Do our clocks strike 13?
Do our clocks strike 13?
Updated 11:48pm (Mla time) Dec 01, 2004
By Juan Mercado
Inquirer News Service
Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the December 2, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer
IS the flawed textbooks scandal merely about quick-buck-publishers and slipshod research? Or is it about Orwellian flushing of truth down "memory holes" in a society where the "clocks strike 13"?
That question underpins Inquirer reporter Dona Pazzibugan's reports on error-studded textbooks. It took 22 historians and academics, working overtime, four weeks to blue-pencil one book. Another book blacked out historical upheavals, like People Power-now reverberating in Ukraine, after Georgia, East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Indonesia.
"The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory," Milan Hubl wrote. So were Ferdinand Marcos' brutal dictatorship and Joseph Estrada's boozy corrupt regimes shoved into "memory holes"?
In his novel "1984," the Observer's Eric Blair, who wrote as George Orwell, sketched a fictional dictatorship's ultimate weapon: "memory holes." These devices obliterated "even scraps of paper" not devoted to propaganda.
Orwell also coined "double think," "newspeak" and "Big Brother," the predecessor of North Korea's "Dear Leader." So thoroughly did he "describe methods of totalitarian thought control, that the adjective Orwellian now forms part of everyday language," a literary encyclopedia notes.
Memory disintegrated at the hands of Orwell's "thought-police." In "1984," lies become truth as words lose their meaning. "Slavery is freedom." Dissidents were tortured in "Room 101." In Orwell-land, clocks strike 13.
But Imelda insists that "martial law was the most democratic period in our history." Marcos' Military Intelligence Security Group was our "Room 101."
Democracy grows out the barrel of a gun, proclaim coup plotters, from Juan Ponce Enrile of "God-Save-The-Queen" schemes to the Magdalo mutineers. "Operation Ahos" and other communist pogroms safeguarded the "people's war," Filipino commissars claim. "A blanket of paranoia engulfed the movement," says former rebel Robert Francis Garcia in his book, "To Suffer Thy Comrades." And a levy is not a tax, the dictionary notwithstanding, the coconut cartel argue. The clock strikes 13.
A textbook ignores 12 other presidents and discusses only Transparency International's Marcos and Estrada. It presents Erap's background, platform of government and State of the Nation Address promises. Period. The aborted impeachment trial and Edsa II are nowhere.
Marcos founded the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, a book asserts. It ignored President Diosdado Macapagal who, with Malaysia and Indonesia, forged Maphilindo, Asean's forerunner. It also endorses Proclamation 1081. To dampen threats to security, Marcos was compelled to use "absolute power, so he declared martial law."
What "memory holes" fail to delete, Orwellian "double think" twists. Public school textbooks distort the martial law record, University of Asia and the Pacific's Joel Sarmenta and Melvin Yabut told the 1999 Ateneo/Wisconsin Universities "Conference on Legacies of the Marcos Dictatorship."
In these taxpayer-paid-for books, dissent such as the "First Quarter Storm" is depicted as chaos. Militarization and the thousands of desaparecidos (salvage and torture victims) are ignored. There is nothing on mass arrests or padlocking of a free press, so similar to the junta-ruled Myanmar of today.
"The end result was that the generation born after Sept. 21, 1972--now comprising over 13 percent of the entire population-are the 8.3 million students using these [fatally flawed] textbooks," their study notes.
"Who controls the past, controls the future," Orwell noted. "Who controls the present controls the past."
Thus, Stalin's regime rewrote history as often as its purges. Glorified accounts of the secret police's Lavrenti Beria were erased after his assassination. Japan remains embroiled in textbooks that tiptoe around the "Rape of Nanking." Denials that the Holocaust occurred persist.
A youth scrubbed of memory will take it for granted that the clock strikes 13. Can a people, afflicted by tax-subsidized amnesia ever become a purposeful nation? "The struggle of man against power," Czech novelist Milan Kundera wrote, "is the struggle against forgetting."
History is a "dangerous, often subversive subject--it opens minds," Inquirer columnist and historian Ambeth Ocampo writes. "But myths and distortions warp the present crop of history textbooks and presentation of martial law."
No action was ever taken--until Marian School supervisor Antonio Calipjo-Go blew the whistle in a June 6 letter to the Inquirer. For that he was first branded as a publicity seeker, ignored by the education department and threatened with libel charges.
"In this country, those who horsewhip money changers out of the temple, end up excoriated," I wrote here last Aug. 5. Acsa Ramirez, who exposed Land Bank tax scams, ended in a police lineup. For denouncing the purchase of sub-standard Kelvar helmets, flawed HK-MP5 assault rifles, Rear Adm. Guillermo Wong was shipped out. There are hundreds of such cases.
"Governments must create an environment that encourages, instead of penalizes, citizens who denounce venalities," 135 countries declared at the 9th Anti-Corruption Conference in Durham, South Africa.
For the first time since its creation in 1995, the National Book Development Board has ordered a textbook's pullout due to gross errors. Corrected teaching notes are being shipped to the 5,700 public high schools. These are slow and overdue measures to prevent the clock from striking 13.
