A revolution in the making?

If we don’t watch out, the Philippines in the next two at most three years will spill into a bloodbath of unprecedented proportions. A full-fledged revolution or civil war, if you will. I wish I were kidding but I am not. Look back and read back. In 1963, Pope John XXIII in Mater et Magistra emphasized the human right to a decent standard of living, education, and political participation. A group of Third World bishops during Vatican II lobbied for a "Church of the Poor". Their leader was the famous Dom Helder Camara. After Pope John XXIII, Pope Paul VI issued the most advanced of his encyclicals Populorum Progressio emphasizing the "economic, social and political rights" of mankind. In his first encyclical Redemptor Hominis, the Supreme Pontiff identified humanity with a higher moral force ‘untainted by the corruption, cynicism and falsehoods of an alienating political system."

Has anything happened since then? Nothing. Our own Church has repeatedly expressed its "Preferential Option for the Poor." Our poor have become poorer and in greater number.

Most political scientists will cite John Locke, particularly his Second Treatise, which justified revolution as a natural and justified remedy in defending liberty. The following words of Locke ring a bell wherever freedom is in distress: "But if a long train of abuses, prevarications and artifices, all tending the same way, make the design visible to the people – and they cannot but feel they lie under, and see whether they are going – it is not to be wondered that they should then rouse themselves and endeavor to put the rule into such hands which may secure to them the ends for which government was first erected."

In short, people have a right to revolt if they’ve had it, if they have been abused and oppressed beyond measure by their rulers.

No less than Thomas Jefferson, author of the US Declaration of Independence, claimed that the "tree of liberty must be refreshed from time in time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." And of course, last but not least, this coming July 14, (an event this Francophile never fails to attend), we have the anniversary of the French Revolution of 1789. Thousands of heads were severed by this revolution, ending the brutal and repressive reign of the monarchy and opening France to the first headwinds of "Liberté, Egalité, and Fraternité." Blood for the Jacobins and the revolting French was a "cleansing fire."

No, we are not advocating revolution in this country. In fact, we conceptualized Freedom Force precisely because we wanted to head off a bloodbath which could be spearheaded by the Left (the communist left and the ultra-nationalist left). The visage of the military taking over power also terrified us. And we figured only the Middle Forces could thread the needle and save this country. But that has been said so often in this space and enough is enough.

Very few Filipinos will be shocked to know that the so-called "objective conditions’ obtaining today have made the Philippines ripe or about ripe for a violent revolution or civil war. This largely explains the ongoing mass migration from the Philippines. Like the denizens of a forest who feel the onset of an earthquake, hundreds of Filipino families flee for they see the morrow as the Apocalypse.

The situation today is much worse than it was when the Huks (short for Hukbalahap, Hukbo ng Bayan Laban sa Hapon) staged their post World War II peasant revolution.

The Huks of Central Luzon understandably rose in revolt because of the abuses of landlords who subjected the peasantry to serfdom and a lifetime of humiliating, backbreaking servitude. The Huk uprising proved to be premature. America’s military presence was too much and the rest of the country was not bleeding. Besides, Ramon Magsaysay came to the fore, a man of magic and magnetism who broke the backs of the Huks and their allies in labor, the Congress of Labor Organizations (CLO).

If the situation was worse then, the revolutionary clouds gathered even more murkly when the Lava brothers, Jose and Jesus, idealist and visionary scions of rich landlord families, organized The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) in the late 40s and early 50s. And coopted the Huks.

The immediate postwar world had metamorphosed into the Cold war between capitalism and communism, each with the doctrinal brag it alone had a right to rule mankind because it held the secrets of an earthly paradise. The CCP was Soviet-oriented. It came on stream when the citizenry was shocked by Malacañang graft and corruption (the golden orinola and the P5000 bed). Reparations scandals made matters worse, as did immigration irregularities, shady palace deals, dollar-peso manipulations, import substitution. American imperialism was the all-word. Dialectical materialism was the only key to intellectual wisdom.

