EDITORIAL

7 September 1992

SCHZOPHRENIA

THE world would be outraged and scandalized if the Vatican were to proclaim Judas Iscariot a saint for the good things that he presumably did as one of the 12 Apostles before he betrayed Jesus Christ. It is this kind of outrage and scandal that is courted by those people advocating full state honors for the remains of the late Ferdinand Marcos, whose presidency they proclaim but whose dictatorship they ignore.

Full state honors are given to a whole man and to his achievements over the span of his entire life -- and since no man is wholly good or wholly evil, the decision to give full state honors must be based on a judicious balancing of the good and evil attributed to the man.

We use the word attributed to stress the point that good or evil too often is in the eye of the beholder. To law-and-order types, Mr. Marcos' declaration of martial law stopped the country's plunge into the chaos of lawlessness; to human-rights types, that same act plunged the country into the chaos of government-sponsored criminality. Obviously, Mr. Marcos is loved by those who thrived during his rule, but not by those who were impoverished because Mr. Marcos and his cronies thrived.

The persons advocating full state honors for Mr. Marcos ignore the fact that those who were impoverished during his rule vastly outnumber those who were enriched. The people who suffered under Marcos may not be enthusiastic about his successors, but their lack of enthusiasm should not be interpreted as a longing for the return of the Marcos era or as a vindication of the way Mr. Marcos ruled. Their suffering during the Marcos regime is a strong, empirically-based refutation of the schizophrenic argument that the country should honor Mr. Marcos for his good deeds while forgetting his bad ones.

The fallacy of this schizophrenic argument lies in the fact that it is selective and, for this reason, intellectually dishonest. It leaves to the commentator the choice of concentrating on the evil deeds of a person he dislikes and the good deeds of the person he likes.

Following this schizophrenic concept of history, supporters of President Ramos and, for that matter, Rep. Juan Ponce Enrile hail their role at EDSA but ignore what they did as martial-law administrators, while the critics of these gentlemen do exactly the opposite. In fact, the way these gentlemen and all our other political leaders will be treated in our history books will depend on a final balancing of the good that they did against the evil that they did. It will not depend on a selective reading of their histories.

In the meantime, the advocates of full state honors for Mr. Marcos should be reminded that they are doing him a disservice when they portray him as a man with a good side (including heroism at battles where he was not present) and a bad side and then argue that we must honor only his good side. This contention unfairly presents Mr. Marcos as a schizophrenic Dr. Jekyll-and-Mr. Hyde and fallaciously argues that we must honor Dr. Jekyll while hiding the crimes of Mr. Hyde.

It would be far better for Mr. Marcos' supporters to accept that he did good things as well as bad things - and to argue that the good things outweigh the bad. If they do this, it will be far easier for our people to achieve a more balanced evaluation of the Marcos era and to give the man his rightful place in our history.

And who knows? Perhaps Mr. Marcos will one day be hailed as a national hero the way Napoleon is in France. Of course, it will take time - just as it will take some time before the American people rehabilitates Benedict Arnold on the ground that his heroism at the capture of Fort Ticonderoga and at the Battle of Saratoga outweighs his later defection to the British.