I have to congratulate the Inquirer for the photo titled “Lamentation,” on the Front Page of its July 24’s issue. Rarely has a single picture so powerfully captured everything that is wrong with the current administration’s silence, if not tacit approval, of vigilante killings.
President Duterte should take notice of an old ballad by Goethe and Schiller, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” where the apprentice in the end could no longer control the forces he had unleashed.
Vigilantism of this kind appeals to the lowest and most savage of human instincts and it will be very difficult, if not impossible, to put that genie back in the bottle. The people who carry out these brutal killings are no better than the ones they murder. But more appalling than those murders is the eerie silence of the wider society about it. As a German of the immediate postwar generation, I can still remember how we questioned our parents about how something as horrific as the Nazi atrocities could have happened without the populace standing up against it.
No matter what each of us may think about this, in the end nothing good can come out of something like this. The end does not justify the means, if it puts human values and civilized conduct at risk. The righteous man is only righteous because he maintains accepted humanitarian standards even in the face of adversity. Our continued silence about these murders will only embolden the perpetrators to do worse. Where will it stop? Now it is the drug offenders—suspected or proven; soon it might be anyone else who disagrees with those in power.
I would like to close with a liberal translation of the German pastor Martin Niemoeller, who was himself a victim of the Nazi terror:
“When the Nazis rounded up the communists, I remained silent; I wasn’t a communist.
“When they looked up the social democrats, I remained silent; I wasn’t one of them.
“When they incarcerated the unionists, I remained silent; I was no unionist.
“When they came for me, there was nobody left who could protest.”
—U. BOSSE, Antipolo, Rizal