Authoritarianism as shoddy goods
October 5th, 2002
Ferdinand Marcos placed the Philippines under martial law 30 years ago to the day. Filipinos came to know about it only two days later, however. Marcos had signed Presidential Proclamation 1081 on the 21st, but implemented it only in the evening of the 22nd. That was when, order cover of night, he had his political opponents and other “enemies of the Republic” arrested, shut down radio and TV stations and newspapers, and erected checkpoints manned by heavily armed troops on the streets of the country’s cities.
On the 23rd, a Saturday, Filipinos awoke to a newspaper—and radio/TV-less country, and with media people, academics, student and labor leaders, as well as Ninoy Aquino and other opposition politicians in jail. By 7 p.m. that day, however, radio and TV were partially restored so anxious citizens could hear Marcos intoning in funereal tones that he had placed the entire country under martial rule two days before.
Marcos only confirmed that evening the persistent rumors that he had been preparing for the unthinkable for nearly two years. Long before September 21, 1972, reports of a government study on how other countries had implemented authoritarian rule had reached the media. That was followed by Ninoy Aquino’s exposé of Oplan Sagittarius, a plan to place the country under martial law in 1973, an election year, and when Marcos’s second term would end. Under Philippine law he could not run for a third term.
If he had done that it would have been as obvious as the sun’s rising in the East what he was declaring martial law for. By declaring it in 1972 he could make it appear that it wasn’t really to keep himself in power but for utterly unselfish reasons. It would later seem that the Marcos intelligence apparatus had deliberately leaked Oplan Sagittarius to determine who among the generals who had been given a copy were of doubtful loyalty. Aquino’s exposé told Marcos which general that was, at the same time that it made people believe that there was time enough to organize mass resistance to Marcos’s plans.
As usual Marcos overestimated his opponents—a habit that had served him well throughout his political life. He thought he needed both deceit and the cover of night to prevent or at least minimize initial resistance to martial rule. He presumed that the “leftist-rightist conspiracy” that he said threatened the Republic would go out into the streets in force, and that its armed wing, if it had one, would engage his troops in pitched battles.
It didn’t happen because the conspiracy didn’t exist, in the first place.
What Marcos said, and probably thought, was a conspiracy was in fact a vast reawakening in Philippine society—of a people from practically every sector demanding its economic and political transformation.
Before September 21 the country was in turmoil, with demonstrations at almost every street corner and on every issue from the price of gasoline to the rights of women. In the vast Philippine countryside, unchanged for centuries, the poorest farmers were demanding land reform, even as their children joined the growing army of the poor. In the universities academics trained their powers of analysis on developing programs of structural change to end the poverty, social injustice and political exclusion that had haunted the poor and powerless for centuries.
The “conspiracy” was democracy finally working as it was meant to be, meaning beyond the mockery of “guns, goons and gold” that Philippine elections had become, and into remaking the schools, the factories and the paddy fields which shaped the lives of the people.
To steal the thunder from this vast democratic upheaval, Marcos justified martial law as a means “to save the Republic and reform society.” However, in adopting this slogan (which the mass media as they were revived under government control incessantly aired and printed) Marcos accepted the thesis that the Republic indeed needed saving and society reforming.
Except that it would not be from the likes of false leaders like him that the Republic would be saved. Instead, he would do the saving. Society would not be reformed by doing away with the political and economic structures that had made his and other crooks’ emergence so inevitable. He would instead strengthen those very structures and along the way keep himself in power beyond the constitutional limits.
Marcos had outlined these very same plans a year earlier, in his ghostwritten book Today’s Revolution: Democracy. In it he had argued that democratic institutions and mechanisms had the power to effect the reforms “the poorest of the poor” demanded as indeed they had if they were democratic enough, and if those in control of them were willing to make them work.
The problem was that they weren’t. Elections were dead ends in which money and violence ruled. Representative democracy thus became a sham in which only those with millions to spend buying votes or terrorizing voters ended up “representing” the people. Instead, they represented themselves. Congress was a congress of landlords which for decades had refused to pass a meaningful land reform law, which could have been the cornerstone of economic and social reform.
Marcos sought to shatter what had become the common knowledge that Philippine democracy was hardly democratic by, oddly enough, making it even less. His rhetoric, however, appeared reformist enough to make many Filipinos hope that he would do as he promised, and at the same time restore order.
These Filipinos were mostly from the middle and upper classes—the professionals, businessmen and landlords who had looked with fear at the demonstrations in the cities and the reports of a new peasant army in the countryside. It was they Marcos addressed, in the belief that they, and those who didn’t care one way or the other, composed the majority that could sustain his regime.
He was right, of course. No movement for change has ever had the support of the majority. At its peak the American and French Revolutions counted no more than several hundred thousand supporters. The Chinese Revolution had three million at the most out of a population of 800 million, the Russian even less than that. There is, in the meantime and even in the midst of great upheavals, the majority who fear change, who chafe at inconvenience, who would moan the loss of privilege and who want the poor to know their place and to stay in it.
This is the majority that has always served the ends of authoritarianism and social stasis, the same majority who today support the “strong Republic,” who applaud the killing of criminals rather than their arrest, who want the radicals and troublemakers kept off the streets and in jail. They’re also the same people who want to keep the death penalty. They want things to remain as they are, not because they’re perfect, but because they’re predictable.
These are the same people who will also tell you, if they were already adults at the time, that they liked martial law. If they were not, they will say they’re willing to give it a try. They cite Lee Kuan Yew and Mahathir Mohamad’s achievements in the false belief that we have their equivalents in the Philippine political zoo. The Bill of Rights for development? They think it’s fair exchange and it would be, if only the Philippine political leadership had ever demonstrated that it could deliver as promised.
Thirty years ago Marcos promised order, development and predictability at the cost of the Bill of Rights. Instead, the country got further disorder, even worse poverty and years of instability while paying the cost.
Filipinos would do well to keep in mind as they desperately look around for a way out of the chaos, poverty and instability that once again reign in Philippine society, that authoritarianism has been tried before, and turned out to be shoddy goods. The primary reason for that is because the leading members of the Philippine political class is in the same category as oily, used-car salesmen who will promise anything but deliver nothing. Marcos was neither a Lee nor a Mahathir except in his authoritarian instincts, and Arroyo and company no different.
(ABS-CBNNEWS.COM/TODAY, September 21, 2002)