The Revolution Seems Unlikely. Or Does It?

Two years ago, the suggestion that President B.S. Aquino Mk. III could or should be ousted from the office he was born to be completely unsuited for would have been a suggestion heard only in Philippine society’s consistently dissenting fringes. One clue that the idea is becoming increasingly more mainstream is that, without much prompting, an increasingly frequent comment being offered by desperate supporters of Aquino seeing their fantasies of his personal quasi-saintliness evaporate before their very eyes is some version of, “Noynoy can’t be removed, because who is there to replace him?”

One of my brethren in the Cassandra Club took issue with this in a casual post on Facebook, making the point that the two problems – criminally incompetent sitting President who needs to be removed, and lack of anyone who could better fill that job, or for that matter, fill it at all – are mutually exclusive. The fact that the latter is true does not validate Aquino’s continued presence in the Office of the President, and does not cancel out the uncomfortable fact that, at a minimum, Aquino and his Justice Secretaryclearly conspired to obstruct justice, a criminal offense for anyone else, and an impeachable one as far as those high officials are concerned.

Aquino’s behavior during the ‘pork barrel’ scandal also tends to cast him in an extremely suspicious light as well, as he directed the massive expansion of PDAF outlays during his term, directed the creation of the highly-questionable “Disbursement Acceleration Program”, and has thrown obstacles in the path of anyone legitimately trying to conduct an investigation of the wider scandal by refusing to permit the release of most of the Department of Budget and Management’s PDAF- and DAP-related records. For these acts alone he ought to be impeached, “impeached” in this sense meaning what it’s supposed to mean, i.e., subjected to a comprehensive inquiry to determine whether or not the Napoles-managed conspiracy continued into Aquino’s term beyond the 2007-2009 period under scrutiny now (most believe it certainly did), and whether or not Aquino himself was involved in it during his tenure in the House and later in the Senate (a growing number of people now assume he was).

Be that as it may, it is also true that there is no obvious or even vaguely possible replacement for Aquino, and that is a worrisome reality. When there is not a legitimate potential leader to polarize a rebellion, the revolution will not happen, or if does anyway, it will ultimately fail its promise; one need only look at the differences between successes like Poland and then-Czechoslovakia and chaotic disasters like Egypt and the Ukraine for proof. Anti-regime opposition movements in Poland and Czechoslovakia were led by Lech Walesa and Vaçlav Havel, respectively; the former a powerful figure in the Polish labor sector, and the latter a “dissident playwright” with globally-recognized intellectual credibility. Egypt’s uprising against the regime of Hosni Mubarak, on the other hand, was essentially leaderless, and while the recent (and still ongoing) revolution in the Ukraine might have started as a protest against the excesses of the government of Viktor Yanukovych, that, as it turned out, was merely cover for bringing a long-simmering, wider conflict between the pro-Western and pro-Russian halves of Ukrainian society to a head (Something that the Western world does not understand at all, which is why their perspective and approach to dealing with the Ukrainian crisis is wrong-headed and dangerous. But that’s a topic for a different essay.).

In hindsight Walesa and Havel may not have been ideal leaders in the day-to-day job of heading a government, but they were good enough to get their countries to the point where the processes of changing to tangibly better national systems were well underway and most likely irreversible. They were good enough because they had the credibility as symbols and the personal competence to articulate a post-revolution vision before the revolution even started, a vision around which the uprising could coalesce. And under those circumstances, the revolutions they led were virtually bloodless. Others, of course, have not been, and perhaps one reason why not is when the revolution takes place in a vacuum – i.e., when it is a purely reactionary revolt that lacks a unifying ‘post-revolution vision’ – the threatened regime and its supporters fills that vacuum with forceful resistance.

In all likelihood, an uprising to topple the Aquino Regime would look more like Egypt’s and less like Poland’s or Czechoslovakia’s, precisely because there is no personified ‘post-revolution vision’; the Philippines does not have a Walesa or a Havel, much less a Gandhi or a Mandela, and it is in some ways a sad indictment of the quality of Philippine society that some of the names which have been cautiously put forward as possibly filling that role are laughably inadequate by comparison. The last figure who might have even come close was Ninoy Aquino – but that is a judgment based on largely mythical ‘what-ifs’ generated after his death, and the sorry records of his superstitious and vindictive consort and his apparently sociopathic heir tend to suggest the elder Aquino might have been a disappointing leader had he lived.

The country obviously would be gravely harmed by a violent breakdown of its civic framework (no matter how dysfunctional it is) followed by an indefinite period of chaotic uncertainty, but it just as obviously cannot continue to exist indefinitely in a system for which even the “innocent” among the leadership are to blame for perpetuating, while the basic standards of living for the largest part of the population continue to degrade. We have several millennia of human history as evidence that these kinds of situations tend not to end well. Whether anyone in this country has the wherewithal to change that this time remains to be seen.

Source: http://benkritz.wordpress.com/2014/05/18/the-revolution-seems-unlikely-or-does-it/