BONGBONG MARCOS: 'THE FAULT OF THE FATHER IS NOT THE FAULT OF THE SON'

by Philip M. Lustre Jr.

The frequent alibi of Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr., his loyalist trolls and apologists could be summed up by the following words: The fault of the dictator father is not the fault of the mediocre son.

Ergo, Bongbong Marcos should not be associated with the crimes committed by his father and the dictatorship. The father and son are two different and distinct individuals, they argue.

Let me answer this issue by narrating the story of Otto Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi German, who was the assistant of Heyrich Reinhard, whom Heinrich Himmler assigned to enforce the Final Solution, or the total extermination of the Jews in the Second World War.

Himmler was the head of Schutzshapel, or SS. He was the No. 3 in the Nazi Party hierarchy after Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goehring. 

Shortly after the war, Himmler escaped but was captured by the Allied forces. He took cyanide while in captivity.

Heyrich, the notorious "butcher of Prague," was one of the architects of the Final Solution, which was approved in Wannsbee Conference in 1942. Czech Resistance forces ambushed him and he later died in a hospital. 

He was replaced by Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who was among those hanged in the first Nuremberg trials.

Eichmann, who had a rank of lieutenant colonel in the SS, the militia arm of the Nazi Party, worked to provide the logistical support for the transport of those Jews captured in various Nazi occupied parts of Europe en route to the gas chambers of Auschwitz in Poland. 

Millions of Jews were gassed and killed there

Immediately after the war, Eichmann ran away and disappeared. He did not face the victors of the last world. 

Obviously, he was afraid of the victors' justice.

Eichmann went to Argentina assuming a fake identity and using a fake passport issued by the International Red Cross.

Finally, the Nazi hunters under the relatively new Israeli government tracked him down in a suburb of Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina.

The Mossad, the Israeli equivalent of the CIA kidnapped him in 1960 and brought him to Tel Aviv, Israel's capital, for trial.

Eichmann faced charges of crimes against humanity for causing the death of millions of Jews. He was hanged the following year.

I narrated this story because his son, Ricardo, who later became a professor of archaelogy in Germany (his family returned to Germany after his execution), never blamed Israel for the execution of his father.

Ricardo Eichmann was level headed to acknowledge the crimes of his father, who was an unrepentant Nazi even during their exile in Argentina.

Bongbong Marcos should learn to acknowledge the crimes of his father, but he could not do it.

On the contrary, he keeps on projecting his innocence and even takes pride of being a Marcos.

What he has been doing is hurting our collective sensitivity as people.

How come Bongbong Marcos could not acknowledge the crimes of his father and even take glee for being a Marcos?

I have been trying to figure out the answer for years until I came across the concept of "desk murderer" in the classic book "Justice, Not Vengeance", authored by Simon Wiesenthal, the celebrated Nazi hunter, who tracked down key Nazi leaders, who escaped from Germany.

Desk murderers had no heart, conscience, or feeling. 

Despite presiding over the death of millions of innocent people, whose only fault in life was to be born Jews, they were not de-personalized to feel any sense of shame, guilt, or discomfort of those crimes.

On the contrary, they gloated for their crimes against humanity. A Nazi leader even had a scrapbook containing pictures of Jews exterminated; he had the gall to describe those years of extermination as the "best part" of his life.

Bongbong Marcos could be likened to those of Nazi Germany desk murderers. He even takes pride of being the son of a dictator, although he is a mediocre version of the evil genius.