Description
Taped on November 17, 1977. The Philippines were five years into President Marcos' martial law and looking forward--although with some skepticism--to elections for a new National Assembly within the next year or so. (As it turned out, the elections were held, but in the context of martial law, and Mr. Marcos' party won handily.) Meanwhile, Mr. Marcos tells us, Filipinos were rethinking their place in the world, in the light both of their own history and of recent developments such as the death of Chairman Mao and the Carter Administration's rumblings about our defense commitments. A perhaps surprisingly rich discussion--embattled heads of state are not always very forthcoming--ranging from the need "for the Filipino--especially the Filipino who was educated in Western ways--to retrace his roots, and retracing his roots, of course, he discovered that he was Asian," to the achievement of Mao Tse-tung ("the unification of the Chinese people, a people divided, isolated, degraded, colonized, a people that was marked as a sleeping giant even by Napoleon"), to the reasons democracy has not thriven in the Philippines ("We tried to get used to it and we--my predecessors--somehow convinced you that we were democratic, but we all knew that this was some kind of a mask which we had put over our face. We were trying to ape you and yet we didn't have the basic requirements--education, distribution of wealth, economic equality, equal opportunity, and the most important, believing in it"). Summary by Firing Line staff.