Convergence

The Edsa Revolution was a rare convergence: part conspiracy, part spontaneity, part spiritual movement, part festive outbreak and part magic.

It certainly was not some inevitable outcome of a linear historical logic as spokesmen of the Left are now telling us – part of a self-serving effort to install their forlorn political faction in the midst of a historical event even if this required brazen revisionism and outright lie.

Satur Ocampo is imposing Marxism-Leninism on us when he tried to portray the Edsa Revolution was the final outcome of the actions of the communist movement. That is a crude attempt to obscure the historical facts: foremost of which is the fact that the communists denounced the democratic anti-Marcos movement, undermined the strategy of peaceful struggle from the vantage point of moral ascendancy and, finally, called for a boycott of the "snap elections" which turned into the organizing principle for the successful uprising.

As the convergence towards a peaceful uprising was in motion, the communists were frantically trying to conserve their vision of a cataclysmic and bloody "people’s war." Not only was the notion of a peaceful democratic rising to be invalidated, the groups engaged in the democratic effort were smeared unremittingly by the communist propagandists.

That obsession with the cult of violence, that neurotic view that revolutions need to be cataclysmic to be real, eventually led to the ideological and factional splits in the communist movement in the wake of the Edsa Revolution. In face of the intense debates that broke out within the radical Left, the CPP-NPA ideologues mounted a bloody purge of their own cadres in the late eighties and early nineties. Those purges took thousands of lives in a classic case of a doomed revolution eating its own children instead.

I know the process rather intimately.

I was one of those viciously attacked by communist propagandists in the early eighties for espousing a strategy of unarmed popular democratic struggle employing the tactics of mass civil disobedience. By doing that, I had touched on the rawest nerve of Maoist orthodoxy: the indispensability of "people’s war."

For espousing what the communists thought was a naïve, petit-bourgeois delusion of an unarmed and democratic revolution, I was called many names: "revisionist" being the kindest of them.

The events of February 1986 were, however, exactly as we imagined it could be. It was exactly the swift turn of events that the communists had found unthinkable – and therefore condemnable. It was a revolution of the forces they consistently denigrated as petit-bourgeois.

Because of their fixation with armed struggle, the communists never reconciled with the Edsa Revolution. They constantly saw it as a faux revolution, a historical aberration whose newly opened democratic spaces must nevertheless be exploited by those representing the "real" revolution. Since 1986, the communists have never ceased undermining and destabilizing every democratic government installed by popular will. As the leftist party-list groups demonstrate, they are ready to seize the pork barrel but not the democracy that allows it.

Which makes Satur Ocampo’s most recent utterance intellectually dishonest and completely cynical. Having condemned the Edsa Revolution as faux, he now claims it is a product of the what the Left has done before it. There is a daring rape of logic here.

More dangerously, that baseless claim can only be made by obfuscating the essential historical character of the Edsa Revolution: it was a struggle for formal democracy.

As such, it was as much a rejection of the repressive and particularistic authoritarianism of the Marcos regime as it was a rejection of the party tyranny promised by the communist movement. In which case, this was an authentic democratic revolution mounted by citizens who believe that civil liberties are valuable, that governments must be formally accountable and that fundamental human rights must be religiously respected.

The people’s uprising of 1986 was not some bastard son of the "people’s revolution" imagined by the Maoists. It is the alternative revolution. The one more humane and truly more forward-looking. The one that is truly rooted in the democratic consensus on which our nationhood has been anchored, even during the darkest days of dictatorship. This is why, its tyrannical character notwithstanding, the Marcos regime paid cynical tribute to democracy by ceremonially re-enacting its formal processes such as through controlled-election while denying its substance which is civil liberty.

Satur is wrong. He is terribly and cynically wrong.

Because the essential spirit of the Edsa Revolution is the affirmation of formal democratic freedoms is at once a revolution against the persisting Marcos dictatorship as it was a revolution against the prospect of a communist tyranny coming in place of the former dictatorship. It is a rejection of every mode of dictatorship, whatever its ideological guise.

Because it is an affirmation of formal democratic freedoms, it must also be an affirmation of formal democratic procedures.

The restoration of formal democratic freedoms is, at the same instance, a restoration of formal democratic procedures. The former cannot be without the latter: there can be no assurance of individual rights unless there is assurance of due process.

If there is any bastard son here, it has to be what is called "Edsa Dos." I say this with some embarrassment, having played an active role in the events leading up to "Edsa Dos."

And the bastard son’s bastard son has to be "Edsa Tres": an event of pure populism with total rejection of process.

I find it curious now that those raging in the streets to the detriment of everybody else – both the communists who rejected the 1986 uprising and the personalities associated with Edsa Dos – are trying very hard to hide behind the skirt of the original uprising. Because of that which politically obsesses them at this moment, they downplay the essential spirit of the Edsa Revolution.

That spirit, to reiterate, is to achieve formal democratic freedoms by, necessarily, accepting formal democratic procedure. It is contrary to that spirit to try and constantly shout down duly mandated governments.