Marcos win sets off rush to buy books on era of martial law

MANILA• • Books about the late Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos and his brutal era of martial law are flying off the shelves, spurred by "panic buying" after his son and namesake won a May 9 presidential election.

Mr Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr's presidency, set to begin on June 30, has many people worried about losing access to books and other accounts of his father's rule, given his family's decades-long effort to rehabilitate its name through what critics describe as a campaign of historical revisionism.

"They are panic buying," Ms Alexine Parreno said of her customers, many of them are parents buying books about martial law aimed at children. "They are really worried and scared that the books will be pulled out and that everything will be revised."

One shopper was Ms Faith Alcazaren, a mother of two, who picked up extra bundles of books to send to friends overseas.

"I felt like the smallest thing I can do and have control over is to protect the truth," she said.

Thousands of opponents of the senior Marcos were jailed, killed or disappeared during martial law, from 1972 to 1981, when the family name became synonymous with cronyism and extravagance as billions of dollars of state wealth disappeared.

The younger Marcos has called for a revision of textbooks that cover his father's rule, saying they are teaching children lies.

His choice of education minister, Vice-President-elect Sara Duterte-Carpio, daughter of outgoing strongman leader Rodrigo Duterte, has raised fears that the Marcos family will succeed at entrenching its version of history.

"We already thought that textbooks and the teaching of history in basic education was woefully inadequate in terms of explaining to our youth and children what the martial law period meant," said Professor Ramon Guillermo of the University of the Philippines.

"If the Marcoses come back to power and Dutertes are supporting them, we could even have a more difficult situation in teaching what really happened."

Prof Guillermo, with a group of fellow scholars, launched a manifesto last week pledging to combat attempts to falsify history to suit the Marcos narrative, and to oppose all censorship.

The manifesto, signed by 1,700 people, came after a government task force labelled as communist a children's book publishing firm selling five titles on martial law and dictatorship which it called the "#NeverAgain Book Bundle".

"Never Again!" was the battle cry of millions of protesters who joined the "people power" revolution that toppled the 20-year dictatorship in 1986, when the senior Marcos and his extravagant wife, Imelda, fled with their children into exile in Hawaii.

In 2020, Mr Marcos Jr dismissed accusations of rewriting history. "Who is doing revisionism? They put it in the books... what they have been saying about what we stole, what we did, not all of them are true," he said.

REUTERS