco family, who are still missing to this minute, to stage the sarswela that Acosta and Jimenes died in an “encounter.”

There was no encounter; there was a double-murder.

Ericson Acosta was murdered more than a year after the military had slain his wife, Kerima Lorena Tariman. Five days before, six alleged New People’s Army rebels were reportedly killed in Sultan Kudarat — under, yet again, the soldiers’ favorite excuse: “encounter.” How many more revolutionaries and defenseless peace consultants were killed before? Decades after Bonifacio was extirpated by another Filipino, they’re still killing revolutionaries.

Every day, we encounter reports of Filipinos being killed: hapless drug suspects, farmers falsely tagged as armed rebels, red-tagged activists and community organizers, journalists, teachers, ordinary folks, even local officials and politicians. And unarmed peace activists and revolutionaries. The headlines are almost always splashed with the blood of people executed with impunity, without remorse, without any hint of apologia from their murderers. In a society where Dutertian fascism and the lawlessness of the gun thrive, these killings are normalized. Many of them are relegated into oblivion.

More tragically, we often fail to see, is how the normalization of extrajudicial killings and murders in this nation often trivialize their victims in numbers, as if they were not human beings who lived sublime lives. As if they are mere statistical data of violence. Ericson is not, and should never be, just another addition in the tally board of the murdered in this government’s war against its own people.

Say his name: Ericson Acosta. He was a poet, one of our country’s best. He won a National Book award for his book of poetry. Beyond that, he was an exceptional activist; the quintessential artista ng bayan who offered his art, who consecrated his art, in the struggle of our people for freedom. He embodied the best values inculcated in the University of the Philippines: patriotism, courage, service to the people. Honor before excellence. He was a husband, a father, a comrade. A self-styled bohemian, in his late wife’s words, who abnegated his “crazy drinking habit” for the life of struggle. A patriot who proved beyond words that offering his life to serve our people is the noblest act of heroism.

Ericson exemplified the revolutionary tradition of our people. He had the heroic DNA of Bonifacio. He dared to envision a society without the shackles of feudal control and landlessness, and sought to turn it into a reality. He wrote poems that spoke of the people’s anguished lives, and the necessity to fight with them. He wrote songs that inspired — and still inspires — countless generations of activists to tread the same dangerously heroic path he had taken. He lived with the farmers of Samar, Bicol, and Negros to understand their condition. He fought with them. He went to prison under Ninoy’s son, but his cases were eventually thrown out. He stood by tomorrow’s revolutionary promise. In the Longfellowian language: he was a hero in the strife. And not merely because he refused to be driven like a cattle.

Ericson Acosta’s brutal death is the Filipino people’s loss. The nation lost one of its best and brightest because this regime, under the son of an ousted dictator who murdered hundreds of revolutionaries and activists like him, insists on a despotic counter-insurgency method to deal with our people’s funereal living conditions. The downtrodden farmers with whom Ericson lived and fought to achieve a better world, lost their ardent champion. Words are not enough in explicating the grief that comes with this huge loss. They will never be.

In 1982, after Marcos’ military summarily executed another gallant working-class hero, Edgar M. Jopson, Don Joaquin “Chino” Roces wrote an elegy and lamentation for Edjop. He asseverated:

One day, who really knows, we will no longer be decorating Filipino soldiers for killing fellow Filipinos.

Who knows? But the answer to this question lies in our collective affirmation of our people’s struggle to cast away a society where more Ericson Acostas would be murdered by the ruthless gods of Malacañang and Camp Aguinaldo because of their fear of our people’s radical vision for the future. Who knows, indeed.

During the first 29 days of Ferdinand Marcos Jr in Malacañang, more than 30 killings have already happened. The latest murder was that of Rolando Yumol, the father of physician Chao Tiao Yumol, himself a cold-blooded murderer of three people in Ateneo de Manila University one day before his first State of the Nation Address. One day after Marcos Jr’s SONA, the Philippine military slaughtered four people in separate incidents of killings in Negros Oriental and Batangas. Scores of people were also gunned down under his “calibrated” continuation of Duterte’s drug war.

The scale and brazenness with which these killings have happened is alarming, even though it isn’t really a big surprise. This is a worrisome perpetuation of Duterte’s most notorious legacy in his six years as president: the spate of killings in this country.

One word comes to mind, in the face of these killings in broad daylight: impunity. The culture of impunity which Duterte emboldened — and which fueled his “wars” against drugs, insurgency, and terrorism — is still kicking under the late dictator’s son. This isn’t new considering the Marcos legacy of killings during the twenty-year dictatorship of Marcos Jr’s father, but this is nonetheless outrageous.

The apex of the Yumol narrative is that the killer himself is a rabid far-right Marcos-Duterte fanatic. His belief that the law could be taken upon someone’s hands, that killings could resolve his otherwise justified issues of narcopolitics and corruption against the Furigay dynasty in Basilan, pushed him to actually pull the trigger and murder three people, including the defenseless Ateneo security guard Jevelen Bandalia. His murder spree has opened a Pandora’s box of violence, which now claimed his own father’s life. Who’s next?

Where could we turn to? The supposed guardians of the people are themselves the architects of this culture of impunity. The new president could not even acknowledge the vortex of killings under his predecessor and his dictator-father. Vigilantism and extrajudicial killings are not solely a Marcos or Duterte creation, but these two surnames certainly emboldened a plethora of murderers to perpetuate this cycle of violence with an unbridled amount of impunity. Their legion of fanatics could not be bothered to condemn these killings, especially since they were the same people who cheered on Yumol when he murdered former Lamitan, Basilan mayor Rose Furigay and two other innocent civilians.

#StopTheKillingsPH is not just an issue confined within Dutertismo’s era. It should not be.

Not when Duterte’s biggest legacy — the culture of lawlessness and impunity with which these killings were (and are still being) carried out — still pushes Filipinos like Yumol, his father’s killers, and Philippine state forces to murder without conscience.

Killings are our real State of the Nation. And it is not sound at all, Mr. Marcos.

Writing this blog while the country’s novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) cases shoots up to over 800,000, to remember how things were almost five years ago is a note of pain.

Remember May 9, 2016?

It offered a great measure of hope, of something so alternatingly new, a fresh air from six years of a callous government’s wrath. A start-from-scratch restart after decades of state negligence, systemic theft, and economic oppression across different presidents. An alteration — a radical overhaul, even — of the rotting socioeconomic order.

What we are now seeing is the starkest reversal of that change.

This is denigration at the apex of a regime which was once touted to be the perfect, or the all-too-perfect, harbinger of social change. This is bastardization of the very promise that change is coming which, in the first place, allowed Rodrigo Duterte to make a soft landing in Malacañang with 16 million votes underwriting his victory.

In 2016, the battle cry was hope. And change. And a reversal of what the people commonly viewed as the ills, the rot, the pestilence plaguing the country for a long time.

Five years down the line, it’s all anguish, agony, and an anxious sense about the future.

Remember Duterte’s popular image of a local chief executive plying down a taxi, taking on the driver’s seat, and roaming around the streets of his mighty Davao to catch criminals on the loose? Remember Duterte’s jetski promise? Remember Duterte’s 2015 Christmas message on criminals? Remember that clip of Duterte cheering the New People’s Army, or that video of him sobbing in front of his parents’ tomb?

The country to whom Duterte vowed to provide a safe haven, an almost shamanistic salvation whose “moral” guideposts, if there are any, rely upon the most immoral and backward of methods — obedience through fear, state terror, mass murder — now finds itself in a crossroad, a pivotal juncture in the configuration of its history.

The vision of peace, the imagery of order, sold by Duterte as a candidate is paved by his “kill” order on anyone who dares to deviate from the mass of conformity. To hell with human rights, international observers, the rule of law, due process, and democratic institutions — to hell with bleeding hearts who scream at the sight of her daughter punching to bits a court sheriff, or who shriek at the words Davao Death Squad.

No one can be president if the person cannot carry out killings. That was Duterte’s law.

And so, he won on a counterfeit pledge to cleanse the country of crime bosses and corrupt officials in an unrealistic timetable of three to six months. He vowed to kill businessmen who would not regularize their workers, or to go after rice cartel syndicates. He vowed to move away from United States’ neocolonial grip, only to crawl back into Uncle Sam’s largesse for military aid and Ronald Dela Rosa’s passport.

Duterte once claimed even to become the first socialist president of the Philippines, boasting about his relations with exiled communist leader and National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) Chief Political Adviser Jose Maria Sison, who founded the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) — and of his supposed affiliation with Kabataang Makabayan during martial law. He promised to finish peace negotiations with the NDFP by the end of his term.

