Advocating for the revival of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps using the obvious shopworn nonsense that its training has the sole franchise to teach discipline and love of country has a sinister reactionary madness that is best exposed.
And so glad are we that Senator Nancy Binay forcefully says that ROTC training “does not have the sole franchise to teach discipline and love of country.”
With Ms. Binay and other concerned senators expressly objecting to this unswerving reactionary orthodoxy, we are now compelled to dive wide-eyed into the dark side of the ambiguous alibi of ROTC proponent Senator Sherwin Gatchalian, who says that “the goal of ROTC … is to inculcate discipline and good citizenship among the youth.”
Right away there is a need to dispel ambiguity here since Mr. Gatchalian hasn’t had the courtesy to tell us what he exactly means by “discipline” or “good citizenship.”
Does he mean “discipline” in the dictionary sense as either “the practice of making people obey rules or standards of behavior, and punishing them when they do not,” or “the quality of being able to behave and work in a controlled way which involves obeying particular rules or standards?”
Mr. Gatchalian doesn’t say, leading us to hazard a guess he sees “discipline” as altogether something else.
This isn’t nitpicking, by the way.
Legislating the contentious mandatory ROTC issue requires specific and exact definitions of its general terms. Otherwise, we’ll likely end up nowhere.
Still, I am reasonably certain Mr. Gatchalian specifically means to say “military discipline.”
Searching around, I came across a pro-ROTC Facebook page with the following definition of “military discipline.”
“Military discipline is primarily developed by military drill. For that reason young men, upon joining the Armed Forces, are made to undergo recruit training and further trained as they progress in the service to drill into their system. The elements that transform their being into a condition that renders compliance instinctive and ensures the reaction desired.”
“Instinctive compliance” is the telling phrase here.
In fact, the phrase exposes the one sinister subliminal political assumption in rightist circles that largely propels the insistence on reviving mandatory ROTC training as the best mode for “good citizenship.”
Before that, however, it should be clear — for obvious reasons of warfare’s life and death situations — there’s nothing inherently wrong with inculcating “instinctive obedience” among legitimate members of the professional military.
Clarifying that, we’re now about ready to honestly confront the subliminal political assumption, one of several serious objections raised, which ROTC proponents have managed to conveniently sweep under the rug so far.
At any rate, the tipped-off political assumption here concerns the suspicion that reviving the ROTC cements further the rise of one political personality type who in the past six years or so has gathered extra force and chilling pungency: the Filipino right-wing authoritarian.
Such abnormal political personality, as described by recent scholarly studies, is “somebody who is highly submissive to their authority figures, acts aggressively in the name of said authorities, and is conformist in thought and behavior.”
Not only that, but this political personality type also believes that “respecting authority is an important moral virtue that everyone in the community must hold.”
So much so that “they tend to place strict limits on how far the authorities can be criticized, and believe that the critics are troublemakers who don’t know what they are talking about.”
Furthermore, these political personality types “are extremely submissive even to authority figures who are dishonest, corrupt, and inept… They believe that the authorities have the right to make their own decisions, even if that includes breaking the rules that they impose on everyone else.”
As such, the crucial political question about reviving ROTC is this: Can this fledging constitutional democracy, where political and economic corruption is endemic, survive with more and more compliant authoritarian personalities around?
Email: nevqjr@yahoo.com.ph