Veiled apologetics and insurgent nostalgia: Sociogenesis of contested memories of the Marcos dictatorship

Abstract

Across many nascent democracies, living historical memories of past conflicts are vulnerable to contestation. Past scholarship explains such mnemonic dissonances as the outcome of either broad cultural scripts or top-down political maneuvering. Building on these insights, we utilize the concept of sociogenesis to show how contested memories are semiotically mediated within institutional and informal spaces. Across two studies, we employ mixed methods designs to examine social representations of the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines, using (a) nationally endorsed history textbooks (N = 86 pages), and (b) online comments (N = 9605) on public YouTube videos (N = 978). We find that textbooks construct the dictatorship in terms of veiled apologetics, leveraging representational strategies of balanced reportage to commensurate the dictatorship's legacies of abuse against contributions to economic and infrastructure programs. Meanwhile, social media messages represent the regime in terms of insurgent nostalgia, which yearns for a mythologized past under the strongman Marcos in rejection of an elite-coded democratic present. We discuss implications of our findings for broader social psychological discussions of living historical memories in the context of structural fragility, linking to related debates on critical history education, digital democracy, and the resurgence of authoritarianism locally and worldwide.

Grappling with polarization on Wikipedia: the case of the biography of Ferdinand E. Marcos

“…The educational apparatus in the Philippines must also share in the blame for allowing the image of Marcos to be rehabilitated. In an examination of history textbooks authorized by the Department of Education, Joshua Uyheng found that the Marcos regime was portrayed in a positive light using a discourse of what he and his fellow authors label “veiled apologetics,” a term they define as the set of “consistent yet subtle ways in which seemingly balanced reportage is employed in positively representing the actions of the Marcos regime” (Uyheng et al ., 2021), but is it not only textbook authors and government officials at fault here. As Aguilar (2019) points out, the academic community too has been rather laggard in producing works of scholarship on the Marcos years [1].…”

If the past weighs on the present, then the present also weighs on the past: Collective remembering as an open system for human science

“…Unlike in Germany, where National Socialism is unapologetically narrated as an evil dictatorship, "textbooks portray the early opposition as protesting for freedom against the unjust rule of the Marcos administration, they also simultaneously portray the Marcos administration as justified in taking violent action in order to quell the revolt and to protect the wider public" (p. 340). In their second study, Uyheng et al (2021) examined 987 YouTube videos and identified a prominent feature of these accounts as "insurgent nostalgia." The Marcos dictatorship is portrayed as a lost golden age, contrasting with the failed and "oligarchic" elite governance that followed.…”