A friend of mine expressed a theory he must have taken from someone or somewhere else, perhaps from a galaxy far, far away. He was commenting, of course, on what now seems a tsunami of Rightist fascistic demagoguery sweeping the world; and how so many are swept along with it.
“They’re using the dark side of the force!” my friend said. “Fortunately, it affects only the weak and feeble-minded. And that is why those of us who are not affected must not stop complaining and protesting. One day, they will snap out of it. Just like the Germans, the Italians, the Spanish, even the Chinese after the Cultural Revolution, or the Khmer Rouge after Pol Pot.”
My mind continued the statement with, “…just like us, after Marcos,” though that thought brought with it an ironic affirmation of the cyclic nature of history. “Kyklos,” the ancient Greeks called it.
“Hunpana ligidli!” was what older generation of my townmates, the Taga-Dumanjug, said to each other in a play of syllables to code the assertion that life was a rolling wheel traveling through time. (Ang) panahon liligid. The need for putting this thought into a cypher indicates how the statement was born in the time of the last world war when Cebuanos had to deal with the Japanese, the guerrilla movement, and then finally the “liberating” American forces. A man on top now may soon end up at the bottom and then vice-versa. That fact would seem like biblical truth. Much irony that we have to speak it as if intoning a secret. Ah, but it is not the truth of it which is the secret. The secret is that we believe it. The secret is that it is spoken as a curse on those who trample on the defenseless and the defeated. Thus, it must be spoken so that cursed do not understand how history itself will bring vengeance on each one of them.
For it is inevitable that those in power always find it hard to see, much less accept, the inevitability of downfall. And this fact is always more true for followers than for their leaders. And it is for this fact that Mao Tse-tung never had to order the children of the Cultural Revolution to betray their own parents to the working camps. The children did it all by themselves. As did Pol Pot never had to sign any individual death warrant for those who fell in the killing fields.
Hatred and death acquire their own momentum over time. Sometimes, all it takes is for a tyrant to say even in the vaguest terms how a problem can be solved very quickly if “quickly” translates to the willingness to commit murder, or just passively accept murder as a justifiable means to achieve the state’s goals.
Oh, but first, the target must be given a quick easy-to-understand label. In our case, pusher, addict, drug lord, drug user, snatcher, robber, criminal. The labels work by themselves, grow by themselves, work their way into the minds of the weak and feeble-minded just like any commercial brand, just like the dark side of the force.
And if one were so inclined, one might use this for a case study of brandin theory. The selling proposition is a quick fix from all our fears, the problems of our country. No competing product, no brand X is as effective. The fact of this must be repeated daily, over and over again, until we have to try the brand. This brand, even if its name is Murder.