Tragedy of our democracy; Corpuz forecasts civil war

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(Last of two parts)

While rummaging in my library several days ago, I pulled out the two volumes of historian O. D. Corpuz’s The Roots of the Filipino Nation. I had already read the award-winning two-volume opus of this quiet brooding scholar who seldom appears in public. But I figured good books are read and reread particularly when authored by a Filipino who obtained his doctorate in Political Economy and Government from Harvard and spent years and years of research here and abroad. Published in 1989, almost thirteen years ago, three years after the first EDSA, six years after Ninoy Aquino fell dead at the airport from a single bullet that shattered his brain, O.D. had all the time in the world to spin his enthralling intellectual spider web over the whole of Philippine history.

When I espied his Epilogue in the rereading I literally sat bolt upright.

I had read these paragraphs before, but this time they clawed at my consciousness like some burglar of history opening up a safe. "In some three decades," he wrote, "the Filipino population should beat the 100,000,000 level. That population will exert unimaginably heavy strains on the civil structures. These structures from the past, as they persisted into the late 1980s, will be replaced. Inside of a generation, perhaps before the end of the century, Filipino politics will go through civil war or revolution or coup d’etat. The primary reason will be the proven incapacity of the political system – its leadership and institutions – to serve the basic needs of the masses and to win over the politicized youth."

Then O.D. hit this one out of the ballpark: "On the eve of the 1990s, time was running out on democracy in the Philippines."

I have labored long on this issue, as my readers well know, but it took this rereading of O.D. Corpuz to set my heart throbbing again, my pulse racing again, my mind pounding feverishly again. O.D. was ahead of my forecast by more than ten years. I had reckoned a "social volcano" would erupt sometime this year before the rainy season, if not this year, at the latest next year 2003. It was all there, the political, economic and social ingredients for an explosion. Avoiding it or evading it was like commanding the tides of rampaging sea to go back. It was 50 years in the making, I wrote, 50 years of neglect and abandon, 50 years of political system that favored the rich and willfully oppressed the poor, 50 years that got stuck in the swamps, 50 years that refused to ford the deep waters of reform and storm the bridges that led to the future.

The signals that we were doing things wrong were mighty strong. But we didn’t heed them or we did not understand them. Now we have Erap Estrada seeking exile in the US under the guise of knee surgery with the Senate and the House pounding their drums in scandalous agreement.

Maybe it’s because of our culture that is person-oriented or leader-oriented, a legacy of our centuries-long tribal civilization. We Filipinos were never touched by the impact of Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution and the Reformation. And yet we lavishly and naively imitate the Western way of life. The focus and only focus of the first EDSA was the dictator Ferdinand Marcos. We didn’t see even then how rotten and unworkable the system was. We did not realize that our superficial American-style democracy bred cronies and parasites instead of builders and entrepreneurs. Our bedrock tribal culture was lashed to the low masts of indolent Latin-style capitalism. We copied mostly Hollywood instead of the driven, creative and entrepreneurial style of American free enterprise. Our democratic model was, in Lee Kuan Yew’s words, "exuberant" and "fun-loving" utterly devoid of vision, nation-building and discipline.

In that sense, were we the ancient late-stage Athenians of Pericles "blind to the bleak forces of human nature" or an Asian version of a "democratic Colombia which is a pageant of bloodletting and many members of the middle class are attempting to leave the country" (The Coming Anarchy, by Robert Kaplan) or a heavily indebted ($142 billion) Argentina, once the richest and most progressive country in Latin America now because of atrocious leadership and fiscal mismanagement and spreading joblessness easy prey to riots and street demonstrations? Or is it possible that we have missed the train, fallen so far behind, that we have sank to the level of Burma and Cambodia? And Zimbabwe?

More questions. A number of social scientists and economists now argue that what countries like the Philippines need is an "authoritarian regime" that can gun the economy to faster and more effective performance. Prosperous middle classes, we are told, arise under authoritarian regimes as witness Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia, South Korea. It had to take the iron hand of Park Chung Hee in the 50s to lift the war-battered nation to rapid economic progress that amazed the world.

