Who’s the Mad Bomber? A nation in wrath - HERE'S THE SCORE by Teodoro C. Benigno

History’s ugly scrawl was writ on the five bomb explosions that rocked Metro Manila last Saturday. That scrawl takes you back to the days and weeks before President Ferdinand Marcos declared martial rule Sept. 21, 1972. Bombs, big and small, exploded across Metro Manila. The car of then defense secretary Juan Ponce Enrile was riddled by bullets in an "ambuscade." The studentry had long taken to the streets in the First Quarter Storm, their fists raised against the despotic rule of Marcos. You didn’t have to guess who the "culprits" of the bombings and the "assault" on Enrile’s car were. In so many shrill cries, Marcos blamed the communists, and so he had to save the nation from "the communist conspiracy."

Marcos and his minions had learned their history well, a history that went way back to June 1933 when Herr Adolf Hitler sought to legitimize the sway of the dreaded swastika all over Germany.

Somebody had set fire to the Reichstag (German parliament). As the flames devoured the huge building, Hitler’s evil genius, Herman Wilhelm Goehring, who set up the Gestapo and the concentration camps, shouted: "This is the beginning of a Communist uprising! Not a moment must be lost!" Hitler cut in with the swiftness of drawn saber. "Now we’ll show them! Anyone who will stand in our way will be mown down! The German people have been soft too long. Every communist official must be shot. All communist deputies must be hanged this very night. All friends of the Communists must be locked up!"

Many historians have written that Goehring himself was the mastermind of the Reichstag blaze and that Hitler – a tremendously gifted madman with a mustache who sought to conquer the world with his swastika-bearing Aryan armies – danced a jig as the building burned. Ferdinand Marcos was a great student of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. Marcos was a genius in propaganda, a greater genius in substituting illusion for reality, a man with many faces who sought to perpetuate his rule – and failed. As Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo failed.

I write thusly today because I do not believe the government crap the communists were behind Saturday’s bombings. And neither do I believe the Abu Sayyaf was behind it or the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). I’ve been around too long as a journalist to suck up to this kind of propaganda. But neither do I have the concrete evidence to prove "dark forces" operating for the powers-that-be unleashed the Saturday bombing. But there was a jawohl smell to it, the guttural accent of a Philippine Gestapo, the snake hiss of the Metrocom under Col. Rolando Abadilla whenever the dictator needed him to do a dirty job. Remember Ninoy Aquino’s assassination?

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But there is a difference. A big one. Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo and – yes – Marcos were riding a cresting wave. They were eventually atop the mountain ridges, casting their spell over an obedient, if not spellbound, citizenry. If indeed "dark forces" working for the government were behind Saturday’s bombings, that government must have been desperate for it was under siege. The shadows had come very close. Street demonstrations (Erap, resign!) had greatly mushroomed in Metro Manila and 45 cities and provinces. There was – and there remains – besides a Senate impeachment trial whose overhang is a noose dangling closer and closer. Acquittal would set off widespread pandemonium even violence.

So who stands to benefit from last Saturday’s bombings? Any kindergarten student can answer that question in these perilous times. Desperation has set in and former Marcos cronies now surround and counsel President Joseph Estrada. Three of them.

But a word of caution from this corner. If verily those "dark forces" said to be engaged by the government set off those bombs Saturday, then they are not only playing with fire. They are seeking to choke off the plains from the march of history, from the onslaught of the Moving Finger which "having writ moves on." Or listen to Sophocles: "Fate has a terrible power. You cannot escape it by wealth or war. No fort will keep it out, no ships outrun it."

You three and him would subject our nation to more pain, as if it has not had enough agony already. You have awakened the sleeping dogs. You have cut off one artery after another. And now the economy is about to go into a tailspin and with it the deadly ride on history’s cobblestones of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. You want the peso to depreciate further, much further, to 60 against the dollar, or even to 80 as Peter Wallace, guru of the multinationals, warns. Can you sleep as the economy spurts more blood and goes into a recession, as even NEDA big boss Felipe Medalla now admits is possible? Can you ride out soaring unemployment which could easily reach or outstrip 20 percent, the tell-tale moan of hundreds of thousands as stomachs of the poor quiver and twitch with mass hunger in their squalid homes in the city? And suppose they march as they did in Nicaragua, Argentina, Venezuela in 1989 and descend on the ritzy residences of the rich to raid their refrigerators for food and victuals, milk for their starving babies, what do you do?

Do I hear you right when the three of you in Malacañang reply you will have fled the country by then?

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Good mother of God, you are destroying the country! Yes, you three – and I don’t have to mention your names anymore. You have set up shop in Malacañang, and as you set it up to get closest to the ear of the president. You have added to the whirlwind of wrath now sweeping across the country, a nation in terrible pain reaching for its guts. And those guts figuratively will form the street bayonets that will eventually bristle in Metro Manila, a horde probably bigger than what we witnessed in EDSA in 1986. Study history, sirs. Not alone what George Santayana said about those who do not learn the lessons of history because they are doomed to repeat it.

Listen to E. L. Doctorow: "All over the world today, not just the totalitarian countries, the assiduous functionaries in the Ministries of Truth are clubbing history dumb and rendering language insensible." Or again Claude Levi-Strauss: "Only the study of historical development permits the weighing and evaluation of the interrelationships among the components of present-day society." And again Eric Hoffer: "The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle."

If you needed another lesson in history, look again at the front-page photo of The Philippine STAR Monday, New Year’s Day, when on the eve, Mass was celebrated in Malacañang. It was the Ejercito clan in attendance with movie actors Fernando Poe Jr. and Rudy Fernandez thrown in. Look at the president. Look at the First Lady. Look at the president’s mother; Doña Mary Ejercito. Look at Beaver Lopez and wife Jackie Ejercito bearing their baby. The mood was deep purple, as though all of them were at a wake, every face crawling with a pall that could have been drawn only from a dismal and distant moor, the sadness there, the loneliness, the slow invisible swirling as though of autumn leaves peeling off. The president had both hands down clutching a prayer paper, and his eyes had that three-mile look, looking at nothing – about as downcast as a brooding cliff at Dover.

I have repeatedly urged President Joseph Estrada to resign.

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But he will not or professes not to. I have said in so many words his watch is politically over. He has lost the trust and credit of the nation. His reply to all those urging him to step down is that all the resonating sound and fury are just a movie. He is getting pummeled, yes, he is on the ropes, yes, spitting blood, yes, his face wealed and welted with cuts and swollen bruises. But he will not go down. He will triumph in the end. And baloney to those who say the masses have deserted him. They are there – if I may say, like flotsam and jetsam – whenever he visits the neighborhoods of the poor and downtrodden.

Yes, they are there all right. But they are the ignorant poor, the unwashed and the wretched of the earth and – in the end – they cannot do anything for him. And whatever his prodigal promises, he has done nothing for them – really. We shall not berate him anymore for his many sins for those are brass gongs that sound again and again in the streets, in media, in the international press, everywhere and anywhere truth takes a stand. As Keats said, "What the imagination sees as beauty must be truth."

Those Saturday bombings should never have happened. They were the handiwork of a dying beast, and perhaps the beast did not know he was dying. That is the tragedy of it all, and the ancient Greeks knew what real tragedy was. Sir, if I must quote an old Persian proverb: "When water covers the head, a hundred fathoms are as one." The waters are there, Mr. President. It takes courage to admit they are there. It takes courage to be contrite. It takes courage to turn on your heels. It takes courage to face the Eternal Footman. It takes courage to strip down to your shorts and admit the race has been run because you stumbled and fell before you could reach the tape.

It takes courage and an abiding belief in God.