Dictatorships revisited
January 14, 2007 | 12:00am
Saddam Hussein was ignominiously executed finally the other week and earlier Chile’s Pinochet died in bed. These deaths, by no means, mark the end of dictatorship in this new century or even in the next. Dictators were with us in the ancient world as emperors, as monarchs "anointed" by heaven, as bulldozer politicians and ideologues, and they will be with us in the future for as long as societies are weak and the iron compulsion to shape them into strong states exists.
Modern dictatorships come in various persuasions and must be ascertained in the context of power alliances. In that primeval contest between the former Soviet Union and the United States, the delineations were very clear. Jean Kirkpatrick, the former American Secretary of State who also died last December, made it clear that it was those dictatorships that were not Marxist that were its allies; in fact, under this concept, America abetted and supported such despots. It did not matter that they were directly opposed to the libertarian ideals of democracy that was the primary source of American ideological strength – a blatant hypocrisy which the American leadership ignored in pursuit of its national interest. This is a principle we understand only too well – "He is a son of a bitch, but he is our son of a bitch."
We will now go through a partial list of dictators in the recent past, what they meant to the societies they ruled, to see if they have any relevance to us, bearing in mind that we, too, had our own Ferdinand Marcos.
First Saddam Hussein. He was beastly but he welded a fractious oil-rich nation together if only by annihilating some of the recalcitrant Kurds in the north and keeping under his brutal heel the Shiites who did not belong to his own religious faction.
Under Saddam, order prevailed in Iraq – not the bloody anarchy which roils the country today. Then, too, during the Iran-Iraq war two decades ago, he was America’s boy, just as the Taliban in Afghanistan were supported by the United States when they were fighting the Russians. But plutocrats get assassinated or brought down by a coup or by their own weaknesses. They become liabilities, rather than assets to the United States – then the Great White Father withdraws his support for them.
Augusto Pinochet, 91, Chile’s former caudillo lorded it over a population of 15 million compared to our 85 million, but Chile is far more prosperous, more democratic with a broad middle class, and more homogenous than us. Pinochet ruled Chile for two decades with support of the United States, which, in the first place, assisted his bloody coup against the democratically elected Salvador Allende. A Marxist, Allende wanted to change overnight the face of Chile resulting in strikes and economic chaos. The arrival of Pinochet was welcomed by the Chileans who were soon to feel an iron hand that killed some 3,000, tortured and, to use our own euphemism, "salvaged" thousands. But with his economists from the University of Chicago, Pinochet brought economic progress. When he was buried last month, thousands attended his funeral attesting to the loyalty of so many Chileans.
Gen. Francisco Franco (Dec. 4, 1892-Nov. 20, 1975) won the Spanish Civil War in 1939 and died in bed, too. That Civil War which pitted brother against brother was a precursor to World War II during which Franco sided with Italy, Germany and Japan. Spain was the least powerful of that Axis alliance, but Hitler was not able to convince Franco to take Gibraltar from the British. That move would have opened the Mediterranean to the Nazis, prolonged World War II and could have even enabled the Nazis to win. Through much of his regime, Spain was considered the "sick man" of Europe much like we are labeled today the "sick man" of Southeast Asia. At one time, so the anecdote goes, considering that the losers in the war with the United States were soon assisted and brought to economic recovery, it was suggested that Spain should also make war on the United States. Franco demurred and asked, "But what if we win?" He joined America in the Cold War and gave the Americans military bases. He left behind a mixed legacy. But as many Spaniards now say, he provided Spain with the stability that became the bedrock of Spanish modernization and progress today.
Park Chung Hee’s (Nov. 14, 1917-Oct. 26, 1979) South Korea was devastated by the Korean War in 1951. The continuing threat from communist North Korea was held at bay by the United States all through the years that he wielded power. But Koreans, who had chafed under Japanese control for 50 years, are a homogenous, hard-working people.
