Be like Yew, Duh

THE PHILIPPINES needs more of discipline than democracy – Lee Kuan Yew, 1991.

A truism now popping up in the Facebook page pushed principally by Duterte diehards as the indisputable confirmation of their choice as the one, the only answer to the question that benighted this country through all these years – the truly transformational president we need to have.

Yea, as LKY – with the strongest of political will, with iron-clad discipline – thumbing his nose at the Malays wanting to absorb Singapore in their bumiputra-dominated federation at the setting of Britain’s imperial sun in the Orient, for his people to craft – with him at the spearhead – the transformation of that backwaters island into the financial megalopolis it is now.

Yea, as LKY in SGP, so did Duterte in Davao City, and will, presently, in the whole country. The two, cut off the same cloth, off the same chainmail of armor – to be true to form – in the rabidity of the DU-thirsty horde.

We cannot argue with LKY’s success in Singapore, memorialized as it is in the granite canyons of Orchard Road and just about in every available space spared from greening in the city-state, impacting in all the world’s corporate boardrooms and financial enclaves.

As to Duterte’s Davao? The arguments have never been short and silent, the counterarguments even longer and louder.

Still, we concede that among the presidential pretenders, RRD’s persona hews  closest to the LKY template, not necessarily in near-approximation nor appropriation of it though.

But, even as there is universal, even avid, acceptance of LKY’s thesis for the Philippines, it is not exactly devoid of any infirmity as an argument.

To repeat: The Philippines needs more of discipline than democracy.

Incorrectly or otherwise, we sense there a mutual exclusivity, of some contradiction – dialectical, if you fancy – between discipline and democracy.

Discipline – the sore lack of it, is a problem – a hell of it, in the Philippines, yes. But to tag democracy as its contraindication makes a flawed conclusion. Discipline and democracy do not constitute an either-or proposition.  

From grade school we learned that this of-by-and-for-the-people political system rests on the tripod of executive-legislative-judiciary co-equality with the much heralded rule of law at its hub.

By that very rule of law then, discipline – if only based on its basic definition of “state of order based on submission to rules and authority” – is elemental in a democracy.        

The breakdown of discipline in the Philippines is not so much a failing of democracy as the failure of both government and people to live by its precepts. The rules are clear, only to be obfuscated in the pursuit of vested interests. The laws well defined, only to be twisted to serve any and all agenda other than the public weal. And only the least in society get punished. That ain’t the way of democracy.    

In those “days of disquiet and nights of rage” immediately prior to the Great Ferdinand’s intervention of 1972, there popped in the public discourse the proposition: “Democracy failed us.” Which, immediately bred its antithesis in “We failed democracy.”

The resultant cacophony of arguments muffled the tiny voice of reason that pointed to the seemingly opposing standpoints as part of the same proposition – that the Philippines had no need for democracy. Thereby laying the groundwork for the ultimate demise of the republican state with Proclamation No. 1081.

And we are not into dotage yet to forget the cornerstone of martial law: Sa ikakaunlad ng bayan, disiplina ang kailangan.

In the context of our Marcosian experience, discipline found its very meaning in the suppression of our freedoms and the violation of our human rights by the very state sworn to uphold them, readily translating to tens of thousands of warrantless arrests and arbitrary detention with torture in the military stockades, and thousands more of forced disappearances and extra-judicial executions.

Thus, no matter the gains that discipline wrought to the nation, it never came into full acceptance by the citizenry. Hence, the liberation that was EDSA Uno.

Alas, a mere generation removed from those exhilarating days of pride and glory, we are rooting for a self-proclaimed killer to impose his even worse brand of discipline upon the land.

So: The Philippines needs more of discipline than democracy.

Of course, we know whereof LKY spoke. And we cannot, again, argue. His most-discipline-least-democratic system wielded the economic miracle, arguably the biggest in the 20^th century, that is his Singapore.

So, we go for the Davao Punisher then?

Unlike Duterte’s though, LKY’s discipline was not of the mass murdering kind. And the ever prim and proper LKY was never heard to have made sick rape jokes.