Theres The Rub
Impunity
By Conrado de Quiros
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 03:28:00 05/20/2008
Filed Under: Robbery, theft
MANILA, Philippines—Your heart goes out to the kin of the victims. One fine day their loved ones go to work, and without stepping outside their workplace, where any number of accidents could befall them, they end up dead. It’s mind-boggling, and I don’t know that the parents, wives and husbands, brothers and sisters, or children of the dead will ever be able to come to grips with their loss. The picture in our front page of that woman clutching a girl, probably her daughter, in a tearful embrace, wailing out her grief to the world, says everything about the senselessness, vileness, and perversity of what happened.
Bank robberies are not unknown in this country, and they have been happening more plentifully of late. It’s a sign of the times. The last time I saw this rash of bank robberies was during the twilight of martial law, when lawlessness and drift were rife and criminals felt free to ply their trade with impunity. But this is the first time, as far as I know, where an entire bank crew was executed like prisoners of war by brutal captors. It’s the sort of crime that cries out to the heavens from its sheer gratuitousness. Other bank robberies have been bloody too, but that is because they went bad. A guard or bank employee had tried to resist, a hostage had been gunned down in the crossfire. Or at most the guards were cut down mercilessly to cut off any resistance. This one is completely wholesale and premeditated. This was done by people who are incapable of remorse. This was done by people whose last vestige of humanity has deserted them. The Laguna police call them animals, but even animals just kill for food.
How could something like this have happened? Is it just a fluke of nature? Did we just happen to harbor a bunch of sickos who have added depravity to desperation?
There’s that of course. Other countries do not lack for examples of utter perversity too. We’ve seen how mentally disturbed kids have gone on a murderous rampage in the United States and cut a swath of death and destruction in their wake. And that too has been happening alarmingly of late. I leave the more theologically-minded to argue for the devil running amuck in this world and manifesting itself in this horrific way.
But there is a difference between that example and this one. Which is the element of calculation in this one. The killing sprees in US campuses were done for ends that escape the rational mind, this mass murder was done for an end that does not. It was done to prevent the witnesses from identifying the perpetrators and quite possibly to put a chill in the personnel of the next banks they intend to rob. Of course you can’t discount the possibility they are also sadists and took pleasure in the killing. But the calculation stamps itself out more than any other. Even more horrifying than madness is reason gone berserk. More hellish than insanity is obscene logic. If this one compares with anything, it is with the Nazis inventing the gas chamber to efficiently dispose of the Jews. There is madness in the method and method in the madness. This crime partakes of that monstrosity in essence, if not in scale.
Which plucks this out of the realm of heaven and hell and thrusts it into the province of earth. I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that this rash of bank robberies resembles that of the twilight of martial law, which also left a trail of bodies in its wake. You have no law, you’ll have a wild, wild West. Which was exactly how the country was described then—a wild, wild West.
But even that doesn’t quite capture the pit of our plight. For a wild, wild West presumes only that the arm of the law is not long but amputated and cannot reach out to the wilderness. It does not presume that the law itself is nowhere to be found, least of all among its designated executors. The latter is our case today. It is not merely that the law is unable to stop the lawlessness, it is that the law is unwilling to stop the lawlessness. No, more than that, it is that the law itself is the fountainhead of lawlessness. We do not just have a wild, wild West, or lawlessness at the frontier, we have a wild, wild West, East, North and South, or lawlessness everywhere. Not least in the seat of law, which is government.
Example, not words, is the best teacher. You have government itself going into a killing spree of activists and journalists—directly in the case of the activists and indirectly, by dereliction of duty, in the case of the journalists—you are going to have other criminals going into a killing spree of bank tellers and sundry victims. You have government itself getting away with murder, literal or figurative, you are going to have other criminals thinking they can get away with murder, literal and lethal. This crime partakes of the culture of violence, or the “culture of impunity” as outraged international media organizations have put it, as surely as a ravaging of the body partakes of the culture of gangrene.
The direct consequence of constantly lowering the bar of morality or decency is that morality and decency disappear in the end, to be replaced by lack of conscience or compunction. If you can be outraged by outlaws cold-bloodedly executing nine hostages, you have to be outraged by law enforcers dragging Jonas Burgos in the dead of day to a waiting car and making him disappear forever. You have to be outraged by the now hundreds of activists and journalists who have been shot in the head by their captors, many of them wearing uniforms, and buried in shallow graves.
The people who coined the phrase “culture of impunity” got it completely right. Not just in the word “impunity” but in the word “culture.” Cultures, biological or social, have one definite characteristic:
They spread.
|
