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To say that the declaration of a revolutionary government is far from President Duterte’s mind is like disbelieving a sex offender of harboring lewd and dirty thoughts. His track record as mayor of Davao and his first year in office as president are exhibits of his penchant for violating or skirting around the requirements of the law if he sees fit. In fact, what seems to get a rise out of him is when he is called out for violating the rule of the law in pursuit of his pet peace and order projects.
First, it was the drug war which he insisted on implementing even as casualties written off as collateral damage piled up. Then it was the Marawi siege which provided the pretext for declaring the whole of Mindanao under Martial Law. In both instances, upon his orders, state agents have gone over and beyond what is allowed by the law just to please the bloodlust of their master whether it be the pile up of bodies of petty drug criminals in the streets or the disproportionate decimation of an entire Islamic city, transforming it all into rubble.
As he shifts his attention to a new front versus the communist rebels, he has again touted his plan to go around the limits of the law of achieving his desired objective of crushing a resilient revolutionary movement. In fact, what he plans to do with the declaration of a revolutionary government is to do away with the law altogether in order to meet this new objective.
Declaring a revolutionary government would finally achieve for him the kind of political latitude he had been most comfortable with even when he was mayor of Davao – absolute power with no cumbersome co-equal branches of government watching his move. Such a state may just as well be the final transformation in making the country the Republic of Duterte just as the southern city of his political origins had been for decades. Here, there is one ruler, whose edicts and whims were the absolute law. And he just might be able to pull it off because of the adoration of a mystified public.
But despite his flair for drama and histrionics, let us not forget that he happens to also be a shrewd politician whose braggadocio actually reveals his hidden plans. He has boasted in recent pronouncements that he need not declare a revolutionary government to achieve his objectives. He will just go ahead and do as he pleases, a card that by all indications he has already drawn.
As if on cue, the increase in incidents of arrests, harassment, and killings of left activists has commenced coinciding with the declaration of the end of the peace talks with the CPP-NPA-NDF. The planned rallies in Davao calling for a revolutionary government this coming November 30, 2017 are seemibgly afterthoughts that will display public support for a de facto state.
Because what he has done actually is the emasculation or the deliberate threat of emasculation of co-equal branches of government even without the declaration of a revolutionary government. The sustained attacks against the Supreme Court through the sitting Chief Justice Sereno is but one in the latest bid to rid himself of critics, a move he has successfully pulled off through the arrest of a sitting Senator.
The Marawi siege has actually done wonders for what is revealing itself to be important elements that make up a grand political design. Whether the siege itself was deliberate or it was the unintended but welcome piece of an unfinished puzzle, does not matter actually. It has just proven that there is nothing more effective in consolidating support for the state institutions than the depiction that they are underdogs parrying attacks, first, from the liberal party, then the IS-affiliated groups, and now the Left. The situation at present is revealing. The paranoia and the fear that are being peddled only have one function – to prop up Duterte’s fascist state.
It is quite interesting that Duterte, from being a promising self-ascribed socialist leader, can actually turn out to be the battering ram of the country’s ruling elite as they remove what they consider to be cumbersome obstacles to their unrelenting projects of accumulation by dispossession in this most recent attack against the Left.
The fact that Duterte can imagine this as a “revolution” with him at the helm reveals how he has seemingly lost all grounding. When a sitting president whips up a nationalist frenzy and rely on the violent powers of the state to implement its will, that is not a revolution but, in fact, its’ opposite - a fascist counterrevolution.