Nah. That was just me trying to inject my thoughts into President Laurel’s brain. Maybe when he said ‘aristocracy’ that’s exactly what he meant.

On the SuperFerry bombing, I don’t think there was an outcry because the Arroyo government did not reveal that it was a terrorist attack until several months after the event. Definitely assistance should have been provided to the victims.

On the same topic, was there any outcry from anyone to at minimum provide financial aid to the immediate family of those who perished from the SuperFerry14 terrorist attack? I do recall that there was assistance provided to the immediately family of those who perished from the Wowowee stampede.

But then again, Major General Mohamad Benjamin Dolorfino himself is wrong. The P50,000-per should NOT be for the enemy, but for for the innocent civilian who is killed. But this will require changes in the curriculum at Baguio-PMA since P50,000 per civilian “..killed in crossfire” is cheaper than P500,000-per-day stipulation in the Anti-Terror Bill.

“My order to my soldiers is that, if they are certain that there are armed rebels in the house or yard, shoot them. It will just be too bad if civilians are killed in the process. We are sorry if you are killed in the crossfire.”

“Sorry na lang kung may madamay na civilian. The deaths of civilians and local officials were ‘small sacrifices’ brought about by the military’s anti-insurgency campaign.”

I see it more as a tension between direct democracy and representative democracy…As a libertarian, I’d much prefer direct democracy, but…I see representative democracy as a necessary evil – Jeg

Your line of thinking is more or less what the United States’ founding fathers went through. Since the earliest model of democracy from Greece was of the direct variety, they felt the need to innovate and come up with the representative variant that would scale up to suit the needs of the then 13 colonies turned states. (Also, a number of the Founding Fathers, like James Madison feared the consequences of direct democracy.) Since then, the representative model of democracy has proven successful to the extent that people equate representative democracy with democracy itself, and are unaware that there is such a thing as direct democracy.

What president Laurel was afraid of I gather is not genuine direct democracy, but a fake representative democracy run by an amoral and unintellectual aristocracy–what we have now.

You think so? But how does that fit in with Laurel’s statement that “The people cannot be governors and governed at the same time.” Sounds to me that he was trying to set apart the common people from those who govern, i.e. the moral and intellectual aristocracy . I also suspect that ‘amorality’ was *not* his focus since this was not yet a problem in 1943 when the Third Republic under the Japanese was inaugurated. The widespread moral degradation was yet to come the at tail-end of the Japanese occupation.

A moral and intellectual aristocracy is needed to thwart them, which is why I think the challenges Abe Margallo outlined are worth meeting, else we’re stuck with the aristocracy we have now.

It would be good if we can do that, but we should not stop there. I think that the concept of a representative democracy is reaching its limits. We should develop the elements of direct democracy which will help us get closer to the democratic ideal of the rule of all by all. For a start, this means direct engagement of ordinary citizens in the public sphere as individuals or members of NGO’s. This also means more frequent plebiscites, allowing for mass actions which includes the possibility of People Power. Fortunately, all of these are, to varying extents, compatible with the Filipino psyche.

UPn Student, i think it is understood that the dead that you mention in the Superferry bombings are victims of a terrorist act, and are not collateral damage. Collateral damage are the civilians who are caught in the crossfire of the government’s war. Who is going to be responsible for this group of people?