Like animals

On Dec. 7 we were on the front page of The New York Times website, an interactive feature that allows you to read text interspersed with photos and videos.

When you go into the webpage you find the feature prominently located, and the photographs come in as a slide show. They are disturbing, as is the title: “They are Slaughtering Us Like Animals.”

You can guess what it was about. The text and photographs are by Daniel Berehulak, a veteran journalist who has covered armed conflicts. This time, his 35-day assignment to the Philippines brought him to 41 homicide scenes and 57 victims in President Duterte’s war on drugs.

The mildest photos are mild, meaning the people are still alive, arrested and thrown into jail. There’s a classic photo that’s been used in many articles, and a recent global report on how not to solve the drug problem.  It shows several male inmates, presumably rounded up for suspicions of drug use, sleeping on the floor and literally packed like sardines, in all kinds of positions.

Again, such photos are mild, followed by photos of grieving widows, parents, children. Funeral scenes.  There’s a scene from a morgue captioned “stacked like firewood,” and indeed they were, the corpses.

The gross photographs are those of people just executed, mostly bloodied, but I always get most affected by the ones that are bloodless, and faceless. Contorted bodies, and faces wrapped with layers of duct tape.

Then there are the videos. The most dismaying one in The New York Times is CCTV footage showing a man being pushed to board a motorcycle, with two masked men riding tandem.  They drive off and then several people are shown chasing after the motorcycle. There’s a woman’s voice commenting on the footage and you learn that the woman, and children, who followed the motorcycle were relatives.  You cannot hear their voices, but you can imagine their screams, their appeals for help, maybe for mercy.

Read the texts, including the account of an execution, with one of the murderers talking to the victim casually before firing, then laughing with his two companions.

‘Foreigners don’t understand’

Then read the readers’ comments, including the ones defending the murders. Nothing new: We get them all the time from trolls on social media.  But I am shocked at how callous people can be in response to an article as graphic as this one with photos and videos. No one can say these were fabricated, but those defending the war on drugs use the standard lines: Foreigners just don’t understand why we have to do this, or that these are not Mr. Duterte’s actions, or his police, and that these are drug lords at war with one another.

The defensive postings are as innovative as the police’s explanations of prisoners who die in custody. There is in fact one photograph captioned “Nanlaban,” which journalists have picked up as the standard excuse of the police: The suspect fought back, and so was shot dead. We see how nanlaban translates into corpses.

“Please,” a journalist-friend told me some weeks back, “can’t they at least have new scripts?” But I proposed an explanation: “They don’t see the need to have new scripts. They know people know, and they know people have stopped wanting to know.”

The journalist-friend was telling me about how media people—writers or photographers—were beginning to get affected by all the blood and gore, daily scenes they have to cover.

I thought, but what about the ones who witness the killings as they occur, in their homes, in their streets? The New York Times article captures these scenes; in fact, the article starts: “You hear a murder scene before you see it.”

How true. Many of us live away from the killing fields, which are mostly urban poor areas, but I do wonder at times in the middle of the night: Were those firecrackers or gunshots?  I have not heard the wailing of widows and orphans, and I hope I will never have to, even as I know every day somewhere in Metro Manila and other urban centers, the night is pierced by the anguished cries of victims about to be executed, or of relatives and friends rushing to someone just executed.

One photograph shows the police carrying a corpse on a stretcher, past a fast-food place with the patrons, and food servers, staring from the inside. It’s a story to tell when they get home.

Rationalizing

There are tons of articles about the way our minds rationalize, or try to explain away these tragedies. It’s part of a human survival mechanism to want to think these are still isolated incidents, that these are drug lords battling one another. No, it can’t be the government. Okay, if it’s the government, maybe it’s an isolated incident, scalawags are found in all organizations.

We had that same kind of rationalization right after martial law was declared. We heard rumors all the time about people being picked up, then, later, about torture and executions. But in that pre-internet, pre-mobile cameras era, it was not until a year or two after martial law was declared that blurred photographs appeared.  Always antiseptic, no gory details.  In many cases, just ID photographs of the victims.

Now we see violence as it unfolds, in wars all over our planet, and in the wars here in our backyards. There was that front-page photograph of a farmer in Palawan shot to death by a security guard, cradled in the arms of another farmer. I don’t know how many of you saw the video, which showed how the security forces came in and confronted protesting farmers. Then the execution. Then a woman screaming.

The war on drugs brings out an ugly side of the human psyche, and this daily exposure can desensitize us, so that we see it almost as normal, like we do with road kill: the dogs and cats run down by cars.

We can shrug and move on with life. That’s what we were told during martial law: No, the killings are lies, communist propaganda. After martial law and the exposés of the human rights atrocities that occurred, we are told: That happened so long ago, let’s move on.

And I want to say, Yes, I have moved on, but why do we now keep stumbling into scenes replaying the past, now in full HD color, now in full motion? In the 1970s all we had were black-and-white photographs, silent ones. Today the photos and videos scream at you, even those of the faceless ones.

Dare we turn away?

mtan@inquirer.com.ph