MANY have been bewailing the apparent descent of Philippine society to the depths of state-sponsored anarchy and vigilantism. They use as a reference point the drug war that has so far killed three thousand suspected pushers and drug personalities, a significant number of these felled through suspicious extrajudicial means. They point to the State under Duterte as the culprit who has tolerated and even encouraged the elimination of the country’s new scourge.
They have found allies in various international media outlets and multilateral agencies and they have coalesced together versus the Duterte administration on the issue of human rights. The grim picture being painted is that government has paved the way for vigilante killings of drug suspects to take place all over the country. The rising body count is evidence of this and the recent Senate hearing involving a self-confessed member of Duterte’s death squad was supposedly an eye-opener of how this state-sponsored operation worked in the former mayor’s haunt that is Davao City, and is now being implemented nationwide.
The concerted international effort in media to discredit the new administration reached fever pitch right before the ASEAN Summit where the Philippine president successfully parried American pressure with his volatile antics. However, the demolition job show no signs of abating with the recent New York Times article and the new banner story of TIME magazine that both covered the on-going drug campaign in the country.
There are global and local “realpolitik” considerations now involved in the current campaign against the Duterte administration, that is a given. The Philippines remains a strategic interest for many political and economic superpowers all over the world and they all have a keen interest in the country’s political developments for their own geopolitical concerns.
But while the din of these media generated noised have increased in the past few weeks, they remain no match to the resounding expressions of support by an unperturbed Filipino citizenry. Amid the stories of pain and loss of the innocent victims of the ongoing drug war in these articles penned by both foreign and local journalists, the average Filipino seem to just shrug these off as acceptable collateral damage. Some sectors have even launched an international campaign against global media on Facebook with users posting signs that warn international media outlets against destabilizing the nation with their unflattering depictions of Duterte’s drug campaign.
If the objective of the campaign is to reduce the popular support of the Duterte administration, then it has been an indisputable failure. If anything, it has only caused its’ rabid and middle class supporters to close ranks and identify its new ideological enemy – the dislodged Yellow Army of the Liberal Party. The anti-US rhetoric and appeals to nationhood of the president’s pronouncements to counter what is interpreted as unwelcome meddling of foreign powers helped prop up the legitimacy of the administration in the eyes of its constituents and other foreign governments.
But what is sociologically interesting is what these ongoing social dynamics also reveal about the moral pulse of Filipino society in the age of Duterte. The continued popularity of the current administration and the strong support of the Filipino public to his drug war also indicate how a significant number of Filipinos appreciate human rights as a discourse, for instance.
Durkheim had a sharp observation regarding the relationship between crime and society that we can employ to understand the current impasse over the issue of universal human rights in the context of THE brutal drug war." It was his assertion that no act is inherently criminal but only achieves such a status when society accords it that label. Therefore, it is the society’s moral code that creates the categories of what is regarded as criminal.
Our written laws are a good measure of the state of a society’s collective conscience but they are not the only source of a society’s moral code. There are occasions when society prefers to suspend the limits and measures enshrined in our written codes based on its shifting standards. Or it may be the case that there was really no consonance between the written laws and how justice and power are practiced on the ground and certain occasions reveal this moral dissonance.
I believe we are at that unique occasion of witnessing how such a moral dissonance is currently plaguing Philippine society. The spirit of our written laws including our signed international agreements such as the United Nations Universal Declaration on Human Rights, a western liberal construct, are apparently put on hold for a greater public good. Duterte himself expressed the contours of this new moral assertion in his famous statement during his first State of the Nation Address, a rallying point of many of his supporters: “Human rights must work to uplift human dignity, but human rights cannot be used as a shield or an excuse to destroy the country.”