THERE is a Japanese manga entitled “Ikagami: The Ultimate Limit” which was made into a movie in 2008. The manga, written and illustrated by Motore Mase presents a thought-provoking premise that the film adopts. All Japanese children are inoculated with a nano capsule that would, at programmed time when they have grown up to be 18 to 24 years of age, kill a select number. They are to be informed of their impending demise through a government agent who will deliver notice 24 hours before the nano capsule is activated so that they can bring a proper close to their affairs.
The strange but effective logic behind the national policy implemented by the Japanese government was for people, given the government-sanctioned threat to everyone’s life, to lead productive and prosperous lives. The law was thus called the National Prosperity Act and those who are killed at random are considered as heroes who paid the ultimate sacrifice for the good of the nation.
The dystopian vision of Mase is not a dire prediction about a dark and twisted future, however. To my mind, it is really a contemplation on how the various iterations of state-building even in modern times are built on the carcass of the sacrificial dead.
The body heap upon which the nation-state is built on comprises of a minority ethnic group or the lower disposable classes. They are marginalized or driven to extinction by state-sponsored wars to prop up the interests and goals of the nation-state supposedly at the behest of a fervent nationalism.
From the period of the continuing anti-colonial revolutions of the Katipunan up to the present civil war in the countryside, the Philippine nation-state has always operated on the principle of defending elite and landed interest versus a disenfranchised peasant class on one front. In another front, the same war for resources have been continuously waged without let up by the Philippine government in Muslim and Lumad Mindanao in a bid to assimilate not just their culture and practices but more importantly their ancestral domains.
The Philippine nation-state and the neocolonial and local interests it represents have always used at their disposal repressive state instruments to achieve their goals and protect their security. These acts, that have led to an ever increasing body count of not just of the marginal and the disposable, but also their very own soldiers, are justified in the name of nebulous and contested concepts such as “nation,” “rule of law,” and “peace and development.” That is why while we mourn their untimely passing, it is crucial to ask: for whose nation, rule of law, and peace and order did they die for?
The Duterte administration has played this card to the hilt, calling for an unquestioned patriotism among the citizenry. The comfortable and the excluded especially the middle class have responded positively with a new and fervent nationalism.
The first demand was to chalk off the rising body count from the costly drug war where the thousands of victims come from the ranks of the disposable urban poor. The second is to place the whole of Mindanao under martial law as a response to the siege of Marawi City. As the city is turned into rubble by the incessant aerial bombardment, the nation-state demands from the displaced Maranao populace to grin and bear the dead piling in the streets and the wholesale destruction of their homes and businesses. Meanwhile, Lumad leaders, schools, and communities are continuously being attacked without let up in the name of a counterinsurgency campaign.
In these current and contemporary instances, we see the long shadow of a deliberate and discriminating kind of death practice providing logic to the operations of the State. The identification and determination of who will be placed under this necropolitical power of the state are also revelations about its true nature. But what is disconcerting is that this display of power to assign death and spare lives comes with the marshaling of public support akin to fanning the passions of an unquestioning patriotic lynch mob hungry for blood.
There was something very Japanese and orderly about the premise of Ikagami, the Japanese manga and film, that provides an interesting fodder for thought in the face of all these unfortunate events. Note that the sacrificed citizens in the Japanese story were all picked in random, at once amplifying and equalizing its effect to the whole citizenry. The case is different in the necropolitical practice of the Philippine nation-state where an unquestioned assignment of labels such as rebels, local terrorists, drug addicts, and pushers make these outliers fair game to the death practice of its agents.
Like a desperate bloodthirsty vampire, this most recent iteration of the Philippine nation-state under Duterte can only sustain itself by feeding off the marginal and disposable elements of its own disintegrating carcass.