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  • Defining Dictatorship

    Last Friday, November 18, the family of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos secreted his body into the Libingan ng mga Bayani (Heroes’ Cemetery) for a long-contested burial. The Philippine National Police and the country’s armed forces secured the area, and a chopper from the national air force flew the strongman’s body down from Ilocos to be interred among the nation’s most revered citizens.

    Look, I’m not highlighting the government’s role in this to be petty.

    No, I’m pointing it out to underscore how the converse can also be true: just as the participation of government assets helped the event take place, a hero’s burial for Marcos enables certain possibilities for the government, too.

    Martial Law is the picture of authoritarianism for the Philippines, and certainly the country’s most recent and most visceral experience of authoritarian rule. The Human Rights Victims’ Claims Board, created specifically to address the abuses wrought during that era, will be processing over 75,000 cases well into 2017. The country itself has been paying off Marcos-incurred foreign debt since the dictator’s ousting, and will continue to do so until 2025. The Martial Law period is a weight we struggle under to this day, and its memory is the strongest cornerstone in any conceptual defenses the country has against the idea – and appeal – of dictatorship.

    In that sense, enshrining Martial Law’s chief architect in our Heroes’ Cemetery is exactly the kind of blow that accelerates what seems to be the steady rhetorical erosion of those defenses. For a long while now, various members of the current administration have, in one way or another, presented an increasingly chilling picture of the kind of leadership that they deem necessary to, as they say, “save the country”: disregard for due process and basic rights, especially if “required” to secure the “greater good” (i.e., national stability and progress); awesome executive powers concentrated in one office; ruthless policies, often carried out by emboldened law enforcement and armed forces; unquestioned and unaccountable authority. In that light, the rehabilitation of Marcos’ legacy seems not only understandable but essential.

    This sudden hero’s burial is the gravest instance thus far, but this is not the first time that President Duterte and his surrogates have attempted to reframe our understanding of leadership.

    And so we arrive, again, at the Marcos burial. Intended or not, it can – perhaps it already does; who knows? – serve dual purposes: erase one of our key reasons for resisting authoritarian rule, yes, but retroactively create a precedent that affirms our current administration’s predilection for strongman rule, too.

    Many of the President’s supporters spin the above statements as misquoted or misunderstood; as off-the-cuff pronouncements that shouldn’t be seen as indicators of policy or intent; or perhaps worst, as jokes. But the President himself hasn’t made a secret of his beliefs and methods, and he has a long and public record to belie the assertion that his recent pronouncements don’t hold any kernel of sincerity or truth.

    As the Communications Secretary has said: “He already warned the electorate that if you vote for me, there will be bloodshed. …[He] was voted.” In other words, we knew what we were in for.

    Besides, campaign promises aside, we have had enough time to see for ourselves. Even prior to assuming the presidency, before he had any 2016 election voters to supposedly woo with promises of swift and total “justice,” Mr. Duterte already defended the kind of governance that deemed shoot-to-kill orders as legal, proper, and moral. As far back as 2001, assassination and targeted killings have been Mr. Duterte’s answer to crime, an approach driven by the idea of “[serving] the greater good no matter what it takes”; unsurprisingly, the Human Rights Watch notes that his political rise “coincided…[with] city mayors [gaining]…greater operational control over their police forces.”

    And so on, and so on.

    So, pause. Go back. Take a look at those dates. This is by no means a comprehensive list, but it is a far-ranging one. The fact is, for all of his apparent inconsistencies, his volatility and his habit of veering off-script, certain key aspects of the President’s statements and behavior have remained unchanged. Indeed, they have been taken up and amplified by many members of his administration, from Cabinet members like Andanar and Aguirre to his many allies in the Congressional supermajority. If these statements are all jokes, un-meant, of no consequence, then we should worry about how much time and vehemence our government has poured into repeating them. And if these aren’t jokes, then we should worry even more.

    Either way, intended or not, all of these instances add up. Taken together, these pronouncements can redraw – have perhaps already started redrawing – the lines that delineate what actions and decisions we deem acceptable, even necessary, for the good of the country.

    We can quibble about questions of intent and interpretation; it’s tempting to refrain from even mentioning any of these instances in the same sentence as “dictatorship.” Sure. Okay. Nobody wants to be the hysteric. But refusing to even consider these instances in aggregate and to think about what they might mean for the future of our country contributes, in its own way, to the same erosions of memory and resistance that these events are helping along.

    By opting for the supposed objectivity of “wait and see,” or by dismissing these statements as jokes or hyperbole, we are not being charitable. Instead, we’re giving a pass to these words and actions – as well as to the particular brands of history, values, and outlook that come with them. Too “trivial” to be engaged with, too frivolous (or alternatively, too important to national welfare) for critique, let alone alarm. In short, we’re letting potential seeds of dictatorship live.

