By tyrant.marcos on Skatehive
CHAPTER 5Martial Law and BeyondHow the Dictator Usurped PowerAt his inaugural address as the sixth president of the Philippine Republic on December 30, 1965, at Luneta Park in Manila, Ferdinand Marcos proclaimed: “We must rise from the depths of ignominy and failure. Our government is gripped in the iron hand of venality, its treasury is barren, its resources are wasted, its civil service is slothful and indifferent, its armed forces demoralized and its councils sterile.” His election, he stated, “is a new mandate of leadership. It is…a mandate not merely for change. It is a mandate for greatness…Come then, let us march together towards the dream of greatness.”1In the same speech, he invoked the nation's overthrow of three hundred years of Spanish colonial rule that began in 1521, and the establishment of the first republic in Asia in 1898. Left unsaid was that the republic was short-lived. Some months earlier, the United States had declared war on Spain, ostensibly for blowing up an A