Panorama

Media

Part of Panorama

Title: Panorama
Issue Date: Volume XIV (Issue No.12) December 1962
Language: English
Rights
extracted text: Zell ]/our friends about the Panorama, the Philippines* most versatile, most significant magazine today. (five them a year’s subscription — NOW! they will appreciate it. Subscription Form ................ 1 year for P8.50 ................2 years for P16.00. ................Foreign subscription: one year $6.00 U.S. Name ....................................................................................................... Street ....................................................................................................... City or Town ................................... Province ................................... Enclosed is o check/money order for the amount specified above. Please address all checks or money orders in favor of: COMMUNITY PUBLISHERS, INC. Invernes St., Sta. Ana, Manila, Philippines THE PHiLIPPINR mGMlNE OF GOOD READING VOL. XIV MANILA, PHILIPPINES NO. 12 "HATE IS ALWAYS TRAGIC” Those who adhere to the method of nonviolent direct action recognize that legislation and court orders tend only to declare rights; they can never thorougly deliver them. Only when the people themselves begin to act are rights on paper given life blood. The method of nonviolent resistance is effective in that it has a way of disarming the opponent; it exposes his moral defenses, it weakens his morale and at the same time it works on his conscience. Nonviolent resistance also provides „ a creative force tlnough which men can channelize their discontent. It does not require that they abandon their discontent. This dis content is sound and healthy. Nonviolence saves it from degenerating into morbid bitterness and hatred. Hate is always tragic. If is as injurious to the hater as it is to the hated. It distorts the personality and scars the soul. Pyschiatrists are telling us now that many of the inner con flicts and strange things that happen in the subconscious are rooted in hate. So they are now saying, “Love or perish.” This is the beauty of nonviolence. It says you can struggle without hating; you can fight war without violence. Freedom is like life. You cannot be gven life in in stallments. You cannot be given breath but not body, nor a heart but no blood vessels. Freedom is one thing — you have it all, or you are not free. — Martin Luther King, American Negro Leader ■ Without economic,security, the common man would remain the hopeless captive of iron necessities, a tool,of other njinds and a helplees pawn in the game of selfish politics. THE COMMON MAN AND THE RULE OF LAW Perfecto Fernandez In the manifold ways with which a government may deal with its citizens, certain pro cedures are available which are thought to be more civil ized than others. In dealing with political dissenters, for example, England is supposed to have more sane, if not more humane, approach than either Russia or China, in that English oppositionists merely lose elections, while Russian or Chinese "deviationists” are said to lose their liberty, if not their heads. Again, when it comes to cri ticism in the press, our gov ernment is supposed to be more responsible than Ngo Diem’s regime, as with us the administration counters press criticism through the press itself, while in South Viet nam reports have it that for an answer to an attack in the press, a full press is applied on the editor’s desk. In assessing certain proce dures as more civilized than others, the verdict, whatever it be, is necessarily open to question. What is civilized, in this connection, is now here as nearly certain as two plus two. The absence of a mathematically precise stand ard precludes, so long as we choose to be reasonable, a dogmatic result. This is speially true of particular tech niques. For example, by no accepted criterion can a una nimous conclusion be reach ed that the jury system is more civilized than the sys tem of trial by a judge only. Indeed, the issue between these competing procedures relates more to expediency than to the question of inhe rent justness of either of them. 2 PANORAMA On a more general level, however, there is a standard which for all its admitted imprecision, commands wide spread acceptance in testing how civilized is the over-all conduct of a government to ward its citizens. This stand ard is the rule of law. In this short and simple phrase lies compressed fundamental ideas of civility by which for over a thousand years govern ments have been judged to be good or bad. Of course, a verdict of guilty binds no one, least of all the government adjudged guilty. Hitler’s persecution of the Jews, for example, was condemned again and again as inhuman and uncivilized, but it went on, nevertheless, and did not stop until Germany was crushed by force of arms. A contemporary illustration is furnished by South Africa, where a dominant white mi nority had stripped colored persons, Negros and Asians alike, of basic rights and fundamental liberties in the interest of a continuing white primacy. For such lapses from civilized standards, South Africa has been de nounced and rebuked by turns, but apartheid remains entrenched. The rule of law, as applied to the conduct of independent governments, rests its appeal not on force but on “the vaguer sanctions of conscience.” Its function, in this regard, has not been the redress of grievances but to indicte the measure as well as direction of needed politi cal and other basic reforms. In societies, of course, which are sworn to an observ ance of the rule of law by a fundamental charter or cons titution, the rule of law is basically a stimulant to the process of self-correction and peaceful reform. The consti tutional history of England and the United States fur nish striking illustrations of such process. The gradual enfranchisement of the .Eng lish working classes in the case of the first and the steady accretion of civil and political rights enjoyed by Negroes and other minorities in'the ease of the second, are highlights in a general evolu tion towards a more fair and equal allocation of rights, civil and political, in two so cieties. As a standard in assessing the conduct of government, the rule of law is compre December 1962 3 hensive in reach. This is understandable, as it is its of fice to pinpoint and expose situations of the most griev ous injustice and arbitrary conduct. The amplitude of its grasp is clearly indicated in what is perhaps the most authoritative statement of the rule to date. This is found in the Declaration of Delhi, which was adopted by the International Congress of Jurists in its conference at New Delhi, India in 1959. In this Declaration, the rule of law was defined as follows: "The principles, institutions and procedures, not always identical, but broadly similar, which the experience and traditions of lawyers in dif ferent countries of the world, often having themselves vary ing political structures and economic background, have shown to be important to protect the individual from arbitrary government and to enable him to enjoy the dig nity of man.” The Declaration further states that “the Rule of Law is a dynamic concept for the expansion and fulfillment of which jurists are primarily responsible and which should be employed not only to safe guard and advance the civil and political rights of the in dividual in a free society, but also to establish social, economic, educational and cultural conditions under w’hich his legitimate aspira tions and dignity may be realized.” From this, it is clear that in aspiration and effect, the rule of law operates to limit the power of the government over its -citizens and inhabit ants. Instances of arbitrary or high-handed exercise of public powers, of oppressive acts, of violations of human dignity, and of patent discri mination by various govern ments of the earth against their citizens and subjects abound not only in history but in the contemporay scene. All these, however, although exhibiting an infinite variety, may be grouped into four distinct categories or situa tions of basic injustice. First is the situation of des. potism. Here, the authority of government, whether con centrated in a king, emperor, dictator, or in a junta or other, group, is theoretically without limit. The will of the ruler, whether individual 4 PANORAMA or collective, is absolute. Cor respondingly, the citizens and inhabitants are at the mercy of the ruler, holding their lives and possessions at his pleasure, subject to all sorts of abuses and injustice. Such situation depicts what the textbooks call a ogvernment of men and not of laws. The basic defect is that power is not limited by law. Examples of this condition are so com mon and familiar that men tion of them need not be made. The second situation is marked by strict adherence to existing law, but the law itself is bad. A familiar ex ample is the case of South Africa. From a purely formal viewpoint, its government os tensibly adheres to the rule of law. No citizen is restricted as to his opportunity or li berty, except by authority of a duly enacted statute. But the statutes passed by its legislature are undeniably dis criminatory. Hewing close to a policy apartheid, these legis lative enactmens deny civil and political rights to colored people merely because they are colored. As1 carefully pointed out in the 1960 Report of the Inter national Commission of Ju rists, a statute does not satisfy the standard of justice pres cribed in the Rule of Law merely because it is a statute. A bad law is perhaps as bad as no law, or even more so in certain situations. Observed the Commission: “It is readily apparent that viewed from the standpoint of the lawyers’ broad civic responsibility the formal cor rectness of a legislative mea sure does not per se assure its compliance with the Rule of Law; the absence of the social content in an Act and its incompatibility with the basic principles of human rights makes it devoid of those ethical and moral val ues that have become an in dispensable corollary of legal craftsmanship and do in the final analysis set it apart from an indiscriminate exer cise. of power. The Commission holds that the application of the princiciple of apartheid which has come under scrutiny in this Report is 'morally reprehen sible and violates the Rule of Law. The evil of the policy of separation of races lies in the presumption of racial su periority translated into the deliberate infliction of an in ferior way of life on all who are tainted by non-white skins. Not permitted to chpose their own way of life, the non-white population are reduced to permanent poliDECEMBER 1962 5 tical, social, economic and cul tural inferiority. The impact of apartheid extends to virtualy all aspects of life in the Union. At church, at home, at school or university, the cinema, on' *he beach, in the courts, in hos pitals, at the polls; in fact in all conceivable forms of hu man relations a rutheless dis crimination against the nonwhite population has become the law. The humiliation in flicted by such measures is the testimony on which apart heid can be judged. Its price in terms of human degrada tion will never be known, but it is one which is high enough to outweigh any of the benefits which it is claim ed to bring. As part of this human suf fering, both whites and non whites have been exposed to steady encroachments on their basic freedoms. Liber ty of expression, movement and association are but three of these freedoms which have been drastically curtailed. Judges who alleviate^ injus tice by refusing to interpret the law in the spirit motiv ating the Government are vi lified openly, x x x The denial of civil and re ligious liberties in which apartheid has resulted is re flected with equal intensity in the economic disparity be tween the races, in the discri mination in the use of public services, in the enjoyment of social rights, and in the deli berate denial of opportuni ties in education. Whilst the white population do not suf fer from economic or social injustice, their opposition to apartheid may entail grave restrictions of their civil li berties. Injustice has been inflicted on the liberal white element in the interest of ad vancing a separate and su preme white community.” (South Africa and the Rule of Law, pp. 6-7.) In the third situation, the authority of the government is limited by law and the law is on the whole fair, just and reasonable, but injustice ne vertheless results because the law is unfairly or unjustly ap plied., Here, the basic defect lies in the administration of justice. This problem besets all societies, including the most advanced and the most free. It tends, of course, to be more serious in less deveped and less literate societies, such as the emerging nations in Asia and Africa, where the traditions of civility are mere ly beginning to take root. Still, it is a constant problem -everywhere, in the United States no less than in Nigeria. The struggle against injust ice, within the very temple of justice itself, never ends, as it is itself a struggle against human weakness, corruption and perfidy. Lawyers and 6 panorama judges, in all lands and climes, are open to the sins and temptations which beset us all, and when they' suc cumb, their fall or surrender pollutes the stream of justice. In the fourth situation, the basic injustice is subtle and not immediately apparent. The authority of the govern ment is exercised according to law, nor in the existing law, nor in the manner of its application. It lies, rather, in this: that by reason of ex treme disparity in economic condition, aggravated by pre vailing social ills, the law is precluded from giving justice in cases similar in virtually all material respects to cases in which the law has already giv en, and continues to give, adequate redress. The defect is that like cases are not given a like redress, not because the law is unfairly applied, but because some cases are brought to court, while the others are not. Thus, due to socio-economic conditions, some violations of law or pri vate right are properly red ressed, while other violations are not. This kind of basic injustice flourishes in many countries of the world, specially in the so-called free countries where poverty is prevalent. There is no need, however, to go far afield for a example, because our country is one of these. We are the living illustration of that paradox: poverty am idst riches, squalor in a set ting of bountiful resources, penury in a land of great natural wealth. Observation no less than statistics con firms the great economic in balance which divides our people in two groups: the few who have enough or more than enough, and the great many who have less than is needful for a civilized existence. Poverty, of course, inflicts more and greater evils than, merely hampering our full conformity with the rule of law. For the moment, how ever, it is our task to ascertain how it brings about a basic defect in our system of just ice. The key lies in how we put our system to work in a particular, case. In order to operate as to a particular case, our legal machinery must be put in motion, or it does not move at all. It de clines the role of a busybody; it will give redress only to those who seek its remedies; December 1962 7 its intervention must be in voked in the prescribed fash ion, before its eyes open to see what wrong has been done. This step is crucial, for unless it is taken, the law sleeps and sees no wrong. It is in the taking of. this step that socio-economic con ditions spell a fundamental difference. It matters very much, for practical purposes, whether the person wronged belongs to the “haves” or to the "have-nots". As a rule, the members of our wealthy, well-to-do, or middle classes are quick to invoke the aid of the law. Possessed of ade quate means, usually literate, and conscious of their rights and prerogatives, these solid citizens lose little time in be taking themselves to some lawyer and having a com plaint filed. On the other hand, this is usually not the case where the party wronged or offended belongs to the economically submerged groups, such as landless peasantry or the great army of the unemploy ed and underemployed. It is not merely a question of mo ney, for lawyers can always be found who will fight for a contingent fee. It is more often a question of the-cou rage and the will to fight for what the law recognizes in him as his rights. Under the circumstances, it is under standable if his courage fails and his will to fight falters. Frequently, illiterate, igno rant of what is due him as a citizen, impelled mostly by the never-ending search for necessities, sapped of his drive and energy by disease, malnutrition and excessive labor, beset by the anxiety of today and the insecurity of tomorrow, and lastly, condi tioned to subservience and humiliation by his econo mic and social status, would this common tao, whether a kasama or obrero, have the gumption and the stamina to fight, especially if the other party happens to be mote fortunate? Most unlikely, for the total impact of his expe rience has brought about his degradation and a deep-seat ed sense of acute inferiority. The conclusion that we are to draw is confirmed by common experience. Rare, indeed, is the peasant or laborer who dares to joust with a landlord or a busi nessman, or professional, or politician. This is true, even 8 PANORAMA in criminal cases- which rhe law forbids to be compromis ed. The killing of a tenant’s child through the reckless driving by a politician’s son, the injuries to a peasant re sulting from a threshing by an irate or drunken landlord, the abuse of a laborer’s daughter by a rich and spoil ed delinquent — these and other crimes hardly reach our courts. The blame does not always attach to our fiscals and other prosecuting of ficers. For if the injured party, or his parent, declines to make a complaint, or de sists from one already made, or refuses to give evidence on the matter, what alternative is there for the public prose cutor but to drop the case, as suming it reaches his office in the first place? Hence, a host of injuries, which are normally cognizable in the courts of law, are borne by the aggrieved without re course to the courts. Normal ly, a substantial sum is paid by the wrongdoer in satisfact ion of the jury inflicted. Thus, the compounding of crimes, which the law official ly forbids, prevents the red ress which the law intends. Such extra-judicial settle ments are assisted in a great measure by the institutional ized habits and attitudes of our people. First is that the common tao does not fully trust our law. Many, causes, in themselves obvious, may be assigned to explain this atti tude. For one thing, our law is for the most part a mystery to them — very much akin, from their situation, to the commands of an unknown god speaking, in an unknown tongue. Illiteracy and Want of opportunity frequently co operate to bar the great mass of our people from familiar ity, or even a nodding acqaintance, with our law and how it works. Ignorance is naturally not all conducive to confidence, it breeds fear and mistrust. I need hardly add that this perhaps applies as much to the lawyers as to the law itself. Then, there is the historical explanation. For several centuries, law as our people knew it had al ways been imposed from above, an instrument of co lonial power, a tool by which the ruler preserved mastery over the ruled. And so, now, our Constitution regardless, the feeling is wanting that December 1962 9 our law is