Flipping Pages
The National Guilder
With the right kind of education about history, we can be sure that our present will no longer sound like our past. The lack of interest in history and the neocolonial structures that exist within our system may be the reasons why we end up continually making the same mistakes that we made in the past. A lack of awareness regarding the past may result in thousands of mistakes being made over and over again in the future.
With this, the fact that the website of the Presidential Museum and Library can no longer be accessed through the domain http://xn--malacaang-q6a.gov.ph/, which details the history of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr.'s Martial Law regime, has become alarming for everyone causing a major concern. The Presidential Museum and Library is an institution in charge of preserving, managing, and promoting the heritage of the Philippine presidency. These responsibilities fall under the jurisdiction of the Presidential Museum and Library.
Manolo Quezon III, who had served in the past as an undersecretary for the Presidential Communications Development and Strategic Planning Office, alerted the public via tweet about the removal of content. It gained a lot of perspectives from Filipinos that it is perhaps the beginning of their plan to clear their names through revising the history. Concerns have been raised in response to the increasingly likely prospect of Ferdinand Bongbong Marcos Jr. as president. These concerns center on the possibility that documented abuses committed during Martial Law will be covered up and most likely will be rewritten.
However, in response to this alarming change, a statement has been received from the museum administration stating that the Presidential Museum and Library has not been removed and is instead undergoing the process of being updated and secured. The statement was released in response to concerns that the PML's online records, including those from the period of Martial Law, had been deleted or otherwise made unavailable in some other way.
On the other hand, the Director-General of the National Intelligence Coordinating Agency, Alex Monteagudo, asserted without any evidence that children's books published and sold by Adarna House about dictatorship and Martial Law were part of a communist plot to radicalize Filipino children. Despite this, Adarna House became unsilenced about the truth being shared about Philippine history and offered a #NeverAgain bundle of books with a discounted price.
The formation of a consistent worldview, or a conceptual model of how the world operates, is facilitated by acquiring insights from great works of literature. With it, we can cope with the change and interact with other people more coherently. And a critical reader, if they have read the material correctly, will have constructed a relatively strong mental foundation that can be used to bring the truth to the attention of the general public. As a consequence of this, we need to acquire our very own copies of these books so that we can learn the truth about our past. Together, we need to realize that the factors that ultimately determine the course of history are not just the behavior of specific people or the integration of certain events; rather, it is the collective consciousness and organization of the population as a whole that is responsible for this.
Throughout our history, the Filipino people have been influenced not only by the firmament of heroes and the unheard and unnamed multitudes who sacrificed their lives to secure our independence but also coupled with the fact that we have been held captive by the mistakes and lies of the past, which continue to haunt us even today. Due to a lack of historical knowledge and understanding, the revolution is still not finished because the issues that were intended to be resolved are still present in our society today. Filipinos must be taught that the study of history is not just about gaining data and details from primary sources like archives, documents, journals, and books but also about thinking logically and interpreting this raw information to disseminate and spread it to the uninformed crowd.
Let us allow the experiences we've had in the past to serve as a guide for us as we navigate the myriad challenges and concerns that we face today. Let us realize our potential as catalysts for change and shapers of history by acknowledging the mistakes we have made, working to make improvements in the areas where we are deficient, and accepting responsibility for those mistakes. It is not yet too late for those individuals who have made the mistake of putting the wrong people in the office to be aware of the facts. Take what you can from the past, and then begin over with a new start. The real difficulty of learning history lies in discovering ways to break cycles of transgression to ensure that the present does not continue to mirror the past. It's time to flip the pages and advance towards a brighter future.
