Emerging police state?

With an advance party of 1,000 uniformed PNP to indicate strong police presence in the area around the Sandiganbayan on the occasion of Erap’s court appearance is clear enough proof of an emerging police state.

To spring Erap out of a military camp in Tanay to the courtroom of the Sandiganbayan alone would require a convoy of about 10 motorcycle-riding PNP, over a dozen assortment of cars packed with heavily armed police and military operatives, and more than enough uniformed AFP in high-powered rifles in back-up cars.

The 22nd day of March, a month after 24th day of February is another landmark in history in that Erap will have his day in court for the charges of plunder slapped against him. People loyal to Erap gathered at St. Peter’s Church along Commonwealth Avenue the night before to indicate their support to the former president ousted by People Power 2.

Sandiganbayan, invoking if self-servingly its sanctity, allowed only about 140 people to witness the proceeding but with cellphones, digital cameras, recorders, and vtr equipment of media banned from the immediate premises. The court has officially disallowed the supposed-to-be historic hearing to be covered live on television or radio even if the event is imbued with much public interest. This kind of media black-out is simply an assault to press freedom or what else is it?

There had been forms of social control that Malacanang undertakes to implement on a need basis. Problem is, each type of social control suffers from legal infirmities. Proclamation 1017 placing the country under a state of emergency – real or imagined – is meant to muffle public dissent, clamp down media, trigger chilling effect to anti-GMA activists.

Executive Order 464, held for its blatant unconstitutionality, is meant to shield Malacanang from its anomalies being uncovered in a congressional inquiry than protect its officials from being intimidated by the senators in the case of Senate or the congressmen in the case of the House of Representatives. It was a gag order that makes a mockery of the revered principle of check and balance and co-equality in the 3 supposed-to-be separate branches of government.

Calibrated pre-emptive response or CPR is another entirely anti-people form of social control that rests so much political power to the PNP or the AFP as the case may be. Video footages tell us that it is the PNP which always resorts to harsh, violent, and arbitrary means to enforce crowd dispersal action in otherwise peaceful and legitimate protest rallies. When this happens, it blurred the line between the law and the exercise of political power by Malacanang. And GMA is not the State but only the ‘highest servant of the State.

Under this unenlightened rule of men than of laws, it has become luminous that all powers of the State tend toward the curtailment of fundamental rights or freedoms that citizens normally enjoy in a democracy. The euphemistic social contract has been violated. The euphemistic Divine Covenant is swept in the dustyard. In its place – a set of prior restraints, means of social control, and a police state unrestrained by any law – takes us a to a rigidly regulated environment. Remember George Orwell’s novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four - a police state that has crippled any freedom of action and of thought and its nauseating double-speak?

Randy David is right in believing that the youth of today ought to seize one golden opportunity to chart their own future or destiny – if they must act in accordance with their conscience – sans fear or favor. Under a regime characterized by its naked use of force to subvert all constitutional guarantees enshrined in the Constitution in order to protect its own political survival, nothing even in so-called requisite critical mass can tilt the scale in favor of the people. Could it be that philosopher Spinoza is right in saying that the best government is a monarchical order? Pray tell.