FRAIL THREAD

“Bataan Day? What's that?” The Inquirer feature presented a jeepney driver, a second year college engineering student and a stall vendor who hemmed, then hawed why April 9 was a national holiday.

“All I know is I am playing Dota with my friends later,” the engineering sophomore said. Everything he learnt form a high school history course had “gone down the drain. He knew nothing of the “Death March”.

Prisoners of war made that 98 kilometer trek from Mariveles in Bataan to prison Camp O'Donnell in Tarlac. Over 21,000 Filipino and American soldiers died “from disease, starvation, thirst, untreated wounds, and wanton execution”.

Isn't Araw Ng Katingingan “about easing traffic?” a jeepney driver wondered. . Philippine Scouts Sg.t Jose Calugas -- who? The mess sargeant from Iloilo sprinted across a shell swept 914-meter field in Bataan and took over a cannon whose crew had been killed.

With a squad of volunteers, Calugas returned fire all afternoon of January 6,1942. After the Death March, he joined the guerrillas. After World War II, he received the US Medal of Honor from General of the Army George Marshall

Voice of Freedom broadcast from on the besieged Corregidor Island? The stall vendor never learned about its final program, aired after Maj. Gen. Kameichiro Nagano presided over negotiations for surrender. Bataan resistance derailed Japan 's Southeast Asia campaign by four crucial months.

“Bataan has fallen,” the broadcast from Malinta Tunnel said. “Philippine-American troops… are not made of impervious steel. The flesh must yield at last, endurance melts away, and the end of the battle must come.

With heads bloody but unbowed, they have yielded to the superior force and numbers of the enemy…. The world will long remember the epic struggle that Filipino and American soldiers put up in the jungle fastness and along the rugged coast of Bataan …”

”The memories of men are too frail a thread to hang history from”. Filipinos forgot faster than anybody thought. Do a people of truncated memories recall that skid into 14 years of dictatorship in 1972? More important, do we care?

Eight out of 10 students in, September 2002 surveys tell us, barely recall Sen. Benigno Aquino, or why he was gunned down. Who remembers the officers, handpicked by Marcos, for Military Commission No. 2? In November 1977, they sentenced Aquino to die by musketry, after a kangaroo trial, in Fort Bonifacio .

No one of you can name the military tribunal members who sentenced Andres Bonifacio, Aquino told his “judges” then. “But this camp, where you try me, is named after the very man they sentenced to death.”

Indeed, “we have little collective memory of the past,” Ateneo University President Bienvenido Nebres, S.J., told the Legacies of the Marcos Dictatorship conference. “We tend to live in a perpetual present. Thus, we cannot see well into the future.”

But Imelda Marcos remembers — selectively. So do her kith and bejeweled kin, aging loyalists. “It was one of the best things that happened in Philippine history,” Madame asserted in a 1999 interview. “ Tayo ang nagligtas ng demokrasya.”

“Forget the past,” former President Joseph Estrada said while on a Latin American trip. Senators say “Let the country move on.” They parrot Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet (1915-2006).

Under Pinochet's iron-fist rule, 2,279 persons were murdered by state agents. Thousands disappeared. “It is best to remain silent and forget,” Pinochet said after his extradition from the UK and imprisonment. “It is the only thing to do: we must forget.”

“The first step in liquidating a people,” the historian Milan Hubl says, “is to erase its memory.” The Marcoses have tried to scrub the national memory blank. Under House Resolution No. 1135, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and Clan, Imelda Marcos, plus 210 representatives badgered President Benigno Aquino: allow Libingan ng mga Bayani interment for the late dictator.

Communal amnesia would expunge all “New Society” crimes. “The Marcos family never expressed any remorse,” Inquirer's Randy David points out. “They do not seek forgiveness.” They see HR1135 “as a vindication of their innocence…They want the nation to revise its remembrance of the past.” PNoy said no.

Exploiting national amnesia becomes rife as national elections approach.: “We “challenge —no, demand upon—the older generation, the ones who hold the institutional memory of the country, to dredge the past and leave a cautionary tale in their wake," Inquirer columnist Conrad de Quiros wrote:

“Videos appeared on YouTube advertising itself as facts about Marcos and Aquino… meant only to establish the truths of history…They're meant to sow doubts about the essential truths of history, thereby allowing a rewriting of it. "

The video I saw is a classic in exploiting on how to wring a different spin from bald facts, Cory was in Cebu and did not lead People Power Revolution." She was in Cebu leading rallies against rigged elections.

"But the videos are clearly aiming for the young middle class urban dwellers who are computer-savvy in hopes of getting them if not to lead the charge in the rewriting of history at least to be the least resistant to it.

“Let us read history critically,” the late Horacio de la Costa, S.J., wrote in Rediscovering Our Past. “By and large, we have no very deep or sharply defined consciousness of how tremendously rich and varied our culture is…

We have been accidentally --- and it is hoped, temporarily --- severed from the historic origins of that culture….We have to renew our interest when the Philippines ceased to be merely an archipelago and became a nation.”*

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