Test Drive Volume 1, No. 6 | Page 7

Nov. 21- 26, 2016

Vintage View

By Prof. Rolly Borrinaga

Rewriting history

Historical revisionism is now a worldwide phenomenon. And it had succeeded in unsettling the conventional view of history. Some of us here in Leyte and Samar are not exactly ignorant of the global trend. After all, some of the seminal works on what is now called“ regional” or“ local” history were about the history of Leyte and Samar.

We would like to share with our readers some other thoughts about the“ revisionist approach” that we use in writing historical articles. These were taken from the May / June 1995 issue of Index on Censorship, a journal published in London. The whole issue was devoted to the topic“ Rewriting history” and includes articles of similar efforts around the world( USA, Russia, Japan, Israel, Korea, etc.).

The first quoted material is the editorial for the whole issue; the second is the concluding paragraph of an article entitled“ Revisionism”:

Reflectors

Reynaldo B. Almenario

Ours,” said the late Fr. Horacio de la Costa, Filipino Jesuit scholar, historian and writer,“ is a society where justice is not conspicuous, where too few have too many and too many have too less.”

Said many decades ago, this courageous declaration remains no less valid today than the day it was written. Now as then, the Philippine situation stays as a great divide between the few rich and the destitute majority. Official government statistics, of course, belie this assertion. National poverty, said the National Statistics Authority( NSA), declined steadily over time: 22.9 percent of all families in 2009; 22.3 percent in 2012; and 19.1 percent in 2013. Similarly, it said the trend in subsistence incidence( or food-poor families)

All change on the history train

“’ Historians are dangerous, and capable of turning everything topsy-turvy. They have to be watched,’ said Kruschev in 1956 – one of the more candid admissions that people in power try to determine the history of their nations.

“ It is a good moment to be looking at censorship in the writing of history. 1995 is a year of important anniversaries – of the end of the war in Europe, the liberation of concentration camps, the first use of the atom bomb, the signing of the UN charter, the fall of Saigon – and of the first shot fired in the American War of Independence.

“ Some of the reordering of history has been particularly unsettling. In Germany a main thrust of the anniversaries this May has been to establish the sufferings of the German people rather than the horrors of Nazism. In Russia, key material from the Central Party archive

Eradicating extreme poverty by 2030( First of a series)

is declining. From 10 percent in 2009 and 2012, it was down to 10.7 percent in 2013.

On the other hand, results of self-rated poverty surveys of the Social Weather Station( SWS) reveal a story in qualitative and quantitative contrast. Incorporating more basic food items than the NSA’ s“ food basket,” the SWS said there were 49 percent of all families who considered themselves poor in 2009, a level that rose to 52 percent in 2012, then slid back to 49 percent in June 2013. Likewise, 19.2 percent of all families in March 2013 said they experienced hunger, a level that rose to 22.7 percent in June of the same year.

There thus appears a huge chasm between the official poverty and hunger statistics and those gathered by the privately run

OPINION Vanguard

has not yet been made available, despite promises.

“ In Korea, the story of the Korean‘ comfort women’ is only now being fully told – a story of 200,000 young girls kidnapped and coerced into brutal prostitution for the Japanese military, and brushed under the carpet for nearly 50 years by the Japanese, Korean and US governments. Now the women themselves have broken their silence …

“ The comfort women exemplify what is so disturbing about revisionist history-( it often exposes the) triumph of official orthodoxy, the voice of power,( in) obliterating the diverse voices of the people, for political ends.

“ Even where the rewriting of history is a cause for rejoicing – the defeat of authoritarianism or racism, as in Russia or South Africa – there is still the danger of a new orthodoxy.

“ One safeguard against the distortion of history is

( Go to p. 8)

Voices

ByJun Portillo

Way too far

Armed men barged into our home and brought me to a camp. They detained and interrogated me. I was taken … just like that.” My teacher in UP proceeded to tell the experience in one of our conversations at Dunkin’ Donuts in Tacloban. I shook my head with deep sadness fighting the urge to cry in public.

