When asked what his marching orders were from the presumptive President, the incoming Philippine National Police chief laughed and said,
“Forward march!” Then he went on and promised that he’s going to run over drug lords and it’s going to be bloody.
This gung ho attitude of the protege and his tendency to ridicule the act of killing mimics exactly the style of his boss, Rodrigo Duterte, who, without any hint of hesitation, already admitted to having killed nearly a thousand criminals in Davao City where he was believed to have operated a Gestapo-style Death Squad.
Duterte loves to brag about his being ruthless and even makes it a laughing matter knowing that a lot of people out there thinks it’s funny. In one video, for example, he talked how he was told by his men that the suspected criminal, whom he had already started torturing by pulling out finger nails, turned out to be the wrong person. He laughed and cursed and laughed again as he recounted this story. And we all laughed with him.
We always do. We laughed when he said that, as Mayor, he should have been the first to rape the Australian girl who was raped and killed by hostage-takers. We laughed when he told Mar Roxas during the Presidential debate that he is not fit for President because he doesn’t have the guts to kill. And that it’s this willingness to kill that makes one presidential.
We laugh but the joke is on us.
This paradox reminds me of Joshua Oppenheimer’s “The Act of Killing”, a documentary film about the executions committed by a right-wing vigilante group during the anti-communist campaign in the mid-1960s that led to the ouster of President Sukarno and to the rise of the fascist dictator General Suharto who then led the country for three decades
In the film, Oppenheimer went to North Sumatra and let local perpetrators in the killings reenact their brutal acts against the suspected communists and even some ethnic Chinese who were among the nearly one million people killed nationwide during this year-long red scare-cum-ethnic cleansing campaign. Anwar Congo, the group that was portrayed in the film, claimed to have killed about 1000 people in North Sumatra.
Oppenheimer encouraged the killers to have their way of storytelling and expectedly it turned into an expression of collective trigger-happy machismo with elements of Hollywood action film, Westerns, and comedy. The dramatizations then becomes a motley of emotions, always ambivalent, with scenes of perpetrators breaking down as they confessed to their crimes but also sharing the fun of their self-portrayal before the camera.
This ambivalence makes the film even more disturbing and thus emotionally poignant. As audience we laugh at the humor and wit even as we feel deeply disturbed by the great evil and terror hinted in the details of the depictions, even if these were largely mythologized.
Humor and terror, beauty and gruesomeness are the contradictions that the director highlighted in this film. The result is something universally disturbing. And yet, we can only imagine how the Indonesian people, particularly those who lived through those dark times depicted in the film, might have felt when they saw it.
Which brings us to how Filipinos now tend to reflect the same contradictions: Our gung ho celebration of the prospect of Davao-style Death Squad now operating on a national scale to wipe out criminality; our embrace and enthusiasm of violence as a Machiavellian means of “fighting evil with evil”, as one evangelist supporter of Duterte would put it; and our cheer when Duterte announced that he will revive the death penalty, this time in the form of public hanging.
My brother calls it “necropolitics”, this rhetoric that promotes a culture of death. And that seems to be how Duterte wanted to brand his style of leadership.
He already warned that there will be shortage in the supply of coffins and demand for funeral parlors will rise as soon as he starts in office.
Related to necropolitics, albeit on a more personal scale, is necrophilia or an inclination to be sexually aroused by the dead. It’s a bizarre combination, but, yes, it’s not impossible that they could intersect.
There must be serious psychological implications and that’s the dark truth behind every slip of the tongue or a bad joke that we all nonetheless laugh at.
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