Quo vadis, peace talks?

The country who once bought Duterte’s sale of a redemptive chance at change now finds itself in utter shambles after five years of this madman’s change. In Duterte’s worldview, change entails mass murder. Change gives a leeway for policemen to kill suspects under a dubious nanlaban script. Change allows “friends” such as China to gobble up what is left of our national territory and transgress our sovereignty in exchange for onerous loan contracts that, if not paid within a few years, would covet our patrimonial riches to serve as collateral payment.

In Duterte’s marshland, change empowers military officials to conduct red-tagging across universities, hang tarpaulins whose graphics screams of anything but a thorough edit, and kill or detain outright dissenters for the “crime” of being activists and union leaders. Change entails the recycling and pardon for corrupt government officials, from Gloria Arroyo to Nicanor Faeldon to Vitaliano Aguirre II, while hoisting a perfidious anti-corruption banner whenever it becomes convenient.

Who would have thought?

But maybe, in a time of some profound contemplation that the challenge of today’s pandemic offers to us, that’s the question we should be throwing off to ourselves now: who would have thought that Duterte’s banner of change was a road to perdition? A backward route?

In hindsight, another question rises: did no one really anticipate this scale of predicament under Duterte’s iron fist? Or, have we become too blinded by Duterte’s spectacle, perhaps even dazzled by his bombast against the “evils” of society, to even ponder over the ramifications of his rough-and-tumble, even violent, leadership?

In 2016, The New York Times came out with an enticing piece tackling how societies such as ours “fall into vigilante violence.” It was published, locally, by the Philippine Daily Inquirer — which of course was “warmly” met by Duterte’s troll armies and fanatics.

The article’s thesis was as simple as it was too complicated: “a weak state and a population desperate for security… push everyone to bad decisions that culminate in violence that, once it has reached a level as bloody as that in the Philippines, can be nearly impossible to stop.”

But that’s the thing, if we look at it more truthfully: that desperation for change, which included an overreaching gamble for almost criminal and vigilante means of achieving a peaceful societal order, in sheer irony, has led us to the similar quicksand — where crime, injustice, and poverty thrive — from which Duterte’s bloodied fist once vowed to lift the people, in his five years in the presidential throne.

And not only that — Duterte’s incoherent and equally callous regime has opened more ways to die, than to live, in this benighted country: by the bullet, by a plague, or by hunger. Thousands upon thousands have been killed by extrajudicial killings ordered, emboldened, or inspired by Duterte himself, while thousands more perish because of his COVID-19 pandemic response mishandling. Consecutively, millions more live on the edge of death because of poverty and hunger.

Didn’t this guy, for all his bluster and “jokes” about killing a person, promise to inspire redemption? This image of a country with a floundering economy, where millions are mired in starvation, under whose thumb thousands have been annihilated by senseless and unabated killings, in which jobs are an illusion, and in whose farmlands the blood of peasants are splattered by violence or economic turmoil, stand too far, too isolated, from Duterte’s golden rhetoric of change.

This isn’t change; this is the most backward, the farthest extremes, of a corrupt and authoritarian regime.

How did we reach this point? And, yet again, who would have thought?

But, of course, there were voices who hollered against Duterte’s ascension in 2016.

On the frontlines of the early opposition to Duterte, particularly his worldview that killings solve all social problems afflicting this archipelagic nation, were human rights organizations. Into the words of Human Rights Watch, “Duterte Harry” has always been dirty.

A few days after the May 9 elections, HRW came out with this warning about Duterte: “Duterte’s statements both before and during the presidential election have raised grave concerns that his administration will result in a serious regression of human rights.” They were not wrong, after all. But it was a confirmation that came with a sad note: thousands of killings, which means thousands of lives snuffed out and thousands of families dealing with grief and rage, were what it took before HRW’s notion has become an out-of-the-edge paradigm among many.

Duterte (and his handlers) positioned him to be adorned with the hallmarks of a socialist president: the antipathy against United States clad with the veil of an independent foreign policy, the promise of land for the landless and jobs, a social-democratic philosophy (as one analyst claimed in 2016) that would mean “more equitable economics” on Duterte’s side. Throw in the ring his “openness” to see through the end of peace negotiations with the communist and Bangsamoro rebellious movements.

But what has happened since?

On June 5, 2016, Philippine Daily Inquirer came out with a report on five executions in three days’ time across different provinces. Just before Duterte’s first State of the Nation Address, Inquirer bannered that famous photo of a slain drug suspect’s wife cradling his husband’s cadaver in a Pieta-like iconography in Pasay City. Along the way, killings had started to rise in numbers, until it became too normal a news item that it takes new forms of savagery now to sensitize a numbed people.

Did we fail to take notice?

Perhaps, among Duterte’s ramshackle of diatribe, this one was drowned out with the din of his presidency: in February 2016, the presidential candidate himself warned that he would kill union leaders — particularly addressing Kilusang Mayo Uno. Some trade unions called foul, but many remained complacent, especially after Duterte issued a “clarification” that he was only referring to abusive unions, as if workers who toil under exploitative conditions can even “abuse.”

Five years after he went out with his threat, on March 28, 2021, the vice-chair of Southern Luzon’s regional trade union affiliated with KMU, Dandy Miguel, was shot dead — while he was going home. He wore a red shirt that calls for jobs, wages, and rights. Was this dastardly murder of a progressive union leader part of Duterte’s “change?” Was Dandy’s murder a direct consequence of Duterte’s threat to kill unionists way before the presidential elections? Anyone can make their intelligent guess. But the dots are there, waiting to be connected into a coherent web of stories.

In October 2016, Duterte came out with a bold statement: he was “separating” from the United States. That signaled a tough break from the country’s oldest neocolonial power, whose generosity funded some of the most violent and corrupt Philippine presidents — from Roxas to Marcos to Gloria Arroyo — and maintained a systematic plunder of the country’s natural resources, while making a doormat out of Philippine sovereignty itself. But there was one caveat: Duterte announced his “break” from one imperialist power… in China.

It wasn’t a top-secret across the country’s Defense tables that the government Duterte’s own had succeeded challenged China’s aggression in Philippine waters and islands through the legal avenue. On July 12, 2016, the Permanent Court of Arbitration awarded the legal ownership of the islands and waters the country was claiming to Manila. It would have been a huge win, but not with Duterte himself doing a Manchurian engagement on Manila’s territorial rift with Beijing: on one hand, he invoked the jetski icon; on the other, he offered concessions to China, ostensibly to avoid any war or confrontation with the rising superpower.

And his supposed break with the United States was everything but genuine. Duterte’s military remained dependent on Pentagon’s magnanimity, especially in the military’s bloody counter-insurgency drive and in the war on terror which made Marawi a spectacle for Duterte and the American government’s horrid wars. Even with the change of wind in the Oval Office, Duterte’s servile relations with the United States is still earmarked with arms deals that give the military their toys. He once threatened to cut off the Americans’ Visiting Forces Agreement in early 2020, but only to bargain the return of his former police chief and butcher’s visa that the American Embassy had denied. Duterte had since walked back on this chest-thumping, as he also did before.

Meanwhile, on the Chinese neocolonial front, it’s a much worse predicament: far from jetski politics, Duterte has even went to the stretch of practically disowning Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana’s own incensed riposte to the Chinese Embassy’s insulting statements on China’s illegal snatching and take-over of the Julian Felipe reef, which is situated within the country’s Exclusive Economic Zone.

Land for the landless? More than 300 farmers were slaughtered under this regime precisely because of fighting for the very same land that Duterte promised the peasant class to return. While his appointment of peasant leader Rafael “Ka Paeng” Mariano into the agrarian reform portfolio was applauded, Duterte’s supermajority allies eventually got rid of Ka Paeng. And think-tank IBON Foundation had this to say about Duterte’s sham “land reform,” the slowest in almost 32 years: in February 2020, only 3,400 hectares of land were distributed by Duterte’s regime. It was even way lower than the previous haciendero president’s own record.

Social democracy, or whatever remnants of it that were ephemerally lit during his election, was no more than an illusion under Duterte. Not only was this a scintillating illusion under Duterte because the bourgeoisie perpetuated their hold sway over the government, but because what this government had done are the precise anti-thesis of social democracy — and of democracy, socialism, and justice itself.