the creature of our people, springing from their needs, fashioned to suit their interests. There is no deepseated conviction in our peo ple that our law at present is their own, subject to their control, amenable to shanges that they may wish. The law remains to them alien and strange, as of old. Second, there is the persist ence of habits associated with the feudal order. Even today, the feeling of security of the average Filipino from the antagonisms of his fellow citizens or society itself is chiefly built on connections. Kinship or other relationship to someone prestigious and powerful is the key to person al security. It pays to have the law on your side, it is true, but at the same time, it is vastly more important tp have, a patron or protector. This may be a relative, a compadre, a friend, or bene factor. In the absence of someone better, the relative of a relative will do, or the friend of a friend. It is sometimes incredible, but even the most tenuous and ac cidental relationsships will serve the purpose — such as being provincemates, or of ficemates. With such a con nection, all sorts of problems may be tackled with confi dence — the getting of a job, the keeping of one, obtaining a promotion, securing a loan, etc. Such a technique, ap plied with success in many difficulties, is also made to apply to personal entangle ment with the law. In many cases, a peasant or obrero is persuaded to refrain from bringing a suit or to desist from a pending suit, through the intervention of his land lord, or employer, or whoever is the protector or patron whose suggestion he would have no face to refuse. What is vital in such cases is locat ing the patron or. protector of the injured or aggrieved party and securing his good offices in bringing about a settlement, usually for a con sideration. Much as the peas ant or laborer would wish to vindicate his rights in court, how could he refuse his pat ron or protector, the man to whose will he is chained by that indestructible institut ion, utang na loobf By no means, of course, are extra-judicial settlements con demned. In fact, a settlement out of court is an excellent 10 PANOBAMA Vay of bringing disputes to an end and it is the policy of the law to encourage the part ies to settle their dispute among themselves whenever they can. But . this goes only for fair settlements. Such fair settlements are highly un likely when an ignorant or illiterate peasant or worker bargains with a more fortun ate citzen. A fair deal is pos sible as a rule only where the parties are approximately equal in bargaining strength, but not, as in such cases, where one of the parties is clearly at a disadvantage. In addition, it is to, be deplored that piany of the cases com promised are criminal cases, which the law is supposed to deal with regardless of any private arrangements. Crimes against citizens must be met with equal penalties. To the extent that extra-judicial set tlements preclude this result, the protection of our law is unequal and therefore violatr ive of the rule of law and our Constitution. From our analysis of the basic situations of injustice, which offend the rule of law, it becomes clear that a full observance of this standard is possible only in the context of a truly democratic order. There must be democracy not only as to the order of power in society, but as to the order of goods or property if you please, as well. Only a demo cratic order of power, with a basic framework of a limited and truly representative gov ernment, can stave off the in justice of discrimination or inequality in the law itself, and the injustice of its un fair or unequal application. At the same time, a demo cratic order of goods is impe rative. This means a more equitable distribution of in come and a substantial im provement in the standard of living for the common man. Without adequate means, the average citizen cannot be a free and intelligent participant in the de mocratic order of power. Without economic security, he would remain the hope less captive of iron necessities, a tool of other minds and a helpless pawn in the game of selfish politics. Of course, the making of a free man needs more than bread. But with out bread, he would neither be a man nor free. He would only be a little more than a begSt, concerned only with December 1962 11 necessities, heedless of his higher birthright. Such is the present plight of the great mass of our people. Econo mic despair leads them to bar ter their freedoms. Hence, the sale of votes, the disposal of their political rights. Aiu1, hence, the bargaining away of civil rights which the law re cognizes in them. For with out th'e wherewithal of exist ence, what arc rights and what is dignity? ON JUDGMENT We must necessarily base our judgment upon what we know and what we can reasonably hope to know. Our philosophy is what life has taught us; our principles of literature are what our literary ex perience has taught us. We cannot expect to estab lish a code of literary laws for others; we ought not to hope that others will make a code of literary laws for us. Our worth as literary critics largely depends upon our ability to free our minds from cant, obso lete psychology, unexamined contradictions, docile acceptance of fashion and insolent defiance of fash ion, words masquerading as ideas and metaphors mas querading as thoughts, a sense of superiority to the past and a sense of inferiority of the present. If these are our aims, the absence of definable “standards” (whether ethical or esthetic) becomes less disturb ing. — From Casell’s Encyclopedia of World Literat ure. 12 Panorama ■ The teacher must see mono, think mote, ahd ur>* deraUmd more than the average man or woman of the society in which he lives. DILEMMA OF THE TEACHER OF ENGLISH The instructor of English in college here is impaled on the horns of a dilemma. He is expected to help students master a foreign language they have not learned to speak and write correctly, let alone intelligently. The fail ure from the yearly crop of freshmen in our reputable universities and colleges is~ es timated at about one-half. It is a safe bet that in 9 cases out of 10 failure is directly traceable to deficiency in Eng lish. One need not labor the point that since language is the key to knowledge, profi ciency in language is neces sary if one is to keep up with any course, be it mathematics, or literature. Language is part of the individual's make up and if he neglects it, he stagnates. The average college stu dent's woeful lack of under standing of English can be better appreciated if we com pare his basic training in this language with that of his Am erican counterpart. The Am erican student who enters col lege has had at least 12 years in grammar school and high school to gain a basic com mand of his native language, English. The Filipino stud ent enters college with only 10 years of instruction in this foreign tongue. Yet, it is now standard complaint of Ameri can education authorities that "students could not read or write adequately, and could not express themselves orally with either clarity or precision." It is now standard practice in graduate schools in the United States to re quire an examination in ba sic command of the English language before admis sion to these schools. When such a requisite is deemed necessary for candidates for the Ph.D., there must be s o m e t hing fundamentally wrong with the teaching of the language in grammar December 1962 13 school and high school as well as in college. That is why there is a general clamor among educators in the Unit ed States today for a sweeping revision of language teach ing methods to the end that what has come to be known as the "English problem" may be solved. -This observation under scores only too clearly the ap palling lack of preparation of the Filipino college student in the language of instruc tion, which has become the bane and nightmare of the instructor of English. What is the solution? Every means in the book has been tried. Yet, every year each succeed ing crop of freshmen seems to be progressively worse off than the last as far as this "English problem” 'is concern ed. Many students simply cannot express themselves in intelligible English, much less write a> simple sentence without running afoul of some rule of syntax or gram mar. This is because they have not learned tp read. They have-not developed the thirst for reading. They therefore do not utilize the best means they have to pick up the language. Reading, to most students, has become a lost art.. It is the most neglected of the three R’s. Carlyle had the right idea when he confident ly prophesied a century ago that in a hundred years all education would be carried on byz the University of Books. This is as it should be. Man has left his imprint on the pages of history through the books. But Carlyle did not reckon with the present-day instruments of communication which we call the mass media, notably the radio, television and the cinema. Against the lure of a Hollywood “classic” in tech nicolor, what chance has a book? When Hollywood can rehash, to cite only one not able example, The Brothers Karamasov to give it a happy ending and make a gaping movie audience acclaim it as the Dostoyevsky masterpiece, why bother read the book? Or any book, for that mat ter? Here is where the teacher comes in. The chief function of the teacher, it has been said, is that of being an open er of doors. To quote an au thority, the teacher "constant ly opens new doors to his stu 14 Panorama dents, thus permitting them to see vistas previously un dreamed of, to enter exciting areas of experience, to find new roads in the search for and pursuit of truth.*' And this can be done only 'through books. The teacher must help the students discover, and revel in, the wonderful new world of books. To do this, the teacher must see more, think more and under stand more than the average .man or woman of the society in which he lives. He must be able to inspire the learn er in such fashion that he really wants to learn. This means that the teacher must spend the whole of his career widening the horizons of his spirit. This he cannot do un less he has the urge to seek truth—through books. Read ing, says Bacon, maketh a full mam To keep alive, one must simply read. WE FOOT THE BILL, ALWAYS ... The much-ballyhooed $10 million credit loan from Spain is a hoax. We will pay interest on it but we may never get it at all. The condiftpn of the loan is that we can get it only after we have exhausted all our borrowing potentials in the USA, the World Bank and the IMF. Since we won’t be able to do that in the next five years, the Spanish “loan” will just earn interest for Spain. It was all a publicity stunt to make the Spain visit look like something fruitful but it is we who will pay. — Teodoro Valencia. December 1962 15 B A university student, moved by Rival’s writings, delves into the many facets of Filipino society and finds it wanting. RIZAL AND OUR LOST IDENTITY “The Filipino as Spaniard, the Filipino as American, the Filipino as Japanese — when is the Filipino going to be himself? He has worn so many masks, appteerance is hard to distinguish from reality. The mimic, no matter how expert, mudt event ually be himself. The act must stop, when the lights go out, in the loneliness of his foom, in the loneliness of his soul.” — Teodoro Locsin Oscar Valenzuela I For centuries, like the bam boo that sways with each lash of the angry wind, the Fil ipino had to show different faces to those who came to conquer and rule. Each face was different froqj fche other. Each face sought gaze of a different eye. Consider the face so com mon during the Spanish reign: “He always joined anyone, who would speak ill of the natives considering himself above such reproach and not one of the natives. Thinking himself far above the halfcaste Chinese and Spaniards, he would be with anyone who disliked them. When ever new taxes had to be im posed, or a new special as sessment made, he was always first to speak in favor of it, more so when he could sense a lucrative contract. On occasions of victory, celebrat ion of birthdays, feastdays, births, or funerals in the fa mily of the important of ficials, he had a special orches tra ready at his beck and call to play for them. He would cause eulogies written, hymns composed and sung in honor of ‘the generous arid much loved governor’ or ‘the just and courageous judge.’ Such was the typical face then, as seen through Rizal’s Kapitan Tiago. And then there was Dona Victorina, 16 PANORAMA who, “.... in the ecstasies of contemplating herself had looked with disdain on her many Filipino admirers, since her aspirations were to ward another race.” There were different masks, each one a misfit. There was the liberal mask which in reality offered liberalism on ly in so ’far as the tyrant allows it. There was the mask of reform, well-meaning but hopeless. There were many voices begging for due process of law under a despotism, as if those voices could persuade the tiger to change its stripes and thus cease to be a tiger. In the end, the despot began to tighten its hold, squeezing the lifeblood of an unfortun ate race, drop by precious drop. Then suddenly, just as the sea was quieting down, an other wave, a bigger one came rushing in. This new regime in turn produced, not fear but a feeling of inferior ity and incompetence in the Filipino. Before such as tounding ability to build and create, he only felt over whelmed. Was there any way possible by which he could be as good as the Americans? By asking them to teach him how to build? No, three cent uries of a farcical education was enough for him. Perhaps if Filipinas was turned into a state of America. . . But that requires an act of Congress. Then how? If he could not be one, he could seem to be one. Yes, he could be a brown American and in the dark no one would know he only “seemed” American. Hence there was the begin ning of the imitation of * the American way, a beginning that appeared to desire no end and until now has not quite begun to end. With the case of the Americans, the motive was not to hide but to show an imitation complete with the stateside accent. Not fear but hero-worship was the compulsion. Time later showed us that nowhere lelse had a people ever come under a foreign rule and accepted it with such bubbling enthusiasm as the Filipinos did for the bro ther American. When inde pendence came, there was no deafening cheer of jubila tion, there was no great rejoic ing for soon the six-footer friend must go. How sad. So full of nostalgia and regret. December 1962 17 Anyway, the “good old days” were recalled with a passion possible only when a young republic has not yet learned how to fully dedicate itself to the public good. For when independence came, who were they who seemed to hold the world in their pockets just because the peo ple elected to give the reign of power to them? Not just ordinary men. Beasts. The corruptors. The caciques of Rizal’s San Diego come to life again — and more power ful, more sinister perhaps. “I prefer a government run like hell by Filipinos to a government run like heaven by Americans.” This was the bombastic cry of President Quezon. And what a tumul tuous hell! The old days that were not really so good seemed good indeed. So at last another mask was taken off — the American mask. It did not-fit too well but just the same it had been put on willingly. The Ameri can regime resulted in a selfwilled depreciation. Perhaps, since the Americans can do everything, the Filipinos can do nothing. But of course there must be compensation. The Filipinos must be super ior in some other field — let it then be vice: Filipinos may be entirely incapable of building things but surely they must be superior to Am ericans in drinking, in gam bling, in accumulating mist resses! Filipinos may be en tirely worthless but they are superior to Americans in vice. What other booster does the national ego desire than this? To be the worse of two bad things? It is true that admiration is harmless, but it is also use less. . Always, the thing ad mired is not the same as the admirer. In spite of having elevated Brother American to a marble pedestal higher than those of the fallen heroes, Filipinos eventually realized that they are not Americans at all. Then what is he? He feels an overwhelming desire to belong but always there is on ly the sense of not belonging. They would think wistfully of home but where is their home? What is their native land? What is their Pilipi nas? What are they, the Fil ipinos? Imitators. . . This Americanization of the Filipinos experienced an 18 panorama interruption when the new rulers, the Japanese, came. Before their very eyes, their brother Americans suffered. They were only human after all. But still, the ties that bound the master race and the imitation master race held fast, even bringing the two closer than ever before. For how can they not feel closer when they had to share the same humiliation, the same misery, the same suffer ing? Once more love for the brother American took pos session of the Filipino soul. Some, it is true, rejoiced, but the masses lost their hearts to Americans out of compassion perhaps or the sharing of a common woe. The two races were one against the enemy. Truly they were brothers. Failure and defeat has united them. But meanwhile a man must live — a very difficult process. Life became more, tolerable through resistance or collabo ration. Perhaps those who were afraid to die somehow managed to live. The price of survival, as in other tyrant rules, was no longer imita tion but pretense. But there were exceptions. It is quite ironic to remember that some Filipinos became more Japan ese than the Japanese them selves. It became so difficult to. distinguish those who seemed and those who were. The new mask was not wqrn for long for soon the Japanese were driven away. Then came the new era of independence and the com mon mask was taken off. Definite mimicry passed away. At least for the whole race there ceased to be one common disguise. Instead there came a jumble of many masks, each individual being free to wear that which he thinks fits him or enhances his appearance best. After four centuries of for eign domination, a certain national ambivalence has tak en root. The race has man aged to live through those centuries fooling their for eign rulers by being what it is not. A skill in make-up has developed. We have become slippery characters — like a dahong palay which is green with the grass and brown with the mud. The Filipino eludes the foreigners* under standing. The Filipino eludes the foreigners’ grasp. Is it posssible that this uncer tainty of character can be a 19 portrait of the Filipino as a people? But sadly, this same char* acter is as elusive to Filipinos themselves as to the foreign ers. Take away the different masks, take away the many disguises — what is a Fil ipino? So foreign has he be? come to himself that the Fil ipino can not be blamed for feeling desolate. Perhaps he can not be blamed for all his bad acts. But then, who is to blame? II Right now our identity as as people , is "Nobody.” But we can not go on forever be ing nobody. We must find our identity. We have had a great man who knew of the loss of identity of our unfor tunate race. We have his legacy — a treasury of writ ings with which perhaps he sought to find for his people an identity of which they could be proud. And we need not accept his writings as a synthesis of the travails of a Filipino society, if such a so ciety ever existed. What