Ombion: Martial Law victims know best

May 22, 2022 by No Comments

MARTIAL Law victims know best and can teach right. They don’t lie, they cannot and will not. It’s not a matter of pride. It’s an honor and integrity of being mortal.Unlike the Marcoses now back in power after 50 years, they have no sense of truth for their world is nothing but deceit and contempt.Thousands of our people, our elders and contemporaries, myself included, and the immediate generation after us, have been victims of Marcos’s martial regime.Victims of surveillance, vilification, demonization, arrest, incarceration, torture and other forms of unimaginable inhumanity to humans.New narratives peddled by Marcos supporters that human rights victims were not ordinary folk, much less common citizens, but diehard communists and terrorists, left activists, are sheer lies and smokescreen.Even if some were, they still have the basic rights to due process and be accorded humane treatment — not treated as monsters.Many of the victims were simply critics and dissenters, intellectual non-conformists to fascist narratives, rhetoric and repressive acts of the Marcos regime.Thousands more defied, including hundreds or perhaps thousands too of academic scholars and brilliant professionals, went underground, put up resistance, and were hunted down like common criminals.Still thousands others defied the deception and brutality of the Marcos regime, raised legitimate legal protest movements, and were still criminalized and mowed down.Today, thousands of them have passed. Those who survived have hearts filled with pains, minds with trauma. Aging, agonizing with physical impairments, but still imbued with fire of justice.No matter what the apologists, revisionists, plain distortionists and thousands of trolls of the Marcos-Duterte dynasties have done, can do and will do, they cannot cover up, alter or embellish the stories and testimonies of the dead and living witnesses of the so-called benevolent authoritarianism of the Marcos regime and the tyranny of Duterte.These tyrants and their ground hunters may be able to sleep for a night, weeks or months, gloat over the physical pains and sufferings they inflict on others, but those are transformed into nightmares that will continue to bring them no peace anywhere they go, anytime they exist.Victim survivors and other living witnesses of the Marcos regime should come out, inform and educate the youth of today, the elders who succumbed to lies and simply those misinformed, so they can reverse the state-managed wave of disinformation and distortion of historical facts about the Marcoses.They should teach the values of honesty, integrity, dignity, compassion, humility among our youth and millennials — so a new generation of servant leaders will blossom and rise among the present generation breed of youth.Only a well-informed and value-taught Filipinos, especially the youth can reverse the tide of fast shaping right wing regime and reactionary mass culture.

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