Anarchy is Worse than Autocracy

 

That Madman Duterte

I recently attended a reading of a memoir by someone who had been in Korea to teach, as so many of us now have. He recalled running into a group of Filipinos there, and was shocked to discover that they all seemed to like “that madman Duterte.”

I know a lot of Filipinos.  have yet to meet a Filipino who does not like Duterte, and wishes he were still president.

I find it rather arrogant of North Americans to think they know better than Filipinos whom they should elect as their country’s leader. It is a colonialist attitude.

And they do not understand life on the ground in the Philippines. I have lived there. They are labouring under a grave misperception; which perhaps extends to their understanding of the less-developed world generally.

In a country like Canada or the US, we need to fear too much government. Government sticks its nose in everywhere, there are regulations about everything. Government collects half our income in taxes, and spends it erratically. We have reason to fear totalitarianism.

But the less developed world generally does not have enough government. Government by and large does not function; usually because of corruption. The result is chaos and every man for himself. The last thing the average person needs to worry about is government becoming too intrusive.

A good example: when Duterte came to power, there was quickly much more freedom of the press: the number of journalists getting killed went way down. Because until Duterte imposed order, journalists were regularly assassinated by organized crime for exposing corruption. I lived under Duterte, and never felt threatened or in danger from the government.

When the system is corrupt, the only way to fix it is by bypassing the system: breaking the “rules.” And this is commonly seen by North Americans as the man at the top acting like dictator, taking to himself dictatorial powers. Technically, this is correct; but it can be necessary in the circumstances; like a British government reading the riot act.

Duterte achieved results in Davao, as its mayor. The Filipino public wanted him to do the same for the country, and he did, for the length of his term. Because the Philippines has term limits, and because he was not a dictator, he then had to leave power.

Koreans, similarly, often have good things to say about Park Chung-Hee, their autocratic leader during the sixties and seventies. Unlike Duterte, Park really did seize dictatorial powers and bypass elections. Nevertheless, he replaced a deeply corrupt as well as autocratic regime and government that developed under Rhee Sing-Man, and was himself by contrast seemingly honest. He might have craved power, but not money. Under his rule, Korea was able to begin to develop rapidly.

I would like to put in a similar good word for the Saudi royal family, having lived under their rule. Other “republican” nations nearby, culturally similar, are fractious and violent: Syria, Egypt, Yemen, Iraq. Saudi Arabia has remained peaceful, orderly, and prosperous. Their populace did not rise up during the Arab Spring, showing their general contentment. Granted, they have the advantage of oil; but so did and does Iraq, or Libya, or Iran, or Venezuela. The government is theoretically autocratic, but seemingly honest and not intrusive in practice.

We need to understand the common need, in less developed countries, for a strong hand at the top. We should not automatically consider such leadership evil or dictatorial. The proper litmus is this: does thiat regime aggress against neighbouring countries? Does it oppress some minority within that country? Is it corrupt and draining the treasury?

This is the critical difference between a Saddam, an Idi Amin, or a Hitler, on the one hand, and a Duterte, a Frederick the Great or a Tito on the other.

Uneasy Lies the Head

Philippine President Roderigo Duterte.

I think it is time to show some empathy for our leaders. They are human, after all.

Just imagine having to make the kind of decisions they must make in this pandemic. Choose lockdown, and you may wreck your economy, and lose your country’s position in the world. People may starve. You may cause a revolution. Choose to keep things open, and you may kill thousands, millions, of people. Nobody will be happy either way. And there is never enough information; there are no precedents.

Weeks ago, President Duterte of the Philippines, the notoriously tough guy, was already looking gaunt and tired. He was pleading with his own people for patience and understanding. A lockdown in the Philippines means people will quickly have no food. He has no money to give them, or to get masks, gowns, pills, or respirators. Even if a cure or a vaccine is found, he will have to wait in line until the rich countries have all the doses they need. There are no good options.

I think Donald Trump is cracking under the pressure. He has seemed superhuman in the past, able to stand his ground against all comers. But the stress has been showing recently. Hydrochloraquine has not been panning out; he had no doubt been hoping it would. Now he too has no good options. He was getting very aggressive towards the media at his daily pressers. They richly deserved it, but you got the feeling he was acting out some of his own stress. A few days ago, he lost concentration and said something offhand about injecting disinfectants. He was tired; who wouldn’t be tired? Now the press is trying to crucify him for it. All as he needs to make these terrifying decisions. And now they are blaming him for seeming to lack empathy. He seems to have lost his composure: he cut that press conference short, and now is saying he will hold them no longer. He excused his remark on disinfectants by claiming he was just being sarcastic towards the media. Not plausible; the villainy of the media has simply become an idee fixe for him.

