The Filipino people have rendered their judgment

t’s obvious that the well-funded campaign to revise the history of martial law is anchored on one strategy that is actually prohibited in a court of law—which is, relitigating a point after the court has ruled against it.

Of course, this is an analogy. The “court” are the Filipino people and the litigant is that camp that is trying to deodorize martial law and exorcise it of its legacy of atrocities.

I’ve watched a number of videos on YouTube, packaged as “archival footages” of interviews with former President Ferdinand Marcos, filmed mostly in the dying days of his 20-year dictatorship.

In them, the former president extemporizes on his justifications for declaring martial law in 1972. I noted that in many of these videos, he is still trying to rationalize a draconian act he did twenty years earlier, like people are not yet convinced despite the lapse of that much time. In fact, in those videos shot after January 1981, he would be justifying having declared martial law AFTER he had already officially lifted it.

But to go back to my point, explaining the reasons for declaring martial law, as late as in the 1980s already, mirrors the socio-political atmosphere of the day. There was heightened opposition not just to martial law but to his administration itself. All these resurrected videos were part and parcel of an earnest, if desperate effort to prolong his hold on power. He was making an argument before the transcendent court of public opinion, trying to cajole the rising Parliament of the Streets into capitulation--but to no avail.

All those videos—lengthy interviews with prominent opinion TV talk show hosts of the day—even when combined DID NOT SWAY public opinion in Marcos favor. Still on those four fateful days of the 1986 February EDSA People Power Revolution, they kicked him out of power, sending him into exile in Hawaii where he would die, never obtaining the redemption or absolution he achingly yearned for the remainder of his life.

In other words, the Filipino people judged him—and convicted him. And they executed their judgment comprehensively.

Comes now this revisionism campaign—fueled by archival copies of these videotaped interviews that few eccentric individuals would have actually collected. Mostly these are INSTITUTIONAL copies coming from media libraries, if not coming from the family museum itself.

Exhibited today out of the context of the times in which these were produced, they certainly elicit uninformed curiosity—and with a little more nudge of nostalgia, actually result in “radicalizing” fledgling loyalists.

I’ve been asked many times what I thought of these videos. My answer is I am not competent to evaluate them in light of the fact that history has already passed judgement on them. I’m too steeped in my ways as a lawyer to know better than to reopen an issue where the judge has already made a ruling.

Take any decided court case. Read the final decision. Hypothetically, take up the cudgel for the LOSER in the case, then go back and read the original pleadings, contending with each other back and forth and you will ALWAYS see an alternative view that is contrary to the judgment. But it would be moot and academic because, evidently, the judge still decided one way or the other based on the totality of all arguments and evidences presented--and not just from a unilateral perspective.

This is why in our “system of laws and not of men” our court procedures do not allow unlimited appeal. At some point, judgment must be allowed to settle undisturbed or there will be no peace, no closure. This is the essence of prohibiting parties from relitigating settled points of judgment. Ultimately, every decision must finally be laid to rest. Res judicata.

So the next time you watch one of these pretty videos, especially when you feel yourself swaying to one persuasion or the other, just remember that you are 50 years--half a century--removed from the time context. Even Genghis Khan would seem like an altar boy now.

Time softens all villains. Lee Harvey Oswald, assassinator of John F. Kennedy; Mark David Chapman, shooter of John Lennon; Mehmet Ali Agca, failed would-be assassin of Pope John Paul II—If you watch close-up videos of them in the aftermath, you would give their lives a second glimpse, too, as a disinterested YouTuber in 2022. But ask the whole Roman Catholic faithful in 1981, or the Levis-clad Beatniks of 1980 and you’ll get a fiercely different answer.

But here’s the rub: they are entitled to make that judgment, you are not.

By the same token, was martial law good or bad, and by extension was its inceptor malevolent or benign? Your opinion today, whether you are for or against, DOESN'T count. That judgment has been made by the Filipino people in history and like the names in the epitaphs of their victims, the Marcoses' conviction for their crimes is carved in granite.*