Image by Max Santiago
When an esteemed group of writers, historians, researchers, and editors collaborated with Reader’s Digest to publish Philippine history from the viewpoint of Filipinos in time for the Philippine Centennial celebrations in 1998, the result was a 10-volume compendium called Kasaysayan: The History of the Filipino People.
It can be referred to as the first body of work created by Filipinos for Filipinos and students of Philippine history. A reinvention of the encyclopaedia as a collectible hybrid coffee table set that did more than that for which it was intended.
The most important value of this project, however, is the knowledge and reinforcement that history requires evidence of actuality.
It is erroneous, not to mention foolish, to manufacture narrative if only to sway the world into believing that hard-won freedom or unspeakable crimes, for starters, are the figment of many an imagination. Irrefutable evidence should speak to how timelines progress, even as more emerge over time for due examination, study, and inclusion.
The painstaking process of tracking and documenting history is how generations learn of their origins, opportunities, and possibilities.
Children are taught about family being the smallest unit of society. They then develop an understanding of history, first by knowing of the heroes and their struggles and then later by seeing them as people who have sacrificed much.
Their academic studies, defined by a pedagogical approach that allows students to develop an understanding of the modern world in a multifaceted way, allowed the exploration of their role and existence as a people.
Philosophy, the sciences, other disciplines, and the arts later mold people expectedly able to discern and critically ascertain between conflicting ideas and values.
History is one such aspect of a people’s persona—ours—that require thorough and critical attention.
Studying history helps us understand how the past has shaped and is continuously shaping relationships between societies and peoples on a local and global scale. History equips us with tools by which we can examine how problems have arisen. It helps us to appreciate the struggles of our people, the lessons that go with them, and the finite human experience.
This progress is threatened when the narrative is fabricated to sway or influence knowledge or understanding.
“The most effective way to destroy people,” as George Orwell brilliantly pointed out, “is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”
Let us jump right into that.
Negationism (negationnisme) was coined by French historian Henry Rousso in 1987. In his book, he pointed out how critical it was to distinguish between legitimate historical revisionism and politically motivated denial, which he then termed negationism.
“Revisionism is an essential part of the process by which history, through the posing of new problems and investigation of new possibilities, enlarges its perspectives and enriches its insights,” stated Professor Emeritus Maria Luisa T. Camagay, Ph.D. (UP Department of History, College of Social Sciences and Philosophy), referring to historical revisionism.
Here, revisionism applies to legitimate academic reinterpretations of the historical record when there is documentary evidence or actuality aplenty.
In direct contrast, negationism or denialism is a distortion of the historical record, a denial of historical truth.
Harold Laswell (1927) stated that the purpose of negationism is to achieve a national, political aim by transferring war guilt, demonizing an enemy, providing an illusion of victory, or preserving a friendship.
An appalling example of negationism is Holocaust denial as an attempt to declare as falsity the harrowing experience of European Jews. All to misrepresent facts and distort modern-day understanding of how Hitler’s hateful words escalated to discrimination and inhuman conditions, which then culminated in genocide.
Speaking about this, Flemish author Koenraad Elst said that negationism is the denial of historical crimes against humanity.
Fabricated stories insisted that the final solution was simply to deport the Jews, that it did not order their extermination, and that the holocaust per se was perpetrated by the Jews, Allies, or the Soviets.
Denialism has occurred in many other countries including Armenia (genocide in WWI), Japan (whitewashing war crimes in WWII), the Soviet Union (restrictions on historiography), Germany (negation of armed forces participated in the Holocaust), Ireland (an amalgam of stories regarding Irish slavery), Egypt (the burning of the Library of Alexandria), Iraq (ISIS destruction of libraries during the Fall of Mosul), the United States (California genocide exclusion, and slavery in the Confederacy), and many more.
Locally, the Martial Law era (1972-1985) was referred to as the Golden Age of Prosperity for the Philippines, but because of the lack of dialogue and documentary evidence included in the academe, there was not enough discourse on how Martial Law was enacted to silence political dissent. White walls hid a growing population in the slums. Poverty and the rising cost of living were masked by infrastructure and cultural projects. Dissenting opinions from media and private individuals were silenced by atrocity, giving rise to the term Desaparecidos (enforced disappearance) for people that could no longer be found.
But the tale of Desaparecidos does not end there.
A conflation of comparable stories involving the silencing of law-mandated protected rights to an opinion after the 1986 EDSA Uprising is just as long if not longer by this time, and the families of the disappeared then and now could only mourn the loss and pain of not knowing.
Where to then? Quo Vadis?
My friend, it is time to ask questions, condemn logical fallacies, and hold credible institutions to their base obligation.
History is the study of change and could very well be our judge. The problem with waiting for this to happen in the present is that everyone considers themselves to be on the right side of history.
So how does one heal a generation? Especially now when the prevailing use of social media, among others, as a purveyor of such communication, only fosters confusion, conflict, and a growing mistrust of credible institutions.
Fear no discourse. Invite and pursue parity. Love no one less.
If history be our judge, it is time we accept that a historical conflagration is necessary to sweep through the muck of illegitimate historical revisionism and its denialist spins. It is time that we let a deeper thinking and empathetic re-education emerge from the mess we ourselves have sown because we fear to comprehensively explore and expose the darkness, negationism, and rot in our past. We have suppressed the championing of correction and the value of equable communication in sterile avenues that are schools, denying the same to multitudes, and so they have become sores that keep our progress at bay.
Wounds should be bled and then sterilized, the patient that is all of us nourished back to health. Let history see our healing through the marks that remind us of who we are.