Fr. Rolando V Dela Rosa
IT is our custom nowadays to sneer at martial law and exaggerate its defects. In contrast, we extol democracy and belittle its dangers. It is about time that we reviewed such judgments. It is simplistic to say that the Marcos regime had created all our present problems. We are resurrecting repeatedly this chapter in our history as a convenient scapegoat for present failures.
Most of our problems today are not vestiges of the martial rule but the inevitable offshoot of our brand of democracy. Priding ourselves as the first democratic country in Asia, we presume wrongly that democracy is practiced in the Philippines in the same way as in other countries. Democracy is understood and exercised not only in terms of its universally known characteristics but also in terms of cultural parameters. We exercise democracy quite differently than Americans or Europeans do because our country’s democratic processes and institutions have undergone a unique historico-cultural development.
It takes time to develop the right conditions for democracy. Many of us overlook this. We tend to talk about politics and social issues in absolute terms, when we are, in fact, dealing with developmental processes that take time to evolve. Alexis De Tocqueville once wrote that it took centuries to build and construct American democracy and the institutions and behavior that would support it. People are not born with attitudes and skills needed for democracy.
To his credit, former President Marcos was prudent enough to recognize this. He saw that we are not culturally prepared for democracy. I would like to believe that he wanted to be a sort of a benevolent dictator creating the necessary structures that would usher in a democratic form of governance, and then relinquishing power afterwards. Envisioning a
"Bagong Lipunan" composed of disciplined, law-abiding, and politically mature Filipinos, he launched an all-out war against the social and cultural disvalues that hinder the development of democracy in the Philippines. He could have succeeded but the process was cut short by ambition and greed, his and of those around him. Worse, he no longer wanted to relinquish power.
So, the democracy that we have now is the strange combination of a democracy resulting from intermittent people power revolts and a democracy imposed from the outside. The former is mostly known for the antics of a querulous but inept Congress and the endless "rigodon" of government officials dancing to the tune of street protests and mass action. The latter is a democracy fueled by the neo-colonialist tendencies of industrialized nations, a democracy that has reduced our country into a rich source of cheap labor and has created a weak government ruled by dummies of multinational corporations or puppets of developed nations.
Let’s face it. Maintaining weak, unpopular but democratic states which can easily be manipulated is much more lucrative to powerful nations, than supporting nations to evolve into real democracies.
What we have in our country is not a democratic state, but a regime of a small group of agents who depend on outside forces and outside intelligence agencies to maintain stability and order. Sadly, this beautifying veneer, which hides a rule of brutality, has become a necessary component of the now dominant world order or, to be more precise, disorder.
