By Atty. Antonio P. Pekas
What a revolutionary government connotes is a totalitarian form of government which is always intolerant of dissent. For it to maintain itself, it has to depend on strong arm tactics and it has to be feared (not loved) by the people. It has to depend on the military or the police to enforce its will on the people. Democracy would be the first to be thrown overboard. Democratic institutions would be dead in the water before you know it.
The right to be heard and the balancing of conflicting interests would then be a thing of the past.
For a RevGov to impose its will on the people, it will strongly depend on the military and the police. And herein would lie the problem. What they say would be the law. What they dictate would be the verdict on anything.
When this happens, abuses would be left and right. If you will not be with the establishment, you will be with the enemy. Tolerance would be erased from the country’s vocabulary.
Even granting that PDu30’s goal in declaring a RevGov is to solve the country’s problems and that he is benevolent enough for that purpose, he still has to rely on the military and the police. These will become so powerful that even the President might have some difficulty controlling them. That would be scary for abuses will be committed everywhere, everytime.
Our worst nightmare would be when the President dies. The military would then take over and we would be in an unredeemable hole. How will the succession be? Who ever would be wielding the bigger gun would be in control of the nation. He and his friends would be our rulers and what or who could end their reign? Chances are, they will like to stay in power as long as they like.
There will be no credible democratic institutions to assure us our freedoms or the protection of our rights. Our democratic institutions are still very weak. Our government agencies, for instance, are readily corruptible. The rule of law is still a dream in this country in many instances.
In effect, once a RevGov is enforced in whatever form it might be, the tendency to rule in a dictatorial way would be like a genie that is let out of the bottle. It will like to be ruling that way and to curtail its unlimited political powers by pushing it back into the bottle’s neck would be almost impossible in the short run. Perhaps it could be done after many years, if not decades, of struggle by the people.
And by then, the democratic institutions we now know and enjoy would be beyond redemption. Building new ones and making them mature and effective could take centuries.
Along the way, there would be power struggles between different forces. We would end up becoming like those South American banana republics. A group would take over the seat of political power and then another one takes over after a month or two, so forth and so on.
The bottom line of all these is we the people will be suffering as the country’s economy would be crippled. For those who would be involved in the struggle for political power, so many of them will die.
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