¡Muero sin ver la aurora brillar sobre mi patria!… ¡vosotros, que la habéis de ver, saludadla… no os olvidéis de los que han caído durante la noche!
I die without seeing the dawn break over my homeland. You, who will see it, greet it…do not forget those who have fallen in the night!
–Elias, Noli me tangere (Rizal)
Our First Lady
If Liza Araneta-Marcos is widely touted as President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr.’s “brain trust”and “backbone,” if “[h]er legal and analytical mind provides the President a detailed view of the issue he confronts” and “[h]er skepticism separates facts from disinformation, which distills genuine issues from canard,” if she’s a “tough cookie” and “complements what our new President lacks” (Emmanuel Dooc, “Telltales,” Business Mirror), then what does BBM have and what does he bring to the table?
From Mula Tarima Hanggang at Iba Pang Mga Tula at Awit (University of the Philippines Press, 2015), p. 29.
Ikapitong Sundang*
__________
* Ang tulang ito ay nasa computer notebook na inagaw ng mga sundalo sa may-akda nang dakpin nila ang huli noong Pebrero 13, 2013, sa San Jorge, Western Samar. Hanggang ngayon ay hindi pa rin naibabalik ang computer at ang tula.
“There was no firefight that took place. The manner of killing is consistent with many summary executions made to appear as ‘encounters’ and ‘firefights.’”
–Renato Reyes, Jr., Secretary General, Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (Bayan)
Edited by Leia Castañeda Anastacio and Patricio N. Abinales, this book brings into conversation historians, journalists, political scientists, pundits, lawyers and economists across generations as they engage in a collective assessment of Ferdinand E. Marcos, Sr.’s regime. Extensive as well as incisive, the essays in this unprecedented anthology appraise different facets of this seminal period’s policies, programs, and personalities and reveal a complicated legacy whose full import and impact have yet to be thoroughly unpacked.
Contributors include Filomeno V. Aguilar, Jr., Leia Castañeda Anastacio, Lisandro E. Claudio, Christianne F. Collantes, Jayeel S. Cornelio, Sheila S. Coronel, Marites Dañguilan Vitug, Teresa E. Encarnacion Tadem, Glenda M. Gloria, Caroline S. Hau, Meynardo P. Mendoza, Thomas M. McKenna, Michael D. Pante, Jan Carlo B. Punongbayan, Manuel L. Quezon III, Vicente L. Rafael, Eduardo C. Tadem, Mark R. Thompson, Criselda D. Yabes
Published by the Ateneo de Manila University Press
Editors: Pheng Cheah and Caroline S. Hau
Read Pheng Cheah’s Introduction here
The contributors to Siting Postcoloniality reevaluate the notion of the postcolonial by focusing on the Sinosphere—the region of East and Southeast Asia that has been significantly shaped by relations with China throughout history. Pointing out that the history of imperialism in China and Southeast Asia is longer and more complex than Euro-American imperialism, the contributors complicate the traditional postcolonial binaries of center/periphery, colonizer/colonized, and developed/developing. Among other topics, they examine socialist China’s attempts to break with Soviet cultural hegemony, the postcoloniality of Taiwan as it negotiates the legacy of Japanese colonial rule, Southeast Asian and South Asian diasporic experiences of colonialism, and Hong Kong’s complex colonial experiences under the British, the Japanese, and mainland China. The contributors show how postcolonial theory’s central concepts cannot adequately explain colonialism in the Sinosphere. Challenging fundamental axioms of postcolonial studies, the volume forcefully suggests that postcolonial theory needs to be rethought.
Contributors: Pheng Cheah, Dai Jinhua, Caroline S. Hau, Elaine Yee Lin Ho, Wendy Larson, Liao Ping-hui, Lin Pei-yin, Lo Kwai-Cheung, Lui Tai-lok, Pang Laikwan, Lisa Rofel, David Wang, Erebus Wong, Robert J. C. Young
Published by Duke University Press
Read Pheng Cheah’s Introduction here
In his previous and May 30 columns, Rigoberto Tiglao questions the statistics on torture, in particular the “34,000” figure that is often cited in discussions of Martial Law and traceable to the Task Force Detainees (on which Richard Kessler relies in his 1989 book). Tiglao goes through the list of human rights victims registered with the Human Rights Victims Claims Board and concludes that the “majority of these were CPP cadres as well as fighters of the Moro National Liberation Front and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.”
Questioning the empirical basis of the 34,000 claim is an important part of intellectual inquiry. The more accurate statistics we can come by, the better we can understand the history of what actually went on under Martial Law.