    The motto of dictatorship, as authoritarianism scholar Sarah Kendzior notes, is: “It can’t happen here.” But it has happened. Dismissing the possibility of it happening again only makes us blind to recent rhetorical trends that could easily be transformed into the conceptual foundations of a new regime. When we file our own dark history as unthinkable – or worse yet, as desirable – then we unmoor our present from the hard-won anchors that can keep us from being swept away. By forgetting, by agreeing again and again to let things go, we diminish our capacity and willingness to resist.

  • What’s the word?

    From Peter Hessler’s Oracle Bones, which I also mentioned over here and which I’m still reading:

    “Peoples of color” sounded awkward if translated literally, so I used the standard Chinese term for minorities: shaoshu minzu. Of course, that was just as odd in English: “small-number ethnic groups.” Perhaps somewhere in the world there was a language that handled this issue gracefully, but it wasn’t English or Chinese.

    As far as I know, it isn’t Filipino either, which doesn’t seem to have a similar blanket term for minorities at all. (This observation is just off the top of my head, though, so please feel free to correct me.) I asked a friend who speaks Cebuano, and she also came up blank.

    This also brought us to the interesting flavor of the words for “foreigner” or “immigrant”: dayuhan or dayo, which carry connotations of passage and transience that I think are worth probing. When we speak of foreigners, there’s the obvious dimension of “they’re not from here,” but the words we use to refer to them also bear some shades of, “they’re just passing through” or “they’re not going to stay.” I might just be spouting threadbare thoughts here, but I think that makes for some interesting linguistics-inspired takes on how Filipinos might interact with issues of im/migration that have become so prominent today.

  • On law, or how we view it

    I’ve been reading Peter Hessler’s Oracle Bones, a nonfiction work that’s part-memoir, part-journalism, part-travel writing about Hessler’s years in China. One of the more intriguing sections I’ve recently finished dealt with the government’s crackdown on Falun Gong, a health system-cum-religion that gained millions of believers in the 1990s.

    Many of these adherents had a penchant for staging peaceful protests whenever the system received negative publicity, and their protests — highly organized, and highly effective — eventually grew to a point that the Chinese national government found alarming. Officials banned Falun Gong, rounding up leaders and arresting practitioners who mounted demonstrations in protest. These arrests quickly turned violent, and soon news of abuses and even deaths started spreading.

    I mention this here because a couple of passage struck me as relevant — or at least relateable — considering the current political climate in the Philippines.

    On one of Hessler’s friends, a journalist who investigated the crackdown (emphasis mine):

    […] Ian followed up by researching the Falun Gong structure, as well as the nature of the police response. He discovered that it was another instance of top-down commands: local police units were being fined for every believer who slipped through their clutches and made it to Beijing to protest. What started at the top as an idea — ban Falun Gong — materialized at the lowest levels as sheer brutality, for the stupidest, most pragmatic reason of all: money.

    It’s not a point-by-point correspondence by any means, but the parallels are there. I have no idea what methods of incentive/reward the present administration is using to spur on law enforcement, but I do feel like the ruthlessness of our current drug war is animated partly by a drive to “meet quota,” as it were. Certainly there’s pressure there to report concrete results, and that coupled with top leadership’s support for so-called “necessary violence” has given us our own daily feed of “sheer brutality” at the lowest levels. What started in Malacañang as an edict — solve the drug problem — has materialized as a bloodbath.

    And with that bloodbath comes a confounding apathy, which I’m afraid will only grow worse as our government sets aside (or at least talks about setting aside, loudly and vehemently) due process and the rule of law with growing frequency. Another passage from Hessler, I think, comes close to articulating why. Again, all emphasis mine:

    Regardless of what kind of problem an individual had, it was his problem, and only he could do something about it. Without the sense of a rational system, people rarely felt connected to the troubles of others. The crackdown on Falun Gong should have been disturbing to most Chinese — the group had done nothing worse than make a series of minor political miscalculations that had added up. But few average people expressed sympathy for the believers, because they couldn’t imagine how that issue could be connected to their own relationship with the law. In part, this was cultural–the Chinese had never stressed strong community bonds; the family and other more immediate groups were the ones that mattered most. But the lack of a rational legal climate also encouraged people to focus strictly on their own problems.

    The opposite seems to be true for most of the Philippines right now: a common response to the killings, for example, is a self-assured, “You have nothing to fear if you’re not doing anything wrong.” But regardless if it’s a lack of trust in the rationality of the system or a somewhat misplaced belief in the same, the end result seems to be a gulf between the manifest effects of law enforcement in society and how individuals imagine it might materialize in their own lives.