Updated 11:48pm (Mla time) Dec 01, 2004
By Juan Mercado
Inquirer News Service
Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the December 2, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer
IS the flawed textbooks scandal merely about quick-buck-publishers and slipshod research? Or is it about Orwellian flushing of truth down "memory holes" in a society where the "clocks strike 13"?
That question underpins Inquirer reporter Dona Pazzibugan's reports on error-studded textbooks. It took 22 historians and academics, working overtime, four weeks to blue-pencil one book. Another book blacked out historical upheavals, like People Power-now reverberating in Ukraine, after Georgia, East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Indonesia.
"The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory," Milan Hubl wrote. So were Ferdinand Marcos' brutal dictatorship and Joseph Estrada's boozy corrupt regimes shoved into "memory holes"?
In his novel "1984," the Observer's Eric Blair, who wrote as George Orwell, sketched a fictional dictatorship's ultimate weapon: "memory holes." These devices obliterated "even scraps of paper" not devoted to propaganda.
Orwell also coined "double think," "newspeak" and "Big Brother," the predecessor of North Korea's "Dear Leader." So thoroughly did he "describe methods of totalitarian thought control, that the adjective Orwellian now forms part of everyday language," a literary encyclopedia notes.
Memory disintegrated at the hands of Orwell's "thought-police." In "1984," lies become truth as words lose their meaning. "Slavery is freedom." Dissidents were tortured in "Room 101." In Orwell-land, clocks strike 13.
But Imelda insists that "martial law was the most democratic period in our history." Marcos' Military Intelligence Security Group was our "Room 101."
Democracy grows out the barrel of a gun, proclaim coup plotters, from Juan Ponce Enrile of "God-Save-The-Queen" schemes to the Magdalo mutineers. "Operation Ahos" and other communist pogroms safeguarded the "people's war," Filipino commissars claim. "A blanket of paranoia engulfed the movement," says former rebel Robert Francis Garcia in his book, "To Suffer Thy Comrades." And a levy is not a tax, the dictionary notwithstanding, the coconut cartel argue. The clock strikes 13.
A textbook ignores 12 other presidents and discusses only Transparency International's Marcos and Estrada. It presents Erap's background, platform of government and State of the Nation Address promises. Period. The aborted impeachment trial and Edsa II are nowhere.
Marcos founded the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, a book asserts. It ignored President Diosdado Macapagal who, with Malaysia and Indonesia, forged Maphilindo, Asean's forerunner. It also endorses Proclamation 1081. To dampen threats to security, Marcos was compelled to use "absolute power, so he declared martial law."
What "memory holes" fail to delete, Orwellian "double think" twists. Public school textbooks distort the martial law record, University of Asia and the Pacific's Joel Sarmenta and Melvin Yabut told the 1999 Ateneo/Wisconsin Universities "Conference on Legacies of the Marcos Dictatorship."
In these taxpayer-paid-for books, dissent such as the "First Quarter Storm" is depicted as chaos. Militarization and the thousands of desaparecidos (salvage and torture victims) are ignored. There is nothing on mass arrests or padlocking of a free press, so similar to the junta-ruled Myanmar of today.
"The end result was that the generation born after Sept. 21, 1972--now comprising over 13 percent of the entire population-are the 8.3 million students using these [fatally flawed] textbooks," their study notes.
"Who controls the past, controls the future," Orwell noted. "Who controls the present controls the past."
Thus, Stalin's regime rewrote history as often as its purges. Glorified accounts of the secret police's Lavrenti Beria were erased after his assassination. Japan remains embroiled in textbooks that tiptoe around the "Rape of Nanking." Denials that the Holocaust occurred persist.
A youth scrubbed of memory will take it for granted that the clock strikes 13. Can a people, afflicted by tax-subsidized amnesia ever become a purposeful nation? "The struggle of man against power," Czech novelist Milan Kundera wrote, "is the struggle against forgetting."
History is a "dangerous, often subversive subject--it opens minds," Inquirer columnist and historian Ambeth Ocampo writes. "But myths and distortions warp the present crop of history textbooks and presentation of martial law."
No action was ever taken--until Marian School supervisor Antonio Calipjo-Go blew the whistle in a June 6 letter to the Inquirer. For that he was first branded as a publicity seeker, ignored by the education department and threatened with libel charges.
"In this country, those who horsewhip money changers out of the temple, end up excoriated," I wrote here last Aug. 5. Acsa Ramirez, who exposed Land Bank tax scams, ended in a police lineup. For denouncing the purchase of sub-standard Kelvar helmets, flawed HK-MP5 assault rifles, Rear Adm. Guillermo Wong was shipped out. There are hundreds of such cases.
"Governments must create an environment that encourages, instead of penalizes, citizens who denounce venalities," 135 countries declared at the 9th Anti-Corruption Conference in Durham, South Africa.
For the first time since its creation in 1995, the National Book Development Board has ordered a textbook's pullout due to gross errors. Corrected teaching notes are being shipped to the 5,700 public high schools. These are slow and overdue measures to prevent the clock from striking 13.
posted by Dante at 7:15 PM
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