ABSTRACT
Revisiting the question, “how could the same society that expelled the Marcos family in 1986 elect the dictator's son to the presidency in 2022?” this concluding chapter synthesizes findings from across the volume, using the 2016 burial of Ferdinand Marcos Sr. at the Libingan ng mga Bayani as the convergence point where the dynamics documented in individual chapters become visible in relation to one another. The answer confounds scholarly expectations. Democratic institutions themselves became vehicles for rehabilitation, their standard procedures exploited to honor a dictator and marginalize his victims. Factual correction failed because memory operated through affect, embodiment, and regional identity rather than information. Digital platforms amplified distortion but did not create it; the infrastructure was built decades earlier through monuments, textbooks, and institutional capture. The memory architecture that the Marcos regime constructed was never dismantled after 1986. Three decades later, it enabled the very restoration that the democratic transition was meant to foreclose. The Philippine case reveals that how societies remember their authoritarian past shapes not only present politics but also whether such pasts can be reinstantiated in the future.
