The Conjugal Dictatorship of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos standard. On the other hand, Meldy, the OLD beauty queen, has also completed her second “face-lifting” which, reportedly, raised her navel to a dimple on her chin. While the dimple looks cute on her chin, the “lifting” created a new “unexpected problem”. It seems that everything else of Meldy has been raised up in proportion to her navel, and Ferdie now has to search “elsewhere” to find what he can no longer find in Meldy.
Chapter XI Philippine 'Gulag': A Paralysis of Fear A telling evidence on the repressive character of the military dictatorship of Marcos is the unending interment of thousands of political prisoners in various military stockades and concentration camps all over the Philippines. The truth is that the entire Philippines is one vast "Gulag Archipelago" where the Filipinos, whether inside or outside a military stockade, are subjected to continuing deprivation of their civil rights, some of them suffering cruel and unjust punishments in the hands of verdugos. The undermining effect of the military concentration camps on Filipino society constitutes an open and apparently unhealing wound, but at this stage it would be difficult to quantify the national tragedy represented by the indiscriminate detention without charges of non-supporters and opponents of the Marcos military regime, or the influence it continues to have in ordinary Philippine life. For as long as Marcos rules as a dictator backed by the military, the horror of internment of political prisoners would go on and on. And like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, I must apologize to those whose plight I may be unable to reproduce in this work for I am unable to remember or acquire knowledge of every incident, every injustice, every cruelty of the regime, of which I was a part and which I have renounced. As Solzhenitsyn wrote, "The whole scope of this story, and of the truth, is beyond the capabilities of one lonely pen." While still working for Marcos as his chief press censor, I have had occasions to look into the isolated cases of political prisoners. One of them was the case of Liliosa Hilao, whose death was brought to my attention two days after it happened by her own sister. I did bring this matter to the attention of President Marcos, but he never saw it fit to inform me about the action he had taken on the most glaring "atrocity ever committed on a political prisoner under the martial regime. The matter of political prisoners has always been a source of monumental embarrassment for Marcos. He even earned the sobriquet of "lying dictator" for his many prevarications on the issue of prisoners of conscience. That the Marcos military regime has adopted as part of its official policy the shameless resort to prevarications, falsifications and even bribery of a congressional witness, to mislead or prevent the United States and other foreign governments from gaining full knowledge, on political repression and tyranny in the Primitivo Mijares
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