I hope that Tiglao can deepen the discussion further by explaining his own stance on torture.
Do oppressed groups deserve a fighting chance when they challenge an authoritarian regime? In situations of asymmetric conflict involving guerrilla warfare, how can humanitarian norms of conduct be applied when combatancy is not necessarily based on the uniform worn, but rather, on a person’s participation in the conflict?
The notorious and influential American counterinsurgency manuals identify at least four categories of participants: 1) leaders and combatants; 2) political cadres and militants of a party who “assess grievances in local areas and carry out activities to satisfy them”; 3) auxiliaries or active sympathizers who “run safe houses, provide passive intelligence, give rely warnings of attacks and provide funding”; and 4) the mass base and supporting population that “often leads clandestine lives for the insurgent movement” (Michael Gross, Moral Dilemmas of Modern War 2010).
The kind of treatment accorded these participants varies according to their degree of responsibility based on participation. Lethal force may be applied to those classified under 1) unless they are captured. Political cadres and auxiliaries who are considered direct participants but do not meet the definition of full-time armed combatants should be subject to non-lethal force (i.e., either arrested or “disabled”). There’s also the difficult question of how to deal with the involvement of direct and indirect civilian participants whose activities fall short of so-called combatancy.
Real life leaves plenty of room for disregarding the advice against the use of non-lethal force. Americans conveniently preferred to outsource torture of suspected “terrorists” to other territories or countries.
Which interrogation techniques are acceptable or not acceptable? In America, law enforcement techniques like psychological pressure, deception, good cop-bad cop and isolation are deemed acceptable to the police or army. “Torture lite” aka “enhanced interrogation techniques” (blindfolding, stress positions, loud music, sleep and sensory deprivation and waterboarding) are acceptable to intelligence services only. “Extreme, brutal, and severe techniques” such as severe beating, maiming or mutilation, and sexual abuse are unacceptable for any agency (Gross 2010). Are beatings, electrocutions, etc. that do not leave physical marks acceptable then?
Applying the Law of War to “non-international” (internal) armed conflict took time but the additional Protocol II of the Geneva Conventions in 1977 laid out the minimum obligations for protection that should be binding for states and insurgents alike. In 1986, the Philippine government ratified the 1984 United Nations Convention Against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment of Punishment (UNCAT). (See UNCAT’s 2016 review of the Philippines)
It would be good if Tiglao can go further in his research by analyzing the cases of torture involved rather than just counting the affiliation of those tortured. Readers should also be aware that the debate on torture is by no means settled, as scholars differ considerably in their assessments of the meaning, justifiability, efficacy, and consequences (human and political, short and long-term) of torture. Some scholars argue that torture in any form and for any reason is unacceptable.
As one of the initiators of the Manifesto in Defense of Historical Truth and Academic Freedom, I would like to personally respond to Rigoberto Tiglao’s three-part (May 23, 25, 27, 2022) column article in the Manila Times.
MANIFESTO
In joining the Manifesto initiative, I personally drew inspiration from the Russell-Einstein manifesto against nuclear war. Neither Bertrand Russell, philosopher, nor Albert Einstein, theoretical physicist, was an expert on nuclear science and nuclear-weapon development, let alone nuclear policy, foreign policy, and international relations. Their manifesto relied upon the expertise of fellow scientists who had done the research; nonetheless, they called upon all scientists to come together and take a humanitarian (in an important sense, also a political) stand against the use of nuclear weapons.
Another source of inspiration for me personally was one Rigoberto Dikit Tiglao. I came across his early publications when I was reading up on the Marcos era for my own research. His book on the Philippine coconut industry (1981) and his essay on the consolidation of the Marcos dictatorship in Dictatorship and Revolution: Roots of People’s Power (ed. Aurora Javate-De Dios, Petronilo Daroy and Lorna Kalaw-Tirol, 1988) are classic works of Philippine political economy.
In the “Consolidation of the Dictatorship” essay, Tiglao argued that the “debt-driven growth path” of the Marcos regime offered a period of “relative economic prosperity,” but also “led to the worst Philippine recession and contributed eventually to the regime’s downfall.” He identified the “crony groups” that controlled the sugar and coconut industries, among others. He stated that the Marcos regime campaign for international recognition was “characterized more by form rather than substance, grandstanding rather than painstaking diplomacy.” He also argued that “Together, unhampered by any democratic process of accountability and fully aware of the climate of fear and intimidation that kept the Filipino people perpetually intimidated, Marcos and the military effectively maintained 14 years of plunder and terrorism.” He also stated that “Marcos unleashed one of the bloodiest eras in Philippine history.” He talked about the US role in “propping up the infrastructure of repression.”