I sense he has finally been pushed beyond the limits of human endurance. He needs sympathy, an outpouring of support, a rest, and the rest of us need to pray for him. If only for our own sake. The American media, of course, deserve condemnation. I hope he can hold himself together.

I find it hard to pity Justin Trudeau; he seems so insincere. And it is easier for him; as Canadian PM, all he needs to do is the usual: look at what the US is doing, and make the same announcement a few days later. But long before this started, he seemed to me a frightened little boy. “Frightened” may no longer be a strong enough word. I think he has detached himself, and is only reading things put in front of him.

Doug Ford, in his first press conference after the lockdown, seemed close to tears. Unlike Trump, he shows visible empathy. Like Trump, he also shows frustration: lashing out a few days ago at anti-lockdown protesters as “yahoos.” You can see he feels helpless.

But the leader I pity most is Kim Jong Un.

I have no insight into what is going on in North Korea. Multiple press reports say he is dead, or near death. But we know we cannot trust the media. The South Korean Government says they believe he is alive and well. But we know we cannot trust government intelligence.

My intuition is that Kim is still alive, but in grave condition, and not expected to recover. “Brain dead,” one of the rumours, may be right. My guess is that COVID-19 is probably there, as it is in every other country in the world, and the system has not been able to manage it. In early April, his guard detail were photographed wearing masks. If Kim caught it, he is fat, a smoker, with a heart condition.

The true situation has not been publicly announced, and the NK authorities are taking pains to go about their business as usual, because nobody else is yet in command; they need to settle that first. They do not want to send any signals that might give their people an idea that an uprising might succeed.

At this moment, then, Kim may be facing death. He is, in the end, a human being. He has committed unspeakable crimes, for a self-indulgent life. Now he must meet the reckoning. And it must be terrible.

The horror he is going through, and will go through, seems to me too awful to contemplate. The fact that he deserves it does not change that.

Queen Elizabeth I, it is said, died in terror, saying she would give her entire kingdom for just one more moment of life. And Elizabeth, although a far worse monarch than history remembers, was nevertheless not in Kim’ league.

He, more than anyone, is to be pitied.

Oddly Defending Duterte

Sometimes referred to locally as "Duterte Harry"

It is not really my place to comment on Philippines politics. It is not my country. But well-meaning fellow Canadians have been sending me messages of concern about the dangers of living under such an oppressive totalitarian regime. I feel under some moral obligation to set the record straight. As in the case of Saudi Arabia, the Canadian press has things very wrong.

I guess we should not be surprised these days about the press getting things wrong, especially when writing about something far away.

To begin with, the odd image with which the linked story begins: of President Duterte “appearing constantly on the 24 hour news channel.” Makes it sound like 1984, or like Communist China used to be, with government the only source for news. We have TV, without any foreign channels, and do not see Duterte on the screen any more often than a Canadian television viewer might see Justin Trudeau. And in similar contexts: often also featuring someone criticizing him. If there is some government 24-hour news channel, nobody we know has discovered it. The Philippines actually has a pretty free-wheeling press.

It has also always been dangerous to be a journalist here; but murders of reporters have actually gone down under Duterte.

The fact that Duterte is at loggerheads with the Catholic Church is not newsworthy. Every Philippines administration at least since Marcos, with the exception of Corazon Aquino’s, has been at loggerheads with the Catholic Church. Traditionally the Church hierarchy holds the government’s feet to the fire. Governments rarely respond by showing anything like reverence. Duterte is more blunt than most about it; but this seems just part of his tough guy act. He is not even novel in that. He’s acting and talking just like Estrada did in his day.

One paragraph from the article:

“Duterte has launched a hate-filled anti-Catholic campaign that is a match for the most virulent forms of Islamophobia. A cathedral in the Philippines was bombed Jan. 27, killing 20 people. Several Catholic priests have been killed on his watch. Somehow he is getting away with it.”

I think Duterte would have a solid court case here to sue for libel. He is, like most Filipinos, not concerned with being PC. But this clearly implies that he was behind the cathedral bombing or the priest murders, doesn’t it? The cathedral was bombed by Islamist terrorists. Duterte is as much to blame as Macron is for the fire at Notre Dame, or Bush for 9/11. Takes one whale of a conspiracy theory to make that claim.

The clear suggestion that Filipinos might be afraid to speak their minds about Duterte is also wildly wrong. Naturally enough, he has many supporters, but even they tend not to be doctrinaire about it. Probably most people are openly critical of him about one thing or another in conversation.

