The force of restraint
Garvey, John
became the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. Here John ran afoul of the House Un-American Activities Committee. He headed a study for the Fund on the blacklisting problem in...
...It did not happen because of the wisdom shown by the Reagan administration, although there was certainly an unexpected and pleasantly surprising series of careful moves there, following Reagan's initial Bitburgian evenhandedness about fraud on both sides...
...ny, ny 10016 rn 28 Mard, 1986:169...
...It is all very strange...
...In his later work for the Center, John headed up a much discussed project on "Religious Institutions in a Free Society" with Father John Courtney Murray, S.J., Rev...
...Roman or Episcopal, he remained a committed Christian, and it was characteristic of that commitment that he was on his way to ordination as an Episcopal priest when he died...
...Utility workers were asked to cut off all electric power to Manila after the rebellion began, but they would not...
...No doubt there were people who came over to the side of the anti-Marcos forces because it became clear to them that Marcos was a loser...
...If he hadn't given the order to murder Aquino, he had at least created a climate in which the order could be given, lied about, and covered up at every level...
...Humanae Vitae, which reaffirmed the traditional ban on birth control, bothered him as an example of papal power gone astray, and at that time he felt obliged to stop writing a syndicated column in the Catholic press...
...The first days of the Aquino administration reveal tensions which will not dissolve easily, if they dissolve at all: Juan Ponce Enrile, her defense minister, was also defense minister under Marcos and came over to her side only when it was clear that he faced arrest...
...This year he is Visiting Professor in the W. Harold and Martha Welch Chair of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame...
...At the Times John had a lot to do with this transformation until a heart attack sent him back to a less stressful post at the Center in California, where he remained until his death...
...What I have come to feel about this is shared, no doubt, by any number of Americans with Philippine connections, as IrishAmericans are concerned with events in Ireland, and Poles with what happens in Poland...
...Things looked bad, but John stood firm...
...He ordered bombing, and the only restraint was on the part of those who did not obey him...
...Others know the same truth pragmatically: the continuing poverty of the masses will make recruits for the Communist New People's Army...
...The Catholic Worker's Peter Maurin had always predicted that John would one day be an editor of the New York Times...
...Corruption and bribery will continue...
...Yeats wrote about the martyrs of the Easter rebellion, "A terrible beauty is born...
...no revolution can be made so easily, so naively...
...The same thing is ' true, I am sure, of all who loved him...
...And although the majority of Filipinos may have backed Mrs...
...The poverty of most Filipinos is a great challenge to a government which, for all the hope it brings, is made up of people who belong to the oligarchy which has held power in,he Philippines for years...
...People who for years were willing to accept a certain amount of corruption began to say no...
...Of several minds: John Garvey I THE FORCE OF RESTRAINT COLLECTIVE COURAGE IN THE PHILIPPINES T HE VICTORY of Corazon Aquino and the departure of Marcos was a wonderful thing, like the Solidarity movement in Poland, Gandhi's nonviolent victory in India, and the resistance of the people of Denmark to Hitler's occupation...
...This gritty reality, with all of its disappointing examples of compromise and human limitation, will be said to prove that the initial hope, the light some of us think we have seen, was false, only a form of emotional fireworks...
...it was too good to be true...
...deeply was the anti-intellectual, heresy-hunting Humani Generis decades earlier, and I remember his telling me that we had not opposed that papal document vigorously enough...
...Eventually the whole thing blew over...
...Old Marcos hands will try to keep their jobs and regain their old influence, and new job-seekers will wave their revolutionary credentials...
...Something else was at work in the fall Commonweal: 168of Marcos...
...1 year to: (~ Name ('~ 9 Address Z City, State Zip 3/2s/s~ (,~ commonweal magazine ~'* 232 madison ave...
...Terrible things could happen, and no doubt will--there will probably be reprisals, there may be assassination attempts, and of course there will be a lot of infighting among the disparate political, religious, and ethnic groups which make up the Philippines...
...Aquino, a substantial minority backed Marcos, for ideological or selfish reasons...
...Aquino's murder was a sort of martyrdom, but the beauty of what happened in the Philippines was a revolution with so little death, so much initial welcoming and compassion, that what follows, if it is not true to what came before and gave it birth, will be thrown into relief as a betrayal of something rare, glorious, and (best of all) humanly possible...
...Nevertheless, something wonderful happened, and nothing can make it less wonderful...
...The ordinary, dull, often corrupt aspect of politics as a daily business will become a more apparent part of the Aquino administration...
...As the scene darkens we will hear a world-weary voice from the right: we told you so...
...What happened came from the Filipino people, and there is a mystery here which we must not pass over too quickly...
...Some members of that small and powerful group are morally enlightened enough to recognize that the poor must receive justice because it is right...