General Park had clear-cut goals; he gathered the chaebols (big businessmen), told them to shape up and modernize Korea and if they failed after 20 years and he was still around, he would cut off their heads. They knew he meant it. Currency controls were very tight and South Korea even subsidized Korean companies to work abroad so they could earn precious foreign exchange. In the ’70s when I visited Korea, the change was already obvious. They were saying, "We will beat the Japanese." And in many instances, they did – they wrested from Japan maritime superiority and are now competing with the Japanese in almost all aspects of modern industry.
Pak had his favorite generals, businessmen, most of them from his own region. He pampered them. Korean electronics, motorcars, restaurants went global and Korea today is truly one of the miracle economic achievements in the modern world.
Chiang Kai-Shek (Oct. 31, 1887-April 5, 1975) fled to the island of Formosa after the communists defeated him in 1949. His Koumintang party controlled the island which, until 1945, was a Japanese colony. The dictatorship was total and in the first few years, many Taiwanese were killed. But learning from his debacle in the mainland, a massive land reform program was immediately set in place, and strict currency controls – as in Korea – were imposed. The Kuomintang embarked on a program of modernization which, fortunately, was not difficult to initiate for Formosa (or Taiwan, as it eventually came to be called) already had an infrastructure laid by the Japanese. In fact, the Japanese infrastructure, coupled with land reform, facilitated the Taiwanese to take off. But the Kuomintang was hobbled by its own political agenda to "retake" the mainland – an objective that stifled the indigenous Taiwanese desire for independence. After Chiang’s death, his son took over. He too died and soon after, the native Taiwanese became strong enough to form an opposition to the one-party rule and eventually, with its progressive economy, Taiwan democratized. Taiwanese nationalism is the island’s hope when its status with China will be resolved. From the Chiang dictatorship, Taiwan had developed into a robust democracy, but this could yet be jeopardized by the one-China policy that the world community recognizes.
Indonesia’s Suharto ruled with brass knuckles for three decades after he ousted Sukarno in 1965 in a botched coup attempt by the communists. After his takeover, a million Indonesians were massacred in one of the least acknowledged bloodbaths in history. In those 30 years, Suharto modernized Indonesia with an astonishing speed unequalled in Southeast Asia. When he was ousted from power a decade ago, Indonesia entered a democratic phase with elections.
Like all dictators, Suharto and his family squirreled away a fortune abroad, but not the same astounding magnitude of the Marcos fortune. Indonesia’s generals made fortunes, too, because Indonesia did not have an efficient and large bureaucracy, which the Dutch colonialists had left. When Indonesia achieved independence in 1945, it had a hundred or so university graduates compared to the hundreds of Ph.D.s in the Philippines. The Army was, in effect, the administrator of the vast archipelago. Suharto meanwhile avoided imprisonment due to ill health and his continuing influence in the Armed Forces, which hold the real power in Indonesia. As with other dictators, he got a lot of assistance from the United States. His economic advisers were from the University of California at Berkeley.
Which brings us to Ferdinand Marcos. Like the other dictators with military background he had support from the Americans under the Kirkpatrick doctrine. Because of the cozy relationship with US President Ronald Reagan up to the mid-’80s, the United States looked the other way when Marcos committed all those human rights abuses or stashed away billions abroad. The opponents of Marcos in the United States like Ninoy Aquino and Raul Manglapus were snubbed by the White House. Washington distanced itself from Marcos only when he had become a liability and no longer had support at home, either from the people or from the military.
In hindsight, which is the lowest form of wisdom, it is now very clear that it was not the declaration of martial law that was "wrong" but that Marcos dissipated 20 years during which he could have turned this country around.
Why didn’t he do it?
One of his trusted men, a scholar, told me to have faith in the man for, aside from being Ilokano (which meant he was industrious), he had a sense of history.
