A BLINDFOLDED comfort woman, covered from hair to heel, anxiously grips her clothes to herself as she stands along Roxas Boulevard. The statue was constructed by Tulay Foundation, a Chinese-Filipino group.
Even as the image stands, its subject matter is avoided by the countries who have surrounded it with controversy. Japan expressed its disappointment at the Philippine government for allowing the monument to be built while Filipino officials, from the local level to the highest echelons of office, scrambled to point fingers at one another.
Neither governments have uttered the keywords “rape,” “sex slavery,” “war crime,” “reparation,” as they try to de-escalate the tension that the statue has caused. Why do both parties refuse to tackle the heart of the issue?
Social anthropologist Paul Connerton identifies various types of forgetting in the field of memory studies. “Repressive erasure” is a type of forgetting which explains the state’s exclusion of certain people or events from national memory. Connerton locates the first appearance of such state activity in ancient Rome when the memory of any declared state enemy was banned from national consciousness. Citizens declared to be enemies of the Roman state forfeited their place in national memory.
Monuments are often fashioned to serve as lifelines to memory, and so the Roman state would take them down when they no longer wanted their subjects to be remembered. The absence of commemoration in image and inscription work to sever the line between past and present.
Modern day Japan has carried out the repressive erasure of their World War II (WWII) crimes from national memory. Their education system barely makes room for 20th century history, painting an inaccurate picture of the extent of the war crimes their country committed throughout WWII. Japan has propagated a revisionist recalling of the war, denying the existence of their system of sexual slavery which victimised hundreds of thousands of “comfort women.”
When a similar comfort woman statue came to stand in San Francisco, Japan proceeded to cut its sister ties with the city. It should have come as no surprise that Japan would be quick to contend the new monument along Roxas Boulevard.
However, Japan does not hold the monopoly on repressive erasure. While monuments and inscriptions can work to commemorate, Connerton asserts that they can also impede memory when they offer an alternative, rendering of the truth.
The corpse and the cardboard sign
“Drug pusher, ‘wag tularan (do not imitate)” are words that have spread throughout national consciousness along with the image of corpses laid across streets. Even as vigilantes, championed by the sitting President, implement real time developments on the war on drugs, the police denies the occurrence of extrajudicial killings (EJKs). Malacañang has denied its involvement in the vigilante killings and has rejected the multiple calls of international organizations to conduct a probe.
The current administration has also been intimidating human rights advocates here and abroad. Congressional allies have even pulled off a stunt by moving to give the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) a useless PHP 1,000 budget.
Currently, the CHR claims that they do not have access to important files relating to the drug war. The family of a number of EJK victims have claimed that their loved ones were not involved with drugs and yet a chunk of the population insists that this is solely a war on drug addicts and drug pushers. How can these factual contentions be resolved without trial and transparency?
The cardboard sign that accompanies the bodies of EJK victims serves as that crude inscription, symbolic of the lack of due process and transparency in this drug war. Surveys show that there is large support for this administration’s war on drugs, but many also fear that someone they know will soon become a victim of extrajudicial killing. Without transparency, there is no way to assuage their fears.
When the law remembers
Across the globe, there are states that have turned remembering into policy. Germany refuses to forget, and thereby run the risk of repeating, the horrors of WWII. As a proactive measure, there are places of memory across the country. Germans continually encounter monuments, plaques, and a publicly available list of concentration camps as they go about their lives. Some students are even required to visit concentration camps.
Alternatively, remembrance and memory can be so contentious that, in the United States, a Civil War monument caused a rally and a counter-protest that intensified into a violent clash. The American Civil War, from 1861 to 1865, was fought between Confederate states, who opposed the abolition of slavery, and the Union under President Abraham Lincoln.
White nationalists rallied in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 2017 to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee who was a well-known Confederate general during the war. The march was littered with neo-Nazi sentiment, ringing with the political party’s traditional slogans like “blood and soil” and “Jews will not replace us,” complete with confederate flags flying in defiance. Counter protesters came out to meet the marchers and it turned violent, almost reminiscent of the Civil War a hundred years past.
When Germany was beginning to form an idea of the state under the Nazi party’s control, they looked to the institutionalized racism of the Jim Crow laws in America which were legislated to enforce segregation. After bloodied campaigns, the Civil War and the Second World War, against both racist tendencies, parts of America seem to have in some way regressed back to their old ways. Nazi Germany once looked to America’s Jim Crow laws. Today, American white supremacy takes its cues from the German state of the 20th Century.
In the Philippines, the Rizal Law is the most significant piece of legislation geared towards upholding national memory. The Republic Act 1425 requires all schools to include the reading of Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo in the curriculum.
This bill gives students the opportunity to come into contact with a nuanced representation of what Filipino life was like under Spanish rule. The potential of such an encounter is made even more profound by the fact that the same Rizal texts played a part in moving the Filipinos of centuries ago to pursue freedom at all costs.
However, in 1956, the Rizal bill was originally met with staunch opposition from the Catholic Church. High-ranking clergy members condemned the bill as a dangerous and unnecessary rehashing of the past. Catholic universities threatened to close down rather than teach the two novels which they accused of rendering a biased depiction of church abuse. Catholic academics also accused their liberal counterparts, who were in favor of the Rizal Law, of heresy and communism.
Rizal’s novels are places of memory. However, the Spanish occupation ended 120 years ago and a number of commemorable events have occured in between.
The Philippines would do well to take cues from Germany in the effort to actively remember a very eventful 20th Century—one whose loaded issues have yet to be resolved. More urgently, there is a danger that current events are not being truthfully represented by this administration and run the risk of not being properly remembered.