is important is to see the differ ence between our society and that of Rizal. We have to be lieve that the problems of his epoch were much similar to oyrs, although framed in a more complex, a more pain ful futility. Between Rizal’s society and ours, it is easy to see that there is not much great dif ference. The society that was, still is today. Whatever we were, we are today — a people without a portrait. Whatever we pretended to be we have become in time — imitations. Our masks have become our nature. When we try to remove them, we find we can not. And if we could, the face would still be the same. The Filipino has become all he has tried to be — the masks he has put on. The Filipino is much more than the mounthn primitive. To be a Filipino is not a simple thing. It is a great bewilder ment, a matter too complex for the Filipino to under stand completely. Being a Filipino is another way of describing what it is to be a man. There i? the inescap able and difficult problem of being. There is an inevit able awakening into harsh reality. The man after trying to find himself in many dif ferent things returns but only 20 PANOBAMA to himself, the inescapable one. He is like Mitya who sought escape and the reality of his being in many things, in debauchery, in sensuial lust, in all the vile avenues toward recovery or lifelong damnation of the spirit. Eventually, Mitya found only the goodness in his soul. He found his self in him. As with the Filipino, when the mask is off eventually there is only himself. Having accepted the sad plight of our race — its loss of identity — let us turn our attention to the man who might yet bring the restor ation of our portrait as a peo ple — Jose Rizal. You speak of Rizal as dead? You must know there are no dead. Nearness to a beloved pat riot is not mere proximity of body, but nearness to the spi rit. Just as Rizal was contem poraneous with his epoch, Rizal is very much alive and contemporaneous with us. At least, in the hearts of some good men, Rizal is the ulti mate center which one must try to approximate in order to find the secret of being. Perhaps, if we are lucky enough, if those good men are strong enough, we might find an identity similar to that of Rizal. In reality, we are not the people Rizal en visioned. He was wrong when he spoke of a people happy and free, after cent uries of misery and degra dation. He was wrong when he thought of the place in the sun which his people shall make. We have not found our place in the sun. We have to find ourselves first. Then we could all be Rizals, true Filipinos. It is disheartening to know that from Rizal’s time to ours there has not been much im provement in our character as a people. Through Tasio, the Sage, he says: “Ah, we were speaking of the present condition of the Philippines. Yes we are now entering upon a period of strife, or rather, I should say that you are, for my gen eration belongs to the night, we are passing away. This strife is between the past, which seizes and strives with curses to cling to the totter ing feudal castle, and the future, whose song of triumph may be heard from afar amid the splendors of the coming dawn, bringing the messages of Good News December 1962 21 from other lands. Who will fall and be buried in the smouldering ruins?” Our present was the future being spoken of. The song of triumph was just the rus tle of leaves of time scattered by the winds of history. The dawn was without a brilliant sun. We could very much say what Tasio said. We could hope as Rizal hoped, with the same optimism. Or, on the other hand, we could be more realistic, we could be pessimists predicting the in evitable death of an accursed people.. Either way there is the danger of falling into cy nical inaction. Perhaps so many have fallen into it. In time they will prove to be the greatest obstacles that will hinder the restoration of a race to a pedestal worthy of such lofty idealisms as pos sessed by the scant few but true Filipinos. It is unrealistic to ignore reality, but it is unnatural to condemn one's countrymen. A nation may rise as high as the sky and the people may sink to the lowest depths of infamy and degradation but never below the reach of the patriot's love. . love <?f country is never effaced once it has penetrated the heart because it carries with it a divine stamp which renders it eternal and imperishable,” Rizal wrote. Ill With his eloquent pen Ri zal created ideals living through the noble characters in his novels, Elias, Tasio, Isagani.... He said the things the people wanted to say but which they, could not because centuries of shackled silence have rendered the tongue in effectual, dumb. Through his writings his patriotic sen timents shine out. “It is said that love is the most power ful force behind the most sub lime actions. Well t^en, of all loves, that of country is the greatest, the most heroic, and the most disinterested.” And he exhorts: “whatever our condition might be then, let us love her always and let us wish nothing but her welfare.” And just as he was great in writing, in deeds he was greater. He resolved to ex pose the truth about his country and the strange mala dy that has afflicted it be 22 PANORAMA cause “my dtaty has dictated to me, and it does not mat ter if I should die in its ful fillment.*' And he added that he was going “to finish iny work and to confirm with my example what I have always preached. Man ought to die for his duty and his convic tion.” Even when death was in evitable he did not waver. *T prefer to face death cheer fully and gladly give my life to free so many innocent per sons from unjust persecution ... I shall die happy, satis fied with the thought that all that I have suffered, my past, my present and my future, my life, my love, my joys,— everything I have sacrificed for my country... I shall die blessing her and wishing her the dawn of redemption.” Rizal undertook upon him self the task of the Filipino understanding his own peo ple, their weaknesses apd their sufferings and their hopes, in order to prepare them and to lead them io freedom and wholeness. “Nde was the most enlightened re volutionary, one who sought a change achieved not through bloodshed but through idealsr-i a community where relations In conceiving ths possibility of all Filipinos integrating themselves into a national community, he was, in effect, profounding a new way of lite which by its very nature could not exist indefinitely within the framework of a co lonial structure. In both of his novels, there is a failure on a common thing—change^ In Noli, Ibarra failed in his attempts to solve the prob lems of Sisa and the school master. In Fili Simoun ag ain failed in his attempt to gye thp <nrial ills by bloody revolution. Briefly, the social ills are not at all solved in his novels and no positive so lutions are offered. Probab ly Rizal wanted to raise the question a< to why and how these attempts failed. Per haps he wanted the reader to see for himself which final method shall succeed. Relating the problems of the novels withTthe aim of La Liga Fllipina to weld the Fil ipinos into a national communityjwe can conclude that the existence of a national community alone could solve the ills presented in the nov els. J Rizal wanted to build December 1962 were essentially moral in character, and where the peo ple thought of the communi ty before their personal de sires. In La Indolencia de los Filipinos, Rizal pointed out that the lack df a national sentiment and the poor train ing of the people aggravat ed their own ills^ Conversely, the ills of the country could be reduced by the develop ment of a national sentiment and discipline, and most im portant—a better education, for it is through education that the formation of a na tional sentiment can be more easily facilitated. (Only when a national community has been formed can a people develop intellectual and mo ral virtues, where they were aware of their rights and had developed the character with which to defend these rights to the extent of dying for them. Indeed, in such a com munity exploitation and ty ranny would disappear, for Rizal believed that tyrants existed only where there were slaves, a corrupt government on|iy among a corrupt-people. Corrupt government, cor rupt peoplel Can it be that we possess not the substance but the shadow* of a nation al community? Possibly, Rizal was more interested in preparing the people for eventual independ ence in order not to perpetu ate in the succeeding social order the very ills he expos ed in the Noli. For if such ills would persist, what would have been accomplished is merely a succession of bad governments, nothing accom plished in matters of freed om and morality. Rizal pro bably did not believe that an immoral government of Fili pinos was more desirable than a similar one by Spa niards. As shown in his Filipinos Dentro De Cien Anos, Rizal anticipated that the Philip pines would some day be an independent nation. This foresight gave him the desire to prepare the people in their political transformation tow ards independence so that the social cancer would not be perpetuated. Again a well-in tegrated national community by Rizal’s standards would be a prerequisite to a successful independence. Time has shown to us that we are plaguof with the very 24 PANMAMA same problems that faced our grandfathers. The nation is still sick with the same can cer. Eventually it will die for it can not go on forever sick. But still there is always the promise of an effective cure even if that cure is slow, pain ful and costly. As Rizal said, we have to have a national community. For us to become all that we aspire to be we must stand united for the common good, the commonweal before our selfish well-being. When we have created a true nation, when we have become one in thought, in spirit, then at last we will know who we are; we will know our names; We will see our faces; we will imitate no more; will cultivate our own; we will be proud of our selves; we will declare to eve ry man: "I have found my self. I know who I am. I am—a Filipino..." SHE COULD BE RIGHT AT THAT! Children — and for that matter, grown-ups — still continue to have trouble with the meanings of words in sjpite of special dictionaries. A houewife reports that her six-year-old daughter was asked Dy aTriend how many members she had in her family. "Let’s see,” said the six-year-old. “We have two boys. And three girls. And one adult. And one adulteress.” December 1962 25 ■ A visiting librarian find* some of the books we give our children to read in school are “almost treasonous.'* THE NEED FOR LOCAL LITERATURE IS URGENT It is time we took serious note of the deplorable state of the kind of literature children in the grades are exposed to. This problem, simple as it is, has become one to test our mettle as a people with pretensions to cultural maturity and a cer tain degree of political so phistication. Consider the findings of a visiting Rockefeller consult ant on libraries who is here to develop literature for children in the country. She is Miss D. Marie Grieco. She would like to see some beau tiful books, the kind a book lover can love — “books writ ten for children by your (our) most talented writers, illustrated by your finest art ists, printed and published by ycur most competent people.” We have the technical know-how and the training and the aptitude to do this. But, what actually do we we find? Let Miss Grieco give you her observations, as cull ed from a talk she delivered before members of the Bi bliographic Soeiety of the Philippines: “Let us look at some of the books your children have to read in your libraries, have you seen them? Row upon row, shelf after shelf of dis carded American readers. . . Have you seen your children learning to love ‘literature’ with worn out texts that were designed for quite different purposes and for quite differ ent children? XXX “You know that a majority of your children leave school after the first four years. During- these few years, they have precious little contact with good books in any lan guage. . . So how and when do we develop a reading pub lic? . . Have you seen some 26 PANORAMA of the books on Rizal that are used in schools? I have here a book published in 1957. . . Let us investigate the caliber of some of the questions asked. After a se quence in which Jose does some tricks, we are told, ‘Jose was a. magician boy.’ Could you do some magic?’ XX’X "I must submit to you that some of these books are al most treasonous. The senti mentality distorts the man. He has been disembodied, dissected and put back in i.«*» lated bits and pieces into les sons and exercises from which he emerges lifeless and un real in a textbook teaching method which is a paragon of boredom. xxx “Even if the law did not tell you to develop ideals of nationalism, patriotism and* freedom, you would want your children to be taught such values. You could have books which depict the beau ty of your country, the values of your own culture, the meanings of your own cus toms. xxx “Whatever your values are, if they are to be part of your educational program, you must attend to the literature used in the schools. Since your culture emphasizes dif ferent aspects .and values in childhood, all American read ing textbooks are not suitable for use here. xxx “The need for local liter ature is urgent. We need books to arouse intellectual curiousity, to stimulate aes thetic appreciation, to dev elop taste in good writing and art. to converse with the child as he copes with him self as an individual human being, as a member of a com munity and as member of a nation and a world.” Human liberty: liberty of thought, liberty of religion,liberty of residence, liberty of action. — Woodrow Wilson. December 1962 27 g New ways to achieve peace must be sought for the methods we still persist in pursuing are not going to save us from further catastrophes. THE GREAT DOUBLE FALLACY: TO ARM OR DISARM Emery Reves To the writer of this art icle, who closely followed the discussions in the 1920s which led to the great Dis armament Conference of 1932 in Geneva under the chirmanship of Arthur Hen derson, the present excite ment about disarmament ap pears unbearably repetitious. We express great surprise when Mr. Khrushchev pro poses immediate and total disarmament, forgetting that this was exactly what Litvi nov proposed in the name of the Stalin Government thirty years ago. And we follow with the utmost attention the American arguments that we must first establish controls before we disarm, forgetting that these were exactly the arguments of Briand, Herriot and Leon Blum. Not one single argument is being rais ed today by either of the par ties which was not discussed over and over -again in the 1930s. Trust and Treaties Let us imagine that the American, Russian, British and French Governments agree on all the problems concerning nuclear disarma ment and that in the near future a treaty is signed ac cording to which all further atomic tests will be banned, all production of nuclear weapons stopped and all the existing plutonium and hy drogen bombs destroyed un der a system of control as effective as any scientist and miltary expert can devise. Suppose that such a treaty is signed and ratified not only by the great Powers, but also by all the members of the United Nations and those outside, including China. 28 Panorama Is it imaginable that, given the existing political struct ure of this world American miltary leaders, responsible to their, nation for the de fence of the people and the territory of the United States of America will not suspect that, in spite of all the treat ies and assurances, the Rus sians may hide in some un derground cave in the Urals a few nuclear weapons, making it imperative for the U.S. to keep secretly some hydrogen bombs for self-defence in case of emergency? And is it possible to imagine that the General Staff of the So viet Army, whose respdnsibility it is to defend the peo ples and the territory of the Soviet Union would not have the same reaction towards the U.S.A.? These are rhetorical quest ions; for if the political con dition of the world made it possible for one sovereign great power to trust the pre sent and future actions of an other sovereign great power, there would be no need for disarmament,, because there would be no need (or arma ments either. But let us be credulous and accept the possibility that, if our governments succeed in signing a treaty of complete nuclear disarmament, such a treaty would be honestly car ried out and that there would be not one single nuclear weapon left anywhere nor the intention to produce one. Would such a most unlikely achievement bring us nearer to it? In such an event we would be exactly where we were in 1939 and 1914 Technical Steps During the 1930s our gov ernment thought that we could achieve peace by reduc ing the calibre of naval guns, by limiting certain heavy weapons, prohibiting the bombardment of civilian po pulations, etc. None of these negotiatioons! led anywhere. But if a disarmament treaty had been signed in 1935, in corporating all the aims of the 1932 Geneva Disarmament Conference, it would certain ly not have prevented a sec ond world war. It would have merely reduced the tech nical conditions existing in warfare during the nine teenth century Thus we can go backwards, century by century. No mat December 1962 29 ter what weapons we abolish and what armaments we pro hibit, under certain condi tions there will still be wars, even without artillery, even without gunpowder, even without cavalry and without arrows. It is strange to realize how we swing between two contradictory conceptions of peace. As long as we try to maintain peace between so vereign power groups, we have to apply the age-old di plomatic formula of the bal ance of power. The peculiar ity of the balance-of-power principle is that it can main tain peace only during pe riods when power is not in balance. As soon as there is power balance, conflict inva riably breaks out. During the phase of history when the power relationship is more or less in balance, we try to prevent war by disarmament. And during that phase when power is -not in balance, we always try to maintain peace by superior armament, by what we call today the “deter rent.” Misleading Terms This is a highly misunder stood and misused term, as the superiority of power we like to call "deterrent” is act ually an "incentive.” Bet ween 1945 and 1949 our Western statesmen said that peace was being safeguarded by the "deterrent” of the Am erican atomic obmb. Unfor tunately, to the Russians the American bomb did not ap pear as a “deterrent” but as an “incentive,” which forced them to multiply their efforts to produce the same weapon and even to surpass their ri val in the existing power re lationship. When the Russians produc ed their long-range rocket and shot satellites into space, they called it a “deterrent" to American aggression. But to the Americans, the Russian rockets did not appear to be a “deterrent” but an “incen tive," which stimulated them to double and redouble their efforts to produce bigger and longer-range rockets. If we want to discuss seri ously the problem of peace in this magnificent and highly dangerous age of nuclear fis sion and fusion, we must first realise that our thinking and our action are threaten ed by two fallacies. The first fallacy is that we 30 panorama can secure peace by arma ment. And the second fallacy is that we can secure peace by disarmament. Political Problem Endless historical. evidence proves the incontrovertible