September 21 and the Continuing Past
The contingent was initially blocked by authorities along Recto near Mendiola before proceeding with its final program. Elsewhere around the capital, police and barricades had already become part of the scenery as thousands were expected to join various September 21 demonstrations. Accountability over corruption, political dynasties and civil liberties figured prominently in the day's mobilizations.
It would be tempting to treat all this as another annual ritual: speeches, placards, the familiar chants of “Never Again,” followed by the inevitable arguments over what martial law accomplished and what it destroyed.
Yet September 21 persists precisely because the argument has never really been confined to martial law. It is also an argument over how power presents itself, how development is sold, how corruption survives political transitions and how easily the language of national salvation can become the language through which entrenched interests protect themselves.
That is why the starting point must still be 1972. Martial law was imposed with promises of order, discipline, reform and national reconstruction. What followed included widespread arrests and detention, torture, enforced disappearances and killings of people considered opponents or critics of the government. Amnesty International documented such patterns during the period; Philippine law itself later formally recognized victims of summary execution, torture, enforced disappearance and other gross human-rights violations committed under the Marcos regime.
These facts need not be embellished. Their weight is sufficient. But the more interesting question today is how such a system explained itself.
Martial law did not advertise repression as its objective. It offered instead a grander proposition: the republic had to be saved and society remade. The old political order was supposedly exhausted. Oligarchs had corrupted democracy. Disorder had become intolerable. Only a more disciplined state could sweep aside the failures of the past and construct something new.
The old society really was unequal. Oligarchic power really was a problem. Poverty, landlordism, political patronage and dependence on outside interests were not inventions of martial-law propaganda. The failure lay in claiming that concentrating political authority would solve these problems.
Instead, the attack on the old oligarchy became associated with the rise of cronies and favored interests surrounding the new regime. One arrangement of privilege gave way, in significant respects, to another.
That distinction is worth remembering because it prevents September 21 from becoming merely an argument over whether roads, hospitals or cultural buildings were constructed during the dictatorship. Of course things were built, as Governments build things. But the more serious questions concern lies in how they were financed, who benefited, what institutions were weakened in the process and whether visible construction compensated for costs carried elsewhere by the population. Concrete is an inadequate unit with which to measure political legitimacy.
The same caution applies in the present. The Philippines of 2026 is not the Philippines of 1972. There is no useful analysis in pretending that every controversy involving government is simply martial law reborn. Institutions differ, political competition exists, circumstances change and contemporary abuses require examination on their own terms. But the persistence of certain questions is difficult to ignore. Extrajudicial killings, red-tagging, alleged trumped-up charges, anti-terror laws and the treatment of political dissent have replaced some of the terminology associated with the dictatorship. They are not interchangeable phenomena, and they should not be lazily collapsed into one historical category. Yet they keep alive the older dispute over where legitimate state power ends and political coercion begins.
So does corruption. Every generation seems to discover corruption as though previous generations had somehow neglected the subject. Scandal is exposed, hearings are held, officials denounce wrongdoing, prosecutions begin and reforms are promised. A few years later the country discovers that public money has once again acquired a remarkable talent for finding its way toward private interests.
That recurring spectacle explains why corruption occupied such a prominent place in the September 21 demonstrations. The commemoration became not merely a retrospective condemnation of what happened half a century ago but a convenient occasion for asking why the political structures that permit patronage, concentrated wealth and weak accountability remain so difficult to dislodge.
Pax Silica entered the march from this direction. Opposition to it should not be mistaken for the whole protest, nor should criticism of Pax Silica be reduced to hostility toward technology or foreign investment.
The proposed initiative is tied to semiconductor manufacturing, artificial intelligence infrastructure, critical minerals and other strategic supply chains, with a major hub planned in New Clark City. Supporters see an opportunity to place the Philippines inside higher-value technological industries. Critics, including labor, environmental, church and other civil-society groups, have raised questions about control, land and water use, environmental costs and the extent to which the project aligns Philippine development with the strategic objectives of the United States.
There is a serious economic argument buried beneath the slogans. A semiconductor plant on Philippine soil is not automatically Philippine industrialization. Neither is an artificial-intelligence complex necessarily technological sovereignty. A mine producing strategic minerals may generate exports without developing downstream industry. A data center may attract capital without producing Filipino ownership of the technologies running inside it.
None of this makes such investments undesirable by definition. Foreign capital can create employment. Integration into sophisticated supply chains can expose local firms and workers to new technologies. Industrial parks, transport corridors and energy projects can become foundations for something larger.