What was not noticed at the time was the increasing gap between the rich and the poor. Democracy was not working. The economy was not working. Poverty was beginning to spread with seven-league boots. That was the period barong-barongs uglied many patches of Manila. Filth and squalor invaded the slums, and squatters started to become a household word. The population was multiplying fast. Manila’s population had already increased from one million to about three million. The population time bomb was beginning to tick. Now Metro Manila is sardine-packed with 10 million.

The Soviet-denominated CCP would have made its mark if The USSR, Eastern Europe and China, won the Cold War. Russians would have swarmed over to the Philippines. But the great Marxist-Leninist gamble did not pay off.

The Soviet Union became a military superpower with 27,000 missiles aimed at the industrial and economic citadels of America. But great and massive as its weaponry was, the Soviet Union’s economy could not adequately feed its burgeoning millions. At one time Nikita Krushchev quipped that a camel caravan, loaded with consumer goodies destined for the rural poor, would be stripped empty in the hour it left Moscow.

But the idea of revolution here did not die.

A bespectacled UP professor emerged from the ruins of the CCP in 1968. Jose Maria Sison (Joma) had a periscope that was more piercing. And this time, he sought to prove Mao Zedong’s dictum that his New People’s Army guerrillas were the fish, and the fast growing, impoverished rural citizenry the water. Ferdinand Marcos did Joema the honors of declaring martial rule. As the dictator brutalized the countryside and spread fear with his ruthless soldiery, several things happened almost at the some time. First, Mr. Marcos alienated the middle class with the arrest and incarceration of Ninoy Aquino and many others of like libertarian ideology. Second, he alienared the business community by creating virulent "crony capitalism". Third, the Marcoses and cronies looted almost everything they could get their hands on while corrupting the soldiery which remains corrupt until today. Fourth, he interred the two-party system and brought to the fore today’s "balimbing" and "butterfly" which have no recognized party loyalty and affiliation.

The revolution stalled and lay fallow when Ninoy died.

His death was eventually to reshape the structure and conduct of Philippine politics. A different "revolution" came about, the "revolution" of EDSA I and the "revolution" of EDSA II. If anything the two EDSAs proved the fulcrum of revolt – and theirs was a non-violent one – could come from the middle class, the middle forces. But the two EDSAs misfired. They brought down a berserk dictator whose pickpocket hands looted an entire nation, and after, they brought down a third-rate actor whose hands were just as itchy and lived the life of the ancient Romans in their gilded, marble baths. The system remained the same.

Now things have gone much, much worse. The population is now a cockroach swarm of about 80 million Filipinos, about a third of them in the cities on the verge of life-threatening hunger. Filipino politicians with almost no exception daily suck the teats of the Golden Calf with absolutely no regard and no pity for the poor. Crime and violence belch their deadly venom by the hour, exhaling death and the lethal sputum of drugs in almost every neighborhood. The economy, despite all the pretensions of GMA’s super-tecnocracts and Luis (Sito) Lorenzo Jr., rides a Ship of Fools.

Is it any wonder then that the morrow looks bleak and talk of revolution or civil war gains by the hour? The Social Volcano?

The drip, drip, drip of events over the past 50 years are now beginning to take their toll. Nothing has really ever trickled to the poor. Even the business community of Makati, normally the last to be perturbed, now hears the endless cacophony of Philippine politics, the endless quarrels and feuds, the accusations and recriminations, as evidence of sputtering wick. And they worry like hell.

Where before, events came gradually and sometimes even on thick stockinged feet, today they whip at the eye with quickening ferocity. Modern broadcast journalism has slain the dragons of time and space. A US-led world whirling with the war against terrorism has the Philippines by the neck. And yet a world, an underdeveloped world desperately sprinting after the train of globalization sees the Philippines missing the train again and again.

I hope to God the revolution will never come. Or if it comes, it is deflected. We expect that many Filipinos of courage, goodwill and love of country will come in the multitudes and throw back the Apocalypse.