fact that peace is not a tech-, nical problem, not a military problem, but an essentially political and social problem. Within a certain political structure, no weapon not even the hydrogen bomb or the long-range rocket, 1 epres ents any danger. The people of the State of New York are not afraid of the nuclear weapons manufactured in the State of New Mexico or the rockets launched in Florida. But the people of the Ukraine are frightened of them. The people of the Ukraine are not afraid of the hydrogen bombs ^nd rockets manufactured and launched in Central Si beria, but the people of New York and Chicago are. Peace between conflicting groups of men was never pos sible and wars succeeded one another until some sovereign power and source of law was set over and above the clash ing social units integrating them into a higher sovereign tyIf human society were or ganised according to presentday scientific, technical and industrial realities, so that relations between groups and units in contact were regulat ed by democratically-controll ed law and legal institutions, then modern technology could go ahead in devising and producing the most de vastating weapons, yet theTe would be no war. But if we allow sovereign rights to re side in-the separate units and groups without regulating their relations by law, then we can prohibit every wea pon, even penknives, and people will beat out each other’s brains with clubs. Most practical politicians will smile and say that any integration of the sovereign nation-states,in a higher legal order is Utopia. This is a de batable assertion. But there can be no question that the ideal of disarmament between the highly industrialised sov ereign nation-states of the twentieth century, with or without controls, is the Uto pia of Utopias. A Sick World Our world is prodigiously healthy and vigorous and at the same time terribly sick. The extraordinary economic expansion of the past fifteen years, the upsurge of almost every segment of the human race, give hope of unprece dented progress. The malady that may destroy everybody and everything is caused ex clusively by our outdated po litical institutions, in flagrant contradiction to the econo mic and technological reali ties of our time. This ma lady resembles more -a ner vous than an organic illness. During the past years, our leaders have tried to cure this neurosis by shock treatment: violent changes of mood and policies, constant travelling, innumerable visits to each other, conferences and more co nferen ces. One never knows who is where and who is visiting-whom next. But all this globe-trotting diplo macy, this interminable chain of meetings before the eyes and ears of thousands of jour nalists, microphones and ca meras, can produce no other result than personal publicity and the reinforcement of the antagonistic national posi tions. The shock treatment hav ing failed, perhaps we would try to treat the world neuro sis by a rest cure. Let us try to organise a few months of quiet: no conferences, no meetings between the mem bers of the different national governments, no speeches on international affairs. Just for a few months. During these few months, with not travel ling, no broadcasting, no pro paganda, our ministers and the leaders of public opinion may find a little time to re flect in privacy, to get down to the fundamentals of the problem and to discuss the possible solution with their advisers. In a democracy based on popular elections, politicians are apt "to think first of the effect their actions and words migljt have on their electors. So they turn down a priori any suggestions which they feel would not.be immediate ly accepted or even under stood by the majority of their electors. This is a travesty of the principle of leadership. With such an approach in any field, progress would be 32 Panorama impossible. How could we have arrived at nuclear fis sion if Einstein, Planck, Bohr and the other giants of abs tract science had been guided by the consideration whether the masses would immediately understand and appreciate their theoretical conclusions? Leadership’s Task The solution of a vital problem always goes through two stages. The first stage is to find the correct theoretical solution of the problem. Dur ing that stage it is absurb and futile to take into consi deration whether the solution would be acceptable to the masses. Once the solution is found, then begins the second stage, which is a totally dif ferent process, the. spreading of the solution and its accept ance by the large body of mankind. It is perfectly possible that the correct solution to the problem of peace will not be understood by the peoples and will be rejected by gen erations to come. But even such a gloomy outlook does not justify advocating super ficial and oversimplified measures which appeal to the credulity of the masses, when we know that even a hun dred-per-cent acceptance of such measures by the major ity or even the totality of the nations would not solve the problem. If we want to make some progress, the first step is to organise a meeting or a series of meetings between states men and political thinkers to analyse the problem of peace as it presents itself in the middle of the twentieth cen tury. Should they succeed in finding a solution, then be gins the task of the politi cians, that of persuading the peoples to accept the solu-. tion, if it is peace they want. New Thinking Whether statesmanship will be powerful enough to organ ise humanity in a social or der that will save us from a nuclear war is impossible to foretell. But it is certain that the measures which have been put forward since the second world war by Left and Right, by East and West, and which we still persist in pursuing, are not going to save us. from further major catastrophes. Mankind has always yearn ed for peace. The fact that since the establishment of the December 1962 33 sovereign nation-s t a tes we have never achieved it does not prove that peace is an un approachable ideal. But it certainly makes it clear that the methods we have hitherto applied for reaching it have been inadequate. The fear of a sudden nu clear war should induce us to re-read history and to see how, in the past, wars have been stopped between fami lies, tribes, feudal barons, mu nicipalities, p r i n c ipalities, and other units when they were endowed with sovereign power. If we are capable of learning from history, the outlook is immensely bright. —The London Times. WHAT IS FILIPINISM? However we may differ in our definition of what Filipinism is, we know that it is a hope, a promise, a dream. The hope of a nation where men and women are-judged not by their nationality or their religion, but by their worth as individuals, as neighbors. The promise of a land, rich in the fruits of the earth, where none willing to work need fear want. The dream of a society in which citizens may try new social and political paths free from inquisitions. Filipinism is a hope which can be fulfilled — and only we, Filipinos, can bring about this fulfillment. 34 Panorama A GENTLEMAN AND A SCHOLAR Can one be a gentleman and a scholar? The phrase is peculiarly American, a piece of old-fashioned, oro tund, rustic blarney, a cliche of insincere praise. Was it meant to suggest the felici tous combination of two ad mirable accomplishments or did the flattery intend to go further and suggest that the recipient combined in him self virtues elsewhere irrecon cilable? Probably the first. Gentle men and scholars were alike, alien to the .experience of most who employed the phrase and there is little like lihood that they even guessed at their fundamental opposi tion. For if gentleman be inter preted in the American sense, as designating a man endow ed with natural kindness, marked by delicate considera tion for others and graced with polished manners, no thing could be more opposed to it than scholar. A scholar is interested in the pursuit and publication of facts. Nothing is more ruthless, less considerate, more devoid of kindness.. And few occupa tions have been marked by manners as consistently bad as those shown by scholars. They are not interested in making a good impression. They shouldn’t be. Of course if gentlemen is interpreted in the English sense, as designating one of a good family, with some edu cation, and not in trade, the combination is possible. In deed, it has been made many times. Newton was a gentle man and a scholar. So was Darwin. So were Lecky, Buc kle, and a dozen others. But the English sense of gentle man won’t do; the phrase is used only in America.—Ber gen Evans. One of the great truths we have to learn is that there are no national lines if you are a decent person. December 1962 35 ■ A noted expert on Soviet diplomacy takes a fresh look at the changing face of the Kremlin monolith and makes a plea for more tolerance and under standing. KEEPING a world intact George F. Kennan International life normally has in it strong competitive elements. It did not take the challenge of Communism to produce this situation. Just as there is no uncomplicat ed personal relationship be tween individuals, so, I think, there is internationl relation ship between Sovereign States which is without its elements of antagonism, its'competitive aspects. Many of the present relationships of international life are only the eroded rem nants of ones which, at one time, were relationships of most uncompromising hostili ty. Every government is in some respects a problem for every other government, and it will always be this way so long as the sovereign State, with its supremely self-center ed rationale, remains the ba sis of international life. The variety of historical experi ence and geographic situa tion, would assure the pre valence of this situation, even if such things as human error and ambition did not. The result is that the rela tionship we have with the So viet Union has to be compar ed, if we are to determine its real value, not with some non-existent- state of total harmony of interests but with what we might call the nor mal level of recalcitrance, of sheer orneriness and unrea sonableness, and which I am sure we often manifest in our own. This again is largely the product of the long-term factors af fecting a n a t i o n’s life. Russian governments have always been difficult govern ments to do business with. This is nothing new in kind —if anything is new, about it, 36 panorama it is only a matter of degree. Russia would have been a great military and industrial power by mid-century, what ever regime she might have had. This greater strength would certainly, in any cir cumstances, have whetted her ambitions and, stiffened her diplomacy. Traditional, deeply ingrained traits of re action and of diplomatic me thods would have made her, under any government, a country difficult to deal with in the present mid-century. It is against this reality, not against a state of blissful conflictlessness, that Soviet recal citrance and hostility have to be measured. The result does not justify us in the conclu sion that we are facing a wholly new and unprecedent ed situation. Dangerous dreams Not only are these differ ences ones of degree but they reflect factors which have been, are, and will continue to be, in a state of constant flux and change. Soviet states manship represents a mixture of some elements which are ones of abnormal hostility towards us and do indeed em body dangerous dreams of world hegemony, and of other elements which are indistin guishable from the normal motivations of governments in a competitive world. The re lationship between these elements is not a stable one. It is constantly changing; and if it is true that these changes have been erratic, that they have been in the nature of zigzags with downs as well as ups, the general trend of' them, especially in recent years, has been in the direc tion of normalcy—towards a preoccupation with internal and defensive interests in the Soviet State, away from. the world revolutionary dreams of the early aftermath of the Revolution. Significant changes Let us not be put off by the angularities of Mr. Krush chev’s personality. Individuals are not so important here: they come and they go, soihetimes faster than we expect. 1 am inclined to ascribe deep and encouraging significance to some of the changes in the character and structure of the Soviet regime that have taken place since Stalin’s death. The drastic alteration in the role of the police has consti December 1962 37 tuted a basic change in the nature and spirit of Soviet society. It has also altered somewhat the character of the political process, particularly in the senior echelons of the party, away from the horror of unadulterated police intri gue, and in the direction of a rudimentary parliamentarianism, at least within the Central Committee. This is true despite the fact that it is a reform which could, theo retically, be reversed again at any time. The longer things go on this way, without a' re versal, the harder any such re versal will be, in my opinion. The relaxation of the Iron Curtain has, to date, remain ed within modest limits. It obviously encounters, deep in hibitions in the neo-Stalinist echelons of the regime. But I think it has gone so far that it would not be easy to bottle up again the intellectual and cultural life of this talented people as it was bottled up under Stalin. Ally and rival Finally, the position of the Soviet regime has been funda mentally altered by the fact that for the last ten years it has not been alone within its own Communist community but has had, alongside it, one great associate to whom its re lationship is partly that of ally and partly that of rival, and a number of other asso ciates in eastern Europe whose interests it cannot treat quite as cavalierly as many people in America seem to fancy. This means that it has passed from the relative sim plicity of a bipolar world, in which the only issue was “we” and “they”—who-whom, ktokogo, as Lenin put it—and has come into an internation al setting marked by real complications and contradic tions. People who have only enemies don’t know, what complications are; for that, you have to have friends; and these, the Soviet Government, thank God, now has. If this'is now a complicat ed world for the Soviet Gov ernment, so it is for us. This, too, places limitations on our ability to treat Soviet hosti lity in the simpliste way that some of our people would like to see us treat it. When we have only, one enemy, we can at least have some hope of doing this successfully. When we have more than one, and when they are too strong to 38 Panorama be taken on all together, we cannot afford thi$ luxury. In connection with the events of the thirties, when we were in this position, when we had two quite separate and unre lated adversaries: Nazi Ger many and Soviet Russia—and when we were so weak that we could hope to cope with one of these adversaries only by collaboration . with the other—then we could no long er cultivate the luxury of high moral attitudes. This, I fear, is our position again to day, in the face of Russian and Chinese power, not to mention some of the other complexities of our interna tional position. Complicated world In saying this I am not en tertaining dreams of setting the Russians at war with the Chinese. I do not want to see any great nation at war with any other great nation in this day of the atom. I think it naive to suppose that Russian-C h i n e s e relations relations could in any case be very different from what they are to-day, so long1 as the pres-ent world situation prevails. I am merely saying that it is incumbent on us, too, to re cognise the existence of a complicated world, not a sim ple one; and that in the light of the duality which now marks the Communist orbit, we would be very foolish to overlook the differences in the nature of the challenge of fered to us by these two great forces and to insist on having merely one adversary where we could, to our own bene fit, have two. American public opinion has often been something like a decade behind the times, in devising these responses. Not until the late twenties, a de cade after the event, did it begin to be generally recog nised in America that a re volution had taken place in Russia of such strength and depth that it was destined to enter permanently into the fabric of our time. When F.D.R. recognised the Soviet Government in 1933, he was acting largely on an image drawn from the Russia of Le nin’s day; nothing was -furth er from his p'owers of imagin ation than the Russia of the purges that was already then in the making. Even in the Second World War, Roose velt’s view of Russia, and that of many other Americans, was Decbmber 1962 39 one that took little account of the purges, little account of the degree of commitment Stalin had incurred by virtue of his own crimes and excesses —a commitment which would have made it impossible for him to be a comfortable as sociate for the likes of our selves, no matter how we had treated him. Progress marker And when in the late for ties, numbers of worthy peo ple in America suddenly and belatedly discoverd the rather normal phenomenon of for eign penetration and espion age, and set out frantically trying to persuade us that we ought to lose faith in our selves because they had made this discovery, the evil of Communist subversion over which they were so excited was one which had actually reached its highest point seve ral years earlier and was by that time definitely on the wane. Today, there are many equally worthy people, who appear to be discovering for the first time that there was such a thing as the Stalin era, and who evidently have much difficulty in distinguishing it from what we have known since 1953. I could even name professional “sovieto logists,” private and govern mental, who seem afraid to admit to themselves or to others that Stalin is really dead. Let us not repeat these mis takes. Let us permit the image of Stalin’s Russia to stand for us as a marker of the distance we have come, a reminder of how much worse things could be, and were— not as a spectre whose vision blinds us to the Russia we have before us to-day. Moral dilemma I also Wish to stress the ne cessity of an American out look which accepts the obliga tions of maturity and con sents to operate in a world of relative and unstable values. If we are to regard ourselves as a grown-up nation—and anything else will henceforth be mortally dangerous—then w®» must, as the Biblical phrase goes, put away chil dish things; and among these childish things the first to go in my opinion, should be self idealism and the search for absolutes in world affairs, for absolute security, absolute 40 panorama amity, absolute harmony. We are a strong nation, wield ing great power. We cannot help wielding this power. It comes to us by virtue of our sheer size and strength wheth er we wish it or not. But to wield power is always at best an ambivalent thing—a shar ing in the guilt taken upon themselves by all those men who, over the course of the agies, have sought or consent ed to tell others what to dor There is no greater Am erican error than the belief that liberal institutions and the rule of law relieve a nat ion of the moral dilemma in volved in the exercise of po wer. Power, like sex, may be concealed and outwardly ig nored, and in our society it often is; but neither in the one case nor in the other does this concealment save us from the destruction of our inno cence or from the confront ation with the dilemmas these necessities imply. When the ambivalence of