Hollow

The President yesterday formally lifted Proclamation 1017, one week after a confluence of political and military movements threatened to mount a coup d’etat against a duly constituted government. That lifting was largely anticipated, considering how the coup effort jointly undertaken by leftist groups and military adventurers collapsed so quickly under the weight of its own inanity.

The formal lifting of Proclamation 1017 should put to a close the hollow debate that has been going on the past few days. That debate has revolved around a grossly inflated claim that a proclamation that is merely descriptive of a prevailing situation and adds no new powers to the Chief Executive constitutes a mortal threat to our democracy.

That inflated claim seems to put undue weight on the unbridled exercise of the political freedoms we imagine are due us while, at the same instance, downplaying the right of the State to defend itself from armed threat. That is a conceptual sleight-of-hand that is being played on us by those who were, in all probability, part of the conspiracy that would have killed the constitutional order.

There are names and names and names mentioned in the "Final Talk" transcripts: politicians and preachers, academics and habitual anarchists. They were the same ones busy hustling the past week, issuing dire warnings that President Arroyo is out to kill the constitutional order.

They have tried to turn things inside out and upside down. Those who conspired against our democracy are now presenting themselves as democracy’s saviors.

In the end, this whole episode is silly.

The "Final Talk" transcripts tell us so much about the need to dissociate megalomania from real political competence. The men involved in the negotiations between the renegade military officers and the leaders of the CPP-NPA were overwhelmed by their own delusions.

They thought they could dictate the course of events. Events have clearly demonstrated they were not up to the task.

The most important delusion, which brought ruin to the coup effort, was the belief cultivated by the plotters that the people would accept them as the nation’s new leaders. How could they have so grossly miscalculated the sentiments of our people?

Proclamation 1017, while it was there, was a provocation for totally inane utterance.

A number of direct conspirators were cynical enough to pose as civil libertarians – condemning loudly the most minimal actions taken by the State to defend itself from an armed threat that was afoot. By analogy, what they were actually saying was that it was foul for the State to try and parry a blow directed against it. Such a view does not only run against modern republican theory, it also runs against the natural instinct for self-defense.

The argument they pose is sustainable only if we assume that all rights are unbridled and that the exercise of such rights must have primacy over the survival of the State that precisely makes those rights available. The whole logical infrastructure of political philosophy is being quashed here by the opportunistic utterance of those desperate few who are dealing with the aftermath of their own failure to grab power.

When 1017 was lifted yesterday, the conspirators were denied a leverage for conducting propaganda. In exasperation, they now threaten to impeach the President for even proclaiming that an emergency existed. That is totally bankrupt.

Did they want the authorities to wait until there was actual fighting in the streets, where civilians are hurt or killed and where the economy is thrown into a tailspin, before government acted to nip a brewing coup in the bud?

Did they want the Palace to be under direct attack and senior police and military officials held hostage before a state of emergency is declared?

On its face, Proclamation 1017 is a tame document that seems intended principally for political effect: to break the gathering momentum of a coup conspiracy. Much of the denunciation thrown upon it by the self-appointed guardians of civil liberties is, at best, misplaced. The apprehensions were largely the consequence of political agitation and propaganda hype.

When the momentum of the coup conspiracy was broken, the intended political effect of the proclamation was served. That sets the condition for its lifting.

We must understand, however, that it was just the momentum of the build-up that was broken by the prompt and decisive actions taken by the authorities. Many of the conspirators, hiding behind the principles of due process they would have suspended had they succeeded in grabbing power, continue to lurk either in the half-light of clandestine existence or in the limelight of television cameras.

Yesterday morning, purveyors of political mischief exploded two puny bombs at the Ortigas area. The NPA attacked the police at Puerto Galera, scaring away the tourists. In the afternoon, Senator Rodolfo Biazon claimed that he was contacted by soldiers who were ordered to bring military-type explosives into the city. The main coup attempt had unraveled but many of its component parts have yet to realize that.

The conspiracy was the sum of many delusions. But the capacity for political mischief remains.

Too bad, the coup conspirators and their useful pawns in the open dissident movements proved too inept to even make the threat they bear more substantially real. If they were a little more capable, events would have a more clarifying effect and the authorities would have seen enough reason and enough of a mandate to rout them more decisively.

The most disturbing aftertaste of this silly episode is the extent to which a significant number of our people equate democracy with the irresponsible exercise of right, with the idea that the State must be completely emasculated it is unable to defend itself against a horde of poseurs claiming to represent "people power" and with the constant refusal of self-styled democrats to accord the law its majesty.

That is a warped view of what democracy is. It is a view that, by simply persisting, constitutes a continuing threat to the effectiveness of our democratic order.