as the rest of us wait for more reasons on how "to try to live with it", here's an unemotional take on this topic:
Was Marcos a Hero?
No. But he was a soldierHOME Marcos’s family brings his body home from Hawaii in 1993 (Photo: Jun Camarillo)
SORSOGON Rep. Salvador Escudero III has introduced a resolution supporting the burial of the waxy corpse of dictator Ferdinand Marcos in the Libingan ng mga Bayani—the misnamed heroes’ cemetery where among the honored sleepers are war veterans, guerrillas, former presidents, and people like Haydee Yorac who distinguished themselves in service to the people of the Philippines. But basically it is a military cemetery. All soldiers who die in battle in any of our conflicts are entitled to be buried there.
Nearly 200 congressmen have signed the resolution. Sen. Ferdinand Marcos Jr., son of the dictator, has been pressing since February for the burial among dead soldiers of his father, who, he says, was a war hero. This was disputed during the campaign for the 1986 snap election. The dispute had to do with whether Marcos deserved all of the 27 war medals that he claimed he had earned. There were questions about the authenticity of those medals, but Marcos insisted they were authentic. The opposition couldn’t care less—the only thing that was in dispute was whether he deserved them all.
What is undisputable is that Marcos was a soldier against the Japanese, something very few Filipinos were.
To be sure, Marcos’s guerrilla unit Ang Mga Maharlika, was a product of his imagination. No war veteran remembers it, much less fighting as a member of it. But that he fought the Japanese is not disputed or has been disproved, nor that he wore the uniform of a soldier for which he was socially despised by the old rich who whispered that he was too poor to date their daughters in proper linen suits.
To be sure, too, Marcos fought for the country’s freedom from Japanese occupation, although in 1972, as president, he contrived to suppress that freedom. But again there is no question that he was able to hold together a fissile and fragile economy when the Arabs clamped a global embargo on oil exports and destroyed most of the world’s economies. Marcos’s iron grip, with which he held the opposition by the neck, also held the economy together.
Saving the economy during that difficult time, however, would not entitle Marcos to be buried among dead soldiers. What entitles him is his having been a soldier, decorated or not. He was, and so it seems he is entitled to be buried in the Libingan ng mga Bayani. Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV, a former soldier, supports Escudero’s resolution for the same reason: hero or heel, Marcos was a soldier and he should be buried there. But not among ex-presidents, national artists and scientists and other notable men and women, but among the soldiers, under the same poor-quality marble cross with just a few words roughly carved on it— the dates of his birth and death and a single word to describe his service: “SOLDIER.â€
Marcos’s friends are behind the House resolution, supposedly inspired by a recent Social Weather Stations poll that found that 50 percent of the Filipinos favor Marcos’s burial in the Libingan ng mga Bayani. President Benigno Aquino III, whose father, Sen. Benigno Aquino Jr., was one of the victims of Marcos’s martial-law regime, has stepped aside and tossed the job of making a decision to Vice President Jejomar Binay, who, in turn, has formed a committee to study the matter.
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