one’s vir tue is recognized, the total in iquity of one’s opponent is also irreparably impaired. Worth living in The picture, then, which I hope I have presented is that of an international life in. which not only is there no thing final in point of time, nothing not vulnerable to the law of change, but also no thing absolute in itself: a life in which there is no friend ship without some element of antagonism; no enmity with out some rudimentary com munity of interest; no bene volent intervention which is not also in part an injury; no act of recalcitrance, no seem ing evil, from which — as Shakespeare put it — some "soul of goodness” may not be distilled. A world in which these things are true is, of course, not the best of all conceiv able worlds; but it is a toler able ohe, and it is worth liv ing in. I think our foremost aim to-day should be to keep it physically intact in an age tvhen men have acquired, for the first time, the technical means of destroying it. To do this we shall have, above all, to avoid petulsnce and self-indulgence in our view of history, in our view of our selves, in our decisions, and in our behavior as a nation. If this physical intactness of our environment can be pre served, I am not too worried December 1962 41 about our ability or inability to find answers to the more traditional problems of inter national life. I am content to add: “Let us leave a few problems for our children to solve; otherwise they might be so bored.” — From the book,. Russia and the West under Lenin arid Stalin, as excerpted by The London Observer, HOW FREE ARE WE? It is often said, with reason, that a person is really free and independent only up to the time he is nine years old. After this, he is subjected to all sorts of prejudices — racial, religious, social, ideological, or what have you. What he claims are his views or opinions are no more than the views and opinions of people who have influence over him - his parents, his teachers, his other mentors, religious, political or intellectual, and others. Unless he is able to free himself from these influences, and he can do so only through study and learning, he will remain fettered. One authority says, if somewhat flippantly, that the best teacher is the teacher that teaches the least. Cer tainly, there are many things one has to unlearn. And freeing himself from his prejudices is the surest way to his discovery of himelf. Only then can he consider himself really free. 42 PANORAMA ■ It will be necessary for each and all of us not only to disarm o».r ermies of dreadful weapon^ but to disarm our minds of dreadful fears. A WAY IN WHICH TO SAVE MAN Adlai Stevenson TVith all the disadvantages, with all its disorderly debates and cross-purposes, is demo cracy becoming a luxury we cannot afford any more? Is it possibly true, as the com munist leaders love to say, that history really is on their side? Even if you ask the quest ion in those terms—which are the terms the Communists themselves prefer—I think history since 1945 has*already begun to give the answer; and the answer is No. Communism has yet to be the popular choice of one single nation anywhere on the face of the globe. In the few places where it has ex tended its control, whether in Czechoslovakia, North Viet nam, or Cuba, it has been in the same clasic role—as the scavenger of war and of ruin ed revolutions. And we have seen, too, that the high tide_£a_n recede: Yu goslavia ceased to be a satel lite; Poland achieved a certain measure -of internal autono my; and in more than one country of Africa and Asia, Communist ambassadors have been requested to go home and take their agents with them. The score isn’t one-sided. The promised victory of Com munism keeps on receding in to the future. The juggernaut just does not jug. Either de mocracy is less bumbling than we fear, or Communism is less efficient than it claims. War Machine It is small wonder that dic tatorships look efficient at waging war — whether cold or hot — because a totalita rian government is in its very essence a kind of war ma chine. Power is the ultimate December 1962 43 justification for all its acts, and the extension of power is the chief article of its for eign policy. The aims of democracy are altogether different. “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master” — was Lincoln’s idea of democracy. We positively do not want power and domination over others. The greatest triumph of the Marshall Plan was not, as Mosow then said, to enslave Europe, but to put it back on its feet and restore its inde pendence. Our aim in the emerging nations is basically the same. The tides of history, in this particular time, have brought the world to a fortunate con junction of circumstances. The colonial system through out the tropical regions of the world is coming rapidly to an end. Almost the first object for which the emerging nat ions wish to use their new .in dependence is to overcome the age-old curse of poverty and ignorance, which are the most elementary obstacles to personal freedom. In this same period the northern Atlantic region is emerging into a post-colonial era of unprecedented growth, starting from the most ad vanced industrial and tech nical base known to history, and spurred on by increasing regional unity, provides the very resources of capital and technical and scientific ac complishment on which the new and emerging nations must draw. Atlantic Community The stake of the United States in the success of the Atlantic Community is very great. This is one of the his toric creative developments of the postwar generation. We are determined that the At lantic Community, far from being opposed to the general interest, shall move in direct ions that will serve and invi gorate the economic and poli tical freedom of the whole world, and especially the 'in terest of/the developing nat ions. The United States, there fore, proposes both to support a growing Atlantic Commu nity and to use it as a creat ive force for unity in the world at large. We shall ex periment freely within it on the institutions and policies of free association; and thus we may perhaps provide mo PANORAMA dels for other continents and even for the association of continents which ultimately has to come. We shall make use of all the worldwide agencies — the U.N. programs of technical cooperation, the World Bank, the Internation al Development Association, UNESCO, F.O.A. and other important members of the United Nations family. In short, we shall seek, in season and out of season, to demonstrate that the fortun ate and advanced nations of the world are forming our as sociation not to withdraw from our common human res ponsibilities, but to explore them more deeply and more effectively, not to look in ward on our affluence, but outward on our common hu man tasks. Principles We believe the principles of an open society in the world order survive and flourish in the competitions of peace. We believe that freedom and diversity are the best climate for human creativity and so cial progress. We reject all fatalistic philosophies of his tory and all theories of poli tical and social predestina tion. We doubt whether any nation has so absolute a grin on absolute truth that it is entitled to impose its idea of what is right on others. And we know that a world com munity of independent na tions accepting a common frame of international order offers the best safeguard for the safety of our shores and the security of our people. Our commitment to the world of the United Nations Char ter expresses both our deepest philosophical traditions and the most realistic interpret ation of our national interest. Sometimes it seems to me, working at the United Na tions, that the name of that organization is almost right, but that the adjective is wrong. It should be, if we are precise, the Uniting Na tions. It was founded to main tain a peace which has never been made. It is not some thing established and achiev ed, by means of which we ca sually attend to little quar rels and difficulties as they arise. It is rather a center of aspiration; a continuous pro cess of wrestling with the seemingly irreconcilable; and a constant straining to break out of those temptingly clear December 1962 45 but hopelessly narrow logical systems which drive us apart, into a less clear but far wider and deeper logic of tolerance that can save mankind. Moving Humanity. . How excruciatingly slow that process seems, and how distant that aspiration! But “man’s reach must exceed his grasp, else what’s a heaven ♦or?” It is not just the dread of war but the yearning for peace, and the intuition of brotherhood, that can exert the necessary force to move humanity, against all the obs tacles of outworn institutions toward a peace based on to lerance. And surely, at some point along the way, it will be ne cessary for each and all of us — Russians, Americans, Eu ropeans and Latin Ameri cans, Asians and Africans — not only to disarm our armies of dreadful weapons, but to. disarm our minds of dreadful fears; to open our frontiers, our schools and our homes to the clean winds of fact and- of free and friendly dialogues; and to have done with those exclusive fanatical dogmas which can make whole peo ples live in terror of imagin ary foes. Not in order to save one self, we must act on the truth which our experience makes inescapable: that the road to peace in this fearful genera tion is the road to an open world. ON ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM What is our attitude toward brains — the in tellectual? What do the young learn, at home, in the newspapers, over the radio, bn television and wherever they turn, about the intellectual? They learn that intellectuals are not really to be trusted because they have a fatal tendency to indulge in sub version. They learn that intellectuals are trouble makers. They learn that college professors are absent minded and wooly and silly; that “brain trust” is a term of contempt; that “eggheads” are not to be entrusted with political power. — Henry Steele Commager. 46 Panorama | It is an open question whether extreme measures such as the death penalty can effectively deter others from following the paths of those who have faced the firing squads. SOVIET LAW AND CAPITAL PUNISHMENT Theories of capital punish ment in the more progressive countries are based on the retributory and corrective func tion of the death penalty in the scheme of penalties. Oc cupying the highest level in this system, the death sent ence has been subject to vari ous criticism's most of which are based on humanitarian motives. In those countries which impose the death sent ence however, capital punish ment has been confined only to the more heinous crimes generally regarded as particu larly shocking. Only occasion ally does the state impose the penalty for offenses commit ted against its very existence such, for instance, as rebel lion, espionage, and treason. Even then, the offense i§ gra duated into various degrees with correspondingly serious penalties imposed and with the death penalty reserved for offenders whose crimes fall under the highest category. In the Philippines, the death penalty is imposed in case of political crimes only where several aggravating cir cumstances are present. Otherwise, the offender may get a jail sentence ranging from 10 years to life impri sonment. Rebellion, or acts committed by citizens to over throw the lawfully constitut ed government, is not pena lized with the capital punish ment. On the contrary, the maximum jail term a convict ed rebel can receive is 12 years. Only when the rebel,, does not only seek to replace the duly established g&ernment with another set up by him and his cohorts but also tries to literally hand over his country to another sovereign power is the capital penalty usually imposed. For then, he commits treason which cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be justified. On 47 the other hand, rebellion, so the penologists say, becomes a patriotic act when it is suc cessful and is able to re-estab lish order in the society. With a few local variations of no substantial importance, this system prevails in most democratic countries at .pre sent. In comparison, at least one state established and ruri along Marxist-Leninist lines extends the capital punish ment to various other of fenses, some of which merit only a protracted stay inside a prison cell. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, by a very recent series of legis lation passed by its highest governing body, the Presi dium, has imposed the high est penalty on a class of of fenses previously punished by less extreme penalties. Signi ficantly, most of these new capital offenses are primarily sins against the economic structure of Soviet society. Thus, embezzlement of state property, counterfeiting, ille gal currency transactions, and bribe-taking can earn for those involved either the hangman’s rope or the firing squad’s bullets. In comparison, these of fenses are punished, at least in the Philppines, with jail terms ranging from six months to 12 years depending on the value of the property embezzled, the number of persons prejudiced, and seve ral other factors most of which have little to do with the state’s political and eco nomic policies. Of course, of fenses against the government are classed either as crimes against public policy or the public order. But these \la bels are more for convenience and orderly classification than for anything more sub stantial. Suffice it to say, Philippine laws, at least, would probably never reach a point in their progressive dev elopment when the death pe nalty would have to be impos ed for the commission, of any of these crimes. It is significant to note that the trend in the Soviet laws on capital punishment has been towards "humaniza tion”. But probably more significant is the successive aboliton and re-appearance of capital punishment in the 50old year history of the Soviet regime. Thus, the death pe nalty was abolished* by the new Soviet government wayback in 1917 and later rein 48 panorama troduced the next year, abo lished early in 1920, and re introduced some years later. After the Second World War, in 1947, the capital penalty was again abolished in ac knowledgement of “the ex ceptional devotion of the en tire population of the Soviet Union to the Soviet home land and the Soviet govern ment” and of “the wishes” of various workers’ unions all over the country. The Soviet Union went as far as to advo cate among delegates to the United Nations in 1948 for the universal abolition of the penalty. Philippine penal law has been consistent, at least on this point. The only offenses to which the death penalty has been further imposed right after the war are rape committed on a child below 12. years and kidnapping . where ransom is demanded by the offenders. Quite apart from the obser vation by experts on the So viet legal system that capital punishment is imposed on a wider class of offenses in Rus sia tfian anywhere else, these experts note the phrase “temporary and exceptionaTmeasure” which invariably qua lifies any Soviet edict impos ing capital punishment on more and more offenses. This clearly implies that Soviet po licy-makers, and perhaps in cluding Soviet penal theorists, do not consider the death pe nalty as a logical and essential part of Soviet penal law. They have consistently just ified this subterfuge or legal fiction by maintaining that an enlightened Soviet legal sys tem has no place for such a capitalist contraption as the death sentence. And when it is found. necessary to impose the extreme penalty, it is be cause certain capitalist vest iges producing crimes shock ing to the Soviet people need to be firmly and unequivo cally weeded out. This line of reasoning has been most apparent in those laws, most of which were pass ed only last year and early this year, penalizing so-called economic sins. Thus, recent statements from official Soviet, sources maintain tha; certain “rotten elements” in society are the targets of these new edicts, that these elements are carriers of “capitalist infect ion” and that “objectively,” therefore, are agents of impe rialism. Specifically, pecula December 1962 49 tion, bribe-taking, and illegal trading are regarded as “sur vivals of capitalism ,in the consciousness of the people,” as forms of “parasitism” with out roots in the soil of Soviet society. Without judging at this point the validity of these rea sons, one is tempted to laud the Soviet regime for being firm against such “parasites” of society. But for unfortun ate prejudices entertained by most of' us which preclude intelligent appraisal of such stringent measures, one might well convince this country’s top administrators and policy makers to give these recent Soviet laws a second thought. It is of course an open question whether extreme measures fuch as those recent ly passed by* the Soviet Pres idium can effectively deter others from following the paths of those who have gone to the execution grounds. Even those who seek to justify the penal systems after which ours is substantially pattern? ed by saying that the prospect of having oneself roasted should sufficiently discourage wrongdoers cannot stand up against bare statistics.