After fleecing billions of dollars from the Philippines, torturing and murdering thousands during the period of martial law, Ferdinand Marcos Sr. was removed from power through a popular uprising in 1986.  How was it possible that his son, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., was elected as president in 2022?  Dr. John Lee Candelaria, from Hiroshima University, argues that a long history of memorializing heroes and forgetting the victims of the nation’s past, has much to do with the reality of the Philippines present.  From the influence exerted by American authorities during their half century of rule in the Philippines to the dependence on Japanese aid in the present, larger political forces have played a major role in shaping the parameters of official memory in the Philippines.

Elevating the memory of José Rizal was one strategy employed by American authorities to celebrate the Philippines Revolution while discouraging resistance to American rule.  Rizal was a Filipino writer whose work both inspired the war against Spain and led Spanish authorities to convict and execute him.  Lee Candelaria argues that Rizal was the perfect poster boy for the Americans because while he was critical of the Spanish he was also a proponent of education as the means for peaceful change.  American support for the memory of Rizal was most evident in the form of monuments and memorials.  Lee describes the Rizal monument in Luneta, Manila as a cultural icon for the Philippines.  Rizal is also celebrated in the national education system and through a national holiday every December 30th.  While we now have a more nuanced understanding of Rizal, at the time of American rule he was thought to be a pacifist and opponent of the Philippine Revolution.  

One of the ways of downplaying less desirable memories is to subsume them in larger memories.  During the period of American control in the Philippines this was done with Memorial Day.  Memorial Day began in the United States in the period after the Civil War to honor the fallen Union soldiers and eventually encompassed the lives of American soldiers lost in all past wars.  Introduced in the Philippines, Memorial Day recognized the deaths of American soldiers in the Philippine-American War but not Filipino combatants.  Another example is the Mausoleum of the Veterans of the Revolution.  Built in 1915 in the Manila North Cemetery, the Mausoleum originally housed the bodies of many of the heroes of the Revolution—some of whom also fought in the Philippine-American War.  Included on the facade of the Mausoleum are the dates 1896 and 1902.  By including dates that marked the start of the war against Spain with the end of the Philippine-American War, the Mausoleum subsumed the memory of the later conflict within the story of the former.

I think the fact that national commemoration of historical events tend to shy away from recognizing victimization makes it easy for narratives such as the Marcos golden age.  It’s so easy to popularize because at the end of the day the Philippines state has never really recognized points of weakness of the Philippines.  John Lee Candelaria, Realms of Memory interview.

There are monuments in the Philippines that recall heroic episodes in the Philippine-American War.  Lee Candelaria points out that in Rodriguez, Rizal, near his hometown of San Mateo, there is a monument to Licerio Gerónimo, a Filipino Revolutionary general who was credited with the defeat and death of American Major General Henry Ware Lawton at the Battle of San Mateo on December 19, 1899.  Lawton’s earlier claim to fame was the capture of Apache leader Geronimo.  What is more striking to Lee, however, is that there has been very little done on the national level to recall the Philippine-American War.  

Nearly a million Filipinos lost their lives in the war against Japan.  While the vast majority of those who died were civilians, most Pacific War memorials are devoted to the memory of soldiers and the themes of military valor, sacrifice, and duty.  Memorials at Corregidor and Bataan, where some of the fiercest fighting took place, are shaped not only by the past but also by the desire to recall the unified Filipino-American struggle against a common foe, an important imperative within the context of the Cold War fight against communism.  For Filipino leaders, like Ferdinand Marcos Sr., fabricating heroic memories about personal valor during the Pacific War was a means of building political capital and justifying his long rule.  Marcos became directly involved in the design and construction of one of most prominent memorials to the Pacific War in the Philippines, The Shrine of Valor on Mt. Samat in Bataan.  Inspired by Francisco Franco’s Valley of the Fallen, built a decade earlier in Spain, the Shrine of Valor includes one of the largest memorial crosses in the world, visible on a clear day from Manila some 30 miles away.  Planned soon after Marcos took office in 1965, the Shrine of Valor became the government’s main memorial to commemorate the war.  Completed in 1969, when Marcos was running for his second presidential term, the Shrine includes references not only to the heroes of the Philippines past but to Marcos’ own imagined role as the greatest Filipino hero of the war and the leader of the Filipino resistance against the Japanese.  

Broader memories of the Pacific War became possible after the People Power Revolution in February 1986 finally toppled the Marcos regime.  Unthinkable in an earlier era marked by the celebration of the valor and heroism of Filipino combatants, we now see the commemoration of prisoners of war.  Capas, Tarlac, the site selected to commemorate the victims of the Bataan Death March, was declared a National Memorial Shrine in 1989 and later the Capas Prisoners of War Memorial Shrine was erected under the presidencies of Corazon Acquino and Fidel Ramos and inaugurated by President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in 2003.  In 1995 the Memorare-Manila 1945 Memorial was completed.  Located in the heart of Manila, the memorial commemorates the some one hundred thousand civilian lives lost in the Battle of Manila in 1945.

Despite the expansion of official memories of the Pacific War there are some subjects that continue to remain taboo.  While most of the 80,000 to 200,000 sex slaves, also known as comfort women, who served the Japanese military during the Pacific War came from Korea, some 1000 Filipina women became comfort women during the war.  In 2017 a memorial to Filipina comfort women was erected in Roxas Boulevard in Manila, near the Japanese Embassy.  Supported by the Manila city government and the National Historical Commission of the Philippines, the monument nevertheless triggered a backlash from the Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs and the Japanese Embassy.  After only four months the Department of Public Works and Highways removed the statue because of supposed “drainage” issues in the area.  In response to criticisms of the removal, then President Duterte commented that it wasn’t the policy of his government to “antagonize other nations.”  Lee Candelaria argues that the politics of victimization may be available to stronger nations like South Korea, but is not possible for the Philippines which remains heavily dependent on Japanese aid.  

The long history of remembering heroes, especially those of the Philippines Revolution, while neglecting stories of victimization from the Philippines-American War and the Pacific War, has direct repercussions for the Philippines political present.  When Ferdinand Marco Jr. and his sister first began to cultivate nostalgia for their family, perhaps with funds Marcos Sr. stole from the state, they met with a highly receptive public ill-informed about the long history of victimization of the Filipino people.  It was far easier to recall a golden era when there was less bribery, crime, corruption and more law and order.  Lee Candelaria’s participation in the podcast project, entitled Podkas, is inspired by the desire to better educate Filipinos about their past by featuring the insights of professional historians.  By providing a more reliable alternative to Filipinos, who might otherwise turn to questionable sources on social media, the aim of Podkas is to bolster democracy in the Philippines through a better understanding of the past.