Instead, he looted what Franco, Park Chung Hee, Pinochet never managed to amass. Sometime in the late ’70s, former executive secretary, Rafael Salas told me in New York that if Marcos returned all the billions he had stashed abroad, our foreign debt would be wiped out. Our foreign debt then was about $24 billion. Was Marcos able to steal that much?
Remember, Salas was in Malacañang during those years, privy to information most us did not have.
Marcos surrounded himself with our best technocrats, just as Pinochet and Suharto were assisted by experts whose talents were honed in American academe. But those technocrats were not harnessed for nation-building – like Marcos, they were engaged in fortune-building or were simply transfixed and paralyzed by the status that Marcos had conferred on them. In other words, they were corrupted.
And as for his own oligarchy, which Marcos had hoped to build, the men whom he had enriched with monopolies and favorable decrees, they also sent their loot abroad.
Marcos could have put down the communist rebellion and restored peace in Mindanao as well. Both rebellions flourished instead. He could have disciplined the bureaucracy or, like the Koreans, used corruption to develop the economy. Both Korea and Taiwan took advantage of the American market – the best in the world! He didn’t.
The English novelist, James Hamilton Paterson, who authored America’s Boy, the story of Ferdinand Marcos, has an interesting theory about why Marcos failed. He was bored – he had all the power he wanted, the money, the women. He was not after glory, he was after possessions. What else was there to covet? And yet, as those who knew him closely say, he lived simply and did not relish gourmet food – although those who broke into Malacañang after the Marcoses had fled found bowls of caviar there. Marcos was happy with traditional Ilokano dinengdeng – broiled vegetables. Nor was he henpecked by Imelda as those who knew him would later attest. Imelda was not his undoing, although she did diminish Marcos’ stature.
Hubris came into it, too. All his life, he showed brilliance, cunning, opportunism. He could buy anyone, anything. But as events showed, he couldn’t buy everyone.
Revolutions, civil wars and coups are almost always bloody as they attempt to resolve a country’s internal contradictions by violence. All too often, they usher in a dictator – Napoleon after the French Revolution, Lenin and Stalin after the Russian Revolution, Franco after the Spanish civil war, Mao after China’s civil war. These men of history then transform a once-divided country into a strong state. Years of stability and order – the foundation of modernization – follow. The transformation is not permanent, it is fragile; but hopefully, a people shall have been strengthened by it. Even without willing it, consensus and the democratic ethos develop with the ensuing surge of the free market. This is not always the sequence, but we can see this pattern in some of the modernizing societies unfurling before us. Just look at Vietnam now.
Power is always seductive. Is there still a role for our past presidents? Certainly, there is always something they can do but unless their successors behave so badly, they need not interfere with the structure of power anymore. They have had their chance, indeed Cory Aquino and Fidel Ramos have had their turn at the helm.
History teaches us nothing because we have no memory but history has many insights to impart to those who remember. It is for us to rekindle this memory and with it the sense of nation that could move us. A "benevolent dictator" is a contradiction, and the compulsion towards dictatorships is fraught with danger. There is no substitute for the formidable institutions of freedom and they can only be built if the people themselves are strong for the simple reason that institutions are people, and cannot exist by themselves.
Was the end of the Cold War the end of history as well? How far can development go, and with it, the perfection of governance? Such questions will have to be reconciled with the meaning of our own existence, our struggle for justice.
The distinctions that Jean Kirkpatrick made are of no real value. All dictatorships, of whatever color or creed, are tyrannical, oppressive and murderous.
Dictators will continue to demean humankind; they will persist in their present form, but in the advanced modernized states, with many of the functions of government being privatized, the new tyrants may no longer be generals or bureaucrats but the CEOs of mega businesses plying their untrammeled greed.
We can already see some of what they can do to ravage the environment, the cynical manipulation and escalation of consumer prices, the spread of new and fatal ailments caused by the wanton use of technologies and chemicals. These are the challenges faced by democrats and committed humanists – how to curb avarice and instill the old verities of civic virtue in the elites and, at the same time, nurture strong citizens.