    I’ll veer off course a bit here to point out how a lot of the support for these killings is confusing (at least to me), even contradictory. Those same assurances of safety for law-abiding citizens, for example, often come from people who support drug-related killings precisely because they’ve lost faith in the law and its apparatuses of enforcement. Better writers than me have already sketched out these strange but potent twists of reasoning; from a recent New York Times article, for example:

    When people begin to see the justice system as thoroughly corrupt and broken, they feel unprotected from crime. That sense of threat makes them willing to support vigilante violence, which feels like the best option for restoring order and protecting their personal safety.

    […] “When you have a system that doesn’t deliver, you are creating, over a period of time, a certain culture of punishment,” she [Gema Santamaria, a professor from the Mexico Autonomous Institute of Technology] said. “Regardless of what the police are going to do, you want justice, and it will be rough justice.”

    To me that sounds like supporting crime to stamp out crime, but that’s not how a lot of my countrymen see it. Again, from that same article:

    Surprisingly, that includes increased support for the use of harsh extralegal tactics by the police themselves. “This seems counterintuitive,” Ms. Santamaria said. “If you don’t trust the police to prosecute criminals, why would you trust them with bending the law?”

    But to people desperate for security, she said, the unmediated punishment of police violence seems far more effective than waiting for a corrupt system to take action.

    And so, over time, frustration with state institutions, coupled with fear of crime and insecurity, leads to demand for authoritarian violence — even if that means empowering the same corrupt, flawed institutions that failed to provide security in the first place.

    And this brings me back to that last excerpt from Hessler, because I think it’s also much easier to subscribe to this kind of thinking when one has the sense, however seemingly unfounded, that any authoritarian violence will pass one by. Or to put it in Hessler’s terms: that your problems are not connected to anyone else’s, and conversely, that the problems of suspects who are getting gunned down are not connected to yours. It’s not the only factor, clearly, but it helps: when you believe that others will be the ones doing the dying, that you (and your family — I can’t say much about Chinese culture, but placing a premium on family and more immediate social ties is spot-on for Filipinos, too) have no reason to fear, then why oppose violent measures that mean to cleanse the country?

    I think the use of terms like “cleanse,” as if criminals had transformed irrevocably from persons to unsightly grease spots that need to be — literally — wiped out, deserves a red flag here. It’s the kind of absolutely dehumanizing perspective that makes the ideas articulated in that last Hessler excerpt all the more troubling.

    Why? As we resort more and more to vigilantism and authoritarian violence, the rule of law continues to crumble — and so does any reliability or rationality in how we resolve questions of legality, of guilt, and maybe even of the right to live. And as Hessler’s observations warn us, those conditions breed apathy — or, in our case, are likely to feed the apathy that already grips many Filipinos. Who’s going to bother to push back against the widespread shift to “rough justice” and more vicious politics then? It looks as though the growth of desperate support for vigilantism and authoritarian violence also reduces the possibility of cultivating the same much-desired societies where such drastic measures would be unnecessary.

  • As T.H. White’s Merlyn says,

    “The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love… There is only one thing for it then–to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.”

  • Radiolab on thinking trees

    Great episode from Radiolab on the vast underground networks that link trees together. Does that sound dull? It’s a testament to the Radiolab team’s skill that this remains one of the most riveting podcast episodes I’ve heard in months.

  • Cross-posted from Tumblr: Unit 731

    (In response to this post.)

    I’ve been interested in Japan’s Unit 731 since it came up in a bioethics class back in college. Recently, I read a journal article on the subject written by Tsuneishi Keiichi, one of Japan’s top biowarfare specialists, and several details stood out.

    “It is said that Ishii [Lt. Gen. Ishii Shiro, the head of Unit 731 and Japan’s wartime biochemical weapons research network] first became convinced of the need to develop biological weapons with the signing of the Geneva Protocol in 1925.”

    For context: the 1925 Geneva Protocol outlawed use of biological and chemical weapons in war. Which means Ishii decided to embark on his research precisely because a good number of nations (38 original signatories), including many then-formidable powers – France, Germany, Russia, the UK, the US* – had agreed not to use biological and chemical weapons.

    * Though lobbies in Congress blocked US ratification of the 1925 Geneva Protocol until the 70s

    (My first reaction: What an asshole. This impression remains unchanged, and is much more vehement than that pithy statement implies.)

    It’s reasonable to assume that Ishii Shiro plunged into Japanese biological and chemical weapon development with the intent of taking advantage of the prohibitions placed on protocol signatories. But did Japan – or at least Ishii and his research network – really intend, or at least expect, conflict with these powers?

