“NEVER again” was what most Filipinos who are old enough to remember Martial Law under Ferdinand Marcos would have replied if you asked them about the chances of martial law being declared ever again. Now it has happened. The problem is that the term martial law has always been used as a synonym, a euphemism to refer to the Marcos dictatorship. And make no mistake, it was a dictatorship. The fact that the younger generation seems to know little about it and some of the older generation still refer to Ferdinand Marcos as the best President the country has ever had is a problem of what the Germans call Vergangenheitsbewältigung, that is, properly dealing with the past. The German lexicon defines Vergangenheitsbewältigung as “public debate within a country on a problematic period of its recent history”. Sadly, Vergangenheitsbewältigung has never happened here. This is why people get confused about the term martial law. Is it the beginning of a new dictatorship? Is it just a legal instrument, a toothless tiger?