^ Public ity complete with’lurid de tails of the convict’s death throes does not seem to help bring down the number of crimes all over the country. Indeed, if one has to justify the death penalty, the only valid, though rather brutal, way is to say that electrocut ing, shooting, or hanging an offender is society’s way of avenging its shocked and trampled feerings.. Whether more offenses are brought un der capital punishment or only “special” ones is imma terial. One might even be said to be only a more “ci vilized” version of the other though both are essentially only refinements of the an cient concept of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” A guest on the speakers’ stand was unexpected ly called upon to make a speech. He stammered for a moment, apologized for coming unprepared, then looked at the toastmaster and quoted Jonah’s admonition to the whale: “If you had kept your big mouth closed I wouldn’t be in this hole now.” 50 PANORAMA | When the interests cif a super-power so demand, can meddling in the internal affairs of other na tions ever be justified sufficiently? AMERICA'S SPIES: THE CASEBOOK OF THE CIA Only more than a year from the order of American Pres ident Kennedy to institute a blockade against Cuba, the United Stales had launced an invasion against CubaTi Premier Fidel Castro—and had failed miserably, thus earning world-wide condem nation from both its allies and antagonists alike because of its having taken a hand in engineering an uprising ag ainst what was after all a le gitimate government—and becaue of its having failed. Behind the invasion was the Central Intelligence Agen cy, a coordinating agency whose functions, because of the Cuban failure, underwent a reappraisal by the new Am erican President who discov ered that the CIA, in going about the Cuban affair, had made several miscalculations, and, what was more alarm ing, had .taken upon itself cer tain powers which did not be long to it. The London Sunday Times, .in examining the CIA’s role in' American poli cy, recently published ex cerpts from a new book, “ClA—The Jnside Story,” by Andrew Tully, which at tempts to set down both the CIA’s successes and its fail ures and the subsequent steps taken to make sure that its failures as in the Cuban fias co, would never, happen again. The CIA has been credit ed as one of the most suc cessful organizations for es pionage so far devised. It was formed by then President Harry S. Truman in 1946 to “make sense” out of the nu merous and at times con flicting intelligence reports which crossed his desk and which only served to confuse him and leave him as unin formed as ever. However, the subsequent years saw the CIA assuming another form: that of its, at times, assum Decembf.r 1962 51 ing the role of a policy-mak ing body. It was during the Cuban fiasco that steps were taken to correct this. The Agency, actually, can be held responsible for some of the biggest blunders which have been dangerous enough to threaten the peace of the world and for some of the less publicised sucesses of the United States in gaining va luable information—and at times in manipulating gov ernments to suit the purposes of the nation it serves. The famous tunnel into East Berlin was one of the CIA’s notable successes. Through its agents the CIA was able to determine the location of a terminal of te lephone cables serving East, German military and govern ment officials. The telephone terminus was six hundred yards from the American sec tor of Berlin. "Somehow" says Tully in his book, “those lines had to be tapped be cause by doing so the CIA would be privy not only to Communist military conversa tions but also to massages to and from Moscow. By late 1954, prodded by Allen Dul les [head of the CIA later relieved by President Ken nedy because of the Cuu<q fiasco], America’s German or ganization had gdfie into the business of tunnel building.' The tunnel finally built tc tap the telephone treminus, ir the words of Tully, was "a burrow with overtones of ele gance.” So elegantly indeed was the wire-tapping carrr out that for almost a the tunnel was undetected as it listened to thousands of conversations within, to anu from East Berlin, recording and transcribing millior^~_of words for analysis. When it wsa detected by Soviet troops, the Soviet Union immediately sent a note to the United States pro testing tlie operation, de manding punishment for those persons who were in volved in it. But strangely enough, Tully notes, both Soviet and East German news papers heaped praise upon the tunnel as a masterpiece of daring and skill and even opened it to the publir-as a tourist attraction, with guides to explain the appara tus. There were no grave inter national repercussions that, time, as there were no grave i n t ernational repercussions 52 PANORAM' from the CIA’s “coathanger case,” when it was able to dis cover the kind of alloy the Soviet Union was using to make new -airplane wing. From a litter basket from a a Russia airline, a CIA agent was able to obtain a bent coathanger, which had been made from the shavings of a new kind of metal for^lane wings. With all the facili ties at its command the CIA was able to know what kind of metal the coathanger and the plane wing—were made of. It was entirely different, however, when the CIA was accused of having backed the French general’s mutiny in Algiers against President Charles de Gaulle of France, only a few days after the Cu ban fiasco. For it ineant, if true, that the US had virtually conspir ed against France’s de Gaulle and was plotting to replace his government with that of the generals whose disagree ment with de Gaulle had been over his Algerian poli cy. President Kennedy’s Press Secretary, Pierre Salinger, managed to convince the French that the CIA had no hand in the mutiny, and mat ters ended at that. But, says Tully, “Obvious ly. .. CIA made whatever contacts it could in the con troversy; and there is every reason to believe that there were CIA operatives who let their own politics show, and led Challe and the other re bels to think that the United States looked with favour on their adventure.” There are thos^ who will look even with less favour on the CIA’s having engineered a coup against Premier Mo hammed Mussadiq of Iran, which Tully calls a coup “hailed as a blow for demo cracy, which it was, but whose results have not been all that democracy might wish.” Mussadiq was appointed by the Shah of Iran to satisfy the growing nationalism in the country. Once appoint ed, however, Mussadiq refus ed to be a mere figurehead: he “shoved the youthful king of kings in the background while he expropriated the properties of the British own ed Anglo-Iranian Oil Compa ny. . .” Mussadiq naturally earned the anger of the large inter national bankers; Iranian oil December 1962 53 was virtually boycotted, and when he attempted to nego tiate with smaller independ ent companies, the American State Department stepped in to warn these companies to keep away from any negotiar tions with the Premier. Iran began to feel the consequenc es, and Mussadiq, finally des perate, wrote then American President Eisenhower and warned him that unless the United States sent more aid, Iran would seek aid elsewhere —meaning with the Soviet Union. "The danger to the West was clear,” says Tully. "With Iran's oil assets in its pockets, the Russians would' have lit tle trouble eventually in achieving a prime object of Russian foreign policy since the days of the Tsars — ac cess to a warm water outlet on the Persian gulf, the free world’s life line to the Far East.” And, even if Soviet Russia managed only to get Iran’s oil from the West, the West. would be weakened throughout the Middle East and Soviet prestige would rise in that area. "It was clear too, of course, that AngloIranian Oil represented a stake of millions, and when private enterprise of that magnitude is involved, State Departments and Foreign Of ficers are apt to react most sensitively." The CIA therefore reacted. It'found out that the Shah of Iran still retained some hold on his people, and that if something were done to en able him to take the reins of government more firmly, per haps a way could be found to ease Mussadiq out of the government and thus end. the threat to the We'SL Through various manipula tions, the hesitating Shah was persuaded to oust Mussadiq as Premier and to name some one else in his place. Mus sadiq, however, arrested the officer entrusted with the message and declared that a revolt against the rightful government of Iran had been crushed. The Shah with his queen, flew to Rome, while Brig. Gen. H. Norman Schwartzkopf, the man as signed to the Mussadiq gam ble, took over "as unofficial paymaster for the MussadiqMust-Go movement. In a pe riod of a few days Schwartz kopf supervised the careful spending of more than ten million,? of CIA's dollars. 54 PANORAMA Mussadiq suddenly lost a great many supporters.” And the CIA was able to put down Mussadiq. “It is sense less,” says Tully further, “to say that the Iranians over threw Mussadiq all by them selves. It was an American operation from beginning to enct a coup necessary to the security of the United States and probably to that of the Western world. But after that the CIA — and the Am erican government — stood by while a succession of proWestern and anti-communist administrations, uninterested in the smallest social reforms, brought Iran again to the edge of bankruptcy.” And because of this, Mussadiq, un der house arrest, continued to gain supporters. As Tully puts it, the CIA learned from all its manipulations in Iran that "in the struggle with Communism the United States cannot be content with short-term results. It is pro per to try to help pro-West ern groups to gain power in the strategic countries of the world, but if their only qua lification is that they are proWestern perhaps CIA should shop around a little more. For too often these Westernoriented leaders are not or iented to the needs of their own peoples.” The U-2 blunder and the Cuban fiasco remain the big gest mistakes the CIA has ever committed. From one point of view the U-2 ope rations may be called a suc cess: it obtained for the Unit ed States invaluable inform ation. From another, how ever, it was an almost unfor givable error, for it broke up a projected summit meeting between the East and West to thresh oat certain points of friction and precipitated a crisis in East-West relations. With the shooting down of airman Gary Powers over Rus sian air space in 1960, “the Eisenhower Administration reacted with extraordinary naivete. .< First a cover story was patently put out that was amateurishly false. Then ... President Eisenhower not only broke the first rule of espion age, which is to admit no thing, but he insisted that the United States had a right to do such things and implied that the flights would con tinue.” This led to the break ing iip of the 1960 summit conference and spread ’ war fears all over the world with December 1962 55 the resulting increase in ten sion between the Soviet Union and the United States. In the case of the Cuban fiasco, Tully notes that the CIA “remains first in line for censure, chiefly for its appa rently traditonal unwilling ness to do business with any but the forces of the extreme Right.” Tully maintains that the planned invasion of Cuba, as ludicrous as it may sound now, would have had a bet ter chance if the ClA had at tempted to contact at least moderately liberal anti-Castro under ground organizations instead of consorting only with the extreme Right forces, who were themselves discre dited in Cuba, since most of them were identified with the dictator Batista. Here is where American in terests come in, for in the effort to coordinate the un derground factions which had sprung up in the United States against Castro, the CIA had relied too heavily on the Right. The two most pro minent factions were the Movement for Revolutionary Recovery, a Right-wing group composed of military officers, Cuban business and profes sional men, and Manolo An tonio Ray’s People’s Revolu tionary Movement. Ray, however, did not meet the CIA’s specifications, for his program included the adopt ion of most of Castro’s pro gram for the Revolution, but without Castro: That meant difficulties for American bus iness. CIA did manage to co ordinate these factions, but the MRR was given the high est attention, although it did not enjoy the popular appeal the MRP enjoyed. The rest is too recent to recall in de tail. The result was that the anti-Castro uprising failed be cause it did not get the po pular support the CIA was banking on and because at the last minute the United States decided to withdraw full support. Strangely enough, the less ons the United States govern ment learned from the Cuban fiasco were limited: President Kennedy merely restored all' responsibility for the making of policy to the State Depart ment “because in certain countries, the CIA had either made policy or had given the impression that its activites were identical with policy.” Largely forgotten is one fact in today’s high tension world: 56 Panorama that the CIA had at times aggravated the risk of war, and had even acted directly in ousting governments which it considered inimical to the interests of the United States. It may be true that Mus sadiq and Castro had serious ly flirted with Soviet Russia, but can a coup against, or an attempt to oust a legitimate government be justified suffi ciently? For in spite of what ever "justifications,” in spite of our hatred for commu nism, the fact remained that both Mussadiq and Castro at one time or another enjoyed the people’s mandate (by the CIA’s own admission) , and were therefore in control of their respective governments for better or for worse. When American interests so de mand,can actual meddling in the internal affairs of other nations ever be justified suffi ciently? We need only re member that the CIA con tinues to be an undoubtedy efficient and well-financed agency capable of toppling any government which may pursue policies inimical to American interests. Where does national sovereignty end — or does it end at all? Like the suppression of freedom, which usually begins with the suppression of the minor ones, this too can start with minor, sesemingly harmless meddling in the internal af fairs of a nation, justified in one way or the other — and can end up in actual, undis guised manipulation of a na tion’s government as a pawn in the Cold War. The Pinoy abroad expresses his patriotism by an intolerable yearning for a mound of white rice.. As he sits down to a meal, no matter how sumptuous, his heart sinks. His stomach juices, he discovers, are much less cosmopolitan than the rest of him and they have remained in that dear barrio in Bulacan or in that little town in Ilocos with the adobo and the pinakbet. He aches for a plateful of crisp pinipig, and he would give his right arm for a dish of sinigang and patis. — Carmen G. Nakpil. December 1962 57 B ‘I shall not be surprised if my last years are spent in a lunatic asylum — where I shall enjoy the company of all who are capable of feeling of hu* inanity.’ CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE (A plea for sanity in an insane world) Bertrand Russell There are two different kinds of conscientious civil disobedience. There is dis obedience to a law specifical ly commanding an action which some people profound ly believe to be wicked. The most important example of this case in our time is con scientious objection. This, however, is not the kind of civil disobedience which is now in question. The second kind of civil disobedience, which is the one that. I wish to consider, is its employment with a view to causing a change in the law or in public policy. In this aspect, it is a means of propaganda, and there are those who consider that it is an undesirable kind. 58 PANORAMA Many, however, of whom I am one, think it to be now necessary. Many people hold that law breaking can never be justi fied in a democracy, though they concede that under any other form of government it may be a duty. The vic torious governments, after the Second World War, re probated, and even punished, Germans for not breaking the law when the law com manded atrocious actions. I do not see any logic which will prove either that a de mocratic government cannot command atrocious actions or that, if it does, it is wrong to disobey its commands. Democratic citizens are for the most part busy with theii own affairs and cannot study difficult questions with any thoroughness. Their opinions are formed upon such infor mation as is easily accessible, and the Authorities can, and too often do, see to it that such information is mislead ing. When I speak of the Authorities, I dd not think only of the politicians, whe ther in office or in opposition, but equally their technical advisers, the popular press, broadcasting and television and, in the resort, the police. These forces are, at present, being used to prevent the de mocracies of western coun tries from knowing the truth about nuclear weapons. The examples are so numerous that a small selection must suffice. I should advise optimists to study the report of the committee of experts ap pointed by the Ohio State University to consider the likelihood of accidental war, and also the papers by dis tinguished scientists in the proceedings of Pugwash Con ferences. Mr. Oskar Morgens tern, a politically orthodox American defence expert, m an article reprinted in Sur vival, Volume II, Number Four, says: 'The probability of thermonuclear war’s occur ring appears to be significant ly larger than the probability of its not occurring.’ Sir Charles Snow says: 'Speaking as responsibly as I can, with in, at the most, ten years from now, some of those bombs are going off. That is the certainty.’ (The Times, 28 December 1960.) The last two include intended as well as accidental wars. December 1962 59 The causes of unintended war are numerous and have already on several occasions very nearly resulted in disas ter. The moon, at least once, and flights of geese, repeat edly, have been mistaken for Russian missiles. Neverthe less, not long ago, the Prime Minister, with pontificial dogmatism, announced that there will be no war by acci dent. Whether he believed what he said, I do not know. If he did, he is ignorant of things which it is hi« duty to know. If he did not be lieve what he said, he was guilty of the abominable crime of luring mankind to its extinction by promoting groundless hopes. Consider the question of American bases in Britain. Who knows that within each of them there is a hard ker nel consisting of the airmen who >can respond to an alert and are so highly trained that they can be in the air within a minute or two? This kernel is kept entirely isolated from the rest of the camp, which is not admitted to it. It has its own mess, dormitories, libraries, cine mas, etc., and there are armed guards to prevent other Am ericans in the base camp from having access to it. Every month or two, every body in it, including the Commander, is flown back to America and replaced by a new group. The men in this inner kernel are allowed al most no contact with the other Americans in the base camp and no contact what ever with any of the inhabit ants of the neighbourhood. It seems clear that the whole purpose is to keep the British ignorant and to pre serve, among the personnel of the kernel, that purely mechanical response to orders and propaganda for which the whole of their training is designed. Moreover, or ders to this group do not come from the commandant, but direct from Washington. To suppose that a crisis the British government can have any control over the orders sent from Washington is'pure fantasy. It is obvious that at any moment orders might be sent from Washington which would lead to reprisals by the Soviet forces and to the extermination of the popula tion of Britain within an hour. The situation of these ker 60 Panorama nel camps seems analogous to that of the Polaris sub marines. It will be remem bered that the Prime Minis ter said that there would be consultation between the US arid the UK government be fore a Polaris missile is fired, and that the truth of his statement was denied by the US government.’ All this, however, is unknown to the non-political public. To make known the facts which show that the life of every inhabitant of Britain, old and young, man, woman and child, is at every moment in imminent danger and that this danger is caused by what is mis-named defence and immensely aggravated b y every measure which govern ments pretend will diminish it — to make this known has seemed to some of us an im perative duty which we must pursue with whatever means are at our command. The Campaign for Nuclear Disar mament has done and is do ing valuable and very success ful work in this direction, but the press is becoming used to its doings and begin ning to doubt their news value. It has therefore seemed to some of us neces sary to supplement its cam paign by such actions as the press is sure to report. There is another, and per haps even more important reason, for the practice of civil disobedience in this time of utmost peril. There is a very widespread feeling that the individual is im potent against governments, and that, however bad their policies may be, there is no thing effective that private people can do about it. This is a complete mistake. If all those who disapprove of gov ernment policy were to join in massive demonstrations of civil disobedience, they could render governmental folly im possible and compel the socalled statesmen to acquiesce in measures that would make human survival possible. Such a vast movement, in spired by outraged public opi nion, is possible; perhaps it is possible; perhaps it is im minent. If you join it, you will be doing something im portant to preserve your fa mily, friends, compatriots, and the world. An extraordinarily interest ing case which illustrates the power of the Establishment, December 1962 61 at any rate in America, is that of Claude Eatherly, who dropped the bomb on Hiro shima. His case also illus trates that in the modern world it often happens that only by breaking the law can a man escape from commit ting atrocious crimes. He was not told what the bomb would do and was utterly horrified when he discovered the consequences of his act. He has devoted himself throughout many years to va rious kinds of civil disobe dience with a view to calling attention to the atrocity of nuclear weapons and to ex piating the sense of guilt which, if he did not act, would weigh him down. The Authorities have decided that he is to be considered mad, and a board of remarkably conformist psychiatrists have endorsed that official view. Eatherly is. repentant and cer tified; Truman is unrepen tant and uncertified. I have seen a number of Eatherly’s statements explaining his mo tives. These statements are entirely sane. But such is the power of mendacious publi city that almost everyone, in cluding myself, believed that h^had become a lunatic. In our topsy-turvy world those who have power of life and death over the whole hu man species are able to per suade almost the whole po pulation of the countries which nominally enjoy free dom of the press and of pub licity that any man who con siders the preservation of hu man life a thing of value must be mad. I shall not be sur prised if my last years are spent in a lunatic asylum — where I shall enjoy the com pany of all who are capable of feelings of humanity —The New Statesman, London, February 17, 1961. Bertrand Arthur Russell, the 3rd Earl Russell, philosopher, mathematician, 1950 winner of the Novel Prize for Literature. First published in 1896. Iconoclast, passionate sceptic, centre of controversy, he now concludes: ‘love is wise, hatred is foolish’. 62 Panorama g A British psychologist explains how easily w*e can be deceived by what is apparent to our eytes. HOW THE EYES DECEIVE' Richard Gregory Our brains receive infor mation from our sense organs in the form of electrical pulse, but how they use this infor mation to give us knowledge of the world around us is al most entirely mysterious. In our efforts to find out how the brain works, we can at present only snatch at straws. Optical illusions are obvious straws, and they have been seized upon ever since psycho logy began. For by studying the conditions under which our senses mislead us we may come to understand how our perceptual system works. It is useful-to separate il lusions into two basic classes. In the first kind, the perceptaul system is disturbed in some way so that it cannot function properly, and we ex perience distortions, or even complete hallucinations; while in the second kind the perceptual system is normal but it is presented with a problem it cannot solve cor rectly. Both these kinds of illusions are interesting, and they can be important in caus ing errors and accidents. The first kind may be caused by drugs, brain da mage, prolonged stimuli, or fatigue. The second kind af fects us all, when we look at certain objects or particular patterns drawn on paper. These are the common opti cal illusions. They have been studied for a hundred years, but we are only just begin ning to understand them. They may take many forms: repeated patterns of parallel lines; concentric circles, or multiple rays which can all produce weird shimmering ef fects, general mental disturb ance, and even nausea. But there are so many sim ple patterns which produce distortions of visual space things look the wrong size or shape. Many theories have December 1962 63 been proposed to account for these effects, but all of them are in my view unsatisfactory. Two famous examples of optical illusions are reproduc ed -here. They are extreme ly simple figures and the il lusions, are compeling. The left-hand picture is Itnown as the Pdnzo figure, and consists of just four straight lines. Two lines converse slightly to wards the top of the page, and look like railway lines receding into the distance. The other two lines are hori zontal and shorter, and one is above the other. They lie be tween the two ‘railway lines’ like a couple of sleepers, but not touching. They are ex actly the same length, but the illusion is that the upper ‘sleeper’ looks longer than the lower. The other illusion is called the Muller-Lyer figure, and it consists of two arrows, with shafts of equal length. The first has ordinary arrow heads at each end. The se cond, which may be drawn parallel to the first, has ar row heads at each end point ing inwards; the fins stretch outwards, extending beyond the ends of the shaft. If you now compare these arrow fig ures, you will see that the one with the fins extending be yond the ends of the shaft looks longer than the one with normal arrow heads. Evidently there is something special about ingoing and out going arrow heads, and about non-parallel lines, which can distort visual space and make things look the wrong size. Why should this be? If you look at the two fig ures you may notice some thing rather important. The first one, the Ponzo figure, has two lines like railway lines. In the real 3-D world, they would actually be reced ing into the distance. And the Muller-Lyer figures are drawings of ingoing and out going corners. If you look at the corner of your room you will see that the line the walls make with the ceiling and floor form the same pattern as the outward-going MullerLyer arrow. The flat image 64 Panorama on the retinas of your eyes of the 3-D corner of your roojn is just like this figure, except indeed that the angle the fins make with the shaft of the arrow is more acute for a fig ure which gives the maximum illusion. Similarly, the in going fins of the other ar row form the same pattern as the corner of a box which is pointing towards you. In fact a common property of all op tical illusions is that they have features which we gen erally associate with depth. An important fact about perception is that if you look at objects which are the same size, but placed at differer.t distances from you, they will appear to you to be very nearly the same size, although the further ones form much smaller images on the retinas of your eyes. This effect is called size constancy. The images on the retinas of your eyes grow larger and larger as you approach an object, but in spite of this the object as you see it will keep almost the same side. It is true that very distant objects look smaller than near objects, but size constancy works over a wide range of distance. There is a simple and dra matic experiment you can do to show your own constancy scaling at work: all you need is an unshaded light bulb. Look at the bulb for several seconds and then look at the furthest wall of your room. You will see a ghostly light hovering on the wall. It has the shape of the bulb fila ment. This is an after-image of the lamp impressed like a photograph on your retina, and it will fade within half a minute. You will find that if you project your after image on to a nearer wall it will look smaller. Although it now looks a different size, the effective retina image must remain the same. The perceived size depends on the distance at which the after image seems to lie in space. The effect is essentially the same as the ‘harvest mdon’ illusion. When the moon is low on the horizon, it looks larger than when it rides high in jhe sky. The actual size of the moon is the same, but when it seems to be further away—behind the horizon—it looks larger, just as the ap parently more distant after image looks larger. If your brain is to correct the size of images, to allow for 'distance, it must be able to deduce how far away things December 1962 65 are. We know that it uses many different sources of in formation. The most import ant are the differences, be tween the views of the two eyes, the angle of convergence of the eyes, and a host of per ceptual features which are as sociated with distance and which can be picket up by a single eye. These single-eye features of distance are used by painters to indicate depth; they are such things as changes in apparent texture, and convergence of lines by perspective. They are essen tial for objects further than about twenty feet: we are ef fectively one-eyed for distant objects. Psychologists have found that size constancy for one-eyed vision becomes more and more perfect as the rich ness of these one-eyed feat ures is increased, while con stancy can be entirely absent for dim patches of light view ed in darkness. As you add depth information, constancy increases, but the increase is not precisely related to the accuracy of judging the dis tance of objects. This is inv portant, for it gives us a clue as to how the perceptual, sys tem is organized: it indicates that constahcy scaling is not mediated directly by appar ent distance. Disagreement Which Leads To Illusions Perception itself cannot be understood without thinking in tefrms of a number of pa rallel systems, each one prov iding information which may or may not agree with the output of the other systems. Disagreement can lead to il lusions, and especially dis agreement over the appro priate amount of constancy scaling to adopt for a given distance. Disagreement can also give us perceptual para doxes. Consider any drawing or painting of photograph. The objects depicted seem to lie at different distances, and yet at the same time you can see that they lie on the plane of the paper. They are seen in depth and yet at the same time as flat. Real objects cannot lie both in two and three dimensions at the same time, yet this is how they ap pear in a photograph or draw ing. It seems that we can have a perceptual paradox when the parallel systems, provide incompatible infor mation to the brain, and in 66 panorama the case of drawings or pho tographs we have perspective information indicating that the objects represented are lying in depth, while at the same time the texture of the paper tells us that they are lying in one plane. But to return to the illu sions. We have seen that there is a mechanism—con stancy scaling—which could produce distortion of visual space if it were misplaced, and that all the known il lusions have features which commonly indicate depth by perspective. It is also clear in every case that the illusions go the right way: those parts of the figures which would normally be further away in 3-D space appear too large in the illusion figures. Any information about the brain could be useful, and generally has a fascination in its own right. Illusions can be serious in flying or driv ing, and they affect the: ap pearance of buildings and clothes, and should be taken into account by architects and artists. The fact that real istic depth is easly obtained from flat, luminous figures viewed in the dark suggests a new art form: in the near future we may walk round picture galleries in the dark, viewing luminous pictures wth one eye! More seriously, it is a real question as to whether our earth-bound perceptual sys tem will work efficiently in space. In outer space there i$ none of the texture in formation which we associate with distance on earth, and so the conditions will be si milar to our self-luminous figures viewed in darkness. Under tfiese conditions., near and distant objects are read ily confused: and we have found that when you move round these self-luminous ob jects they can appear to fol low you. This could be most disconcerting if you were as sembling the parts of a sa tellite in space or on the moon. — The Listener. Traffic is the lifestream of the twentieth century. It is the sign of success and prospertiy. After all, what is a- pedestrian? He is a man with two cars: ope driven by his wife, the other by his children. December 1962 67 ■ We should remember sometime* our collective debt to those who give as wfell as get and put ne cessities and luxury within our reach. ANONYMOUS ARTISANS OF HISTORY History is a fable agreed upon. At best, it is only a part-told tale. The conquer ors tell their own story. The stagehands never get the spot light. The janitor and the night-watchman remain in darkness. The dustman and the doctor are both import ant to our health, but who ever remembers the former unless to complain? The names of the kings and Cau dillos monopolize attention. When they dig up the fu neral bark of Pharaoh, they never ask, who (built it? Who first flaked a flint to a cut ting edge? Who first made fire and tamed it for man’s use? Who pulled on the ropes to make the Stonehenge pillars stand erect? Who car ried the stones for the Pyra mids? Who built the Chi nese Wall? Who cleans the windows in the United Na tions building? When Jerusalem fell, who wielded the hammer and trowel to raise its walls again? Who actually watered the Hanging Gardens qf Babylon? Were there no cooks and foot soldiers and ditchdiggers and roadmakers in the conquer ing armies of the Caesars? Who fed and hostlered the horses of Alexander as he ad vanced to overwhelm the then known world? Who taught Shakespeare the alphabet? Who thinks of the unknown heroes who created the alpha bet itself and gave signs to sounds and made possible the memory of mankind in our libraries? Who recalls the names of the bat-boy and the groundsmen, who will not get a line in the record book full of the home-run heroes and the pitchers’ performances? The- Presidents we know; the peasants are anonymous. In our fables of history the warriors who burned the wheatfield get their meed of praise, but the sowfer and the reaper who labored there are forgotten men. The captain who destroyed the city wears panorama ais laurels, but the identity of die stonemason who built it is an anonymous grain upon the sands of time. Behind the ancient civilization of China were the little people who kept the ditches deep. The great armadas had their ca bin boys. Columbus did not sail alone. The cathedrals, spiring upwards, express the loving care and pride of un told craftsmen. Farmers, in New England, as well as the oft-named fa mous Founding Fathers, had their share in the Revolution —and their disappointments, too, if the too-often ignored Shay’s Rebellion is recalled. The colonels strut in their brigthly decorated uniforms, but it is the campesinos who feed them. The engine driv er and the ship's crew never get publicly, but without them the kings and captains, the statemen and the much decorated chiefs would not depart. The plane must crash before the pilot and the ste wardess get their names listed in the press report. The pre dawn milk delivery man, the letter-carrier, and salesman ply their indispensable roles. They are the cogs without which our community life would grind to a halt. It was the worker’s bones which bleached upon the prairies and the mountains before the golden spike was driven to unite the Atlantic and the Pacific with bonds of iron rails. The bloody in fantry in war and peace sweat out the blood and tears. The miner in the darkness, the man at the loom, and the girl on the assembly line are "newsworthy” only when they strike. The janitor in the basement of the tall sky scraper, the cook and dish washer in back of the banquet hall, the man at the Switch, and the girl at the phone ex change play their role with out the limelight’s glare. The prima donna’s costume gets the plaudits; the seam stress who made it is ignored. Those who wired the syncro ton and patiently worked out the computations to wrest th’e atom’s secrets are anonymous. Thousands of unnoticed workers faced unknown dan gers in pioneer atomic-energy plants. The well-dressed guests at the opening ceremony sel dom spare a thought to the workers’ hands that poured December 1962 69 the steel,. rolled the girders, and riveted them to reach for the sky. The building crafts men are too many to list upon the dedication plate. Behind the radio’s rolling»eloquenc^, the pancaked television ora tor, and the publicity release stand the stenographer, the pencil cutter, the mimeo man. Who would hear then; wisdom without the electri cian and tbe man at the con trols? The mod°st typo sets it up on the page just as part of the day’s work. The liter ary genius coukl not make his ideas available but for the chores of the bookbinder. The locomotive engineer and the bus-driver do their job to get us where we want to go—all unknown soldiers unless accident and death break the journey. Who ever thinks of the man in the front cab of the subway train un less a sudden jerk reminds us that he is human too. Someone washed the dia pers, sewed the coat, rolled the cigar and cut the hair of the allegedly self-made ty coon. Can we spell out in detail the unpayable debt we owe to those who giMe as well as get and put necessities and luxury within our reach? At least we should remember sometimes our collective debt to those who work in obscur ity. The slave, fellaheen, far mer,, serf, peasant, laborer, crafstman, and mechanic are almost as forgotten as ,the, men .who captured the first fire spark, made the first lever and the wheel.—Mark Starr, in The Saturday Re view. THE LAST STRAW In the Bowery’s most notorious bistro, a bouncer threw a drink-cadger out on his ear four times run ning, but the undaunted victim came staggering back for more. An enthralled bystander finally tap ped the bouncer on the sshoulder. "You’re putting too much backspin on him!" he observed. 