There is actually far more freedom of speech, and far less fear of repercussions for expressing your opinion on any matter at all, in the Philippines than in Canada. Nobody in the Philippines has to watch what they say. Everybody in Canada, by contrast, has to guard their speech carefully. If Filipino-Canadians are indeed afraid of expressing their opinions about Duterte, that says more about an oppressive atmosphere in Canada, than back in the Philippines. They are aware that anything they say in Canada can be used against them at some future date. In Canada, quite possibly, it is not safe to express support for Duterte, just as it is not safe to express support for Donald Trump.

I do not like defending Duterte. I would never have voted for him. I oppose him just as I opposed Trudeau pere invoking the War Measures Act, for the same reasons. His government is acting lawlessly, with its extrajudicial killings. But for the average Filipino, the Duterte government is not a clear and present menace. It is like the situation when Mafia factions used to war in the streets of Chicago or New York. They were ruthless about killing each other, but killing civilians was forbidden between them. So too with Duterte’s vigilantes and the criminal gangs. So long as you yourself keep away from systematic criminal activity, you are not likely to be caught in any crossfire. The situation in Canada is quite different: well-meaning people acting morally and minding their own business can become victims at any moment. There is no real way to predict trouble or to defend yourself.

Duterte, it is true, is sometimes killing drug addicts as well as dealers. This seems very wrong to us in Canada, where the established idea is that we are to pity the addict and put all the blame on the dealers. But perhaps it is not self-evidently wrong. Are alcoholics not at all responsible for their alcoholism? Then how does AA work? In Canada we certainly hold cigarette smokers at least in large part responsible for their smoking. And we legally hold the customers entirely responsible in the case of prostitution, and the dealers innocent. Duterte is at least being consistent. His position is more logically defensible than ours.

Generally, what the Canadian press cannot seem to get is that the problem in the Philippines, as in the Middle East, is not too much or too oppressive government, but too little. The problem has been that the government was not in control. Local gangs, criminals, and corrupt officials could act with impunity. We are so far from that in Canada with our traditions of peace, order, and good government that we cannot apparently conceive of what that means. In my wife’s home town, people were fairly regularly murdered by neighbours or relatives, and nothing ever happened to the murderer. The killer just moved away—or perhaps not.

You can forgive so many Filipinos for feeling that it may take a tough guy to get things under control.

Selling Choppers to the "Repressive Duterte Regime"

Philippine President Duterte.

Many are concerned, it seems, with Canada’s sale of helicopters to the Philippines. The Duterte regime, after all, is a repressive totalitarian government. The same sort of concerns were raised not long ago about military sales to Saudi Arabia. 

I have lived in both countries, and I think these concerns are wrongheaded.

The real issue for ordinary people in countries like the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, or China for that matter—I lived there too—is not repression by government. That barely enters the field of vision. It is chaos.

In such countries, nothing works. Far from being oppressive, government in particular seems to do nothing at all. Very expensively.

The problem, in short, is too little, not too much, government.

Canada, by contrast, is an example of a country that has too much government.

In daily life, the average person living in the Philippines, China, or Saudi Arabia has far more personal freedoms than a Canadian. The Canadian government is, in practice, far more totalitarian.

But chaos is hardly preferable. It is hard to make any money or to be secure in your possessions. Or even to manage something simple like getting a telephone hooked up. My own current headache is trying to figure out how to get signed up to pay Philippine taxes. You’d think the government would want this. You’d think they’d make it easy…

As a result, in the mind of the man in the street, a tough guy coming in and cracking a few heads is cause for hope, not for concern. Sure, it may turn sour; but that is a purely secondary worry. Duterte was elected. There was a reason for that, and Canada has no moral right to challenge the will of the Philippine people. You want to condemn colonialism? That’s colonialism.

The average Filipino or Saudi probably welcomes the helicopters and the ATVs for the same reason.

Among other things, the Philippines has a large domestic terrorist threat from ISIS/Al Qaeda.

In the case of Saudi Arabia, look on a map and get real. Who are her neighbours, and do they model a much better way? Iran? Iraq? Syria? Egypt? Yemen? How many different ways can you spell “chaos”? Granted, the Gulf Emirates seems to have done better—but following the same system as Saudi Arabia. Saudi also hardly lives in a peaceful neighbourhood. Everything it has is under constant and direct threat. It has a need for and a right to the weapons to protect itself. In context, they are clearly the good guys.

Better government will probably come to Saudi Arabia or to the Philippines eventually, in the same way and for the same reasons it has come to such other nations as South Korea or Taiwan within recent memory. A stable, healthy democracy tends to arrive with the development of a large, financially independent middle class.