Why ‘EDSA’ couldn’t unify us
IN his recent bestselling books “Sapiens” and “Nexus,” historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari expounds his central thesis: That mankind’s ability to cooperate in large numbers, even if they do not know or meet each other as in primitive societies, is because they share stories, fictions, which include religions, legal systems, and even economies.
“These create a nexus of meaning that binds societies together,” Harari noted.
Zoom in to the most important level of social organization in the modern era, the nation. Harari’s insight was earlier advanced by Benedict Anderson, the late Anglo-Irish political scientist, historian and scholar of Southeast Asia, in his 1983 pioneering book, “Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.”
Anderson defines nations as “imagined communities” because members of a nation will never know most of their fellow citizens, yet they feel a deep sense of belonging and connection. “This sense of unity is constructed through shared myths, symbols, language, and media rather than direct personal relationships,” Anderson explained.
For the US, many would claim that its nexus is the story, that the US was established by British and other Europeans escaping the oppression of King George III’s monarchy, and that this made America the champion of freedom and democracy all over the world in this era. The story is also that landless, poor Americans bravely conquered the Wild West, the areas beyond the northeast and became rich, creating the myth that America is the land of the American Dream. That may not be the US reality (which is that it is a modern Roman Empire), but Harari and Anderson’s point is that Americans deeply believe this story, which forms the glue for their nation.
Nexus
Many countries’ main nexus was formed through revolution: France by the its Revolution that started in 1789, which dismantled the monarchy and established a Republic based on “liberté, égalité, fraternité,” the revolutions’ rallying cry that became France’s national motto.
China’s, the Communist Party’s Mao-led decades of the masses’ struggle and eventual victory against the Japanese aggressors and against the “reactionary” Kuomintang; Vietnam similarly by the Vietnamese Communist Party’s victory, first against the French and then the US and their “running dogs” of the South.
Unfortunately for us, we were robbed by the US of such a revolution-based defining moment that could have been a powerful nexus binding us as a nation, when it stopped with ruthless force our forefathers’ momentum for independence started against the Spanish colonizers.
The US probably has been the most clever colonizer in history. It bribed our leaders by giving them huge roles in running the emerging nation, by creating the so-called Philippine Commonwealth and transforming the local leaders into mayors and governors. It installed a land-based form of capitalism, and created the requirements for such a system as an educated workforce, public utilities and infrastructure.
Imagined
What emerged as our nexus, our “imagined community” was basically of two dimensions. One was the “little brown brother myth,” which the American rulers etched in our minds, that we were replicating in this part of the world the US system of democracy and capitalism.
The second dimension was that Filipinos were dual citizens: the Republic’s citizens, but at heart citizens of the Kingdom of God, of the Roman Catholic faction. It was the Spanish who laid the foundations for such a myth; their colony here only had a skeletal military force, as the friars managed to frighten the natives into submission with their tales of hell. The central infrastructure in all towns, still obvious to this day, is the church, with the smaller municipal government building nearby. Indeed, one term for the nation — sambayanan — a portmanteau of pagsamba ng bayan, is a term referring to the faithful’s worship at the church every Sunday and during Catholic Church holidays, practically the time when they assemble and see almost everyone in the town.
Our weakness as a nation has been due to the weakness of our nexus. Since we are America’s little brown brothers, many of us have migrated to the step-mother country, for Filipinos a seamless transition in terms of language and culture. While US statistics say there are 5 million Filipino migrants in America, the real number could be double that as even before the world wars Filipinos had already been migrating, first to Hawaii, Alaska, then to California.
Nearly half of my classmates at the Ateneo high school, for instance, migrated to the US straight from college, among them Eli Remolona who chose to return home though to serve his motherland in his senior years as Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas governor.
Kingdom
That membership in the Kingdom of God is the second dimension of one of the elements of our national story is medieval, which many of the youth have been jettisoning — leaving them without the nexus to bind them to other Filipinos. This is the root of corruption, the lack of sense of belonging to a nation, without the nexus glue, so much so that even senators and congressmen do not see anything wrong in their ransacking government coffers.
The anti-Marcos elites that were behind the EDSA Revolution had wanted it to be the country’s defining moment, the new core, our nexus, the glue to bind us as a nation. A colleague in this paper, Ranhilio Aquino, expressed this naïve view, and was still ecstatic over EDSA, writing the other day: “They were glorious days — and it would be a disservice to the young to keep them unaware of the greatness of which we were capable, the magnanimity that made EDSA one of a kind, one for the books, one for history.” That’s nonsense, and few are buying that now.
EDSA was as much of a flop as our current national “Catholics-mimicking-Americans” nexus. As the years passed, fewer and fewer Filipinos could relate to it because of two important reasons.
First, EDSA was mostly a metropolitan Manila phenomenon, and the first crowds were good Catholics heeding the request of Cardinal Jaime Sin to go to Camp Crame to defend the coup leader Juan Ponce Enrile and the smart Fidel Ramos from being arrested. The crowds swelled both because of curiosity over what would happen next and because of genuine anger against Ferdinand Marcos.
Second, EDSA and its leaders never really got the rest of the nation to make it the national unifying nexus. The EDSA forces that became the Yellows never even attempted to get the “Solid North” of Ilocanos and the Muslims in Mindanao to join a national alliance.
Shattered
The EDSA myth was actually shattered just six months after the event when Juan Ponce Enrile, the one of the two men who triggered the revolt, with the RAM boys that were at the movement’s vanguard, attempted a coup to topple Cory and replace her with their junta, believing her government had fast become corrupt and controlled by her clansmen. They undertook two other coup attempts, in 1987 and then in 1989, which would have been successful if not for US intervention.
A major force at that time, the Left, were quickly removed from their posts as pillars of EDSA when Cory’s military attacked its rally at Mendiola Bridge near Malacañang, killing 13 protesters and seriously wounding 74. Whether the Leftists really represented or not the workers and farmers in what was dubbed as the Mendiola Massacre, it etched in the minds of most Filipinos that EDSA did not include the masses.
Rather, the Cory presidency that was the product of EDSA more and more was perceived as a government of the anti-Marcos oligarchs. Cory was succeeded to the presidency by Fidel Ramos, her choice, who because of his closeness to old and new oligarchs further cemented the perception that EDSA could not be the story that binds us as a nation.
Indeed, the so-called EDSA Shrine built in 1989 in commemoration of that event that toppled Marcos had a colossal gold-colored statue of the Virgin Mary atop the church, flanked by huge billboards for this and that beauty product, with a huge commercial mall behind it: EDSA happened because of the Virgin Mary’s intervention, and its beneficiaries are the big businesses.
EDSA is receding from memory, totally useless in our imagining of our nation. The nation itself does not have a nexus for us to identify with and be proud of, which is the cultural reason why we have been left behind.
This is clear if we look at our fast-rising nearest competitor, Vietnam: its story as an ancient nationalistic people defeating the two mightiest of modern empires, France and the US is the cultural basis propelling its dynamic economy.
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Why ‘EDSA’ couldn’t unify us
Source: Breaking News PH
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