Woods are dark and deep and GMA’s promises sleep

(Last of three parts)

There is an eerie similarity between the Weimar Republic of Germany 1919-1933 and post-World War II Philippines 1945-2002. The governments of both countries were carved out of seemingly sturdy republican marble fetched by history from the French Revolution of 1789 and the American Declaration of Human Rights. Then the Big Droop came. In Germany, two ideological tides clashed, the left-wing humanist socialism of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg, and the ultra-right wing Nazi philosophy of Adolph Hitler and his Aryan super-racists. In the Philippines, the political pot boiled with a vengeance as Ferdinand Marcos in 1972 scuttled democracy and set up a ruthless dictatorship very much like that of Argentina’s Juan Peron. Marcos would be a feudal emperor.

The assassination of Liebknecht and Luxembourg by German Freikorps officers would find its counterpart in the murder of Benigno (Ninoy) Aquino in 1983 by Marcos’ military cutthroats. In both countries, it was obvious Western-style democracy wasn’t working. In Germany it led to the Mein Kampf of Hitler, the tramp of German armies all over Europe, the crushing defeat of Nazism. In the Philippines, a porous and fragile democracy in 1972 led to martial rule. Two People Power "revolutions" (1986 and 2001, just five years apart) toppled brazenly corrupt presidents. But somehow unlike Germany after Hitler, with Helmut Kohl reuniting East and West Germany and igniting the German economic locomotive all over again within a strong-fisted free-market, the Philippines has lapsed back into the social turbulence of the Weimar Republic. The groping is back. A reborn Ninoy Aquino is nowhere to be found.

There is savage political wrangling. The economy, like that of Weimar, is cracking up like brittle earth during a long drought. There is widespread poverty, like that of a defeated Germany brought to its knees by the Treaty of Versailles. The adventurers are out like a beeswarm in the Philippines today. Self-anointed messiahs abound. They are largely military officers or ex-officers now ensconced in the Senate or in vociferous retirement. Like the parliament of Weimar, like that of the Third or Fourth Republics of France, our Congress has skedaddled itself into a can of worms. Both houses are utterly corrupt, unworthy of the people’s mandate. The once-august Senate is now a disgraceful market of feuding fishwives. People wouldn’t mind if Congress disappears overnight. All around crime sweeps into virtually all neighborhoods like so many packs of wolves.

No fault of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo as we have so often underscored in this space. She is an accident of history and political fallout, tumbling into our midst, a classical economist when what the nation needs is a Superman to clear the swamps that date back to 50 years ago.

In the first two columns of this series, we have assiduously explained what was wrong. In this third and last piece, we have to fashion the tools to cope. We harken to the recent collective voice of Nobel Prize laureates in Stockholm: "The most profound danger to world peace in the coming years will stem not from the irrational acts of state or individuals but from the legitimate demands of the world’s dispossessed. If then . . . we invited a conflagration that can engulf both rich and poor . . . If, in addition, the poor are voiceless, they may well be induced to speak through violence. Particularly if their predicament is aggravated by the environmental carelessness of the rich."

There you are. The voicelessness of the poor. The carelessness of the rich and powerful. These are the wise men of Stockholm speaking, the intellectual elite of that extraordinary nobility — the Nobel nobility. They warn of the same social conflagration I have repeatedly trumpeted in this column, a conflagration that could very well erupt sometime this year or the next — at the latest. In this context, the tools employed by civil society in People Power I and People Power II will be utterly inadequate. Irrelevant. For these tools take aim at individuals occupying the citadels of power in Malacañang. They zeroed on Ferdinand Marcos and took him out. They closed in on Joseph Estrada and booted him out.

But they never rooted out the evils of the system or the system itself. And these remain like the blood-sucking vampires they have always been.