The thousands of killings in his fraudulent drug war do not speak of socialist principles. Duterte’s deceptive schemes in education, healthcare, transportation, labor, and the economy as a whole — which was still under a neoliberal framework championed by Duterte’s neoliberal economic managers — certainly do not speak of that “equitable economics” and “wealth redistribution” for which he was initially credited in 2016. And with millions going hungry, jobless, and impoverished during Duterte’s mismanaged COVID-19 response, his regime is certainly out of touch with even remotely socialist tenets or realities.

Which brings everything back to that fundamental question posited here: Who would have thought?

Who should be blamed for this mess?

Since the unfolding of the reality that Duterte is not the repudiation — but an actual consecration — of the rotten socioeconomic, political, and cultural order that has rendered the Philippines a stunted, backward, and oppressed nation for decades, many from his former legions of fanatics have disowned him and his bloodied banner of change.

When the killings started to skyrocket, when Duterte chose to glorify Marcos with a remorseless burial in the Libingan ng mga Bayani despite a law recognizing — even indemnifying — the late dictator’s victims, when he chose to honor corrupt and thieving politicians with rewards, perks, and positions, and even liberty from prison, when economic conditions started to hover in a complete disarray and crisis because Duterte was favoring the big business, as was his predecessors, over “pro-people” economics, and when the destruction, death, and desperation that once catapulted Duterte to the throne had become the resplendent symbols of how he and his cohorts have been facing off the pandemic, a huge number of people started to fight back. But, admittedly, a huge number of the electorate continue to live under his dangerous fold.

Who should we blame? The millions of “clueless,” expectant, anxiously anticipating, hopeful, optimistic, even gullible, citizens who gave Duterte the consent by vote in 2016 out of resignation from the outgoing government’s callousness? The thousands who, without giving him a vote, festooned his entrance with benefit of the doubt? Those who cheered and celebrated him on as he raised his voice to stentorian levels with each of his “kill, kill, kill” statements? Those who partook in his far-reaching propaganda army and troll farms, and spread false information on his behalf? Those who exercised their right to a belief in the same democracy that citizens now defend from Duterte’s dictatorial encroachments?

Should we blame the Aquino brand for rendering an entire populace hopeless because of hollow promises that it heaped when it was their bloc who was vying for the presidency? Should the media be at fault for, at least in the view of a few pundits, giving Duterte the spotlight? Should we train our guns at Washington and Beijing, for making the country a nation of docile citizens who, in the words of nationalist historian Renato Constatino, was not even prepared for self-rule?

Sometimes, we don’t need to look far beyond to answer the question of blame. But should we even blame?

It is with a sad note, screaming of pain, reeking of evident and palpable regret, that we revisit the optimism that shrouded the myth of Rodrigo Duterte in 2016 — and witness the real state of affairs under the madman, or strongman, who once promised an impoverished nation a quick way to salvation; with the death, devastation, and decimation decorating Duterte’s final years in Malacañang.

Perhaps, the only sad note left in this rickety recollection is a pained reminder for 2022: do not, do not ever, give in to a crowd heaping paeans to a grand spectacle of change. And this thrust, this clarion call, is requiring a painstaking review of our own history — of how things unfolded before the citizenry’s eyes in that not-so-distant past, how factors made an obnoxious unraveling of the Great Pretender, and how one man’s longstanding and grand show of deceit killed thousands of lives in one fell swoop.

There are historical lesions, but there is also an ever-present call to remember and learn from history’s wisdom.

Unless, as in the case of Marcos, there would be attempts to airbrush history? (But that’s a separate issue altogether.)

“Pandemic fatigue” is not an unseen folly.

It’s the natural consequence of the miasma that is Rodrigo Duterte’s failure to defeat the COVID-19 pandemic.

It’s like a ticking bomb waiting to explode, a booby trap that we have stepped on when the country cruised into the lockdown’s first year. We were all waiting to see the pandemic vanish in a few months’ time, to revert back to our state of normalcy after the country gradually slid back to a General Community Quarantine.

While presidential mouthpiece Harry Roque’s ridiculous pronouncement that “we beat UP,” referring to esteemed University of the Philippines scientists and public health experts’ estimate that the country would log in some 40,000 cases by June’s end was a mockery of human intelligence, still, it offered an ounce of hope that we’re nearing the end of the tunnel — and the light is about to shine in our land.

Our misfortune, perhaps, is that.

That this heartless, ineffectual, corrupt leadership has been hyping us up with false hopes, with belated vaccines, with crumbs falling off their table of wealth. That hope, especially that hope for change, has become the banner of a ruthless government heaping death upon whomever it perceives to be deserving of the bullet. That death, instead of hope, traded places in the fight for a secure tomorrow.

Nothing else has marred the whole year of Duterte’s lockdown except that: death.

13,000 dead because of a contagion Duterte could’ve easily contained, suppressed, and defeated. 376 killed because of their political leanings or affiliation. Some 3,259 individuals who took their own lives because of a despairing and failed COVID-19 pandemic response. More than 30,000 murdered, even during the yearlong quarantine period, because of mere suspicion of criminal involvement. Hundreds of farmers and indigenous peoples massacred because they oppose destructive projects that pose a threat to their very existence. And millions more thrown in the throes of death because of hunger, joblessness, and economic dispossession borne out of Duterte’s mishandling of the pandemic.

And yet, Harry crows in public, this administration has had an excellent pandemic response.

While entire cities and provinces under a “bubble” have been enduring a week’s worth of stricter lockdown impositions — from a 6PM curfew to the barangay officials and policemen cursing at or snatching away “violators” — the country just logged in 15,310 cases in a single day, the highest tally of cases since March last year.

One by one, health workers, medical front-liners, and health institutions and hospitals themselves are starting to crumble under their feet. In Philippine Orthopedic Center, 110 out of 180 workers — some 61% of the Orthopedic’s manpower — tested positive for COVID-19. A senior citizen infected with the virus perished out in the cold, because hospital capacity to admit has been dwindling. A father carrying COVID-19 had to be brought in 11 — Jesus fucking Christ, 11 — hospitals before his family could even occupy a spot for him. And here’s a story of a family who, until the end, strived to save their father’s deteriorating life.

Left and right, social media has become our repository, our reservoir, of grief. Not a day passes when I don’t comment down the world condolences to friends who have their loved ones, friends, colleagues die because of illnesses that can’t be treated because practically the entire fragile healthcare system is geared to combat COVID-19 — or because of the pandemic itself.

Another Filipino’s life could’ve been saved if another bed, another room, another hospital have had another capacity to survive and to offer survival for those who are in dire need. But what do we see? It took an infection spate across 61% of the Philippine Orthopedic Center’s employees to renew calls for additional isolation facilities. Bed and hospital capacities are not replenished by a bedraggled and smug Health department.

Several COVID-19 patients even have to wait for a slot outside the hospital, where heat and cold, the infractions of weather, all combine within their plight. Some patients are even charged with P1,000 without any healthcare benefit — while they’re languishing in tents, the virus embedded within their bodies. Nearly half of the 15,310 victims of COVID-19 recorded yesterday are between 20 to 39 years old, the most robust and agile percentage of the country’s labor force.

No less than the DOH itself has said it has no plans of carrying out mass testing in the face of the rise in COVID-19 cases by the thousands. Our contact-tracing infrastructure remains an abomination. The measly aid offered for those who are affected by the Enhanced Community Quarantine within Manila’s bubble is a mere “afterthought” in a wide sphere of State policy.

4.5 million of our countrymen suffer from joblessness, while our foreign debt — purportedly owed by this regime to “aid” in the COVID-19 pandemic response — has swelled over to P10.4 trillion when March came to an end. And yet, we find ourselves mired in this quandary where COVID-19 is now overpowering our healthcare system. Did someone even mention the dismal vaccination rollout program?

And those politicians, the arrogant officials of the Duterte regime? They are all preoccupied with the politics of lugaw rather than dispensing the entirety of the country’s war chest against COVID-19 to avoid an impending healthcare system collapse.

Who would not be downtrodden with this show of degradation?

Who would not be suffused with anxiety as report after report of COVID-19 patients spend several days tracking down hospitals, make ends meet while saving enough to pay for hospital bills, suffer from the overwhelming surge that has afflicted the country’s frangible healthcare system, endure overcharging and other loopholes on their lonely quest to survive, and witness the arrogance, the undue excesses, of those who hold power whilst the citizenry is toiling under anguish?

Who would not be frustrated, if not enraged, with how the abuses are flaunted in front of our misery?

