The power of truth

By Artchil B. Fernandez

“Even the most powerful minister’s authority cannot last for decades, and yet the historians’ words silently live for thousands of years.” Substitute the word “minister” with “leader” and one can see why bad, despotic, corrupt, inept, abusive, and tyrannical leaders fear history. Hence, dictators, despots and autocrats are obsessed with rewriting history to hide the truth about their cruel and ruthless rule.

The above quotation is from the Korean historical drama Rookie Historian Goo Hae Ryung. The story is about a ruler in a fictional Joseon in the 19^th century who rewrote history to hide and cover-up his high crimes and a rookie female historian who unearthed and exhumed the truth and exposed it.

Unlike Toni Gonzaga, Goo Hae Ryun firmly held history must not be concealed. “History must be told. That is the power of truth,” she bravely told the king in the final confrontation scene. For her the truth is never neutral, it must never be compromised and it must be told no matter how unpalatable to the high and mighty and even at the cost of one’s life.

The story of female historian Goo Hae Ryun resonates with Filipinos as the country this week observed the 49^th anniversary of the proclamation of martial law. The dictator Ferdinand Marcos used martial law to destroy democracy and perpetuate himself in power for life. Martial law was a dark chapter in Philippine history but there is an orchestrated and well-funded campaign to rewrite its history and bury the truth.

Leading the charge to rewrite history is the Marcos family. From the matriarch Imelda to the children Bongbong, Imee and Irene down to the grandchildren, all are waging a relentless war against the truth about martial law and their family’s grim rule.

Unable to make headway in the mainstream media and in the academe, the Marcoses turned to social media and the digital world to propagate their lies and falsehoods through troll farms financed by their stolen wealth. Their main targets are the millennials and those born far distant from the martial law era. For the Marcoses, feeding these generations with fiction is the way to obscure the facts about martial law. Once their lies gain traction among the young generation the Marcoses believe this is the key to their redemption and will pave the way for their return to power.

Slick videos peddling falsehoods and fiction about martial law and the Marcos family pollute social media and the digital world. These videos not only gloss over and hide the abuses and corruption of the Marcoses, but they also push the lies that the Marcos family is heaven’s gift to the Filipino people. Among the numerous falsehoods the Marcoses are promoting are: they were never convicted of high crimes, their wealth is not ill-gotten and no human rights violations occurred when they ruled the country.

Imee Marcos was found by the District Court of Honolulu, Hawaii in 1991 as civilly liable for the “wrongful death of deceased Archimedes Trajano committed by military intelligence officials of the Philippines allegedly under the command, direction, authority, supervision, tolerance, sufferance and/or influence of defendant (Imee Marcos) pursuant to the provisions of Rule 39 of the then Revised Rules of Court.”

Trajano, a Mapua student questioned Imee Marcos’ credentials to head the Kabataang Barangay in 1977. He was picked by her bodyguards and his dead, badly tortured body surfaced few days later. Imee Marcos was ordered by the court to pay Trajano’s family $4.16 million in damages for wrongful death.

Imelda Marcos, the other half of the conjugal dictatorship and Imee’s mother, was found by the Fifth Division of Sandiganbayan guilty of seven counts of graft. She was sentenced to seventy years in prison (six years and one month, up to 11 years for each count.) She was found guilty of violating R. A. 3019 or the Anti-Graft and Corrupt Practices Act, when she transferred around $200 million to seven Swiss foundations during her term as a member of the defunct Batasang Pambansa, as Metro Manila Governor and as then Minister of Human Settlements. The case filed in 1991 took almost 30 years to conclude.

The Swiss Federal Supreme Court in 1997 declared the $684 million Marcos money in Swiss accounts ill-gotten and ordered the return of the amount to the Philippines. The Philippine Supreme Court in 2003 also ruled that the money is ill-gotten. The Guinness World Records declared that the Marcoses stole US$10 billion from the Filipino people, the greatest robbery of a government.

In 1995, a Hawaii district court found the Marcoses guilty of human rights violations – torture, summary execution, disappearance, illegal arrest. The court ordered the Marcos estate to pay US$2 billion in compensation to 9,539 victims. Amnesty International documented 70,000 were imprisoned, 34,000 were tortured and 3,240 were summarily executed during martial law.

These are the facts, the black history of martial law the Marcoses desperately wanted to bury and conceal from the present generation. Nothing scares the Marcoses than the truth about the history of martial law. They frantically wanted to erase the history of that dark era and rewrite it to cover-up their high crimes. As long as the Filipino people know the truth about martial law and its history, the Marcoses know their chance of regaining power is difficult. The truth can block their return to power. This is the power of truth.

Afraid of the power of truth, the Marcoses are distraughtly trying to revise history for it stands as silent witness for thousands of years to their transgressions and abominable actions. But they can never escape the verdict of history notwithstanding Toni Gonzaga.