"A country without memory is a country of madmen," wrote George Santayana, the Spanish-American 20th century man of letters. I hope his words cannot apply to the Philippines and its forthcoming presidential elections, but I suspect they might well. Thirty years after the plunder of billions of dollars from the national treasury under the rule of former Philippines president Ferdinand Marcos - not to mention mass torture, murder and the curtailment of civil liberties under the martial law he imposed - there is the prospect of a scion of the Marcos family once again ending up at the upper reaches of power in the country.
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