No wonder, the public would now suffer from a pandemic fatigue. A whole year of obsequious attitude toward minimum health protocols and impositions exerted by the Duterte government — even as state officials themselves flaunt some divine right of Duterte’s clique to violate laws and policies that, if an ordinary citizen transgresses, equates to arrest, abuse, or even murder — has rendered itself an utter failure in stemming COVID-19’s rise in the country.

Nothing can be more tangible at this time other than frustration.

Frustration. A seething, outrageous, enraging, inflaming, raging frustration. Frustration because the Duterte regime does not care if the virus kills us. Frustration that we cannot do anything, within our wherewithal, to save our health workers, our countrymen, from the enveloping reality of death or sickness — except to offer a deep, intimate, fervent prayer, to say a few words of hope in the midst of darkness.

Frustration. That’s our final word tonight.

The road to 1986 beckoned with an entanglement.

But so is the road to 2022.

How poetic, if not ironic, is it to witness history unfold itself once more, although under different sets of conditions and circumstances, in an eerily similar manner and dispensation?

To allow people to reflect and delve deeper into the challenges of today’s opposition force in the face of another upcoming electoral battle, there is a need to consult history itself.

Back to 1985.

As early as 1984, on the heels of the opposition’s sweeping victory in the 1984 Batasang Pambansa elections (whose victory can be ascribed to the outrage flowing out of Ninoy Aquino’s treacherous murder in 1983), Ferdinand E. Marcos’ dictatorship saw itself standing at the crossroads. The bases of support for the dictator were slowly disintegrating, crumbling into severed pieces.

Concomitantly, a motley of scattered opposition movements had been initiating talks between different forces to broaden the horizon of the anti-Marcos movement. Since Ninoy’s murder became the galvanizing point for the entire array of forces opposing the dictatorship, the question shifted on the paradigm of unity.

But a gigantic Marcosian blunder intervened; it was a blunder that spelled Marcos’ downfall.

Raymond Bonner’s definitive account of the Marcos dictatorship vis-a-vis its relationship with the United States recounted: former American president Ronald Reagan’s informal aide and ally, Senator Paul Laxalt, claimed to have hawked to the ailing dictator the idea of a snap elections in 1986, a year before the actual presidential elections. The US State Department, held back by skepticism over the probability of communists overtaking any chance within an early election, rejected the idea. But Laxalt’s prodding on the dictator prevailed, and with a dramatic flair, Marcos appeared on This Week With David Brinkley to announce the snap presidential elections scheduled on the first half of 1986.

It was an American theater performed in Manila, all for Marcos’ and Reagan’s benefit.

Also, for the very survival of Marcos’ legitimacy — if he still had any.

Into Bonner’s words in Waltzing with a Dictator, “[i]t was not an election for Filipinos; it was an election for Americans, specifically for the American critics of his regime.”

Marcos’ sudden turnaround, after months of speculative chatter about a snap elections, posed a stirring dilemma for the anti-Marcos movement. American officials were correct in their misgivings about the opposition’s fragmentation even as the very fervent of opposition against the Marcos regime was on the rise.

The other half of this broad movement, the underground Left, was no more than a boycott force. Out of a calculated and irrevocable fear that Marcos would cheat his way to victory, the Left united behind the clarion call to boycott Marcos’ electoral farce, thus sparking ceaseless debates on whether or not boycott or participation would invariably be more favorable to the cause of Marcos’ removal.

At this crux, the moderate opposition found itself confounded.

Marcos announced snap elections in November 1985. Opposition groups had started to mobilize, in pockets, following the dictator’s abrupt decision. Since 1984, in what Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) founder Jose Maria Sison called “discordance” within the broad anti-fascist movement that sprung out of Ninoy’s assassination, the major challenge has always been uniting these fragments of forces. Without a single broad stroke pulling them together, Marcos would prevail.

The National Unification Committee (NUC) was established to streamline the official candidate against Marcos, devoid of the opposition’s ramshackle quality. Some three decades after, under the trappings of another populist and murderous dictator, 1Sambayan was created in order to streamline the official candidate against President Rodrigo Duterte’s anointed successor in the forthcoming 2022 elections. This is where the crucial points of parallelism, drawing from a historical lesion (albeit with totally different circumstances), would figure.

In 1986, the Gordian knot was three-way — between Ninoy’s widow, Cory; Salvador “Doy” Laurel, one of the active opposition leaders who formed and led the United Nationalist Democratic Organization (UNIDO); and former senator Jovito Salonga, a veteran leader of the Liberal Party, which martial law had browbeaten.

Doy’s pivotal role as a leader of the moderate opposition against Marcos had made him viable a candidate for the 1986 snap elections. Meanwhile, Jovy’s long history with the liberals made him the cut above the rest within their ranks. But there was an undeniable atmosphere welcoming the entrance into the presidential realm of Ninoy’s widow, a cloud of entrancement for Cory wafting across the anti-Marcos movement.

That was the dilemma: who among them should run against the dictator?

Cut to 2021. The dilemma posed by choosing the broadest, even wisest, candidate to defeat whomever Duterte endorses to succeed his authoritarian regime presents a five-way battle of choice: Vice President Leni Robredo; Manila’s chief executive Isko Moreno; Senator Nancy Binay; Senator Grace Poe; and former senator Antonio Trillanes IV, one of Duterte’s more visible opponents.

Of course, let the discourse not get lost in the variances of circumstances surrounding the two identical electoral muddle. Aside from being, by the word itself, “snap,” the 1986 snap presidential elections were a referendum for Marcos’ American patrons, a ratification of his shattered legitimacy to alleviate the anxieties in Uncle Sam’s nerves. Meanwhile, the 2022 presidential elections, apart from being the prescribed constitutional end for Duterte’s tenure, is a litmus test for five years of Duterte’s misrule — whether or not the people would catapult a second referendum for Duterte’s rough-and-tumble populist regime.

In 1986, the dictator was already clocking in at twenty years of one-man rule. 2022 would merely be the opening of floodgates, if Duterte succeeds, for the construction of his dictatorship.

1986 was the endgame for Marcos; his victory or loss would spell the end for him. In Duterte’s universe, meanwhile, 2022 is a launching pad; the ultimate test for this dictator’s wet dreams.

What binds the 1986 movement and the 2021 coalition is their ultimate goal: to topple the dictators in their time, furnished with high socio-political stakes and factors.

Especially back in 1986 — when no less than American diplomats and officials led an all hands on deck operation to sell the elections, lest the United States assent for the only other alternative to the martial law regime: the CPP’s proletarian revolution. Of course, the US would not budge. The snap presidential elections had to push through, and Marcos had to be driven out with a vote.

Back with the NUC. In his memoirs, former Manila mayor Lito Atienza recalled the intense rivalry inside the anti-Marcos opposition: the rift between young and old Liberal guards was initially a moment of reconciling the choice between not fielding any separate candidate and fielding Salonga against Marcos.

But since all of them who huddled together in the house of former president Diosdado Macapagal, whom Marcos defeated in 1965, shared the thought that, should Ninoy had not been killed, he would have been the certain rallying candidate against the dictator who could also unite different factions behind him, the 30 Liberals who met to discuss the snap elections fatefully chose to throw their backs on Cory.

But within the NUC, Cory’s backers were still a handful, according to Atienza. Among the Members of the Parliament (MP) from the opposition, only 15 were campaigning for Cory; the rest, some 40 MPs, were backing a Doy Laurel candidacy.

It was a presidential stalemate, exacerbated by Cory’s initial reluctance to run, that could have emasculated the broad united front against Marcos and gave the old tyrant a win.

Until the young LP leaders met again sometime in September 1985, coinciding with martial law’s month. The vacillation afflicting the opposition on the question that was Marcos’ snap elections left Cory sobbing in burden, young leaders agitated, and the movement’s grassroots confused. It was a decisive moment of indecision.

In Atienza’s recollection, that meeting in Hotel Intercontinental in 1985 was a tipping point. Cory regaled to them the rough process under which she was living, until she laid out the condition that would compel her to throw her hat in the snap election’s ring: a million signatures urging her to run. The late Don Chino Roces — Manila Times’ publisher, Ninoy’s cell-mate — had put himself to task, galvanized the Cory Aquino for President Movement, and gathered a million signatures by October 1985, which he presented to Cory immediately. By November, Marcos would announce that snap elections will occur on February 7, 1986.

The die was cast — except for the quandary that was Salvador “Doy” Laurel.

