On Probe: Political Killings

The military is one of the examples of the repressive state apparatus. The repressive state apparatus’ function is to channel the state’s will and to assert the state itself. Whatever happens, the state will use the repressive state apparatus to crush descent. Descents are deviations or disturbances that are seen as disorganizations to the social order, seen as threat to the leviathan-like government. The leviathan has to assert itself. So it happens… violence.

Contrary to the repressive state apparatus it counterpart called ideological state apparatus which instructions like that family, educational system and the media which shape how we think and what we should think. For me, sometimes, in some cases, it is this kind of state apparatus could critically harm us because it attacks stealthily, without us knowing that we commit ourselves to an ideology without our rational consent.

Fronts

The P 1B-funded anti-insurgency campaign GMA (OPLAN BANTAY-LAYA) was allegedly targeting affiliations of legal organizations which give critique to the current. It includes student activists, peasant unions, workers unions, religious organizations, urban-poor organizations, and other which empower the mass. The government rages a war against it’s political destabilizers—to be put down and to keep the others silent—not to engage in the same act to those who had shed blood. What is wrong here it that these entities are legal organizations and mistakenly or intentionally attacked by the military with the approval of the administration.

Universality of Human Rights

There raised the issue of the universality of human rights. Several political entities strive to protect people from abuse and other forms of violation of the human rights. I was astonished on how the authors and the essays deconstructed human rights. It was said that human rights are only for the whites and should be universalized.

Human rights is something arbitrary. In anthropology, anthropologists’ greatest challenge in their practice of field work is their critical predicament on how to react on the violence they observe on their respondents in their ethnologies. One specific case is in studying Islamic culture, when FGM is seen, in a perspective of an American eye, as something inhumane and irrational. The question goes like this, do we really have the right to intervene and change it? What make us right and what makes us wrong? Is it funny to think that changing a ‘violation’ of human rights a form of violation?

Cultural patterns are not as simple as counting 1-2-3 and guessing what’s next. Thus, there is no such thing as a universal standard of human rights. Simply, the whole idea of it is very ethnocentric. How do we know someone’s culture is wrong? How do we define wrong? People were not raised similarly on the same milieu. What I am trying say, based on the arguments, is that the step of universalizing human rights is simply giving the right for others to violate you. Thus, I believe that imposing universality of human rights would rather be a violation of human rights itself. It would rather annihilate differences since realities don’t work though a same process.

If this would be the core rationality of the urge to universalize human rights—though crushing insurgent entities, democratization of Islamic countries, etc.—something is not right. Why do we have to universalize? I believe that the whole concept is not humanitarian in nature but economic and political. It is to subtly dissolve the walls that divide the different states from being open markets. For me, a political economy does not always work well in all perspectives. They want to globalize the world into a single economic ‘nation’ which only benefit few. If someone’s got to win and someone has got to suffer. Thus it heightens the polarity of the economic classes.

Journalists at Stake

We fill the 2^nd notch, next to Iraq (the first in the list of the most cases violence against and death of journalists. The present administration already includes journalists as its enemy, thinking they are fronts of one of the insurgent groups the CPP-NPA. Now we call our country democratic.

Democracy as Questioned

Democracy! Is it really democracy that we practice? I really agreed on the cohesive antagonistic approaches of the essays to our country’s repressive state criticizing democracy.

Democracy in our context, in globalised 3^rd World Country, our civic liberty as a citizen of the estate is just something floating in the air—just a name we do not really practice. This freedom we mistakenly identify as civic liberty is just freedom to consume goods, but still we are being deprived for the rights that we are legally and legitimately entitled to.

It is said that anybody can run for presidency but how come only those who have possession of capital (may they be economic, cultural or social) are the only ones qualified to be legitimate for candidacy.

Democracy, when we could shift TV channels anytime but does not give us the right to redefine the nature of media.

Democracy, when we have leader incapable of proving that she really was voted by the people. She might lie about fact that she is legit (technically) but what a matter is that he is sadly unwanted.

Democracy, when journalists can bring the hottest gossips about celebrities; however, news that talks about ‘their lives at stake’ does not reach the newsprint.

Democracy, when the government does not practice it and does not even provide social confidence to its people who practice the so-called democracy.

Democracy, when the government turn its back on the economic interest and rights for resources of the populace while serving the interest of transnational corporations, its political allies, including ‘Uncle Sam,’ which helped the leader to be put into office.

If democracy really reins, how do we explain the government’s defiance of public welfare and the irrelevance of its actions to the country’s vision of progress and betterment?

Life surely is paradoxical—an oxymoron.

The Solution

I could not hide the fact the people turn back on me when I pursue that idea that there is still hope to the current political conditions and trends in our country.

Though being aware, not only about the ‘facts & figures’, but also knowing the implications, the meaning, of such we can help. I believe that the self had never been apart from the society, the reality, which he/she is living in. I know that there are many aversions towards mass demonstrations because on how they are portrayed by the media, family or may be educational institutions. They are always associated to violence, with riots, with irrational societal disturbance, which should be corrected.

I knowledge also that all of us have different levels of capacities and it should not be the gap that should segregate us into groups but instead unite us because we belong into a nation (though our nationhood is arguably questioned). Having these invitations presented, we should not consider these present conditions as totally beyond of our control. They seem to be beyond of our control because we are afraid to try to take control—to suspend those people who are in power, who do not embody the vision of our country but instead push for a totalitarian power. All we need is a unified revolution which would withstand the pressures of public stigmatization of the mass, economic constrains and threats that kept us hiding in the dark to urge for a nationalistic unified goal.

It is not important that we know if we belong to the left, the right or the center, but that rationality of the choice that makes a difference.