But the outcome depends on the terms. That is the part of development policy that ribbon-cuttings tend to obscure. If land, labor, minerals, electricity and public infrastructure are supplied locally while technology, intellectual property, financing and commanding corporate decisions remain elsewhere, then the country may host advanced industry without acquiring much industrial power of its own.
The factory may be modern while the economic relationship remains old. That concern explains why Pax Silica has become useful to a broader critique of Philippine development. Protesters opposing the initiative have explicitly argued that development should occur on Philippine terms rather than those set by foreign powers and large corporations.
Whether that criticism ultimately proves justified will depend on the actual agreements, technology transfers, ownership structures, environmental obligations and industrial policies attached to the project. But the question itself is legitimate.
It is also much older than Pax Silica. Philippine governments have spent decades navigating between domestic oligarchic interests and competing foreign centers of economic and strategic power. Washington retains deep security and commercial links with Manila. Beijing has become a major economic actor and geopolitical rival. Japanese, Korean and European capital occupies important sectors. Global finance exerts its own disciplines through investment, debt and access to markets.
The danger lies in confusing movement between these interests with independence from them. For critics marching on September 21, the issue is not simply American influence, nor should it be. Replacing Washington with Beijing would hardly constitute economic sovereignty. Nor would replacing one set of foreign investors with another while leaving the basic domestic structure untouched.
The problem is less geographical than structural. Wall Street or Shanghai, Washington or Beijing: the relevant economic question is what the Philippines gains beyond the immediate transaction.
Those questions become harder to avoid when set against the conditions experienced by ordinary Filipinos.
The country has changed enormously since 1972. Cities have expanded. Industries have developed. Millions now work in sectors that hardly existed half a century ago. Infrastructure has improved, technology has transformed daily life and the Philippine economy is far larger and more complex.
Yet familiar problems remain stubbornly recognizable: insecure employment, inadequate wages, landlessness, housing shortages, unequal public services, political dynasties and recurring corruption.
This persistence gives every new language of transformation a burden of proof. There was once the New Society. Later governments had their own formulas for national recovery, modernization and reform. "Philippines 2000", "Angat Pinoy 2004", "Daang Matuwid", and more recently came "Build, Build, Build" and now "Bagong Pilipinas". Every administration naturally requires a vocabulary with which to explain itself.
The trouble begins when vocabulary substitutes for examination. Order is not necessarily justice. Discipline is not necessarily consent. Investment is not necessarily industrialization. Infrastructure is not necessarily development. Stability is not necessarily legitimacy.
Nor does questioning these terms require rejecting what they can genuinely accomplish.A useful road remains useful. A functioning railway improves lives. A productive factory creates employment. Foreign partnerships can serve Philippine interests. Public authority is necessary for any functioning society.
The point is precisely to distinguish the thing itself from the political mythology built around it. A road can be necessary and overpriced. A factory can create jobs while transferring little technology. A foreign partnership can be mutually beneficial or profoundly unequal. An administration can construct useful public works and still deserve scrutiny for abuses committed elsewhere.
One does not cancel the other. That is also why arguments defending martial law by listing infrastructure have always been inadequate. They treat repression and development as entries in the same ledger, as though enough bridges might eventually balance an enforced disappearance.
For the families of those arrested, tortured, killed or never seen again, September 21 necessarily means something more intimate than a historical debate over economic statistics. The Philippine state has already recognized that such violations occurred.
For the rest of the country, however, the date poses a different challenge. It asks how a political order promising to destroy oligarchy could produce new concentrations of privilege; how repression could be marketed as discipline; and how policies presented as national development could coexist with enormous private accumulation and continuing poverty.
Those are historical questions, but they are not antiquarian ones. The Marcos dictatorship did not invent inequality, oligarchy or foreign dependence. Its overthrow did not eliminate them. EDSA restored democratic institutions without magically resolving the political economy beneath them. Subsequent administrations operated within many of the same unresolved structures, even as each modified them in important ways.
That is the more sober meaning of a “continuing past.” History does not simply repeat 1972. It does something more complicated. Old problems survive while acquiring new institutions, new personalities and new slogans.
The result is not another New Society but the recurring temptation to believe that political concentration can cure political failure, that foreign alignment can substitute for national strategy, or that impressive construction can settle the argument over who actually benefits from development.
This does not mean that nothing has changed since martial law. Much has. It means instead that democratic memory is most useful when it does more than remember villains and victims. It should also examine the arrangements that made abuse politically possible and economic dependence durable.
“Never Again” remains an important warning. But perhaps the harder lesson of September 21 is that the past rarely announces its return under its old name.
It usually arrives rephrased for the present.