Two advisory councils were born out of the need to search a common candidate against Marcos: NUC and a Convenor’s Group known as the Kongreso ng Mamamayang Pilipino (KOMPIL). Doy Laurel and another Liberal stalwart, Eva Estrada-Kalaw, were the cogs in NUC’s machine, while Cory, former senator and civil libertarian Lorenzo “Ka Tanny” Tañada, and businessman Jaime V. Ongpin comprised KOMPIL.

KOMPIL’s immediate choice was Cory — the “rightful” candidate, the “people’s choice.” Manila’s influential archbishop, Jaime Cardinal Sin, backed Cory’s possible presidential bid, despite Cory’s recalcitrance. On the other hand, since manifold attempts to field a unity point of a candidate fell flat, Atienza recounted that the NUC was torn asunder; but NUC’s Nominating Convention, teeming with 25,000 delegates and convenors, eventually raised Doy’s hands.

Officially, around this time, Cory and Doy were the opposition’s two frontrunners. And this is where the anti-Marcos opposition’s Catch-22 moment surfaced: if Cory and Doy would both challenge Marcos in the snap polls, it would mean nothing but an impending loss on both, and a victory for Marcos. That was the stalemate that beset the opposition — until Cardinal Sin made an intervention.

For Cardinal Sin, two candidates opposing Marcos in an elections that the dictatorship would rig only foretells an impending victory for Marcos — and a devastating loss for those who wish to get rid of the dictator. There has to be a way out of this miasma, a compromise that would settle their differences and bind the broadest anti-Marcos, anti-fascist, and anti-dictatorship movement together.

Someone must give way — or the opposition would crumble on its feet.

Not everyone was open to a Doy bid for the presidency, especially for those who saw him as none but a traditional politician — much similar with Marcos himself — and an ambitious, overtly opportunistic political figure. Cardinal Sin’s personal choice was Cory. Other factions of the opposition, from the Convenor’s Group to the Salonga wing of the Liberals, also handpicked Cory as a viable candidate against Marcos.

Cory was not adamant to run for the presidency at first. Picking up from Ninoy’s warning (whoever replaces Marcos would inherit a huge headache), Cory tried her best to stray away from a presidential bid. But Marcos’ announcement of snap elections changed everything; Don Chino Roces’ 1.5 million signatures drafting her into the snap polls contributed in Cory’s vacillation. Sandiganbayan’s decision on December 2, 1985, to acquit former Armed Forces of the Philippines chief-of-staff Fabian Ver and a host of other suspects in the Aquino-Galman double murder case, was the final straw for Ninoy’s widow. On December 3, Cory went out to declare her intention to run against Marcos.

But Doy would not budge; Cory was, at best, indecisive. Or too reliant on political advisers, most of whom are timeworn animals in the political kingdom. As Cory ushered in, Doy’s cards started to fall. Defections within UNIDO increasingly left him in political isolation. Doy knew that he had a better edge over Cory, but political realities at that time suggested otherwise. A compromise had to be agreed upon, or the anti-Marcos opposition would be split into two.

That was when Cardinal Sin’s intervention carved a way out. Teary-eyed, and faced with a probable crossroads between his ambition and Cory’s emerging candidacy, Doy sought for the Cardinal’s advice. Cardinal Sin admonished him to yield to Cory. It was a hard, even bruising, and tough choice for Doy — who worked hard, admittedly, to lead the political opposition at a time when nearly everyone folded under Marcos’ draconian watch. But time was running out, and choices had to be made. Doy, in effect, inched his way through the road less travelled. But it wasn’t that easy.

While Doy had conceded the presidency, he still bargained a condition: Cory should run as president under UNIDO, since it was the formidable opposition party at that time, Cory dilly-dallied, forcing Doy to file a certificate of candidacy in the Commission of Elections (Comelec) to run as Marcos’ opponent. In his diary, Doy narrated:

Early the next morning, I had made up my mind. I went back to Manila and met Cory at my house. I told her I had decided to give way to her. My only condition was that she should run under UNIDO after all, it was the largest and most organized party in the country at that time. It was accredited as the dominant opposition party. Its capacity to wage and win a nationwide campaign had been convincingly demonstrated in the 1984 elections when we won one third of the seats at stake.

But Cory could not see the point. She would not run under UNIDO.

On December 11, Cory agreed with Doy’s sole condition. He recounted:

Cory and I met at the house of my son, David in our Mandaluyong compound. She announced that she had changed her mind. She was now willing to run under UNIDO!…

At eight o’clock that evening I made up my mind. I called Cory to meet me at the house of Maur Aquino-Lichauco. My two brothers, former Speaker Jose B. Laurel Jr. and former Ambassador Jose S. Laurel III, came with me. I wanted them and Doña Aurora to witness what I would tell Cory. At about ten o’clock, I told her I was giving way to her. She was overwhelmed. When I extended my hand to congratulate her, she held it in both her hands and said, “Thank you, Doy. I’ll never forget this.”

By December 15, 1985, in a dramatic announcement in a rally held in Liwasang Bonifacio, UNIDO formally announced the tandem that would go against Marcos: Cory as president, Doy as her vice-president. Both would run under Doy’s UNIDO.

The entire anti-Marcos movement, including fragments from the Left, backed Cory and Doy.

One Cardinal’s fateful advice, and two fateful decisions, were what it took to unite a broad array of different formations, divided by political persuasions, to topple the Marcos dictatorship.

Akin to what Cory, Doy, the UNIDO, the Liberals, and other opposition forces had faced in the prelude to the dramatic showdown that was the 1986 snap presidential elections, 1Sambayan is now facing the critical juncture of a baffling choice.

Rappler recently published an in-depth piece about the same reality in Cory and Doy’s fragile time with which 1Sambayan finds itself living as well: the anxious thread of unity. The novel coalition’s goal, more than anything else, is to field a united national slate to defeat Duterte’s candidates and machinery come 2022. No less than retired Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonio Carpio himself, one of the three convenors of 1Sambayan, echoed this view with an emphatic note: “We have discussed this, again and again, and this is the understanding of everybody: That unless we are united, we cannot win in 2022.”

But it’s never an easy task — as it was not an easy task in 1985.

Specifically when the entire opposition under Duterte, riddled with fratricidal rifts since the strongman’s election, is bickering and rife with disunity and infighting.

But certain conditions make 1Sambayan’s case somehow different from UNIDO’s maze in 1985. Aside from the fact that the 2022 presidential elections is not as declining, dramaturgical, and dependent (on American largesse) as the 1986 snap elections was, and while 1986 was more of a question of the Marcos regime’s survival, the conundrum with which 1Sambayan grapples suggests two climacteric implications: that 2022 will be a decisive time of reckoning on whether the electorate would vote in the perpetuation of the Duterte clique in Malacañang — or vote the Duterte clan out of presidential apex; or 2022 will be a crucial point for the anti-fascist movement in Dutertismo’s era to foil any attempt from the president’s network to bastardize democracy by either cheating their way to victory or cancelling the 2022 elections altogether, with the COVID-19 pandemic serving as a convenient excuse.

Through this morass, the necessity of decisive action is the one factor that remains.

As it was in 1985, certain choices had to be made now.

But one thing should be a primordial consideration: that the anointed aspirant against the Duterte-backed candidate should be, first and foremost, against Duterte and everything he stands for — extrajudicial killings, authoritarianism, subservience to China, corrupt politics, and repression. Populism should be ruled out from the sine qua non qualifications of 1Sambayan’s candidate, since populist politics was the mud from which Dutertismo rose.

If there is a lesson 1Sambayan should learn from the country’s 1986 experience, it should be this: Doy Laurel was already a leader of the anti-Marcos traditional opposition years before 1986. He worked in his own field, tediously, to spearhead a substantial political machinery that could effectually oust the Marcos dictatorship.

Will 1Sambayan’s anointed candidates fit into that bill?

Wrote the historian Timothy Snyder, in his slim volume about dictatorships: “… institutions are deprived of vitality and function, turned into a simulacrum of what they once were.”

Institutions are an important cog in the wheel of democracy, the integral cog that allows it to keep moving. Without the shining knight of institutional balance, democracy is enervated and rendered vulnerable to the assault of right-wing dictatorship and demagoguery, which was what had happened in cyclical periods across the pages of world history. The slow, creeping invasion of far-right ideology and movements into institutions — an established lifeblood of democracy — poses a longstanding folly which threatens to demolish a nation’s democratic foundations.

The same folly unfolded on American front pages on January 6.