...Many people were shocked when toward the end of his life John left the Roman Catholic for the Episcopal church...
...He headed a study for the Fund on the blacklisting problem in Hollywood and wrote a valuable two-volume report...
...Sure enough, in 1965 John left the Center to become religious news editor of the Times...
...My wife, Regina, is from the Philippines...
...What ought to be explored is whatever it is in a culture that allows people to say no...
...At the worst very little will change for the poor, and Corazon Aquino will become nothing more than a figurehead...
...Still later he directed the Center's study on "The American Character" and also served as founding editor of the Center Magazine...
...I am not really very objective about this...
...The most honest person I ever knew, John was above all honest with himself, and he had long had trouble with Roman theology...
...She has relatives there now...
...To oppose him was the safer option...
...JOHN GARVEY 9 COMMONWEAL 9 r, t3 1 1 issues 9 for $9 9 TRIAL SUBSCRIPTION 9 OFFER Dq r or a full year @ 0 (22 issues) for $28 Send [] 6mos...
...The difficulties of dealing with poverty, with the threat of Communism, with corruption at the local level, all of these things remain...
...Government employees quit the election headquarters and testified that the government was trying to rig the results...
...I know that there are great difficulties ahead for Aquino's administration...
...Poverty will turn a substantial number of people to an alliance with the Communists...
...The dark things which may come, after this moment, are the dark things which happen after any transition from one point of power to another...
...It did not happen because Marcos showed restraint, as some would have it...
...Ten years after his death, very few days go by that I don't miss him...
...John Cogley was a good man, a very good man -- as colleague, as friend, as devoted husband and father...
...The fact that a transition could happen with so little violence is enough wonder, just as the continuing presence.of Solidarity is wonderful...
...There is hope to be found in a few places in this deathly century, and it is our greatest moral obligation to encourage whatever in our culture allows people to act collectively with such courage and compassion...
...I was sorry he felt he had to make the move, but I was not tremendously surprised when I thought it over...
...This was a period when religion and especially Catholic news was moving out of the want-ad section and onto the front page...
...There are great differences in each of these examples, of course, but something similar as well, something which is profoundly hopeful...
...John refused to divulge the names of people to whom he had pledged confidentiality, even under the threat of a prison sentence for contempt of Congress...
...But this could not have been true of those unarmed civilians who surrounded the defecting military men, not knowing at that point whether Marcos's troops would fire...
...The song was written by Regina's sister-in-law's father...
...JAMES O'GARA (James O'Gara retired as editor of Commonweal in April of 1984...
...Despite this personal concern, I can't help believing that something of enduring significance has happened in the Philippines...
...A society can't be built on euphoria...
...The wild joy of the first days of Aquino's victory will not continue, nor should it...
...During the later demonstrations, military people who were ordered to attack those who had turned against Marcos refused to so do...
...But the encyclical which really disturbed him most...
...The wonder lies in their courage, in the willingness, for example, of the seminarians who made a welcome for defecting soldiers to approach them, unarmed, so openly, and in the revolutionary hospitality of those who brought the rebel troops not extra weapons, but food...
...It could be that what came about was a result of weariness, like the weariness felt by Rosa Parks when she got on the bus and refused to move to the back: enough was enough...
...Although he was one of those most responsible, in the end, for Marcos's fall, he was the man under whom Aquino's husband was imprisoned and was a chief architect of martial law...
...One of our local Filipino friends is close to General Ramos, and during the bizarre end of Marcos' s reign we saw a film clip of Imelda Marcos, a woman next to whom Evita Peron seems like a hardheaded realist, singing a song called "Dahil sa Iyo" from a balcony...
...People-- people who were armed to the teeth and who could have been called the enemy-- were told by those they confronted that they were not enemies, but family...
...At best there will be some social reforms which may make life marginally better for the poor...
...What, for example, was the difference between the French, under Nazi occupation, and the Danes...
...Poverty--seen not so much as an evil from which human beings suffer but as something which could lead people to become Communists--and the apparent inevitability of corruption define the limits of the world as seen by the right...
...All of this will give way to a less dramatic series of events...
...The assassination of Benigno Aquino revealed a depth of corruption which had until that point seemed routine and relatively harmless, a slightly wilder, tropical version of Chicago Democratic politics, and then Marcos was revealed not as Daley but Dracula...
...People who had been willing to cooperate passively or actively with this process stopped doing so, and thousands put themselves between armed men and those othor armed men who represented hope--not the hope arms would bring, because the rebel military men were out-gunned, but the hope that comes when enough people refuse allegiance to corrupt power...
...Reinhold Niebuhr, and Rabbi Robert Gordis as consultants...
...HUAC members did not like his conclusions, so they subpoenaed him and demanded that he reveal his sources...
Vol. 113 • March 1986 • No. 6
