When EDSA I took place thirty-eight years ago, a privileged vision formed in Filipinos’ minds, a vision of the future in which the Philippines’s authoritarian and oligarchic landscape would be replaced by a rational democratic process and by a more socio-economically egalitarian and mobile society.
Every year in the days and weeks leading up to the EDSA I anniversary, I have occasion to revisit articles and other resources that are concerned with the popular and military uprising that culminated in the end of the Marcos dictatorship. And every year in doing so, I ponder this question: to the extent that People Power I succeeded in deposing Ferdinand Marcos, how much has the Filipino polity since discarded the EDSA I vision?
For those thirty-eight years since, it should have been an era of dynamic change and reform in which the worst ills of Philippine society (corruption, poverty, nepotism, violence, unemployment, environmental damage) were to have been significantly alleviated.
But in looking back through the lens of history since 1986, what many Filipinos thought was the historical inevitability of a more egalitarian, just and halcyon society instead led to more of the same oligarchic, rentier capitalist, and disproportionate socio-economic and political conditions that plagued the Philippines during Marcos’s time.
The ramifications of those preceding thirty-eight years have been very much at odds with the promise of EDSA I. That incredible experience was to become, by and large, a golden opportunity lost. The ultimate failure of EDSA I would invite aspersions from citizens, politicos, and intellectuals alike. It would also tragically give rise to the presidency of Rodrigo Duterte.
Duterte, like other illiberal and autocratic leaders such as Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, was well-versed in what American history professor Timothy Snyder called the “politics of eternity.” This idea runs counter to a more linear, more progressive trend of history and recoils into a recurring “story of victimhood” for a country.
According to Snyder:
“eternity places one nation at the centre of a cyclical story of victimhood. Time is no longer a line into the future, but a circle that endlessly returns the same threats from the past...within eternity, no one is responsible because we all know that the enemy is coming no matter what we do. Eternity politicians spread the conviction that government cannot aid society as a whole, but can only guard against threats. Progress gives way to doom.”
Rather than move the Philippines forward into a bright and prosperous future, Duterte returned the country into a chronically retrograde orbit around “the same threats from the past” that Snyder speaks of. From sponsoring and conducting a horribly bloody and ineffective war on drugs to displaying utter incompetence and apathy in responding to the Philippines’ economic and Covid challenges, Duterte managed to conjure up a wretched, “eternal,” outcome for the Filipino people.
But Duterte would never have had the chance to wreak the damage he caused if not for the missed chance legacy of EDSA I. This aftermath has led to the nurturing and growth of “grievance politics” which, as Professor Richard Heydarian said, has become a phenomenon of discontentment in the Philippines as well as in other nations. For Heydarian, grievance politics is the masses’ way of “rising and trying to tell the elites that 'either you’re gonna change your ways or we’re gonna go with outside the box kind of candidates'.”
In so doing, the nobility and dignity of the EDSA I spirit has become a burnt out shell of itself, thus exploding the illusion that the past was behind the Filipino people once and for all.
As for the liberal elites, the heroes and torchbearers of EDSA I, they must understand what Timothy Snyder means when he says that “History is not therapy.” Remembering the past is not always meant to be comforting. The past is remembered to take into account the mistakes that have been made and to learn from them, to not repeat them again.
The disappointment of EDSA I and the disillusionment with the liberal elites that it fostered is a lesson writ large. A resentful people seething against the backdrop of respectability politics will always leave the door open to the most extreme responses.
It is no doubt a delicate balancing act to make a historical event like EDSA I a prominent feature in one’s memory while meeting the demands of everyday life. But if we pull down the barrier of historical time that distances Filipinos from EDSA I, we will observe that the Philippines has been made into something that it should no longer be: rather than learning valuable lessons from the past, it is a society that continues to live in it in so many ways.
ALLEN GABORRO
Comments
Post a Comment