We have seen the inimitable power of one man’s words; that words, when laced with hatred, bigotry, and a wicked sense of entitlement to the threshold of presidential power, do not remain benign letters stitched together and compiled in a Merriam-Webster’s edition. Words become a scaffolding for a raging movement when a madman exploits, backstops, and mobilizes it to keep himself in power.

This is demagoguery on the halls of the American Capitol — a contradictory symbol of democracy and tyranny mashed up in a photo of a mob siege incited by no less than the American Chief Executive.

Donald J. Trump did not incite that flash of white supremacist violence on the day of his post-election rally itself — nor did he incite them into violence on the minute after Joe Biden’s presidential victory. Trump fanned the flames of right-wing ruckus and domestic terrorism even before the Electoral College handed over victory on him over Hillary Clinton in 2016, when he positioned himself as the citadel of underlying prejudices inspiring bigoted violence and assertion of supremacy among his base of a neo-Nazi, far-right, and conservative electorate.

The Trump mob’s siege on the American Capitol is a mere culmination of four years of his incitement to violence, racism, and imperial hubris exercised with a degree of presidential impunity.

But more than power, words formed the backbone of Trumpism’s rise to the apex of American exceptionalism.

Underneath Trump’s stentorian words lie the ideologies that strive to make sense of his incomprehensible madness: the nationalist flair that behooves the Whites to rally behind his ambition to ‘Make America Great Again,’ the flavor of “authoritarian capitalism” through which he integrated the authoritarian values upon which he built his presidency with features of capitalist ventures that enabled him, the touch of racist chest-thumping and xenophobia that gifted him with “the Other” bogeymen on whose visual defeat the whole Trump presidency thrived.

And then, his grand proclamations.

A combination of American resentment over racial minorities, a hankering for that great past that never was, and nationalism interspersed with a vow to reinforce American exceptional supremacy all paved the way for the rise of Trump’s far-right politics and violent rhetoric, sheathed with illusions of demagogue supremacy that blasted on the madman’s face when the mob he incited, inspired, and emboldened had committed a siege “on the heart of American democracy.”

Days following the Trumpian show of violence on the US Capitol, the center of the Empire found itself mired in a sudden moment of sober reflection. The president-elect’s immediate reaction was to assert that that image of the American president staging a coup to covet power “do not reflect” upon who the United States is. Pundits, conservative elements, and even the Republican establishment itself were all cajoled to reflect upon the Frankenstein monster it has conjured. Renewed calls for booting out Trump a week before his term ends now resonates across American party lines — with US Senate’s Republican leader and a Trump sycophant, Mitch McConnell, himself realizing that pursuing the route of impeachment is the only recourse left for the G.O.P and White House itself to rid themselves of Trump’s malodorous feat.

Yet, it is unalterable how American political sphere has reached this low point: Trump’s own rhetoric.

The demagoguery that unfurled itself on the doorsteps of the US Capitol did not manifest on its own. It has ideological, socio-cultural, and political moorings. Decades of social division fueled by racism and Islamophobia had allowed the Republicans to hold captive a narrative suited to foster the G.O.P’s agenda, where Trump appeared as a centrifugal force and figure holding together an incoherent ideology. But it was Trump’s own words, his language of fascism and racist violence, that allowed destruction upon American democracy to even occur.

Amnesty International (2017) noted that Trump’s electoral ascension “followed a campaign during which he frequently made deeply divisive statements marked by misogyny and xenophobia, and pledged to roll back established civil liberties and introduce policies which would be profoundly inimical to human rights.” From the imprisonment of immigrants, including family separations, on American borders to the staunch use of brutal force and police killings in Kentucky and Minneapolis, Trump’s bloodied banner of fascism unfolded in the last four years of his presidential nightmare as accurately as Amnesty had foreseen it primarily because his words reinforced his obnoxious ideology.

Trumpism’s current casualties are institutions and American democracy itself.

Snyder’s little tome tackled the dilemma that institutions face when dictators rise to the pinnacle of political power — of how institutions, falling one by one while demagogues seize more power, has to be taken upon in the line of democratic defense. The intention is to shake the Americans’ consciousness out of the slippery slope of slumber that institutions, in themselves, can defend itself against a menacing dictatorship — a mistake, Snyder noted, that Germans failed to avert when Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime hoisted its tyrannical banner.

It raises the aspect of how institutions, in the face of the specter that is fascist dictatorship, are left to fend for themselves with an emasculated amount of defiance. Institutions, per se, do not defend themselves, Snyder emphasizes — the people who claims to own these institutions need to gather around the front lines of democracy’s defense, so much so that any assumption that demagogues who coveted power through democratic means could not destroy the same mechanisms of democracy to their own inimical interests should be written off the populace’s consciousness. It’s the vital lesson that, for Snyder, Hitler’s rise to power must implicate among the post-Nazi generations who now witness a global return to fascism’s menacing fold.

The same lesson, it now appears to be, has to be taken into account by Americans who witnessed the Trump siege at the US Capitol as the tyrant counted his days in American presidential seat. A madman who cannot accept defeat in a free and fair elections, a criminal who frights at the sight of prosecution waiting to hold him accountable for the crimes his presidency had so willingly perpetrated, a white supremacist who gambles in a final straw to maintain the Whites’ indomitable hold over American political power to “make America great again,” brought out the worst in his perilous far-right crowd when he incited them to march down Pennsylvania Avenue and stage a coup for self-perpetuation.

By targeting the US Capitol, Trump’s right-wing and neo-Nazi movement thought it wise to send an ominous message across: if we will not get our way, the mayhem persists. Institutions of democracy — elections, courts, the free press, civilian bureaucracy, and the US Congress itself — might budge under the mounting pressure of mob rule on the streets of Washington D.C., with no less than the president himself instigating the assault on the heart of American democracy to preserve his reviled regime.

But while the actual mobsters who inflicted damage on the US Capitol, which left five people dead, have already been arrested, what about those who lent incitement to that crowd to try mowing down and browbeat American democracy? CNN’s Washington chief correspondent Jake Tapper raises that important question in a live commentary a few days after the US Capitol siege. Will this coterie of enablers of January 6’s bloodshed — from Republican stalwarts Ted Cruz and Kevin McCarthy to Trump himself —be punished for that dastardly assault?

Call to arms now focus on defending American democracy and institutions. The moves to impeach, for the second time around, the American demagogue is infused with the spirit of not letting him be off the hook for the degradation of a symbolic American institution. Forcing his removal from office, borne out of Trump’s own intransigence in his backhanded attempts to stay in the White House and evade the shadow of his criminal presidency, screams of an allegiance to the fundamental foundations of democratic rule: a peaceful transition in presidential office.

It remains to be seen how the last week of Trump in presidential power would pan out. Would far-right violence incited by no less than the president standing on a losing edge escalate, or would the rules of the American democratic ballgame prevail over a criminal demagogue’s whimsical aspiration to stay in power? Amidst the fragility and vacuum caused by Trump’s siege on the US Capitol, one thing is left unyielding to the uncertain stage of today’s American political drama: the need to wipe out Trumpism’s influence from the lifeblood of US politics as soon as Trump himself is turfed out of White House.

The only question left is who will clean up Trump’s mess once he flies out of the Oval Office.

Karl Patrick Wilfred M. Suyat is a campus journalist of six years, writer, and activist. He is the current provincial coordinator for the College Editors’ Guild of the Philippines -Laguna. He is also a convenor of the Youth Movement Against Tyranny-Laguna. His bookworm fetish includes works on totalitarianism, fascism, and journalistic essays. He lives by the words of Albert Camus: “Rebellion cannot exist without a strange form of love.” Email him at karl@voxpopuliph.com.

Demagoguery at the US Capitol was originally published in Vox Populi PH on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“It takes little effort to stop a tyrant. I have no doubt in the ultimate victory of right over wrong, of good over evil, in the awakening of the Filipino.” — Benigno “Ninoy” S. Aquino Jr.

‘Marcial Bonifacio’ could have chosen a different path. But he did not.

On the tenth year anniversary of his murder, Teodoro Benigno wrote this of Ninoy:

“What made [the fight] majestic was that Ninoy, even when almost everybody deserved him and his cause, held the conviction that the Filipino was worth dying for.”

Rarely in history do we witness a quintessential show of gallantry among men and women who would naturally seize political glory without fantasizing about heroically putting a lid on an emerging social volcano that stood beyond their elitist, plutocratic horizon. But Benigno “Ninoy” S. Aquino, Jr. was of a different mold, a different kind of political aggrupation, and a different era – the epoch when even the mightiest political figure slugged it out, in a battle of wits and wills, to fight a dictatorship.

