The Year I Learned History Was Not Finished
Blogpost written by Paola Lee - the Philippines.
The first time I heard the word ‘dictatorship’, I was eating dinner. Not in school, not from a documentary. My grandparents said it casually, the way people mention typhoons they survived years ago. Someone brought up rice prices. Someone laughed about old campaign jingles. Then my grandfather said, quietly, “During martial law, people learned to speak carefully.” The sentence stayed with me longer than the dates did.
History books often describe dictatorships through headlines and numbers. But when older people talk about them, the details are smaller and stranger. My grandparents remembered neighbors lowering their voices at night. They remembered newspapers suddenly sounding identical. They remembered learning which conversations should never leave the house. What unsettled me later was how ordinary fear sounded after enough time had passed.
When I was younger, I thought history was something completed. Colonization, wars, revolutions, martial law. Separate chapters. Finished events. Then I got older and realized history does not end. It simply adapts and repeats.
In 2022, during the Philippine presidential election, I was fourteen and already exhausted by politics. I lived in a rural community where political opinions attached themselves to entire families. Everyone seemed to know who you supported before you even spoke. At school, whenever I tried discussing politics seriously, someone eventually laughed and said the same thing: “You're just a kid.”
At first, I tried speaking more carefully. Then I tried speaking less. Neither worked. People are uncomfortable when young people become politically aware too early, especially girls, especially girls from places where silence is usually treated as respect. But curiosity is difficult to reverse once it begins.
That election year, I spent many nights reading beyond my teachers’ assignments.. Articles about martial law, survivor testimonies, reports about disinformation campaigns online. I sat beneath a weak fluorescent light while my phone loaded pages slowly through an unstable internet, feeling as though I had stumbled into conversations adults accidentally left unfinished.
What interested me most was not individual events, but repetition. The same words kept appearing across decades: order, discipline, unity, protection. History rarely introduces itself as history while it is happening. That realization frightened me. What frightened me more was how easily people adjusted to violence once it became familiar.
During Duterte’s war on drugs, thousands of Filipinos were killed, many from poor communities. Images of bodies on sidewalks circulated online so frequently that people sometimes scrolled past them between dance videos and celebrity gossip. Sometimes there would be cardboard signs beside the bodies accusing them of crimes, sometimes commenters celebrated their deaths openly. I kept wondering how a country could become accustomed to that, then I realized every generation probably asks the same question.
When I started reading about other countries and other periods in history, the similarities became difficult to ignore. Different governments, different languages, but very similar patterns.
Authoritarian governments do not appear overnight fully formed. They begin with propaganda, dehumanization of “the other”, and a systematic convincing of ordinary citizens that certain lives matter less. That requires repetition and exhaustion in order for people to become accustomed to things they once considered unacceptable. This thought changed the way I understood history, completely.
Before, I thought evil announced itself clearly. Now I think it often sounds administrative. It arrives through policies, slogans, statistics, patriotic speeches, and people convinced that cruelty is necessary for stability. I also began questioning the religion I grew up with. In the Philippines, Christianity shapes almost everything: politics, education, family, even the language people use to describe morality. For years, I accepted that framework automatically because everyone around me did too. Then I started noticing contradictions.
Politicians quoted scripture while defending violence, public figures spoke about compassion while treating entire groups of people as disposable. Online, I watched commentators reduce human suffering with a kind of terrifying certainty. That was when I understood intelligence and morality are not the same thing. So I kept reading: Elie Wiesel, Hannah Arendt, Svetlana Alexievich.
What affected me most was not the scale of history, but its intimacy. Fear was present in ordinary conversations and activities: a child memorizing which streets were safe, a family instinctively lowering their voices. History survives through the atmosphere before it survives through textbooks. And maybe that is why reading is so important: books allowed me to recognize patterns before they fully repeated themselves completely.
Books taught me that curiosity is not just academic. For some people, especially those living inside unstable systems, curiosity becomes a form of survival. The ability to question what everyone else has accepted — I think about that often as someone from a low-income background. People romanticize resilience when they have never depended on it. They talk about hard work as though everybody begins from the same distance. But poverty narrows our world constantly, teaching us practicality before imagination, so curiosity feels expensive. Yet despite that, young people everywhere continue searching for answers anyway. That matters to me.
A teenager in Southeast Asia, another in Eastern Europe, another in Latin America, another in Africa. Different counties, same frustrations: corruption, inequality, unstable political systems, leaders who underestimate young people while shaping their futures anyway. None of us chose the systems we inherited. But eventually we still have to decide whether we will question them. I do not think history is finished because I see its patterns repeating constantly — online, during elections, in the way people talk about migrants, poor communities, activists, journalists, minorities. Sometimes the repetition is obvious, sometimes it hides itself inside irony, memes, or patriotic language. Either way, it persists.
History has never waited for people to become older before affecting them. So I read, I pay attention, I ask difficult questions even when doing so makes other people uncomfortable. Because if history teaches anything, it is that silence has consequences too.
Thumbnail Photo credit: Dianne Concha via Pexels
About the author:
Paola Lee (INFJ-T), 18, is a Filipina writer, collector of contradictions, and independent researcher passionate about advocacy, literature, and politically engaged storytelling. In her freetime, she writes creative nonfiction and poetry, usually circling themes of memory, identity, girlhood, inequality, and survival. Her work appears or is forthcoming in the Thieving Magpie, Perspektif Magazine, Eunoia Review, Bluemarble Review, among others. She is a participant of Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program for Nonfiction and the Kenyon Young Writers Workshop. She currently works with Aetherium Literary, Florescence Magazine, The Mixtape Review, as well as part of the Community of Practice at Youth Transforming Narratives while living somewhere between fluorescent light, unfinished questions, and the Philippines.