As the country marks the 48th year since Mr. Ferdinand Marcos declared Martial Law, we call on the Filipino people to reject all efforts by the Marcos family to paint a rosy picture of the dictatorship, deodorize their blackened image and whitewash their high crimes against the people.
We must not allow the Marcoses to continue to steal.
We must not allow them to rob us of our truth and history.
Marcos was a dictator.
It is a fact.
The torture, murder and plunder that were all committed under Martial Law happened.
They were all historically documented, recorded and recognized worldwide.
They are not subject for debate, interpretation or deconstruction.
They are beyond contestation. No less than the Philippine state recognizes these facts.
Through the passage of the Marcos Compensation Law and the granting of reparation for the thousands of victims of Martial Law, the state officially and fully recognizes the atrocities of the Marcos years.
Not even Mr. Rodrigo Duterte, a self-confessed Marcos apologist and fake news super spreader, can eradicate the Marcoses’ dark legacy.
Not a thousand hero’s burials and dictator holidays, not even Mr. Duterte’s paid army of social media trolls can erase the reality that Marcos and his dictatorship oppressed the Filipino people and smashed democracy; the very same things that he is now doing.
Mr. Duterte can obscure the truth and make the people doubt their own history, but only for a while.
“Facts are stubborn things.”
But even if the truth is stubborn and history never forgets, they still need defending.
They need to be secured from the Marcoses and Duterte, who both attack our collective memory and seduce us with the allure of authoritarianism.
We join our youth wing, Akbayan Youth, in demanding our educational institutions to implement once and for all the institutional teaching of Martial Law atrocities in our schools as provided for by the Marcos Compensation Law.
The more the government’s education officials delay this institutional teaching, the more they prove to the people that they are complicit to the falsification of our history.
Huwag natin hayaan na patuloy tayo pagnakawan ni Marcos.
Huwag natin pahintulutan na nakawin nila ang ating katotohanan at kasaysayan.