The economist Jeffrey Sachs indicates this is so. "Good government means relative safety from corruption, from breach of contract, from property expropriation and from bureaucratic inefficiency." When he wrote this, he had Singapore in mind, the granite-jawed Lee Kuan Yew cracking his whip on the citizenry. Now Singapore is a model for all developing nations. And so is China, progressing at a clip of 6 t 8 percent GDP annually. In 20 years, even some Western experts predict authoritarian China could move alongside the US as an economic superpower. Asia’s burgeoning countries never bothered with democracy. They chose the right model, Japan of the Meiji Restoration in 1868 which borrowed deep into the technology of the US and Europe, then implanted this under no-nonsense authoritarian regimes.

If O.D. Corpus is right, if I am right, if the social volcano should erupt very soon, then a vastly different future awaits the Philippines.

Three social institutions will be left in a likely turbulent bid to take over power. These are (1) the Right, meaning the military establishment, (2) the Left, meaning the former socialist vanguards of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, and a new breed of nationalists, and (3) the Middle Forces. Unless these three forces see reason and together forge a vision of the future, there could be civil war or revolution, bloody as hell, or coup d’etat. This is where my concept of a Freedom Force comes in, a concept which Jaime Cardinal Sin depicted as "very acceptable and original." And "I will support it."

It would avoid civil war and revolution. The danger here is that the masses will be drawn into armed conflict by the ideologues of the Left, and angry, militant nationalists. The Freedom Force could, by the very nature of resurgent People Power, enlist civil society or the Middle Forces into a heaving, vigilant mass. The Freedom Force will convince the Middle Forces to structure themselves into a shadow government ready to take over at any time. And mute the guns of the Left by coopting them into a powersharing scheme dominated by the Middle Forces. The most difficult part will be convincing the military to keep their powder dry, to allow the Middle Forces to take over the government, to stand sentinel and protect and secure the integrity of the new government.

There is no other way. Only the Middle Forces have the education, the talent, the cutting edge of knowledge and technology, the resources, the vision, the structural know-how, to ably govern the country during a period of crisis. And the support of the Church.

Either the military establishment takes over and releases the genie of civil war or revolution, and the ensuing bloodbath will be terrible to behold. And then the Left and the ultra-nationalists will take to the gun, bring back their red flags and eventually seek to engulf the military in an uprising that could set back the country 20 years. In either case, the nation tears itself up. In my view, neither the Left nor the Right can muster the forces to create the new institutions the new government will need. Since the end of the Cold War in 1989-91, the far Left has dropped its dream to reform and restructure the world in obeisance to the now fallen gods of socialist doctrine. The gods of capitalism and free enterprise have prevailed, even in China. And neither can the military resurrect in the Philippines the strut and swagger of the liders maxima of Latin and South America, or the bristle of Asia’s earlier military regimes which melted in the face of globalization and civilian technology. The only military regimes that remain are those in Burma and Pakistan, pathetic phantoms of a forlorn and forgotten past.

And yet, the Middle Forces, the Freedom Force, the government that would emerge from the debris of our crumbling political system, cannot mount the spiral of progress without the shield of the military and the nationalistic fervor of the Left. The cronies, the parasites, the crooks and the criminal gangs and syndicates would be loathe to leave. The old pols and tradpols will not give up easily. They will resort to terror to undermine the new government led by the Middle Forces. I would presume the interim or provisional government, in power for about two years, could easily crack down on crime by virtue of an Internal Security Act. This Lee Kuan Yew and Mohammed Mahathir wielded with extraordinary skill to contain and imprison if not exterminate thugs, drug lords, smugglers, criminals of every campanilla.

The assumption of course is that Congress, both House and Senate, will be abolished. This will be a cause for national rejoicing since they have proven to be utterly useless, harbor the biggest thieves, grafters, con men and criminals in the land.

And so we summarize. Freedom Force and the Middle Forces can only bolt into action if the social volcano should erupt. And they can only succeed in forging the anvil of the New Government if they get the support and cooperation of the Left and the Right. I cannot see how anybody, how any decent Filipino can quarrel with this concept, which endeavors to eventually construct a fortress of freedom and prosperity out of the rot, rubbish and shameless extravagance of the present system.