AFP nationalist gov’t answer to hunger, political chaos
By Alejandro Lichauco
The Daily Tribune
12/11/2008
On top of the rising hunger, you have political chaos. Or, if you will, on top of the political chaos, you have the rising hunger. Whatever, even the most fanatic devotee of civilian government and democracy will have to agree that the political system, elections and political pros — or what pass off as trapos — and that bull they call “democracy” — aren’t the answer to the hunger and the chaos. The longer the political system stays, the more chaos and the more hunger. And the more hunger, the more chaos.
Both the political system and the hunger must go, or the social fabric — or whatever remains of it — simply disintegrates, as in fact it is already disintegrating in slow motion fashion.
If the well-off think they can insulate themselves from it all, then they are plain crazy. We are in the grip of our own version of an ongoing French Revolution and you know how that revolution ended: In the guillotine for the nobility and the ruling class.
There’s only one answer to the hunger and the political chaos. And that’s the obliteration of the political system that has produced the types you see in Congress agitating for Constituent Assembly (Con-ass). The political insanity and insane arrogance that they represent are more than proof enough that the system must go because it is the system that has produced them and it is they who have produced the hunger. Only these people have succeeded to enrich themselves in a situation where everybody or just about everybody else is going hungry and getting impoverished.
What then is the answer?
History provides the answer. And history says that when you have the kind of demonic chaos and all-pervasive political evil that have our society in grip today, the only solution is a military nationalist solution. The kind of military nationalist solution represented by the Col. Nassers or Gen. Park Chung-hees or General Suharto or Gen. Chiang Kai-shek or even General Francos of the modern world.
The military nationalist solution explains the Asian economic miracle. South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia and Thailand only 50 years ago were far worse off than the Philippines today. But look where they are now. Thanks to Gen. Park Chung-hee, Gen. Chian Kai-shek, General Suharto and to the chain of military governments that governed Thailand for 30 years beginning in the 1930s. All these nations rose from literally nothing to become NICs, or newly industrialized countries, of Asia. If they had taken to the “democratic” path of the Philippines, they would still be in the garbage heap today.
But is a military nationalist solution in the Philippines possible at all? Of course it is, and it is long overdue. Lurking at the corner and nestled in the very breast of the Armed Forces are idealistic, patriotic and nationalistic young men and women just waiting to emerge from the garbage heap of the traditional military establishment.
The Armed Forces, true enough, as an institution have degenerated along with the degeneration of the political system. But unlike the political system, the Armed Forces has a clearly defined class of redeeming elements typified by the likes of Gen. Danilo Lim, Colonels Querubin, Faeldon and Miranda, Capt. Antonio Trillanes and the late Captain Jarque. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of Lims, Faeldons, Mirandas, Trillaneses and Jarques in the Armed Forces today and they don’t have any counterpart in the political system.
Along with these patriotic rebels in the Armed Forces, most of whom are junior officers, you have at the upper level the likes of Generals Yano and Luna, rare senior officers whose reputation and integrity remain unblemished. And they now occupy top, strategic positions of command.
One suspects that it is these “liberators” whom the five bishops saw when they called for a new government. And these “liberators,” as the bishops described them, are just around the corner.
In time, sooner or later, and sooner than later, these “liberator” will surface and step into the forefront to redeem the institution they represent — and to redeem the entire nation as well.
For they belong to the only institution in the world — the Armed Forces — whose members are pledged to die for country. There isn’t any other institution in the world which exacts that pledge from its devotees.
So, people of the Philippines — those in hunger and starving particularly and who constitute the overwhelming majority — don’t despair. That’s exactly what those Con-asses want you to do. Despair. It is they instead who should despair — if their sight hasn’t been completely blighted by their corruption to see a new dawn coming.
General Lim said it all in a statement calling for a new government and read for him by Bishops Tobias and Yniquez a week ago. “This country’s” he said, “needs leaders of heroic and nationalist stature who would champion genuine independence in every aspect of our national life… abandon obscene foreign debt payment, push industrialization, sustainable agrarian reform and ensuring food independence.”
It took raw courage for Lim to say that in the isolation of his prison cell. But he said it, as Ninoy did. And there are hundreds of Danny Lims just waiting to emerge with the new dawn.