70 PANORAMA | Hitherto unpublished, this remarkable document gives us an insight into the early beginnings of Fil ipino journalism from one who was a newspaper man in his youth. F1LIPIP1NO JOURNALISM OF YESTERYEAR I was a newspaperman dur ing my law-student days, from 1909 to 1914. I began work ing as a cub reporter of El Ideal, the organ of Nacionalista Party. That was my first opportunity to come‘in con tact with the Nacionalistas, who, since then, have been, with brief interludes, wallow ing in power. From there I transfered to La Van guar di a, the worthy successor of El Renacimiento. I quit active jour nalism in 1914 when I finish ed law and for the first time entered the government serv ice as secretary to Don Vicen te Ilustre, who was a member of the Philippine Commission in the Harrison Administra tion. Then I became a law clerk of the first Philippine Senate in 1916, and from 1919 to the present successively congressman and senator, without any interruption save for my brief stay,in the Sup reme Court and the three years of Japanese occupation, maintaining contact through out with newspapermen through personal association and periodic contributions to dailies and magazines. This forms the basis of my hum ble knowledge of the evolu tion of Filipino journalism from the early days of the American occupation to this day. I shall touch first on the kind of public relations the two foremost political leaders of our country, Quezon and Osmena, maintained for a pe riod spanning almost half a century. My closenesk-to-the press, which briaghrme also close to these top public fig ures, and my having been my self an actor on the political stage, have given me unusual opportunities for studying and observing not only the character of Filipino journal 71 ism but also the relationship between them during that pe riod, the most eventful, I be lieve, in the life of the nation. It is a trite saying that all men in public life are keenly aware of the importance of public opinion. There is no exception to this rule, only differences in degrees of sens itiveness, which is a matter of temperament. Lincoln him self, who had a hostile press, said that in a democracy "public sentiment is every thing,” and "consequently, he who moulds public sentiment goes deeper than he who en acts statutes or pronounces decisions.” President Quezon had a good press when he was Re sident Commissioner in Washington before the ap proval of the Jones Act, and during the Commonwealth, there being in his last-men tioned era no opposition part ies worthy of the name, and when even the mouthpiece of the American community was the majority floor-leader in the first Philippine Assembly and during his years as Senate President from the middle of 1916 to late 1935. This was due to the fact that oppos ition organs (La Democracia for the Federates and their sucessor the Progresistas, and later Consolidation National for the Democratas) joined hands with the American pa pers to make war on him. Quezon’s impulsiveness and self-assurance bordering at times on cockiness, made him the favorite target of their at tacks. Few remember now the unfortunate incident he had with Don Hugo Salazar, a venerable defenseless old man, then editor of La Democracia, whofti Quezon, accom panied by bodyguards, per sonally assaulted in the very premises of that paper. For such unbecoming behavior he was publicly condemned and Quezon himself, after years and sickness had mellowed his character, spoke about it with genuine regret, in intimate conversations. On another occasion, while president of the Senate, he met, some time in 1922, reporter Benito Sakdalan in a corrider of the old Ayuntamiento and threaten ed to throw the pint-sized re porter out the window be cause of some news item ab out him by-lined by Sakdalan in one of the lodal dailies. His conduct met again with public censure. On still an 72 PANORAMA other occasion, Federico Ca lero, writer and realtor, wrote in Liber las, the organ of the Dominican Fathers, some thing that displeased Quezon very deeply. Quezon gave another display of bad temper on the floor of the Senate by literally tearing to pieces that particular issue of Liberias and trampling it under foot to the consternation of the gallery ^nd his fellow sen ators. American papers — Cable news American, Manila Daily Bulletin, and Manila Times — not only were- after his scalp but were harassing the national campaign for inde pendence, so Quezon thought of publishing his own paper. The Philippines Herald came, with Vicente Madrigal, Ra-' mon Fernandez, and the Earn shaw brothers as financial backers. But as happens with political organs, this one led a languishing life, in s’pite of having, had for editors, one after another, such distin guished writers as Conrado Benitez and Arsenio Luz. Quezon’s public relations went from bad to worse wherf the Roces publications came to the scene. It was hot long after The Tribune appeared that this paper turned its guns on the Senate President. Quezon took up the Roces paper’s challenge, and one day, seething with indigna tion, he took the floor of the Senate in his usual spectacu lar fashion to castigate the said papers and their publish er, Don Alejandro Roces. Quezon’s friends approached the advertisers of The Tri bune, who were mostly Am ericans, to secure the with drawal of their patronage. But the paper’s circulation was increasing daily by leaps and bounds, and the ad vertisers preferred to ignore Quezon’s request. Failing m this, and realizing the error of his tactics, he enticed Carlos P. Romulo, who was the editor of The Tribune and the writer of the Rocesdictated and rabidly anti-Quezon editorials, to transfer to the Philippines Herald under terms and conditions which Romulo found acceptable. This scheme did not work either, but Quezon, ever the smart and practical politi cian, found a way to ingra tiate himself with the power ful Don Alejandro, the sole proprietor of the Roces pa pers. “The Kaiser,” as Don December 1962 73 Alejandro was intimately known, was fond of fishing so Quezon made it a point to have him as a regular guest on the presidential yacht “Castana", the counterpart’of President Garcia’s “Santa Maria” and The Tribune gradually turned out, for all practical purposes, to be the personal organ of Manuel L. Quezon and supporter of his policies. Don Sergio Osmena did not have a bad press; I datesay it was even good "because he so managed to wrap him self in a cloud of enigmatic respectability that, aside from La Democracia, and later, Consiladacion N a c i o n a I, whose fiery editor was Gre gorio Perfecto, and Vicente Sotto’s The Independent, which went a little too far in its personal attacks on the Cebuano statesman,—the rest of the local dailies, Filipino and American, looked up to Don Sergio in awe and rever ence arftl on the slightest pro vocation would shower him with praises. Don Sergio was unlike Quezon in public relations. While Quezon enjoyed a live ly interchange of blows, whether on the Senate floor 74 or in any other forum, Dori Sergio would prefer to sit stoically* and take everything you could throw at him. No other Filipino in public life would have taken or would take the beatings that Don Sergio took. the way he did, from his political' and person al enemies and the opposition press. On this score he wan no different from Washing ton and Lincoln. Ail he did was to let his attackers wear themselves down through sheer exhaustion. It was, I believe, the oriental trait in him; like the Arab of the story, he would sit calmly in his tent, and watch day by day for the funeral cortegesof his enemies to pass by. Vicente Sotto, Gregorio Perfecto, Don Juan Sumulong, Dominador Gomez ancf even Manuel Quezon, whose term of office as President of the Philippines was . illegally extended by the American Congress in 1942, to the de triment of Don Sergio’s per sonal and constitutional rights to the Presidency, and Manuel Roxas, who defeat ed him in the 1946 Presiden tial elections, are no more. They have all crossed the Great Divide. But Don Ser Panorama gio is still with us {He died in August, 1961— Ed.) seated happily on soft cushions in his tent, smoking his narghile so to speak (Don Sergio does not smoke), and on occasion gracing with his venerable presence the meetings of the Council of State, and distrib uting juicy patronage among those of his choice, as he used to do in his good old days when he was the fair-haired boy of the American Governors-General. Don ''Sergio Osmena was not insensitive to the attitude of the press towards him. No thing of the sort. From the start of his national political career, that is, since he was chosen Speaker of the first Philippine Assembly in 1907, and became ipso facto, ac cording to the phrase he him self coined, “the leader of the Filipino participation in the Government”, he gave evidence that he was not un aware of the importance of the press in the shaping of public opinion, and, conse quently, in the success of gov ernment policies and of the men behind them. In effect, shortly after he assumed that high office, he established his own paper, El Ideal, which performed the double func tion of mouthpiece for the Nacionalista Party and de fender of the Forbes Admi nistration with which the Nar cionalista Party was complete ly identified. Governor For bes allowed Don Sergio to ex ercise the privilege of patron age and to deliver innocuous radical speeches demanding i m-m e d iate , independence, and, in turn, Don Sergio sup ported Forbes’ policies to the extent of causing the enact ment of a law legalizing For bes’ order to deport without due process undesirable Chi nese. El Ideal folded up after several years, but Don Sergio continued to be the favorite of the American and the Ro ces papers, particularly on those occasions when interne cine fights for ' party leader ship in the Nacionalista Party pitted him against Quezon, as in the historic quarrel be tween the two leaders in 1^22, ostensibly on whether leader ship should be Collective or Unipersonal,—this was the cause of the split of Qie Na cionalista into "Colectivistas” and “Unipersonalistas” — but actually a fight for personal supremacy; and again in 75 1934, on whether the HareHawes-Cutting Act should be accepted or rejected, which split the Nacionalistas a second time into Antis (Quezonistas) and Pros (Osmenistas). Even during his brief term in the presidency, when his administration was charged with inaction and grave irregularities in the dis position and distribution of UNRRA goods, the press showed a benign attitude to wards him. As for Roxas, Quirino, and Magsaysay, their cases belong to contemporary history. I cannot pretend to know more than you (newspaperman) do about their relations with the press. But this much I will say in the case of Magsaysay. His press relations in life and after his death, inAys coun try and ahrMa^L nave been the best in our history, even since his incumbency as Quirino’s Secretary of National Defense when he conducted a costly campaign for “peace amelioration.” How he man aged to do it is a secret he carded with him to his grave. And yet he was the one great figure in Philippine politics who most feared press and radio attacks to the point of panic. He went to extreme lengths in appeasing and be friending the proper parties to insure* himself against said attacks. Even the Catonian Free Press could not find fault with him. As for the newspaper publishers, they were all for him: they were made to feel they were his consultants and advisors. A word more, and this is about Filipino journalism of my time. Those were the years when the editorial poli cies of the newspapers were still those of the people who wrote them and nobody else’s. Of course, fly-by-night papers and political organs, like La Democracia, El Ideal and Consolidation National, with fixed partisan policies to pursue and defend should be excluded. There remained only the truly independent papers: the legendary El Renacimiento and its sister pub lication Muling Pagsilang, which the courts padlocked as a result of a libel suit UtougUt by a prominent Americanofficial, leaving La Vanguardia and Taliba, which wtre founded, edited and written by the same staff of El Renacimiento and Muling Pag silang. The publisher of 76 PANORAMA these papers was Don Mar tin Ocampo, a great self-sacrir ficing patriot, who not only avoided interfering with the way Fernando Guerrero, or Teodoro Kalaw, or Fidel Re yes, or Pedro Aunario, or Lo pe K. Santos, or Fautino Aguilar, or Carlos Ronquillo, formulated and implemented the editorial policies of the two papery, but was himself in accord with those editofdi As a matter of fact El Renacimiento and Muling Pagsilang and their worthy successors La Vanguardia and Taliba, were the opposition press par excellence at the time, be cause, in contrast with party organs La Democracia and Consolidation National, they fiscalized not the party in power but the American co lonial regin^j Our campaign fo/r indepedence would. not have met with success* with out the support of those Jierculean pillars of the national sentiment: El Renacimiento and Muling Pagsilang, and La Vanguardia arid Taliba; and later El Debate of Ra mon Torres and Franciscp Varona, and La Opinion of Don Ramon Fernandez. There was also Los Obreros, founded and edited around the years 1907-1909 by Jose Ernesto del Rosario, and de voted to the cause of' labor and national independence; it was also a short-lived "periodico de periodistas”^ Few of us realize the enormous contribution they gave to the national cause. Of them it could be repeated with Chur chill: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” By* the middle of the last 20’s press empires began to appear: first, the Roces em pire, then the Madrigal em pire—the Philippine ' Herald appeared ahead of Tne Tri bune, but although risiiliOnaires Madrigal, the Earnshaw brothers and Ramon Fernan dez, all Quezon’s personal friends, were the ones who, with Quezon as the moving spirit, founded that paper, the same began and remained for some time a humble af fair. The romantic era of the '‘newspapermen’s newspaper,” began at the dawn of the cen tury with El Renamitiento and Muling Pagsilang, and af ter their glorious death, con tinued with La Vanguardia and Taliba. That era was in terrupted when La VanguarDecember 1962 77 dia was acquired by Don Ale jandro Roces. After a brief interval the era was revived in its full glory by El Deba te of Torres and Varona, later reinforced by Don Ramon Fernandez, La Opinion, but it ended definitely when El De bate passed into the hands of Don Vicente Madrigal who completed his own press em pire with the formation of the DMHM (Debate, Mabuhay, Herald, Monday Mail) Syndicate, and La Opinion’s publication was suspended. When Ernesto del Rosario, I. P. Soliongco, and Associates founded the Manila Chroni cle it was thought for a while that there would be a revival of the “periodico de periodist as "era; but it was just a flick er of hope, because soon the paper came to be owned by the founders Of a new press empire: the Lopez brothers. A fourth empire, that of Hans Menzi, came recently into be ing when he purchased from Carson Taylor the Manila Daily Bulletin. Thus ended without hopes for a revival in any foreseable future the era of the “news papermen's newspaper”. In this community of press em pires, whatever policies are to be defended or attacked edi torially, what news are to be suppressed or released are the exclusive concern and privil ege of the proprietors; only the columnists can give vent and expression to their own personal thoughts and ideas in their respective corners. Thanks to them, a great tra dition in journalism is still being preserved. In. those old days' the advertised, on mat ter how powerful he was, could not be heard in protest against what should or should not appear in the paper;, editors then would have pre ferred to cancel a profitable advertising contract rather than withold publication of an article or information af fected with public interest. I do not mean to imply that things are now quite the con trary, but I know from per sonal . observation that sup pression of news and with holding of editorial criticisms of top public officials and powerful organizations are becoming a not uncommon practice. During the first decade of the century, freedom of the press was only true in the sense that there was no pre vious censorship, and the li J78 PANORAMA bel laws were so strictly en forced by the courts, that to criticize a high government official, for instance, a mem ber of the cabinet, meant a stiff prison term and a size able fine not to memion crip pling civil damages.™ Teodoro Kalaw was sentenced to 12 months imprisonment and F3,000.00 fine, and business manager Don Martin Ocam po to six months and P2.000.00, for the publication of the editorial “Aves de Rapina” in El Renacimiento written by Fidel A. Reyes, upon com plaint of Secretary^of the In terior Worcester. The lat ter was not mentioned in the wdtle, either by name, or by the title, of his office, but was allowed to prove, by tes timonial evidence, that it was he who was alluded to in the words “vampire”, “vulture”, and “owl”, used in the alleg edly offensive articlelJl Wor cester also succeeded in ob taining judgement from the Supreme Court against such persons as Galo Lichauco, Angel Jose, Mariano Cansipit, Felipe Barretto, and Manuel Palma, who for pure ly patriotic motives contribut ed some funds to the founda tion of the newspaper, for the payment of P25,000.00 as in demnity. Even the names El Renacimiento and Muling Pagsilang went under the hammer and were awarded to Worcesterf4 No prosecutor would file such information with our courts today; nor would a court hand down a verdict of conviction in a si milar case. If we contrast Worcester’s sullen and vindictive attitude' with the humility and for bearance of two of the great est American Presidents, Was hington and Lincoln, parti cularly of the first, in the face of scurrilous attacks of opposition press and writers, without resorting to court for redress of their grievances» and without even attempting to defend themselves in- pub lic, it is difficult to jus" tification either for the mor bid sensitiveness of Secretary Worcester or the severity of the courts at the time; Yet in those days whe>n the colonial regime was a cl\ude affair in the Philippines, I^cKinley’s famous instructions notwithstanding, there was a' firqrj determination on the part of the Filipino newspa permen, such as has not been seen thereafter, to speak their December 1962 79 minds courageously against the illegitimacy of the regime and the behavior of its high est officals. Long imprison ment' and heavy fines did not deter the forward march of their noble crusade. Freedom of the press is pow complete and absolute. The libel law has not been deleted from the statute books, but the day re mains to be seen wheft the editor of a newspaper is sent to prison or made to pay crip pling judgements for damag es, for castigating a high pub lic official for malfeasance or misfeasance in the discharge of his duties. Yet despite this safeguard, the privilege is “arely exercised, if at all. I ha ve not *een so much bene volence or tolerance on the part of. the press towards top public officials in the face of so much/ incompetence and malfeasance. Editorial free dom tfj criticize condemnable policies and practices of the gov-ernment or of powerful organizations, has fallen' into Misuse in sjoite of constitution al quaranties. At the'most it is aired once a year at grid iron dinners, when it becomes license. Let us build up a dedicated Filipino press, inspired and directed, in the. words of poet J. G. Holland, by Strong minds, great hearts, true faith, and w^Sing hands; Men whom the lust of office does not kill; Men whom the spoils of of. fice cannot buyfr Men who possess opinions and a will; Men who have honor; mien who will not lie. Men who can stand before a demagogue And damn his treacherous flatteries without winking: Tall men, sun-crowned, who live above the fog In public duty and in private thinking! “Every nation or group of nations has its own tale to tell”. Whether the Filipino nation, one century hence, shall tell a story of constant frustrations and defeat, or of great and noble achieve-, ments, will depend in a very large measure on how Fihp?‘ no journalism conducts itseif in the years to come.—(From a speech on September 30, 1958.) 80 PANORAMA I Mentions All orge < '■ ' Hdp gour club; •L Joir* the Panorama /‘Fund-Raising by Subscriptions” 7" / . \plan today! The Panorama Fumjd-Raising by Subscriptions plan i will get you, your frieyds, and your relatives a year’s sub! scriptkm to Panorama/ | * The Panorama jg easy to sell. It practically sells itself, r' / nich means more-money for your organization. The terms o'i the Panorama Fund-Raising by Sub scriptions pi .an are as follows: G) Amy accredited organization in the Philippines can ake advantage of the Plan. *- (2) The organization will use its facilities to sell sub script10115 to Panorama. t (3) For every subscription sold the organization will get Pl.00. The more subscriptions the organization sells, the more money it gets. Kizol and Our Oscar Filipinr Journalism of Yesteryear Claro M. Recto........... Lost I dentil Valeqzueli Liter, The Need for The Great Double Fallacy Emery Reves a.. | Keeping a World Intact George F. Kennt \ LawA Way in Which to Save Adlai Stevenson •. Soviet Law and Capital Pr I - \ America's Spies: The Casebo. Civil Disobedience Bertrand Russell ...... 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