I HAD an interesting Facebook exchange with a fellow academic. In reaction to his #NeverAgain comment on my post, I asked him for his thoughts on what the state should do as an alternative to declaring martial law in the event of widespread disorder and rebellion.
His response was classic, one that I would have easily offered myself during my early years as a young political scientist freshly minted from graduate school. He argued that disorder and rebellion are natural outcomes of an oppressive state in the hands of fascist regimes and their cohorts among the exploitative elites and their transnational patrons. For him, we should first inquire into the roots of the rebellion in, I would presume, a scholarly fashion and once determined, would have to address such roots. Hence, in the face of daily bombings, assassinations and acts of terror, the state’s option is to conduct an academic inquiry. Never again should it take the option of calling the military, suspending the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus, and declaring martial law.
This is the same line of response that dominates the academe and those inhabiting the intellectual vocations.
What is ironic, however, is that the same call for scholarly inquiry into the roots of rebellion that push people to take up arms against the state is made by the same people who are unable to make the same call for rigorous and in-depth scholarly inquiries about Marcos’ Martial Law, which is one of the most complex, highly contested periods in our nation’s history. These are people who have readily, and unproblematically, taken as unassailable doctrinal truths the narratives of the so-called victims of Martial Law without the benefit of rigorous, objective, scientific verification and validation of such claims.
These are people who readily problematize constructs in their own areas of expertise, but have taken as fact the convenient generalizations of those claiming to have been innocent victims of state reprisal. Very little critical thinking is deployed to put in clear taxonomic classification using some academic rubric, with data gathered objectively from primary and secondary sources, the various narratives which all people, and not only those who claim to having been innocently victimized, have experienced.
There is quickness to generalize Martial Law as totally evil, and to conveniently deploy the narrative that Marcos was solely responsible for every single act during Martial Law. A student who makes that kind of generalization would have failed. But we have the irony of members of the academic community who expect their students to be more probing, more precise and more rigorous in their data gathering and analysis, who when given the chance to interpret a most complex period in history, settle for the convenient and the safe, at least in the context of surviving in the world of academia.
After all, they live in a world dominated by a mind-set that has already made a conclusion about the total evil of Martial Law. With university presidents, college deans and prominent faculty members adhering to such a view, believing otherwise may be dangerous for one’s promotion and tenure.
It is constraining the freedom of inquiry when we have statements signed by top university officials where, instead of being asked to conduct scholarly inquiries on Martial Law that can help us shed light on its complexity, there is already a tacit celebration of a preferred narrative. It is already discomfiting enough to be labeled as an unscientific, politically incorrect revisionist. What more when you are confronted with public pronouncements of your university president or college dean that tacitly impress on you that they prefer a particular line of argument.
Only senior, tenured faculty members nearing retirement would be as bold. Very few younger ones among those who are still insecure about their tenure and those still trying to seek acceptance by their academic communities would be bold enough to buck the dominant and preferred narrative. This is most unfortunate as it certainly runs contrary to the natural mission of universities to be breeding grounds for ideas, no matter how unpopular, and to be enablers of critical inquiries, even if those are on issues that are inconvenient and controversial.
Martial Law was a complex period in our history. It was perceived and experienced by different kinds of people in different ways. Those who consciously rebelled against the state saw and experienced it differently from those ordinary citizens who simply lived their lives. And there are as many narratives that need to be recognized and valorized, and respected, without labeling or naming those who did not perceive and experience Martial Law negatively as complicit enablers of fascism and tyranny. And consequently, that those scholars who would inquire into these multiple narratives should have the protection that they deserve under the principles of academic freedom, and that they should not be readily labeled as peddlers of historical distortions and fakery, and be treated as pariahs.
It is bad enough that when fellow columnist and academic Father Ranhilio Callangan-Aquino expressed his nuanced recollection of Martial Law, which he characterized “as an ambivalent chapter of our history,” he was derisively labeled as a clerico-fascist for not sharing the view of those who see it as total evil, even if he also disagrees with those who saw nothing wrong with it.
What we see here is a case where adherents of a dominant stream of interpretations impose their own narratives as the only correct way of making sense of a complex period in our history. And in doing so, they dismiss those of others who believe otherwise as irrelevant, flawed, and imperfect, thereby demeaning and diminishing not only the opinions, but even the lived experiences of these people.
While it is problematic and insensitive for those who did not experience the ruthlessness of Martial Law to ignore the suffering and pain experienced by others who did — even if they were brought about by their own conscious choices to rebel against the state — it is equally problematic and insensitive to diminish and label as false consciousness the opinion of those who saw Martial Law in a more positive light because that is how they lived it. Worse is when those who see Martial Law differently are likened to those who enabled genocidal tyrants by people who are supposed to know the finer distinctions because this is part of their vocation as academics and as members of the intellectual class.
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