Our future is not in the stars – it is the clod at our feet which will claim us in the end. It is also the only land we have. And without a sense of nation, there is a very real danger that one unblemished morning soon, we Filipinos may wake up to find that Filipinas is no longer ours.
Modern dictatorships come in various persuasions and must be ascertained in the context of power alliances. In that primeval contest between the former Soviet Union and the United States, the delineations were very clear. Jean Kirkpatrick, the former American Secretary of State who also died last December, made it clear that it was those dictatorships that were not Marxist that were its allies; in fact, under this concept, America abetted and supported such despots. It did not matter that they were directly opposed to the libertarian ideals of democracy that was the primary source of American ideological strength – a blatant hypocrisy which the American leadership ignored in pursuit of its national interest. This is a principle we understand only too well – "He is a son of a bitch, but he is our son of a bitch."
We will now go through a partial list of dictators in the recent past, what they meant to the societies they ruled, to see if they have any relevance to us, bearing in mind that we, too, had our own Ferdinand Marcos.
First Saddam Hussein. He was beastly but he welded a fractious oil-rich nation together if only by annihilating some of the recalcitrant Kurds in the north and keeping under his brutal heel the Shiites who did not belong to his own religious faction.
Under Saddam, order prevailed in Iraq – not the bloody anarchy which roils the country today. Then, too, during the Iran-Iraq war two decades ago, he was America’s boy, just as the Taliban in Afghanistan were supported by the United States when they were fighting the Russians. But plutocrats get assassinated or brought down by a coup or by their own weaknesses. They become liabilities, rather than assets to the United States – then the Great White Father withdraws his support for them.
Augusto Pinochet, 91, Chile’s former caudillo lorded it over a population of 15 million compared to our 85 million, but Chile is far more prosperous, more democratic with a broad middle class, and more homogenous than us. Pinochet ruled Chile for two decades with support of the United States, which, in the first place, assisted his bloody coup against the democratically elected Salvador Allende. A Marxist, Allende wanted to change overnight the face of Chile resulting in strikes and economic chaos. The arrival of Pinochet was welcomed by the Chileans who were soon to feel an iron hand that killed some 3,000, tortured and, to use our own euphemism, "salvaged" thousands. But with his economists from the University of Chicago, Pinochet brought economic progress. When he was buried last month, thousands attended his funeral attesting to the loyalty of so many Chileans.
Gen. Francisco Franco (Dec. 4, 1892-Nov. 20, 1975) won the Spanish Civil War in 1939 and died in bed, too. That Civil War which pitted brother against brother was a precursor to World War II during which Franco sided with Italy, Germany and Japan. Spain was the least powerful of that Axis alliance, but Hitler was not able to convince Franco to take Gibraltar from the British. That move would have opened the Mediterranean to the Nazis, prolonged World War II and could have even enabled the Nazis to win. Through much of his regime, Spain was considered the "sick man" of Europe much like we are labeled today the "sick man" of Southeast Asia. At one time, so the anecdote goes, considering that the losers in the war with the United States were soon assisted and brought to economic recovery, it was suggested that Spain should also make war on the United States. Franco demurred and asked, "But what if we win?" He joined America in the Cold War and gave the Americans military bases. He left behind a mixed legacy. But as many Spaniards now say, he provided Spain with the stability that became the bedrock of Spanish modernization and progress today.
Park Chung Hee’s (Nov. 14, 1917-Oct. 26, 1979) South Korea was devastated by the Korean War in 1951. The continuing threat from communist North Korea was held at bay by the United States all through the years that he wielded power. But Koreans, who had chafed under Japanese control for 50 years, are a homogenous, hard-working people.
General Park had clear-cut goals; he gathered the chaebols (big businessmen), told them to shape up and modernize Korea and if they failed after 20 years and he was still around, he would cut off their heads. They knew he meant it. Currency controls were very tight and South Korea even subsidized Korean companies to work abroad so they could earn precious foreign exchange. In the ’70s when I visited Korea, the change was already obvious. They were saying, "We will beat the Japanese." And in many instances, they did – they wrested from Japan maritime superiority and are now competing with the Japanese in almost all aspects of modern industry.
