OpinionsGender BenderDoes history matter?

Does history matter?

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ZURICH, SWITZERLAND — Being here in Europe at this time is to observe how governments and peoples make it a duty to collectively recall significant moments in their history.

On Nov. 11, public officials and the media in many countries focused on events of nearly a century ago, namely the cessation of hostilities in 1918 on the “11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month” that marked the end of World War I, in accordance with the armistice signed by Germany and the Allies.

Public observances took place, media interviews and articles analyzed the events and their impacts.

People here take their history seriously. When I’m here in Europe, I enjoy listening to a daily radio program on a main French radio station that discusses at length, and with passion, historical figures, movements and events, including of the distant past. (Disclosure: As I studied there as a young person, I retain an interest in all things French.)

Obviously, there’s an audience for this program, along with the daily news, the music or entertainment shows, or else it wouldn’t survive programming imperatives that must, as everywhere, ensure the bottom line .

Connecting with their history gives people a sense of what came before them, and who they are today, their culture and values, the high and low points of their trajectory as a people and country, what they want as a people.

Of course, it helps that here in Europe (and elsewhere), historical sites and monuments are everywhere, and people live with history.

On Nov. 12, another kind of remembering took place: the re-opening of the music theater in Paris where exactly a year earlier, Islamist terrorists shot and injured over a hundred people.

Public officials and a huge audience gathered, and before opening the concert, in solemn tones, singer-songwriter Sting said (in French) that the important task before them was to remember what happened, honor the people who died, and also to celebrate life.

Many years ago, I visited Nazi concentration and extermination camps. Visitors from everywhere and many young people go there to know the reality of a dark period in Germany’s history. The camps were not demolished, as some Germans might have preferred, but preserved as witnesses to history.

Also years ago, I visited the war museum in Ho Chi Minh, and one in Luang Prabang on the land mines dropped in Laos during the Vietnam war, and that still today make victims, as unexploded ordnance remains in the ground. They, too, wanted to remember.

Which brings me to this story: Sometime in the early 1990s, my sister and I walked around Fort Santiago, and saw metal plaques indicating the small stone chamber where the Japanese during WWII held hundreds of Filipinos who suffocated or starved to death, and the stone pit where Filipino prisoners drowned when the Pasig River water rose. (My sister’s parents-in-laws, Josefa Llanes-Escoda and Antonio Escoda, were killed by the Japanese.)

We were back there just a year or two later, and the metal plaques were gone. When we asked the person in charge, he explained that they were removed so as not to offend Japanese tourists.

Apparently, we lay no value on our own history, and find it acceptable to deny or erase what may be uncomfortable truths.

Nine Supreme Court Justices are of this view, declaring that Ferdinand Marcos was a hero. What a sorry lot they are, along with President Duterte.

And many Filipinos, exalting in their willed ignorance and misplaced loyalty (often bought with stolen wealth), have no use for historical truth.

In any case, they say, it was long ago.

No, it is not; any lapse of time is not even a valid argument.

There are countries where recalling and preserving history matters, where memory is a duty.

For too many among us, it seems that forgetting or denying the past are options, that life is possible without a moral compass.

_______________________________

Author’s email: [email protected]

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