Another friend also endured the long and grueling interrogation. He had gone through harrowing mental and physical torture. He was also taken without warrant of arrest from where he lived, brought and detained somewhere, tortured, and imprisoned in a camp together with many other political detainees.

Just hours after suspension of the writ of habeas corpus by then president and soon-to-be dictator Ferdinand Marcos, thousands of Filipinos across the country were forcibly taken to a camp or to a safe house out of nowhere to be interrogated or tortured or killed or all of that.

In Hinunangan, Southern Leyte, a farmer was taken from his house, thrown into a jeep and dragged to a safe house.“ Even before they started questioning me, they beat me up because, they said, they wanted to introduce themselves to me …” stated the farmer in a court testimony. The worst was yet to come.

Ron de Vera’ s mother was also taken and detained when he was a child. Ron now works for Amnesty International. His parents went underground to evade martial law but his mother, Adora Faye, was arrested. She was stripped, beaten and raped. She got pregnant and was forced to undergo abortion.

Even people who refrain from involvement were not spared. Such is the story of Josephine Dongail, employee

7

of Development Academy of the Philippines. She was detained because of her workrelated association with Horacio Morales who was then vice president of DAP before going underground.

By the time martial law was over, 70,000 Filipinos were arrested, 35,000 of them were tortured and 3,257 were killed. The count is from American historian Alfred McCoy. Behind the numbers are ordinary folks who went through extraordinary ordeal in the hands of people who did it with impunity.

There was no legal process whatsoever. Well, there was a process. Good people, cream of the crop of their generation, principled citizens were taken from their homes, detained and then subjected to abomination. These was all made possible because of a legal ploy- suspension of Habeas Corpus.

When the possibility of the suspension of habeas corpus was brought up in the national conversation and with the burial of Marcos at the Libingan Ng Mga Bayani today as I write this, I was immediately reminded of those stories heard first hand and the stories read or heard from others.

Habeas Corpus is a writ( court order) that commands an individual or a government official who has restrained another to produce the prisoner at a designated time and place so that the court can determine the legality of custody and decide whether to order the prisoner’ s release.

Our president’ s determination to eliminate the drug problem is admirable. Legal arrests of suspects are commendable. But killing drug suspects while in prison, whoever killed them, is going too far. Suspending Habeas Corpus, even just thinking about it, is going way too far in the wrong direction. #

SWS. It is difficult to judge which estimates are more realistic, given the differing methodologies employed by both statistical agencies. The implication of such disparity can be significant, even confusing, when it comes to making realistic targets on poverty reduction measures. This suggests that a common definition of poverty, let alone extreme poverty, need be crafted and a more rational survey methodology collectively designed.

This essay will go by Wikipedia’ s definition of extreme poverty as“ severe deprivation of basic human needs, including food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education and information.” More than this, the global definition should incorporate“ severe deprivation of peace and political freedom” to which every human being is entitled. Deprivation of peace can be quantified by the number of people enveloped by internal conflicts or foreign invasions, and deprivation of freedom by a similar number of people under dictatorial or martial rule.

Meanwhile, the 2013 official Philippine poverty incidence estimate was 19.1 percent of all families, or around 3.73 million families involving some 18.7 million people. Eradicating this much poverty by end of 2030 would mean lifting at least 237,695 families a year( 1.19 million people) above the poverty line, beginning in 2015. How do we propose to achieve this milestone?

It is interesting to note that Fr. de la Costa described the Philippine situation as an issue of inconspicuous justice. Indeed, citing the IMF et al as data sources, Prof. Tadem wrote that, in 2011, the poorest 10 percent shared but 2.2 percent of total income or consumption, while the richest 10 percent partook of 33.4 percent( Philippine Daily Inquirer, May 4, 2014). In the same year, the richest 40 Filipino families, said the former national economic planning secretary, Dr. Cielito Habito, received 76 percent of the growth in gross domestic product. Clearly then, the Philippine problem, or the global poverty problem for that matter,

( Go to p. 8)