Pak had his favorite generals, businessmen, most of them from his own region. He pampered them. Korean electronics, motorcars, restaurants went global and Korea today is truly one of the miracle economic achievements in the modern world.
Chiang Kai-Shek (Oct. 31, 1887-April 5, 1975) fled to the island of Formosa after the communists defeated him in 1949. His Koumintang party controlled the island which, until 1945, was a Japanese colony. The dictatorship was total and in the first few years, many Taiwanese were killed. But learning from his debacle in the mainland, a massive land reform program was immediately set in place, and strict currency controls – as in Korea – were imposed. The Kuomintang embarked on a program of modernization which, fortunately, was not difficult to initiate for Formosa (or Taiwan, as it eventually came to be called) already had an infrastructure laid by the Japanese. In fact, the Japanese infrastructure, coupled with land reform, facilitated the Taiwanese to take off. But the Kuomintang was hobbled by its own political agenda to "retake" the mainland – an objective that stifled the indigenous Taiwanese desire for independence. After Chiang’s death, his son took over. He too died and soon after, the native Taiwanese became strong enough to form an opposition to the one-party rule and eventually, with its progressive economy, Taiwan democratized. Taiwanese nationalism is the island’s hope when its status with China will be resolved. From the Chiang dictatorship, Taiwan had developed into a robust democracy, but this could yet be jeopardized by the one-China policy that the world community recognizes.
Indonesia’s Suharto ruled with brass knuckles for three decades after he ousted Sukarno in 1965 in a botched coup attempt by the communists. After his takeover, a million Indonesians were massacred in one of the least acknowledged bloodbaths in history. In those 30 years, Suharto modernized Indonesia with an astonishing speed unequalled in Southeast Asia. When he was ousted from power a decade ago, Indonesia entered a democratic phase with elections.
Like all dictators, Suharto and his family squirreled away a fortune abroad, but not the same astounding magnitude of the Marcos fortune. Indonesia’s generals made fortunes, too, because Indonesia did not have an efficient and large bureaucracy, which the Dutch colonialists had left. When Indonesia achieved independence in 1945, it had a hundred or so university graduates compared to the hundreds of Ph.D.s in the Philippines. The Army was, in effect, the administrator of the vast archipelago. Suharto meanwhile avoided imprisonment due to ill health and his continuing influence in the Armed Forces, which hold the real power in Indonesia. As with other dictators, he got a lot of assistance from the United States. His economic advisers were from the University of California at Berkeley.
Which brings us to Ferdinand Marcos. Like the other dictators with military background he had support from the Americans under the Kirkpatrick doctrine. Because of the cozy relationship with US President Ronald Reagan up to the mid-’80s, the United States looked the other way when Marcos committed all those human rights abuses or stashed away billions abroad. The opponents of Marcos in the United States like Ninoy Aquino and Raul Manglapus were snubbed by the White House. Washington distanced itself from Marcos only when he had become a liability and no longer had support at home, either from the people or from the military.
In hindsight, which is the lowest form of wisdom, it is now very clear that it was not the declaration of martial law that was "wrong" but that Marcos dissipated 20 years during which he could have turned this country around.
Why didn’t he do it?
One of his trusted men, a scholar, told me to have faith in the man for, aside from being Ilokano (which meant he was industrious), he had a sense of history.
Instead, he looted what Franco, Park Chung Hee, Pinochet never managed to amass. Sometime in the late ’70s, former executive secretary, Rafael Salas told me in New York that if Marcos returned all the billions he had stashed abroad, our foreign debt would be wiped out. Our foreign debt then was about $24 billion. Was Marcos able to steal that much?
Remember, Salas was in Malacañang during those years, privy to information most us did not have.