Ninoy, of course, was no saint. Very far from it. In fact, the roots of his political background – having been born to a family of landlords and politicians in Tarlac, married to a scion of Tarlac’s biggest landlord clan, and having served three presidents as a conduit to their governments’ master-servant relations with the United States – somehow makes him one of Marcos’ kind: a product of the ruling class whose sole reasons for existence are wealth and power.

But the battle against Ferdinand E. Marcos’ dictatorship altered Ninoy’s equation.

By refusing to bend a knee to Marcos, Ninoy earned an unalterable place in our pantheon of heroes. But it’s more than him, as he knew. Ninoy imbibed the same ferocious fervor for defiance that echoed through the heroism, the martyrdom, of other Filipinos who also chose to fight the Marcos dictatorship. He breathed the air of liberty as our other heroes did. Ninoy walked through the innermost core of hell, waded through the scorching heat of Fort Bonifacio’s cramped cells, with only faith and determination to offer.

His “lonely” battle from prison embodied hope, which also resonated through EDSA when it was time for Marcos to face the truth of eventual fate: his ouster. But that hope, empty as it seemed at that time, carried the embers of light that illumined across a people cloaked by despotic darkness. That hope, that light that flickered when many had cowered, was transcendental.

Ninoy’s transcendence emanated not from a conceited ambition to push out Marcos from Malacañang (that dream faded with Marcos’ cancellation of the 1973 elections through martial law), but from a deep-seated aim, his impossible dream, which he shared with the rest of the country who also sought to end the Marcos regime, to attain genuine liberation and oppose the insolence of a tyrannical regime — even at the highest cost for himself.

When martial law’s proclamation shrouded the entire archipelago, Ninoy had a choice to forget about his opposition to Marcos and offer a hand for the dictatorship. To scribble down a message of allegiance to the monster he vowed to fight tooth and nail. In fact, Ninoy’s biography includes one instance wherein a military officer who guarded him back in Fort Magsaysay’s fortress mischievously asked him to endorse Marcos’ New Society in exchange for his freedom.

Of course, Ninoy refused the rogue offer – obstinately.

Some pundits had suggested that, looking back, his political rivalry with Marcos could be viewed as an equivalent of a chess match – where both men, of equal gumption, political talent, and largesse, were fighting each other in a close fight that left the country on the edge. That, in my opinion, is way too simplistic a commemoration of Ninoy’s struggle to achieve his impossible dream – because his fight, what his wife’s first presidential spokesperson called his “lonely but majestic fight,” mirrored something greater, much more significant, than a chess match: an entire nation’s revulsion against the pitfalls and evils of Marcos’ monstrous dictatorship.

More so, Ninoy – as he professed himself in his persiflages to Marcos – was never alone in the battle.

Who could ever sweep under the rug the underpinnings of Ninoy’s battle against the dictatorship? The ideals that sustained his struggle — democracy, freedom, justice — incidentally are also our own, in our post-Ninoy world. But the saddest conclusion to his martyrdom was that, even if the people eventually got rid of the reviled dictator, much of what Ninoy held as his “impossible dream” remained that – a dream, however it sustains our own battles.

I think the greatest repudiation to Ninoy’s legacy, the one he stamped on the nation’s consciousness with the permanence of his blood that splattered on that blood-soaked airport tarmac on the day of his murder, was what the successors of the dictator he fought against – including his very wife and son – had done when it was already their chance to take over Malacañang.

Sure, Cory restored basic civil liberties and institutions of democratic rule alongside the ratification of a Constitution that followed and reflected democracy’s basic tenets (without even counting in the fact that Cory was a staple in street protests whenever democracy was besieged through the last three presidencies that she witnessed before her death), but her regime also perpetuated human rights abuses and other fascist methods to stifle dissent while reaffirming cacique rule of the ruling class and American imperialism’s stronghold over the country’s political, socio-economic, and cultural affairs – a far cry from Ninoy’s vision of “a free society,” as he exposited in a manifesto that he wrote back in Fort Bonifacio:

WE DREAM

OF A COMMUNITY OF LIBERATED CITIZENS enjoying the full benefits of a Free Society:

– FREE to choose, criticize and remove our duly elected governors;

– FREE from the imprisoning walls of ignorance, poverty and disease;

– FREE from the exploitation of a privileged and propertied few;

and– FREE from the entangling webs of super-power hegemony, imperialism and neo-colonialism.

Before martial law threw him into seven years of solitary confinement, with an imminent threat of execution hanging across his neck as an albatross, Ninoy was a traditional politician. Again, he’s far from a saintly figure; he was even remotely progressive before martial law. He employed guns, goons, and gold to win elections. He served three presidents in portfolios that involved the capitulation of Huk rebellion and working with American imperialism through the Central Intelligence Agency (his CIA ties became the reason for Marcos’ initial hesitance to allow him a furlough in the United States when he suffered from heart ailment in 1980).

But he was an ironic trapo, too – the only trapo I know who maintained that level of ties with communist intellectuals, Huk rebels (and even New People’s Army fighters), and one who has heavily read on communism, its theory, and its history. A public intellectual who straddled between his politics and his books. While he never involved himself with the communist movement, Ninoy succinctly analyzed the roots of the armed struggle based upon what he had accumulated from his books and his engagements with the communist movement – and, unlike Sen. Panfilo Lacson’s assertion that government officials should condemn communist rebels as “enemies,” not once did Ninoy denounce the communists as enemies.

In his concluding statement on his lopsided military trial, which Cory had published in a posthumous tome a year after his assassination, Ninoy wrote:

If I have gone out of my way to meet with insurgents, if I have given them shelter and medical aid when they came to me, bleeding and near death, it was because I was convinced these dissidents were freedom-fighters first – in their own light – and if they were communists at all, they were communist last.

… They might have been dissidents. But to me they were brother Filipinos who deserved the right to be heard. My intention was to prevent them from becoming hopelessly desperate – and to give them a feeling of belonging. By lending them a hand and a sympathetic ear, I wanted to hold out to them the hope for a better future.

Imagine if Ninoy became president on the heels of Marcos’ downfall.

When the trapo in him vanished in thin air, a Renaissance in Ninoy’s ideology and virtues ensued as martial law’s fascism whipped him with the intensity of a bullfighter. Inside his solitary prison, when his company had been sustained by the books lining up his shelves, the utensils that filled his kitchen, and the calendar on which he counted his days as Marcos’ prize political prisoner, it dawned on Ninoy that there was more to him than political power.

Ambition towered over Ninoy’s consciousness more than anything else. But martial law banished that foible on Ninoy’s mind. Suddenly, he rose from the rubbles of his match with death that loomed over his head as Marcos inched his way through dictatorial perpetuation with a firm resolve for democracy, notwithstanding the price tag. Inside the dungeon that was Fort Bonifacio’s walls, Ninoy coveted an indefatigable commitment to the struggle.

The walls of his matchbox prison in Laur, where the dictator’s men held him at gunpoint with an imaginary Russian Roulette through psychological torture for 43 days, brought him closer to his family, his countrymen, and his God. He questioned his faith, his God, and asked why the thieves roamed free while he rot in Laur’s isolation. But by questioning God, he summoned his unyielding faith to his God, entrusting himself to his will, obtaining moral fortitude and conviction from Christ’s own life and struggle.

Ninoy prayed the rosary like he never did when he was an impatient politician. He jettisoned his presidential ambitions with his defiance of New Society’s tyrannical regime. Squaring off with death in the torment that was Laur, and in the unchartered terrain of battle that was his hunger strike, Ninoy crossed his Rubicon. The dictator’s ephemeral power could not scare him off, so much so that even assassination did not deter his final act of defiance on Manila International Airport’s tarmac.

Say what you will about Ninoy, including disinformation fuelled by Marcosian historical revisionism, but one thing stands the ultimate test of time: Ninoy’s impossible dream is still our nation’s aspiration in the time of Duterte. Social justice, civil liberties, individual freedom, democracy, genuine prosperity that cuts through social classes – the same dream that once preoccupied Ninoy’s mind as he sought solicitude from long years of incarceration, the same wish that punctuated his bloodied return from self-exile, still suffuses our battle against a new dictator.

As with Ninoy in his era, our people constantly stand on the crosshairs of this regime’s tyranny because Duterte’s raison d’etre is diametrically opposed to our covenant for justice, freedom, and democracy. Much similar to the consequences of his obstinacy in fighting Marcos, we are smeared with a subversive tag, denounced as traitors, hunted down as incorrigible insurrectos by forces of dictatorship who, once more, strives to rob us of our freedom – for the “crime” of exercising democracy’s fundamental principles.