Tiglao rails against the Left analyses that, he claims, have brainwashed academics. The irony is that Tiglao’s best publications are precisely those that were framed by a “leftist” perspective. His study of the coconut industry drew on Marx’s notion of ground rent to demonstrate that the industry was capitalist in nature. His analysis of transnational companies and “backward”/”peripheral” capitalism derived from his critical engagement with leftwing dependency theory from Latin America (see for example his “Non-Progress in the Periphery” [1979] and the essay on land reform in Feudalism and Capitalism in the Philippines [1982]).
Tiglao would and should have been one of the best qualified people to work on a proper history of the martial-law (ML) period and more generally the Marcos era. He was already an adult when ML was declared, he used to be an activist, he had done pioneering work on this period. I for one had long been looking forward to a major book from him about this important period in our country’s history.
Alas, all we have, after more than thirty years, is Debunked (2019), a collection of mostly column essays where, here and there, we see flashes of Tiglao’s admirable investigative-reporting skills (further honed during his stint at the Far Eastern Economic Review). Unfortunately and disappointingly, these pieces are scattershot and unsystematic. The acuity and breadth of perspective on ample display in his earlier publications are much less evident in Debunked. (Another book, Colossal Deception: How Foreigners Control our Telecoms [2016], is a good exposé of Manuel V. Pangilinan and the Salim group. If only Tiglao can investigate the foreign partners of the Arroyos and Dutertes! Not a squawk of protest, mind you, over the “Hello, Garci?” and National Broadband Network-ZTE scandals.)
To put it bluntly, Tiglao himself is an example of the failure of the country’s intellectuals (a category that includes not only academics, but also public intellectuals) to engage in sustained systematic study and analysis of the Marcos era.
For readers who are not based in academia, I should also explain that most academics don’t have the wherewithal to get their essay collections published by vanity presses.
The signatories beg to differ.
Tiglao appears to have a problem with scholars and academics (and Juan dela Cruz more generally) fact-checking, preserving archival materials, defending freedom of thought, speech, and expression, and holding individuals and institutions to account when they pronounce and act upon matters that affect the intellectual life and political affairs of the country. In a less polarized society and country, these would all have been part of one’s duties as a teacher, researcher and, most important, citizen.
So rich of Tiglao to label this Manifesto “an internet version of a mob,” coming as his complaint does from a man who evidently has no problems with the vicious attacks and falsehoods leveled by disinformation networks against Marcos rivals and critics, and who has himself liberally indulged in ad hominem attacks against the people with whom he disagrees! An example of ad hominem is his fallacious argument that since the Manifesto’s signatories are “know-nothings,” then their statement and their arguments don’t need to be considered at all. It is Tiglao, not the Manifesto signatories, who deploys argument from authority as a way to discredit the concerns and message of the Manifesto.
As a fan of Vice Ganda, I would consider it a great honor if they were to pitch in to help raise public awareness of this issue.
HISTORICAL REVISIONISM
This is one of several straw-man arguments that Tiglao fashions in this article. In the “History” section of Part One, he disingenuously ignores the actual wording of the manifesto, which isn’t against revising history per se, but rather, against “all attempts at historical revisionism that distort and falsify history to suit the dynastic interests of Marcos family and their allies”. In other words, Tiglao omits the all-important subordinate clause that explains which particular type of historical revisionism is being called out by the Manifesto. A Bongbong Marcos who claims to have graduated from Oxford University and an Imee Marcos who claims to have graduated from Princeton and UP are falsifying history. An economic history of martial law that selectively highlights the early years of economic growth but glosses over the financial and economic crises that beset the country in the later years of the Marcos era distorts history.
Here’s a balanced assessment of the Marcos era: “As the Philippine elite supported the Marcos dictatorship during this period [1973-1975], with increased profits dulling their perception that the regime had struck deep into the country’s democratic roots, the working classes of the country reeled under the impoverishment under the Marcos-type of economic development.” Source of this quote? Rigoberto D. Tiglao, “Consolidation of the Dictatorship,” 1988.
Tiglao knows very well that the term “revisionist” was already circulating as a pejorative term by the end of the 19th century. Lenin famously used it to criticize Eduard Bernstein’s “revision” of Marxism.
You know what sounds like something from the 1950s? Part 3 of Tiglao’s column, which reads as if it were copied from the dossiers of the House Un-American Activities Committee at the height of the Red Scare hysteria. Here, Tiglao seems less concerned with historical revisionism than he is with McCarthyism, with him playing the starring role of Tail Gunner Joe.