    At this point, it’s worth noting that:

    • the Geneva Protocol didn’t ban the production and stockpiling of biological and chemical weapons, nor did it prohibit their use against non-ratifying parties; and
    • many of Japan’s neighbors didn’t ratify the protocol until much later: North and South Korea in 1989, for example, and China in 1952. (Japan itself was an original signatory but only ratified the protocol in 1970.)

    It seems that Ishii, at best, undertook his research in anticipation of biochemical warfare from Japan’s neighbors. At worst, he meant for Japan to use that research against those same neighbors with a little less fear of commensurate retaliation from other powers that had, by 1925, already used thousands of tons of chemical agents in World War I.

    But possibly belligerent motivations and Ishii’s rank aside, it would be disingenuous to characterize Unit 731 as solely a military enterprise:

    “For the most part, the Ishii network took on university researchers as technicians. The part-time researchers were part-time employees of the Military Medical School Epidemic Prevention Research Laboratory; they were professors at Tokyo and Kyoto imperial universities who were contracted to perform research in their own laboratories. In short, a large number of civilian researchers were mobilized.” (emphasis mine)

    Civilian technicians worked in the military; part-time researchers also worked on Unit 731 projects outside of the military structure. It’s easy, and perhaps more palatable for us now, to compartmentalize these atrocities and confine intent and responsibility to the Japanese military personnel of the period. This was, after all, a secret unit. But the reality is that Ishii’s research was sustained by civilian participation.

    Did these civilians intend to commit atrocities? Let’s segue a bit to Hannah Arendt’s discussion of Adolf Eichmann, who faced trial for his role in orchestrating the Holocaust. In general, criminal law requires some element of intent (mens rea) for there to be liability. But Arendt notes that, in Eichmann’s obedient implementation of policy, there’s a lack of reflection. Consequently, the legal concept of “intention” can’t be said to apply.

    In short: can we, must we, speak of criminal intent when dealing with blind obedience? Can standard legal frameworks grasp the details and encompass the systematization of these crimes?

    Arendt gives us the now-famous phrase, “the banality of evil,” which for Arendt meant how people like Eichmann “accepted, routinised, and implemented [these crimes] without moral revulsion and political indignation and resistance.” We can also take this as a gesture at the inadequacy of established legal frameworks in the face of cases like Eichmann and Ishii. Arendt enjoins us to consider people like Eichmann and the Ishii network (including its civilian researchers) not just as perpetrators of specific atrocities against discrete persons/groups. They’ve committed gross and unprecedented crimes against humanity itself, not least by failing to consider their actions crimes. Their systematic, unthinking commission of these crimes—and thus their implicit refutation of established frameworks of judgment, legal or even moral—should well count as a grave evil of its own.

    It’s important to remember, in this case, the sheer extent of the Ishii network. We’re talking about Unit 731, but it’s called a network for a reason:

    “With the expansion of the war front throughout China after 1937, sister units affiliated with Unit 731 were established in major Chinese cities… (Unit 1855 was established in Beijing on February 9, 1938; Unit 1644 in Nanjing on April 18, 1939; and Unit 8604 in Guangzhou on April 8, 1939). Later, after Japan occupied Singapore a similar unit (Unit 9420) was established there on March 26, 1942… As of the end of 1939 (that is, before the establishment of the Singapore unit), the network had a total staff of 10,045, of which 4,898 were assigned to the core units in Tokyo and Pingfan.”

    Sure, call Unit 731 the Asian Auschwitz, but just as Auschwitz was one of many camps, the same holds true for the Japanese complex in Pingfan. Despite being a “secret unit,” Unit 731 was in no way an isolated program confined to one horror-house facility or an unsanctioned pursuit led by a rogue officer. This was a massive undertaking, and official support stretched far beyond just Lt. Gen. Ishii. The Kwantung Army chief of staff and the Ministry of War’s vice minister signed off on these units’ formation; Emperor Hirohito approved their creation.

    Speaking of permission:

    “‘Such information could not be obtained in our own laboratories because of scruples attached to human experimentation.’”

    That’s a line that Keiichi quotes from the Hill and Victor Report, which was the product of the second phase of US investigations into the Unit 731 network. That’s also, perhaps, the one line that best encapsulates why the United States let this vast, aberrant system get away with murder (and much else besides).

    I’m not inclined to buy wholesale the implied benevolence in the claim that the US meant to keep Unit 731 research out of any other nation’s hands. For one thing: that line up there and its “scruples.” It’s such a flaccid word for what ought to be a fierce and adamant objection to human experimentation. As it is, the Hill and Victor report makes such scruples sound like inconveniences that Unit 731′s discovery so fortuitously allowed the United States to sidestep.