The energy that will explode the social volcano this time will not come from so-called civil society taking aim at a corrupt president. It will come from the voiceless poor, our "wretched of the earth" taking aim at a "democracy" that has enslaved them. They are our masses huddled like animals in thousands of squatter villages, inserted into the lie of the land like roaches in holes and creepers under rocks. Now they will not be ignored anymore. They are no longer in our palm-fringed provinces blessed in the image of God but in our cities, millions of them cursed by the reverse image of Mammon.

Can we stop them? I don’t think we can. Anymore than they could stop the hungry hordes of Argentina from exploding these recent weeks.

And when they move like the breakers of a sea, it is likely the government in Malacañang will not be able to cope. It will collapse. For beyond looting supermarkets all over the metropolis, and stocks of rice and food in warehouses, they could also riot and stampede, overturn cars, burn public buildings as the youth and studentry did in Jakarta not so long ago, lay siege on the gated villages of the rich in Makati, and hunt down their perceived enemies. And there lies the danger. The only force that can stop them is the military aided by the police. A vacuum of power will emerge. Our politicians will very probably take flight. Our rich shiver behind the musketry of their armed village vigilantes.

The only force that can theoretically fill the vacuum is the military. For that is a constitutional duty. Restore peace and order.

But a military taking over would be catastrophe. Military regimes are a thing of the past, a fossil. The caudillos and liders maxima were in their turn easily swept aside by history in the 80s. The military turned out to be even more corrupt, a complete stranger to the technology of wealth-creating power and modern governance, bigger killers and murderers even. The finer points of egalitarianism were lost to them. And they became utterly drunk with power. Remember the military-backed Marcos dictatorship? Remember General Fabian Ver? Remember Col. Rolando Abadilla, one of whose famous protégés is now Sen. Panfilo Lacson? Remember the military rampage on human rights?

That military must be prevented at all costs from killing the demonstrators, preempting the vacuum and taking over power. Then you have civil war. For the political fascisti will step in stride on the way to Malacañang, and you know who they all are. They head the narcotics gangs, the smuggling syndicates, the kidnap syndicates. I am not amazed at all why crimes and killings abound today and why they remain unsolved, why Malacañang does not stir at all.

Rummaging through history has helped this writer a lot, international history, our history. This is largely why I conceived the Freedom Force just recently. An alternative to military rule must be found. A temporary alternative to our rotten, corrupt and debased political system must also be found. This alternative is an interim or provisional government with the blessings of or supported by the Church, civil society, the business community, the youth, the women, the studentry. The military. In the interim, anywhere from six months to a year or two, Congress will be dissolved. Emergency rule will be resorted to root out and punish the nation’s top crooks and criminals. Perhaps a People’s Court could help do the job.

We Filipinos have waited too long, dawdled too long, equivocated too long. We have allowed evil to enter our gates, men from the dark rather than men from the temples. They fooled us and ruled us for decades, cheated us and robbed us of our birthright. They have installed apartheid, yes the horrors of apartheid in this once gentle land of song, festivity and prayer. And pretended it was democracy. They tarnished our Christianity and other religions. They sent us hooting and moaning like wanderers in a republic we thought was ours, crippled and sank food-gathering vessels in a once lush and bountiful sea. We have to right these wrongs. We must.

That is what Freedom Force is all about. The military, the police will have no choice but to support this Force if they love the motherland. For even as it amputates a part of our democracy, the apartheid part, it proposes to take out the rot, the decomposing flesh and bone. In their place, the Force would install new systems, pump the red, surging blood of reform into our institutions, throw the rascals out. No, the entire concept of Freedom Force has not yet been fleshed out, that will take some time. What encourages is that so many people have come forth in support, like Jaime Cardinal Sin, former president Fidel Ramos, two or three of the most honest, prestigious politicians in the land, some stalwarts of the business community. Many voices in civil society wish to enlist. Even foreign diplomats nod privately in agreement.

It is a good, auspicious beginning for an idea whose time has come. It will, I am certain, engage Filipinos of every stripe who are lost, confused, bewildered, despondent and discouraged —- all looking for a way out.

There is fire in the ashes. We must not despair.