Yet, in the same spirit that guided Ninoy’s final journey against martial law, we stand proudly on the front lines of subverting the remnants of wicked tyranny that is very much identical to the one Ninoy died fighting against. In each day when the people asserts itself through the struggle to achieve what Ninoy and all the other heroes and martyrs of martial law had worked so hard to achieve, we still battle against his “unbeatable foes,” rushing to the edge of that cliff where others would not dare go, still dreaming of Ninoy’s impossible dream: a nation that is truly free from poverty and injustice, a society where democracy can genuinely exist.

Ninoy admonished the late dictator about the curse of despotism that, in 1986, turfed him out of Malacañang. Marcos refused to listen until it was too late to listen – when the gunshot that snuffed out Ninoy’s life became the reverberating hymn, the uproarious pulse, of our nonviolent conclusion to the Marcos dictatorship’s violence. No dictator has ever lived through history, Ninoy told his fiercest enemy. He was correct. History was never kind to tyrants, even if that same tyrant scored a spurious “hero’s” burial.

And so here our people stand, once more, in another juncture of history where Ninoy and his band of freedom-fighters once stood – what another martyr of the people, Lean Alejandro, called the “line of fire.” The place of honor where battle lines have been drawn between tyrants and a citizenry roaring to defy him with democracy’s muffled tone. Within our struggle, the wax of the candle that is Ninoy’s impossible dream still flickers – and it is the pursuit of our own impossible dream that invigorates our renewed battle against the despot bedeviling our Motherland.

We may be tagged as today’s treasonous fighters, but Ninoy’s own words would redeem for us history’s ultimate vindication for freedom-fighters: “Yesterday’s traitors are tomorrow’s heroes!”

History’s shadowboxing with Ferdinand E. Marcos did not cease on February 25, 1986.

One could posit an initial claim that with the late dictator being dead for three decades already, his death because of lupus erythematosus had swept any issues and matters that he might have still had with history under the rug – for good. But such is not the case, not when the battle for his history remains an ongoing one because his kin stubbornly inches their way through his hollow heroism.

Marcos uttered in a recorded interview back in Hawaii during his first years of self-exile: “history is not made with me yet.”

The dictator was right about history. But so are we – we are not off his hook yet.

Four years ago, a chopper that bore his waxed corpse flew from Batac, Ilocos Norte to Libingan ng mga Bayani to punctuate, in a sneaky way that portrayed his thieving memory, a “hero’s” burial that had to be kept and conducted away from the public’s eye to avoid meriting enough rage to have that same body exhumed from the cemetery in a manner as fastidious as was his burial.

It’s not a stretch of logic or imagination to perceive why the Marcos family, with all the expansive power it wields over Ilocandia, would risk mass actions that would block their dictator-patriarch’s way into Libingan only to insist on achieving something like a chance for that burial that Marcos’ own tyrannical life had forfeited: the whole masterplan of their return to Malacañang would have the resurrection of their vile legacy at the apex, where Marcos’ burial signifies his brand as a “hero.”

Didn’t Marcos’ ouster in 1986 during the People Power uprising settle his designation in the long-running course of our history once and for all? His furtive burial as a fake hero ascertained that to be a naïve hypothesis. While People Power’s historical judgment in EDSA was clear – that the Marcos dictatorship was so intricately evil, so incorrigibly despicable, that a mass uprising had to be the country’s way out of his dictatorial appendages – the officialdom of that judgment was not.

Or until Rodrigo Roa Duterte won the presidency.

Duterte was not the first president to honor the Marcos family’s graces in exchange for the dictator’s “hero’s” burial. When Joseph Estrada won the presidency in 1998, his regime opened up the chance of the dictator’s burial in Libingan. However, by some quirk of fate, Estrada’s ouster through the recurrence of the People Power movement that originally dethroned Marcos also threw that chance for him out of the window. The next two administrations, especially that of the son of Marcos’ arch-nemesis, dimmed any hopes for the Marcos clan – until the 2016 elections, particularly Duterte’s victory, puffed up another chance for the dictator to finally earn that glorious historical culmination that he so clearly does not deserve.

And here the Philippines is, once again: faced with Marcos’ history long after his ouster and demise.

The late tyrant’s burial at the Libingan ng mga Bayani was not the sole signifier that Marcos’ history unfurls again before our stage of historical spectacle. Duterte’s unfolding as a nosy dictator who would not have qualms about killing off thousands in the name of his unholy wars or his repetitive allusions about constructing a dictatorship as his Final Solution for the country’s social malaises is one ample evidence of our continuing saga, our continuing tussle, with Marcos and his legacy.

Suppose there is one arena in which the People Power uprising that turfed him out of the dictatorial throne had failed. In that case, it is in extricating the country of remnants of Marcosian legacy and influence. Corazon Cojuangco-Aquino’s brand of liberal democracy – punctuated by farmers’ blood spilled in Mendiola and hollow reforms that culminated in mere cosmetic reforms without substantial revolutionary alterations in Filipino society – strived to rid the bureaucracy of Marcos’ malignant spirit. Cory’s former justice secretary, Franklin Drilon, dubbed it as “de-Marcosification.”

But that project failed, and miserably at that – specifically when Cory’s first order of business in the immediate aftermath of her ascension to the presidency was the reinstatement of two key personalities inflicted upon thousands of dissenters the fascist wrath of martial law. A huge number of cronies and associates who benefited from the Marcos regime’s thievery of the nation’s coffers remained scot-free through the six post-Marcos presidencies, and no less than the dictator’s widow still relishes liberty even as a conviction hangs over her consciousness. State power, influence, and wherewithal were all exploited to polish Marcos’s “heroic” legacy by aiding the Marcos family’s return to the political battlefield and evasion of prison’s justice and law – at the expense of the tyrant’s victims.

Duterte’s presidency did no more than placating protests against the revivification of Marcos’ discredited legacy with his endorsement of festooning Marcos’ corpse with a “hero” tag – and with his revival of a Marcos-like political dispensation marked by despotism, nepotism, and populism. Where killings and state violence once characterized the Marcos martial law’s atrocious heritage, Duterte’s legacy is awash with the blood of more than 30,000 people killed by his Marcosian brand of fascism; where Anti-Subversion Law and a host of other legal arsenals once aided Marcos’ pursuit of silencing his critics, Duterte’s Terror Law and a task force whose role does not extend beyond the confines of state-sanctioned McCarthyism and witch-hunt of activists embellished his scheme of stifling dissent – the idea for which Duterte merely borrowed, if not inherited, from Marcos’ tyrannical blueprint.

In other words, we are forced to face the ghost of Marcos and historical retrospect not only because his history is undergoing serious threats of revisionism from his family and their entire machinery of apologists and troll armies – but more so because Duterte’s tyranny resuscitates Marcos’ very history. In fact, on almost the whole spectrum, Duterte’s record had already outdone Marcos’s intensity. But that matters little, for one fact remains: Marcos’ history, as it is being rewritten by vile actors seeking to impose his family’s political vengeance, is being played out in Duterte’s character again.

And so, here we stand, once more staring straight at a dead dictator and his farcical legacy – with another dictator honoring his idol by securing him a sacred place of burial and by repeating, if not improving to stentorian levels, the model of his dictatorship. History shadowboxes with Marcos again – in the attempt to diminish his fictional airbrushing of history to his favor and the anticipated legitimization of this revisionism by Duterte’s resuscitation of the Marcos dictatorship on his own.

Three decades after his dethronement, our history’s biggest enemy is still Ferdinand Marcos, only taking on new forms and avenues of distortion.

It’s only a matter of choice on the people’s end to finally put an end to history’s apocalyptic rendezvous with a dead dictator’s legacy by relegating Marcos (and Duterte) to their proper places in history: on the footnotes of national memory, buried under national oblivion, consigned to a pantheon of monumental shame where reviled despots deserve to be conferred with dishonor and utter degradation.

Karl Patrick Wilfred M. Suyat is a campus journalist of six years, writer, and activist. He is the current provincial coordinator for the College Editors’ Guild of the Philippines -Laguna. He is also a convenor of the Youth Movement Against Tyranny-Laguna. His bookworm fetish includes works on totalitarianism, fascism, and journalistic essays. He lives by the words of Albert Camus: “Rebellion cannot exist without a strange form of love.” Email him at karl@voxpopuliph.com.

Rendezvous with Marcos was originally published in Vox Populi PH on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.