Category: randy david

Bullies, the bullied, and bystanders

 Randy David

Watching that disturbing video of a Filipino middle school boy threatening, insulting and beating up a terrified fellow student inside a school toilet, in a brazen display of bullying power, struck me in a way that I could not fully understand. I had to review the video a number of times to grasp what it was that made it specially chilling to watch.

Finally, on perhaps the seventh or eighth replay, it dawned on me: The bully was not only aware that the entire encounter was being recorded. He, in fact, also seemed like he was performing for an imagined audience of anonymous voyeurs. At one point, he brashly faced the camera, as though to address the gallery, and went on to describe in a cold measured tone what options he was offering to his prey — a beating or a rite of degradation (that included kissing his genitals).

Read on…

What the pork barrel scam reveals about us

By Randy David

For more than 10 years, a good number of lawmakers, with the aid of the fixers who assisted them, were able to pocket the entire cash value of their Priority Development Assistance Fund, without anyone in government publicly protesting that there was anything wrong in what they were doing. That is astonishing. It reveals a high tolerance for corruption that contradicts all the norms of modern government enshrined in our Constitution. It exposes the feebleness of our institutional control systems.

Read on

 

 

The bases redux

By Randy David

In September 1991, the Philippine Senate voted to reject a new bases treaty that would have allowed the United States to keep its military facilities in the Philippines. That decision was a watershed in the relationship between the Philippines and its former colonial master. Many thought of it as marking the true beginning of a postcolonial era for the country, which acquired its formal status as an independent nation in 1946. Yet, the US bases issue did not end there.

There has been, since 1991, a determined effort to reverse the effects of the Senate vote. First, our leaders thought we had to appease our American friends. The Visiting Forces Agreement was crafted mainly for that purpose. Because it ran against the spirit of the 1991 vote, the VFA was rationalized as integral to our commitments under the RP-US Mutual Defense Treaty. Then, after 9/11, the global hunt for the al-Qaida terrorist cells in Southern Mindanao extended the scope of the VFA. Visiting American troops subsequently became a regular fixture in Mindanao.

Today, ironically, the justification for regularizing the American military presence in the country revolves around the same reason that had been invoked in the early debates on the US bases—the threat posed by China. What had seemed so ridiculously remote in the late 1960s and ’70s, when China was an underdeveloped agrarian economy hobbled by ideology, now appears so real that if the same bases treaty were submitted to a Senate vote today, it could win handily.

What has changed dramatically is China’s place in the world. In a span of only three decades, the backward country next door has achieved a level of economic prosperity that was thought impossible under Maoist leadership. The key factor was Deng Xiaoping. It was he who made it conceivable for the Chinese Communist Party to preside over the capitalist transformation of that country’s economy.

The rise of China as an economic power has however unleashed its own dynamic. It cannot now afford to stop growing. This unceasing drive for growth has in turn fueled an unquenchable thirst for natural resources wherever they may be found. It is the old story of imperialism. A new rising power starts flexing its military muscles in order to secure resources it cannot obtain through economic cooperation and diplomatic means. That’s where China is today. It seeks to convert the economies of its poorer neighbors into components of its own gigantic economy. This is what it has lately done to Africa. It is what it has tried to do in the Philippines—not by enlisting the help of the local communists but by generously rewarding politicians who are willing to use their powers to accommodate China’s expansionary agenda.

China’s leaders had a cozy relationship with Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Today, it is the opposite. China has taken an overtly hostile attitude toward the P-Noy administration. It can wait until P-Noy’s term is over. But, China now has the power to shape events—to intervene, like the United States has done, in the internal affairs of any country. In the next presidential election, China may not be content with simply being a spectator.

I salute the way P-Noy has stood up to Chinese bullying. But it is unfortunate that the assertion of our sovereignty vis-à-vis China is pushing us toward a revival of the colonial relationship that our past leaders had heroically tried to end. It is bad enough that the VFA—which was originally meant only to provide a legal cover for visiting US forces participating in occasional joint military exercises—has been used to legitimize the regular presence in the country of American troops. It is such a shame (not to mention a patent violation of the Constitution) that we are now talking of constructing new facilities in Subic and Clark for the use of foreign troops.

If all this is because we wish to protect ourselves from China, then we need to review our premises. First, the United States is in Asia for its own interests and not for ours. Part of those interests is to contain China’s military power and influence. While we may indeed find common ground with America, we must not delude ourselves into thinking that US troops are here to defend our national interests against those of China. Most of all, we cannot surrender to America the same sovereignty we passionately assert against China.

Second, do we really believe that China’s leaders are prepared to actually start a war over territorial claims in the South China Sea? It is safe to assume that they know such a war would draw the United States into the conflict, and there would be no way of preventing its escalation. Should war with China become unavoidable, US forces would prefer to fight it in Asia, rather than on American soil.

