On Proposed Military Honors Burial: Rights Lawyers Say: As Always, Shameless

PRESS STATEMENT

10 June 2011

On Proposed Marcos Military Honors Burial

Rights Lawyers Say: As Always, Shameless

Oxy-moronic, the National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers said on the proposal to give military honors to the late Ferdinand Marcos who is universally regarded as a dictator and criminal.

Actually an attempt to combine two terms, oxymoron and moronic, this self-made coinage first springs to mind when coming to terms to a dictator’s burial under this government’s formula.

That Marcos the butcher seems to be headed for a burial of course should be good for his hometown’s health issues, if his cadaver were genuine and not just a wax figure. But to be buried with full military honors?  The idea sounds surreal and weird, but at the same time, odious.

Military honors, just like military intelligence, rivet the mind. Can this be possible? To begin with, do they exist? But military honors are just as incredibly opposite terms. Generations of  generals and chiefs of staff, an insider, the treasurer, calls them thieves. His reportage does not depict an isolated instance of greed but a wholesale institutionalized rapacity .

So is there anything significant from being accorded military honors? Not much we must say. Perhaps the exception is simply the singular distinction of being awarded congratulatory pats by thieves.

We really could not care less about Marcos being kept among the company of his cohorts in the military. They are simply one and the same, identical twins through and through. They are fullthroated poster boys and girls of everything that injustice has been associated with. So indeed go ahead bury Marcos with the pomp and pageantry of military honors, it surely does not matter.

According Marcos his military honors would be wasting the peoples’ money extorted through taxes on a boondoggle. This intended event is a splurge that certainly could have been put to beneficial uses. Adding the money up to the pot for lotto winnings would have more moral values than spending them for a lanyard in Marcos’ funeral procession. 

The State’s participation in dressing up a cadaver of ghoulish symbolisms is by any measure a foul deed.  It teaches wrong values. It educates a wrong message. It stultifies the mind and soul to believe that in this part of the planet, a butcher and thief invariably gets to be a hero someday, courtesy not the least from an incredible number of supposed representatives of the people who, from the glare and height of their temporary pedestals,  have shamelessly turned blind overnight to history and from a top-level government official that rationalizes what is politically expedient to what is right and moral.

The bourgeoisie led by the current President relishes the world’s salutation of our history of people power. Yet his government plays a conspirator’s to the destruction of this same image by adoring the villain that its bourgeois power play had purportedly disposed of.

Marcos can very well have the military honors he and his cohorts want. We will not lose sleep over it. They can fire their guns a million or even a billion times to praise and kiss the behind to bid adieu to a dictator, butcher, thief and plunderer rolled into one. They can stage the pageantry they wish to enact. But leave the peoples’ money out of it. And do not distort what this plan is all about – this taut story of musical chair among leaders where only names and tags change but always absent the commitment to the genuine overthrow of the system of abuse and exploitation.

It is embarrassing to be debating this oxymoron. Actually it is shameful to be even  making known our position again on this middling topic. Oxy-moronic, the combination of oxymoron and moronic behavior, for as Marcos and the thieves and fascists in the military bear the same feathers, let them flock together.#

Reference: Atty. Edre U. Olalia

Secretary General

0917-5113373