The usurper did it August 21, 2006

I’M GLAD THE FOLK OF OTHER COUNTRIES are still alive. By that, I don’t just mean that they are alive physically, though in these times of murder and mayhem that means a great deal already. I mean that they are alive in the sense that they can still see, hear, smell, taste and feel. That is something the folk of this country no longer seem able to do. Jovito Palparan says openly that anybody seen in the company of a suspected NPA can and will be shot to death along with him, and Filipinos no longer fill the air with angry shouts at that obscenity. There is only one thing worse than being dead. That is being dead while still being alive.

I’m glad the folk of other countries are still alive while being alive and have risen to damn it. “No one,” thunders Amnesty International, whose credentials for saying these things have been earned the hard way during the time of butterflies and dictators, “deserves to die for their political affiliation. It should be a deep embarrassment to the government that people in the Philippines cannot freely exercise their rights of political expression and association.”

The Uniting Church in Australia, the Methodist Church in America, and church leaders representing denominations in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, Europe and North America have also railed at the killings in angrier language. The Methodists have called on the US government “to bring pressure to bear upon Philippine authorities to respect civil liberties and human rights,” while the church leaders have expressed “shock and dismay” especially over the killing of church workers “by death squads that seem connected to powerful economic, military and political interests in the country.”

We’re back to the times of the butterflies and dictators when death squads roamed the earth freely and murdered people with impunity. With one difference: The death squads in the past did their jobs clandestinely and existed as shadowy paramilitary elements and vigilantes. Today’s death squads do their jobs openly and exist as legal entities, called the military and police. I really hope the presumptuous general Palparan, and his boss GMA, the presuming President, will one day be delivered to The Hague to answer for their crimes. One is tempted to say that they are war criminals, except that there is no war in this country other than that of their own cynical and murderous invention. They are just plain criminals, of an order that violates—no, insults—humanity.

The fools who constitute the majority of the House of Representatives, who blocked the impeachment bid against their favorite tyrant would say to a man and woman that there was nothing to connect their favorite tyrant to the killings. Well, there is still something worse than being dead while being alive, and that is being a congressman who has sold his soul to GMA. There is no worse state than this—and if they themselves cannot feel the misery of it, it is only because there is no feeling left in their bodies, or souls. Some day too they will reap the whirlwind in terms of the contempt of their countrymen, the infamy to hound their names and houses till kingdom come.

Nothing to connect GMA to the killings? You have to have lost all sense of sight, hearing, smell, taste and feeling to mouth that. At the very least, what is government there for? There’s nothing more ludicrous—the kind that kills when you laugh—than GMA cajoling the witnesses in the killings to come out so she might stop the mayhem. And what, unless the witnesses materialize—something she herself has discouraged by stopping witnesses against her from appearing before the Senate—she is freed from the duty, the responsibility, the imperative, to stop the mayhem? And what, so that the witnesses, who will then have implicated themselves as being in the company of suspected NPA members, will become target practice for Palparan?

We pay taxes so that government will serve us. The least of the service being for it to keep us alive, not to kill us. There’s nothing more ludicrous as well than Eduardo Ermita saying, “But what about the killings by the NPA?” Well, what about them? The human rights groups have condemned those killings as well. I know I have, repeatedly. More to the point, we do not pay taxes to the NPA, we pay taxes to the government. We do not owe allegiance to the NPA, we owe allegiance to the government. You want us to apply the same rules to the NPA as to government, let us pay taxes to the NPA, and let us owe allegiance to the NPA.

While at that, the NPA “killing fields” is a case of the NPA slaughtering its own comrades. The day Palparan slaughters his own comrades is the day I will praise him to high heavens. The day he slaughters himself is the day I will ask for his sainthood.

But GMA’s crime isn’t just one of omission or ineptitude, it’s one of commission or direct authorship. The only thing worse than the scale of the current mayhem—which surpasses even that of martial law: then there was at least a distinction, however often blurred, between combatant and non-combatant; today even NGOs and party lists are combatants—is the ease with which Palparan is able to justify it. He openly advocates the murder of the “enemy,” that category being what and how his diseased mind decrees it, and his boss does not reprimand him, his boss praises him before the nation, before the world, before heaven and earth, for a job well done. This is not sporadic or intermittent bloodletting, this is systematic and calculated bloodbath. This is not accident, this is policy. This is not violence most regrettable, this is murder most foul.

And pray, what, the butler did it?

Not so, Mr. Speaker. The usurper did it.

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=16341