Some People Need Killing

by Patricia Evangelista

The government, every government, failed often, was complicit often, was by and large incompetent, hypocritical, and out of touch. The democracy I believed in was the nation, a community of millions who saw brutality as an aberration to be condemned as often and as vigorously as necessity demanded.

Rappler was barely four years old when President Duterte was elected. There were very few of us, but we did what we could to report on corruption and abuses of power, along with the war on drugs. President Duterte gave Rappler another name. He called us fake news.

“I’d like to be frank with you,” said the president. “Are they humans? What is your definition of a human being?”

I was born in the year democracy returned to the Philippines. I am here to report its death.

“We Americans like to think we taught the Filipinos democracy,” anchor Bob Simon reported from his New York set. “Well tonight, they are teaching the world.”

In the aftermath of the Edsa Revolution, Thai protesters filled the streets of Bangkok. Another man stood before another tank at Tiananmen Square. The Berlin Wall fell, with Germany thanking the Philippines for showing them the way. Once upon a time, we were heroes.

“In autocratic states and in so-called democratic societies, it has been frequently proven that the state’s patronage of the arts serves to advance the interests of the state and not those of the people.”

Most children believe they are special. Not all of them are born miracles.

Between 1976 and 1981, an estimated 13,000 to 30,000 political dissidents vanished during the military junta led by Jorge Rafael Videla, the dictator of Argentina. Videla was later tried for crimes against humanity.

The Oxford English Dictionary has the following updated definition: “To disappear, transitive: to abduct or arrest (a person), esp. for political reasons, and subsequently to kill or detain as a prisoner, without making his or her fate known.”

I said, with considerable righteous naïveté, that no person deserved abduction and torture, Communist or otherwise. It was a truth I thought was self-evident. I thought the problem was that the public didn’t know, because if it did, it would rise up in the same roiling mass that had protested the atrocities of the 1970s and ’80s. I was wrong, of course. People knew, but by then the disappeared were no longer people.

Journalism, in the end, is an act of faith.

“If Rodrigo Duterte wins,” we wrote, “his dictatorship will not be thrust upon us. It will be one we will have chosen for ourselves. Every progressive step society has made has been diminished by his presence. Duterte’s contempt for human rights, due process, and equal protection is legitimized by the applause at the end of every speech. We write this as a warning. The streets will run red if Rodrigo Duterte keeps his promise. Take him at his word—and know you could be next.”

George Orwell’s contribution to understanding autocrats everywhere is necessary here. The word is doublethink, the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in mind simultaneously while accepting both. It was, Orwell wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the power “to tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them.” It was to use facts only when convenient, to disavow their existence when contradictory, and “to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies.” How dare the cops murder? How dare they not kill? Thus, the Orwellian lie, stripped of its subtleties.

No cop should be afraid to kill in self-defense, he said. “But if you’re uncertain or you suspect they’ll draw first, kill them so it’s done. One less idiot in this world.” It was another enumeration of the president’s greatest hits: drugs destroy the youth, every drug dealer is armed, human rights are for the weak, cops are the last bulwark against criminality.