DEBATING THE LEGACIES OF EDSA AND STRONGMAN RULE
Faulty generalization, and reinventing the (academic) wheel to boot. As a matter of fact, there has long been a scholarly consensus on the fact that the system set up after the People’s Power forces toppled the Marcos dictatorship was essentially “restorationist,” ushering in yet another variant of the elite democracy dominated by dynastic political clans at the local, provincial and national levels.
These powerful oligarchic clans include the Arroyos and Dutertes, of whom Tiglao has been a mouthpiece and fanboy. In other words, Tiglao should take responsibility for his complicity in propping up the post-EDSA system. Bongbong Marcos isn’t likely to restore the kind of regime his father installed, for the simple reason that Bongbong Marcos is very much a creature—indeed a beneficiary–of the “EDSA system” (to use Nicole Curato’s term).
Scholars are also in agreement that the Americans had some involvement in aiding the Reform the Armed Forces Movement (RAM) rebels. Americans have a long record of intervening in the politics of other countries to advance their own interests and agenda. For those who are interested in the US history of regime-change operations during the Cold War period, I recommend Lindsey A. O’Rourke’s Covert Regime Change.
Until the 1980s, however, at the level of policy-making, Americans largely accommodated authoritarian rule and its politics of productivity and repression in Free Asia (“Free” here meant free of communism, not democratic). The EDSA Revolution was the first big test case that provided the opportunity for some high-ranking officials (George Shultz, Paul Wolfowitz, among them) of the US government to successfully argue for a shift in US policy in favor of democracy promotion (which had hitherto been targeted at communist states, not US-friendly states and allies). It took time, however, after People’s Power was already under way, to get President Ronald Reagan, a friend of the Marcoses, to agree to the withdrawal of support for the Marcos regime.
Moreover, strongman rule is not the panacea that Tiglao seems to think it is. The economist Emmanuel de Dios has shown in his Discussion Paper that GDP growth per capita was higher during the period of the post-EDSA democratic government than even the so-called Golden Age (1972-1980) of authoritarian rule.
Scholars are wary of conflating the variable successes of very different economies and political systems (Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan, and South Korea) and warier still of single-handedly attributing these successes to either single-person or single-party rule. In the literature on the developmental states of Asia, the Philippines is often viewed as an outlier. This is not because the other states (South Korea, for example) were less corrupt. People like Jomo Sundaram and Yuen Yuen Ang have argued that not all corruption impedes economic growth.
In the case of the Philippines, a combination of external events, timing, domestic politics (especially opposition mounted by Benigno Aquino, Jr. and others), the elite habit of squirreling away money abroad rather than re-investing in the country (the Marcos ill-gotten wealth safely “escrowed” abroad), policy choices made by technocrats and policy recommendations by multilateral institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, rampant plunder and crony capitalism that were not channeled into productive ends, the growing disillusionment of the business community and middle-class as the age of relative prosperity gave way to economic crisis in the early 1980s, Marcos’s failing health and the looming issue of succession that triggered a power struggle involving Juan Ponce Enrile, and many other factors–all of these interacted in different ways to plunge the country into crisis.
RED-TAGGING AND HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS
Note that the list of Manifesto signatories includes critics of the Communist Party of the Philippines and the Liberal Party. If Tiglao can’t be bothered to accurately figure out what the signatories have researched apart from a simple tabulation of their institutional affiliations and a simple Google search of their major publications, how can we trust the rigor of this man who supposedly is able to “debunk” popular wisdom?
Moreover, this is an example of faulty generalization that red-tags four of the country’s top educational institutions, and an egregious case of argumentum ad populum (appeal to the people), a fallacious argument that claims that something must be right because the majority of the people believe it.
Is Tiglao then implying that violating their human rights is somehow understandable or justified? Nowhere is it stated in the Manifesto that there were “widespread human rights violations.” The problem with single party/single person rule is precisely the absence or weakness of institutional checks and balances that prevent such kinds of abuses. In any case, see Article 3(1), especially (a) and (c), of the 1949 Geneva Conventions.
In Debunked, Tiglao rightly reminds us that human rights abuses continued under the Aquino regime and in terms of the scale of the killed or disappeared, were comparable to the Marcos era. Whataboutism can only go so far, though, as two wrongs don’t make a right. The average human rights violations during the Corazon Aquino regime were indeed comparable to (arguably more intensified than) those under Marcos’ rule, but Tiglao ignores the fact that the same military officials-torturers-killers were in charge of the institutions in the post-EDSA period.
