MALAYBALAY CITY (MindaNews / 25 Oct) – Any vision of a social order resides in the realm of the ideal, and derives its desirability from the imagined or objective decadence of the one it seeks to replace. Too often, however, such vision only aims for one thing and one thing only — the justification of coercion, corruption and other crimes as necessary evils.
Thus “Mein Kampf” (My Struggle), an elucidation of Hitler’s political ideology, pinpoints the Jews, along with the communists and other groups, as the chief cause of Germany’s downfall as a European power. His antisemitic views, a paranoia reinforced by the “supremacy of the Aryan race,” led to the Holocaust, which saw the extermination of at least 6 million Jews during World War II.
Two decades after the War, China’s Mao Zedong produced his own “The Little Red Book,” which contains aphorisms from the communist leader on class struggle and other subjects on revolution. It became the handbook for the Red Guards, a paramilitary mobilized during the Cultural Revolution to check on citizens, including Communist Party members themselves, who had “bourgeois tendencies.” Estimates of those who died during the purge range from hundreds of thousands to millions, although the exact number may remain unknown.
Here at home, the importance of creating a sacred text in his quest for political immortality wasn’t lost on President Ferdinand E. Marcos when he published “Notes on the New Society of the Philippines” and other books. (While these works carry his name as the author, it is widely believed that these were written by ghostwriters, as Marcos was never known as a man of prose.)
“Notes” cites the Moro separatist and communist armed movements as among the compelling reasons for the imposition of martial law nationwide. Moreover, prior to martial law, he produced “Today’s Revolution: Democracy,” which heaps blame on the “oligarchs” as among those who had brought the country to the brink of upheaval. It didn’t matter that his political career had thrived under the auspices of the “oligarchy” which he professed to despise.
In 1978, Marcos (read one of his ghostwriters) published yet another book justifying the supposed necessity of authoritarian rule – “The Democratic Revolution in the Philippines” (or “Revolution from the Center”). The book tackles entrenched elite hegemony which had driven the masses to further deprivation in terms of property and power relations. It posits that these relations could no longer be mediated by State institutions due to the “failures of his (Filipino’s) democracy,” a situation that would have required revolutionary changes of the kind espoused by the Communist Party of the Philippines-New People’s Army.
But, as expected, the book does not prescribe the ideal cure to the disease. In a clear act of equivocation that would escape the unsuspecting reader it asserts that the ailment, the “failed democracy,” is the bitter pill too. Marcos wanted to emancipate the masses using the same system that had supposedly failed them. “Democracy, in sum, is the revolution.”
There’s a catch though. Marcos would preside over the “democratic revolution” (whatever that means) through martial law, fashionably dubbed “constitutional authoritarianism.” Nothing about socializing wealth and the means of production. Nothing about broadening decision-making processes and shifting the power equation. What can be more self-contradictory than this?
If anything can be deduced from comparing what these books say to the events during Marcos’ 21-year rule, it is that the dictator was no different from the other politicians before him who thrived within the same ecosystem of corruption, coercion and patronage. He just happened to be more aggressive, brutal and beyond the reach of moral self-assessment that his predecessors may have had encountered at some point in their political life.
All in the name of the illusory “New Society.”
(MindaViews is the opinion section of MindaNews. H. Marcos C. Mordeno can be reached at hmcmordeno@gmail.com.)
