Kinutil
Change is a sacred word. Especially for those of us who came of age in the 1970s. Who lived through the monstrosity that was martial law and made it through to 1986 when we thought the age of Fascism had ended with the People Power Revolution.
Fascism believes in the use of force, whether overt or covert, to further the goals of the state. It was oriented toward extreme right-wing politics. It was in the ’70s the universal means used by oppressive regimes worldwide to bring down populist movements working for change. News of reformists and rebels being tortured and murdered by killer squads was rampant not just here in the Philippines but worldwide.
People power was one such populist movement. It was to our good fortune that it succeeded here. Some of us thought it was a doomed movement when it began. We thought it would become a long drawn-out struggle. Nonetheless, we committed to it out of a sense of its rightness. We did it sincerely as a heroic act. We were young.
We had been raised along the modernist ideals: liberty, equality, and fraternity. We found influence as well in philosophies and thoughts which stood at the polar extreme of those that drove tyrants like Adolph Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco, Augusto Pinochet and our very own and hated Ferdinand Marcos.
The word “change” rings a bell for us. Not the campanilla ting-a-ling used here in olden days to summon the household help. Change was a reverberating ominous knell from the huge campana hanging at the church belfry; a call to arms when it was not a warning for all to run for the hills. Thus, it seems to us bothersome when political candidates use it somewhat frivolously in their campaigns.
“Change is coming!” candidate Rodrigo Duterte’s blurb goes. And when we look closer at the nature of this “change,” we find out it is only the cause of federalism.
Besides that is the openness to the idea of using martial law to preserve his reign if he ever gets there. And if not that, then it is only his openness to killing criminals extrajudicially to cure the country’s affliction of criminality. And we wonder how fascism can ever be a call to change, when throughout history, fascism has always been a call to make things remain the same. And usually, they only got worse.
Any combination of words produce their own reading. Words are signs. Signs signify meanings. Meanings are logical constructs that result when words combine with each other not as a single sentence but as a whole narrative: something of a story we decipher or decode from the blank spaces in between the words themselves.
Where this particular candidate is concerned, the words are: change, federalism, martial law, and killing criminals. The words are not disparate. They do not occupy universes too distant from each other. And so the reading is logical and easy.
The word “change” means that this candidate will not be constrained by elements that now constrain the current government. This change cannot refer to a claim of a greater intelligence than that of the current president. There is no evidence to suggest even that. And so this change must refer to the simple transfer of power from the weaker to the stronger one.
Which tells us this change is really a call for the strong-man regime as was idealized by traditional fascist leaders.
The call to federalism is consistent with this desire. What federalism will do, if ever it is instituted here, will be to transfer power from the national oligarchies to the provincial and regional ones.
This means that national officials of all the branches of government will now be theoretically less powerful than they are; even as provincial and regional officials will be more empowered.
But how significant would this change actually be? The current complexities of governance will only be multiplied. Local officials will be even less accountable for their acts than they are now.
Duterte gets away with murder. And then, what else? Our problem is the oligarchy itself. Federalism will only multiply their number and solidify further their powers. What is changed? Nothing!
On the other hand, the last two words: martial law and killing criminals are words with blank spaces easy for us to fill in. The unmentioned narratives are fresh in our memories harking back to atrocities whose taste lingers in our mouths even now.
Things are not as bad as some people would describe them. But if the reins of government should ever fall once again to a strong man who is predisposed to solving problems by going for the shortest shortcuts, which includes the trampling of civil liberties and the use of murder as state policy, albeit secretly, then we already know how that will go.
We had been through decades of martial law. We have seen how easy it is to poison people’s minds with fear, and then provide them the easy antidote — force and violence.
It is an old scam used in distant provincial mountain roads in the old days. A man comes up to you with a vial and tells you it is the antidote for the poison he has placed in your food.
To buy it and live, you only have to give him everything you have. It is the devil’s proposition: Give me your freedom, your morality, and your soul, and I will give you everything your heart desires.
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