As late as 1981, as documented by the Amnesty International Mission to the Republic of the Philippines, “the security forces and members of authorized paramilitary groups had systematically violated the rights of prisoners, including both civilians and captured armed opponents, and that irregular paramilitary forces operating with official sanction had committed gross violations of human rights, including political killings. They found that procedures for filing complaints against members of the security forces were deficient; that procedural safeguards regulating the treatment of people in custody had been systematically ignored with apparent impunity, that the independence of the judiciary had been severely compromised and that torture, evident in 1975, was still systematically being used” (underscoring added, summarized in Philippines: Unlawful Killings by Military and Paramilitary Forces, 1988).
As for the “usual rotten apples and rogues”, they include torturers like Panfilo Lacson and Rodolfo Aguinaldo, who would go on to have prominent careers in the post-EDSA period. “Mostly” doesn’t tell us anything about the long-term human and political cost of such human rights violations. As Alfred McCoy argues in his Closer than Brothers, the military experience in torture played a role in coloring the putschist mentality of those young officers who later joined the RAM and were involved in the attempted coup d’ etat that triggered the 1986 Revolution and the coup attempts thereafter.
MARTIAL LAW: GOOD OR BAD?
For a judicious assessment of martial law and the Philippine economy, see the Discussion Paper by Emmanuel De Dios et al.
Read Tiglao 1988, not Tiglao 2022.
OVERSEAS FILIPINO INTELLECTUALS
Faulty generalization (did Tiglao sleep through his Logic class at the Ateneo?). Is Tiglao suggesting that Filipino intellectuals working abroad have no concern, right to be concerned, and right to voice their concerns, about their nation? Tiglao should get off his high horse, as he doesn’t have a lien on patriotism.
What does Tiglao know about these scholars’ hopes and dreams, feelings about Inangbayan/the homeland, and commitment to the Philippines? Maybe Tiglao would like a taste of his own argument-from-authority fallacy if we ask him to list his peer-reviewed publications on this cohort of academics.
Tiglao can better serve his readers if he points out the root cause of the phenomenon of labor export. Through its New Labor Code in 1974 and bilateral labor agreement with Iran in 1975, the Philippine state under Marcos played an active role in promoting and regulating the export of Filipino labor abroad. The government had originally viewed the labor export program as a “temporary measure” to ease underemployment (National Economic and Development Authority, Philippine Development Plan, 1978-1982). But as the political and financial crises (triggered by the global debt crisis and the assassination of Benigno Aquino, Jr.) worsened in the early 1980s, the Central Bank turned to labor export as a stop-gap measure, tapping the remittances of Filipino workers to improve the balance-of-payments position. The globalization of Filipino labor and diaspora (as distinct from the earlier periods of migration mainly to the US) is a consequence of this development which had its roots in the Marcos era.
Tiglao might also do well to recall that his former boss Gloria Macapagal Arroyo elaborated on Corazon Aquino’s bagong-bayani discourse by calling migrant workers the country’s “greatest export” and hailing them as “investors, proprietors, stakeholders and philanthropists”. Some scholars even argue that the Arroyo government’s banner vision of a Strong Republic—a slogan that Tiglao helped formulate–is connected with the policy of labor-out-migration (see Oscar Tantoco Serquiña, Jr.’s article). Tiglao prefers to cherry-pick his targets (Yellows, Reds, Stars and Stripes) while remaining silent about GMA’s role in the long-term transformation of the Philippine state into a labor-brokerage state (to use Robin Magalit Rodriguez’s term).
IN DEFENSE OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM
Tiglao’s best work was published by institutions like the Third World Studies Center and journals like the Diliman Review that people like Francisco Nemenzo, Jr. and Randy David helped nurture at the UP. In short, Tiglao was at his most productive as an intellectual working within the space of academic freedom that academics whom he would now not hesitate to tag as “Communist,” “leftwing,” and “liberal” had bravely tried to protect. That he should call for “dismantling” (purging of “Red infection”) the very institutions that made his early work possible–the work on which his reputation as an intellectual rests–saddens me deeply.
Tiglao downplays his early thinking and activist past by chalking them up to youthful passion and limited knowledge. Well, then, I hope Tiglao will take some time away from his column-crunching to work on a “real history” of martial law. I await a more systematic account from him of what new material he has discovered to make him reassess what he had written before, as it seems pretty clear that the historical revisionism he wants to justify is his own.
ikangablog 