Duty to Expose Killings

BY JPAUL MANZANILLA
Posted by Bulatlat

There is a widespread abuse of public consciousness being committed each time a debate on pressing issues is proposed. Typical of such practice are public affairs programs that foreground questions like “Sino ang dapat sisihin sa political killings?” and “Ano ang dapat gawin sa malawakang pagpatay sa mga miyembro ng makakaliwang grupo?”  The glitch is that why are these questions being offered at all? It is as if we are compelled to respond, in a similar rigid craze, that it is alright for such things to happen. That people from the Left should be treated differently. And we realize in the end that our humanity has been trivialized right from the start.

Newspapers head stories on activists and militants being killed. The numbers sum it all while continually being surpassed by acts waiting to be recorded. People’s organizations, the mass media, and the broad public are anxious for answers, for justice. When journalists are murdered, not only the medium of public information is denied, but also the basic right to be informed. People are then induced to renounce social involvement. When leaders of mass organizations, the flank of the most politicized citizenry, are killed, the rest are shoved towards political quietude.

Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo takes as alibi the country’s economic growth for her political right to rule. This is another bind that one should take with great caution. Recourse to the purely economic is a detour to pacifism, same way of directing us to “just return to work.” She demands that when the problem is economic, the solution lies also in it. But the seeds of social and political discontent are inseparable from the economic: landlessness, employment, education, health, among others. The grounds of dispute determining these concerns are political; hence the struggle must be political. One is advised to forget it all out and join her in the quest for utopia, the enchanted kingdom of First World abundance. Isn’t this offer fascistic at the core? “I may maim you and kill you, evict, dislocate and relocate your households, pauperize you with low wages, but please don’t recall the 2004 elections that hailed me as your leader. Don’t blame the killings on me! Let’s join hands for economic take-off!”

Each day the government’s madness to preserve itself in power intensifies. The specter of dictatorship is haunting us – this specter of terrorism that intends to decimate the enemy that is us. The threat of imposing the state of emergency once again never escapes us. Slavoj Zizek, the Slovenian Marxist critic and Lacanian psychoanalyst, in an essay on the war on terrorism, explains that

when a state institution proclaims a state of emergency, it does so by definition as part of a desperate strategy to avoid the true emergency and return to the ‘normal course of things’. It is…a feature of all reactionary proclamations of a ‘state of emergency’ that they were directed against popular unrest (‘confusion’) and presented as a resolve to restore normalcy. (Are We in War? Do We Have an Enemy?)

What is aborted then is the emergence of the people’s will, subverted by the state for the perpetuity of its rule. Against the truth of struggle, the falsity of revolution is declared. History then, our memory, serves to militate against inaction. The long record of state and imperialist terrorism against the people has to be exposed, including an account of the sins of its chief executors. We take a case against the accusation that those responsible for the killings are the same people who fight against injustice, a tactic meant to divide the ranks of the multitude who oppose government atrocities.

Our duty to expose the killings, involuntary disappearances, torture, rape, and all acts of brutality.  Our  protest is a practice of making private and covert operations public. It is our obligation not only to the martyrs but to our very survival as a people.

The staple fare of celebrating Independence Day by submitting the antithesis of the absence of freedom and sovereignty must be overcome. Seizing political power that will guarantee the people’s independence is the very question that needs to be placed at the center of dispute.

June 10, 2006

JPaul Manzanilla teaches in the Department of Arts and Communication of the University of the Philippines Manila and heads the education and research program of the Amado V. Hernandez Resource Center.

Posted by Bulatlat

BACK TO TOP ■  PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION  ■   COMMENT

© 2006 Bulatlat ■  Alipato Publications

Permission is granted to reprint or redistribute this article, provided its author/s and Bulatlat are properly credited and notified.