As the convulsions of the 2022 Philippine national elections settle down, we can begin a preliminary accounting of what they might mean for Filipinos. Does the election’s final outcome mean the beginning of a game-changing process of national unification, socio-economic development, poverty-alleviation, human rights advocacy, and foundation of a more egalitarian, meritocratic society?
Or does the political re-ascendancy of the Marcos family mean that Philippine democracy will be brought to its knees? Is what is in store for Filipinos a repeat of the corrupt, kleptocratic rule of the new president’s father, Ferdinand Marcos?
Anyone’s educated guess is as good as anyone else’s on which path the post-2022 national elections Philippines is heading. But before moving forward, we should look back at the past as to why the Marcoses have effectively been able to master the art of legal evasion and political resurrection.
We can go for pages into how the Marcoses, since the death of their patriarch Ferdinand in 1989, have avoided punishment for their crimes against the Filipino people. But exactly how they have gotten away with what they’ve done is no longer so much the point as is this: what historical contexts and cultural representations enabled the Marcoses to widen the gap between truth and justice?
This speaks to two glaring double-edged swords, one historical, the other religious, that have put Philippine democracy in the gravest danger today.
In staring back at the historical phenomenon of EDSA I/People Power in 1986, we can conclude that its lofty goals of socio-economic egalitarianism and prosperity, political empowerment for the masses, and a democratic restoration of a universally-enforced rule of law, have proved to be elusive.
Over the next thirty years following People Power, the liberal democrats who were supposed to see those goals through strayed in another direction, one that was retrograde to the needs of the Filipino people.
Instead of dealing with the challenges that beset Filipinos, the post-EDSA liberal democrats unwittingly confirmed the truth that underlies Philippine society: the wealthiest and most affluent among them would never act in any significant way against their interests. By compounding that reality with an overall lack of will, gumption, and imagination, the beneficial seismic changes that should have been within reach were arrested.
As a result, the masses’ belief in socio-economic and political change waned into disappointment, then disillusionment, and then outright grievance regarding the post-EDSA 1 vision. Thus, the seeds for authoritarianism and for the darker version of nostalgia politics were planted with each succeeding setback.
So the miscarriage of the EDSA I/People Power promise was the historical reckoning that by and large brought about a buckling under to the illusion of a lost paradise under the Marcos dictatorship. External factors and causes aside, we now come to the even more troubling aspect of the Marcoses’ return to power. I say more troubling because this aspect alludes to one of the pillars of the Christian faith so intensely adhered to by millions of Filipinos.
Christianity seeps into every part of Philippine society, from top to bottom and back again. For hundreds of years Filipinos have been influenced by Christian teachings to the crest of immanence and religious absolutism.
Like so many of the plethora of foreign ideas that have permeated the Filipino collective consciousness for centuries, at once Christianity’s salutary and deleterious messages and their generational effects could scarcely be greater for Filipinos than they have been.
There is one Christian belief that on the face of it sounds high and noble. That is the power of forgiveness. For a people immersed in the dogma of the Christian faith, the idea of forgiveness is irresistible. To get the most as a Christian out of forgiving another, it is important to keep in mind that the act or expression of forgiveness is contingent upon the assent for asking forgiveness for oneself.
It also means paying respect to the moral imperative of repenting on the part of the forgiven subject. The transgressor must acknowledge his or her sin and show penitence before they can be absolved.
Christian forgiveness is not something typically referred to when the public conversation turns on why some of the worst political actors in the Philippines are time and again restored to power despite their crimes and misdemeanors and overall ineptitude for office.
But the fact of the matter is that, deeply invested in heavenly visions of redemptive salvation and sanctification, Filipino Catholics---Catholics comprise the vast majority of Filipinos---have enabled the rehabilitation of careerist politicos both heir to and accountable for squalid, unscrupulous, and hubristic excesses.
It is one thing to forgive with compassion, but to forgive and forget is to diminish moral standards and to elevate the impulse to social and political expediency. With the election of Bongbong Marcos, Filipino voters have walked straight into a figurative cordon sanitaire where the echo chambers of misinformation, the potent themes and exploits of democratic erosion, and the pernicious systematizing and reinforcing of oligarchic constructs slash and burn their way across Philippine society.
To forgive is divine, to bury what should be heeded from the past is perilous.
ALLEN GABORRO
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