Marcos surrounded himself with our best technocrats, just as Pinochet and Suharto were assisted by experts whose talents were honed in American academe. But those technocrats were not harnessed for nation-building – like Marcos, they were engaged in fortune-building or were simply transfixed and paralyzed by the status that Marcos had conferred on them. In other words, they were corrupted.
And as for his own oligarchy, which Marcos had hoped to build, the men whom he had enriched with monopolies and favorable decrees, they also sent their loot abroad.
Marcos could have put down the communist rebellion and restored peace in Mindanao as well. Both rebellions flourished instead. He could have disciplined the bureaucracy or, like the Koreans, used corruption to develop the economy. Both Korea and Taiwan took advantage of the American market – the best in the world! He didn’t.
The English novelist, James Hamilton Paterson, who authored America’s Boy, the story of Ferdinand Marcos, has an interesting theory about why Marcos failed. He was bored – he had all the power he wanted, the money, the women. He was not after glory, he was after possessions. What else was there to covet? And yet, as those who knew him closely say, he lived simply and did not relish gourmet food – although those who broke into Malacañang after the Marcoses had fled found bowls of caviar there. Marcos was happy with traditional Ilokano dinengdeng – broiled vegetables. Nor was he henpecked by Imelda as those who knew him would later attest. Imelda was not his undoing, although she did diminish Marcos’ stature.
Hubris came into it, too. All his life, he showed brilliance, cunning, opportunism. He could buy anyone, anything. But as events showed, he couldn’t buy everyone.
Revolutions, civil wars and coups are almost always bloody as they attempt to resolve a country’s internal contradictions by violence. All too often, they usher in a dictator – Napoleon after the French Revolution, Lenin and Stalin after the Russian Revolution, Franco after the Spanish civil war, Mao after China’s civil war. These men of history then transform a once-divided country into a strong state. Years of stability and order – the foundation of modernization – follow. The transformation is not permanent, it is fragile; but hopefully, a people shall have been strengthened by it. Even without willing it, consensus and the democratic ethos develop with the ensuing surge of the free market. This is not always the sequence, but we can see this pattern in some of the modernizing societies unfurling before us. Just look at Vietnam now.
Power is always seductive. Is there still a role for our past presidents? Certainly, there is always something they can do but unless their successors behave so badly, they need not interfere with the structure of power anymore. They have had their chance, indeed Cory Aquino and Fidel Ramos have had their turn at the helm.
History teaches us nothing because we have no memory but history has many insights to impart to those who remember. It is for us to rekindle this memory and with it the sense of nation that could move us. A "benevolent dictator" is a contradiction, and the compulsion towards dictatorships is fraught with danger. There is no substitute for the formidable institutions of freedom and they can only be built if the people themselves are strong for the simple reason that institutions are people, and cannot exist by themselves.
Was the end of the Cold War the end of history as well? How far can development go, and with it, the perfection of governance? Such questions will have to be reconciled with the meaning of our own existence, our struggle for justice.
The distinctions that Jean Kirkpatrick made are of no real value. All dictatorships, of whatever color or creed, are tyrannical, oppressive and murderous.
Dictators will continue to demean humankind; they will persist in their present form, but in the advanced modernized states, with many of the functions of government being privatized, the new tyrants may no longer be generals or bureaucrats but the CEOs of mega businesses plying their untrammeled greed.
We can already see some of what they can do to ravage the environment, the cynical manipulation and escalation of consumer prices, the spread of new and fatal ailments caused by the wanton use of technologies and chemicals. These are the challenges faced by democrats and committed humanists – how to curb avarice and instill the old verities of civic virtue in the elites and, at the same time, nurture strong citizens.
Our future is not in the stars – it is the clod at our feet which will claim us in the end. It is also the only land we have. And without a sense of nation, there is a very real danger that one unblemished morning soon, we Filipinos may wake up to find that Filipinas is no longer ours.
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