“This rigmarole about protecting the Philippines is window-dressing: is it not?” Sen. J. William Fulbright asked Rear Adm. Draper Kauffman in a 1969 hearing of the US congressional subcommittee on US security agreements and commitments abroad. Admiral Kauffman, then the commander of the US naval forces in the Philippines, stammered and replied thus: “No, sir; I do not think it is window-dressing. I think it is a mutual advantage or else we would probably have to pay rent, something like that, if there were no advantage to them. I think they believe it to be in their advantage from their own defense point of view, but I believe we are there … because these are very fine bases for the United States.”

American interests in the region have not changed much. But, we have changed. We cannot turn our back on what we achieved in 1991 when our senators said “No” to a new bases agreement—emancipation from our colonial past.

* * *

public.lives@gmail.com

Communities of memory

By Randy David

A few days ago, I participated in a forum to explore the purpose and methodology of establishing a “museum of memory” that would contain and preserve memories from the dark period of martial law. The concept behind this is prompted by the strong feeling that today’s young people hardly have an idea of what happened during the 14 years of the Marcos dictatorship. The premise, of course, is that the memory of this period must not be allowed to fade because, if Santayana is correct, “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

On the initiative of the Edsa People Power Commission and the National Historical Commission, three specialists from Latin America were invited to share their insights and experiences on the establishment of museums, parks, and monuments commemorating the struggle against dictatorship and state violence in their respective countries. The three guests—Eugenia Ulfe of Peru, Patricia Tappata of Argentina, and Lelia Perez of Chile—spoke with great wisdom about the complex struggle to recover the voices of the countless victims of repression and their sometimes frustrating quest for justice when the dictatorship ended.

The exercise of memory, they said, is but one of the four essential tasks of a post-authoritarian government if it is concerned with healing and reconciling the national community. The other three are: truth, justice, and reparation. Listening to them, one realizes that the main reason we have been poor at remembering is because, in the first place, we failed to document in a sustained and systematic way what happened during that period, particularly in the remote towns and among the less prominent sectors of our society. That failure has left an empty space in our own consciousness.

The idea of setting up a process to hear the victims and to confront the perpetrators of state violence was from the outset rejected as divisive. The successive coup attempts launched against Cory Aquino’s presidency served as stern warnings that the government would be making a big mistake if it started digging up inconvenient truths about martial law.

Without anything approximating a truth commission, the most that could be produced was a list of the victims, and even this was incomplete. Because some of the central figures of martial law were part of the new government, it was difficult to bring any of the military leaders responsible for the tortures, disappearances, and illegal detentions to trial. Later, a general amnesty formalized the self-induced amnesia that set in almost as a precondition to the survival of the new government.

Reparation was one area where something valuable could have been accomplished. Yet even this was denied the victims. When the latter sued the Marcoses before American courts demanding compensation for the victims of human rights violations, judgments in their favor could not be enforced without the consent of the Philippine government that had claimed prior rights over all Marcos properties. To this day, the government has refused to compensate the victims of human rights violations during martial law. Yet, it did not think twice about paying the debts owed to financial institutions that were incurred by the Marcos regime.

The three Latin American guests said that symbolic reparation is often more important to achieving closure than material reparation. This entails giving the victims and their kin the chance to recover their dignity and validate their experiences. This can only be done if their stories are allowed to be freely told, collected, and preserved. These stories must be situated in the broader context of the events that marked that period. Someone’s imprisonment or torture or rape in the hands of military captors must not be treated as a cause for stigma or shame, to be buried as a family secret. Only in this sense can truth be redemptive.

From all this, wrote the Jewish philosopher Avishai Margalit in his thought-provoking work, “The ethics of memory,” we may glean an ethics of remembering that must be distinguished from the politics of memory or the psychology of memory. An ethics of memory implies an obligation to remember and also to forget. It involves complex attitudes and sentiments that come with what he terms “thick” relations—relations that are “moored in shared memory.”

“Thick relations are grounded in attributes such as parent, friend, lover, fellow-countryman.” The operative themes that mark such relationships are those of loyalty and betrayal, gratitude and love. “Thin relations, on the other hand, are backed by the attribute of being human.” These are our relationships to the “stranger and remote.” Here, the operative themes are usually those of respect and humiliation. Margalit says that ethics refers to how we should live with those who are bound to us by shared memory. Morality refers to the rules that govern our relationships to the rest of humanity.

Read in this context, it becomes clear that the project of a museum of memory has to confront the tricky issues posed by the ethics of remembering. This cannot be done by a committee working separately from the communities of memory that alone must decide what to remember and what to forget. The purpose must be neither merely to exhibit the trauma of the past nor to demonize the perpetrators. If it is to succeed, a memory museum cannot have any other purpose than to reawaken the values of loyalty, forgiveness, gratitude, and solidarity that hold us together as a people bound by thick relations.