“TO THE victor,” according to Adolf Hitler, “belongs the right to write history.” And for 35 years now, or from 1986, when Pres. Ferdinand Marcos was illegally ousted from power, our ‘history,’ or how it is to be read and ‘interpreted,’ has become the exclusive domain of those who came after him—the ‘Dilawans’ (the Liberal Party), the ‘Reds’ (the Communist Party) and the ‘Grays’ (the oligarchs) and their minions in mainstream media.
The changing of our history to suit their particular interests has been swift as soon as the Aquinos, the Reds and the oligarchs settled themselves into power— our educational curriculum was changed immediately centered on two things: glorifying the Aquinos and the damnation of the Marcoses.
Today, at least two generations of Filipinos since 1986 have been raised possessed of a truly bias and skewed understanding of what really and actually happened during martial law in particular and in all those years in general. While bad for understanding, this is good for politicking.
Well, thanks to the rise of the ‘Web’ and the ‘Internet,’ majority of our people have now come to realized that in all these years, we have been fed a truly biased and distorted view and interpretation of our recent past as a nation, as a people and as a society.
Credit should also be given to the rise of Pres. Duterte under whose leadership we are nearing indigestion insofar as freedom of expression and access to information are concerned.
For haven’t people noticed that it is only under Pres. Duterte that Filipinos gained a degree of freedom to inquire—and to dispute—the information and news reports being daily fed to us by the mainstream media and in the social media?
The ‘Great Lie’ that has been foisted on all of us that both the Internet and Pres. Duterte’s presidency have managed to unshackle our thinking from is that Pres. Marcos and everything associated with him—martial law and yes, even his family—are not only bad but also “evil.”
The other side of the coin of course is that, since Marcos, martial law and everything that happened back then are evil, it is “good” that there was the Dilawans, the Aquinos in particular, to save us and our country from perdition.
Blinded by the yellow color, our eyes failed to see the growing strength of the CPP while the oligarchs continue to silently partition our economy among themselves.
Of course, the social inequality this situation brought is beneficial to them—poverty ensured that the Reds would have a steady supply of manpower for its “revolution;” poverty is also good for the “padrino” style of politics that the Dilawans espoused.
Meanwhile, the wealth the oligarchs accumulate make sure all of them are “happy”—the CPP thru the ‘revolutionary tax’ the oligarchs regularly pay to them and the politicians thru the campaign funds (and the business commissions) they also regularly receive from their transactional relationship with the oligarchs.
Up until Pres. Duterte became president in 2016, the Great Lie continues to gather believers and adherents that effectively shut us out from realizing we are being taken for a ride all these times by this cabal.
But combined with the rise of the Internet, the Web and social media platforms, this Great Lie is now being seen for what it is: a colossal lie.
In the 2022 elections, expect this colossal lie to be discarded– for good.