VANTAGE POINT

It was a moment of mass empowerment, the precedents of which go back a hundred years to the Reform and Revolutionary periods of Philippine history. For the first time since the country declared its independence, and after decades of tolerating corrupt and incompetent misgovernment from 1946 onwards, some two million Filipinos braved the tanks, the helicopter gunships and the mercenary soldiery of a murderous dictatorship to declare that they had had enough of the human rights violations, the torture, the enforced disappearances and the extrajudicial killings of the regime, and that it was time to end the lies and the deceit of a self-serving kleptocracy that had brought only dishonor to this country and suffering to its people.