President Rodrigo Duterte once compared himself to the German dictator Adolf Hitler. Now, during tour of Israeli Holocaust memorial, he calls the Nazi leader ‘insane’. Photo shows Duterte with his daughter, Sara Duterte-Carpio, laying a wreath in honor of victims of the Jewish Holocaust. (Photo courtesy Los Angeles Times)
(Albert) Camus said, ‘Where there is no hope, one must invent hope.’ It is only pessimistic if you stop with the first half of the sentence and just say, There is no hope. Like Camus, even when it seems hopeless, I invent reasons to hope — Romanian-American writer Elie Wiesel
NO less than Pope Francis has warned: “The world is confronted with an ‘escalation of evil’.”
The ‘escalation of evil’, according to the pope, builds up an “even greater contempt for human dignity and rights . . .” and the antidote to this escalation of evil is remembrance—remembrance of the past, remembrance of its wars, remembrance of the Shoah and of countless other atrocities. In the 1930s, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany became the world’s unstoppable Frankenstein monster and its victims were countless defenseless Jews who were butchered and killed by Hitler’s henchmen animated by the ideology of Aryan supremacy.
During these brutal times, The Führer became a merciless dictator who dared to judge other people as “subhuman.” That was the basis for his order to massacre all Jews, defective children in the womb, the comatose, inutile grandparents in homes for the aged and prisoners on death row—everything in open defiance of God’s 5th Commandment: “Thou shalt not kill.” And fast forward to September 2016 . . . Three months after taking power, former Davao City mayor Rodrigo Roa Duterte—the man they called The Punisher—became president and he dared to compare his bloody war on illegal drugs to Hitler’s Holocaust: “Hitler massacred three million Jews (incorrect statistics). Now, there are three million drug addicts . . . I’d be happy to slaughter them.”
And now towards the end of Duterte’s presidency, the culture of impunity, murder and plunder has reached an alarming level with at least 6,000 persons dead in police anti-drug operations. Hitler’s method was done strategically that the persecution, experimentation and genocide of six million Jews were carried out in stages and culminated in the so-called “final solution to the Jewish question.” Similarly, to achieve his goal, Duterte mobilized all government agencies to obtain his end and inadvertently promote extra-judicial killings (EJKs).
The International Criminal Court prosecutor counted 12,000 to 30,000 dead bodies of civilians killed between 2016 and 2019 in connection with Duterte’s war on drugs.
But this has been argued by government agencies, particularly the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) which estimated the death reaching only 6,201 only. But to this end the Catholic Cvhurch has become extremely concerned. In a joint pastoral message dated Sept. 12, 2021, archbishops Marlo Peralta of Nueva Segovia, Socrates Villegas of Lingayen-Dagupan and Ricardo Baccay of Tuguegarao jointly expressed their alarm: “Bullets kill. Viruses kill. Governance without direction kills. Corruption kills. Trolls kill with fake news. Hunger kills. When will the killings stop? The poor pay for the corruption of the powerful. The nation is sinking in debt.”
In September 2018, Amnesty International reminded Duterte “to restore respect for human rights on the 46th anniversary of martial law.” Moreover, it reminded gullible and forgetful Filipinos that in playing the game of brinkmanship, Ferdinand Marcos Sr. declared martial law in 1972 and ruled as a merciless dictator, leaving a legacy of more than 100,000 victims: 3,000 were killed, 34,000 tortured and 70,000 arrested, as history has documented.
To this, though, we expound from the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who is credited for theorizing that “the power to forget, not the power to remember, is the key to happiness.”
This appears to be the way to happiness for more than 31 million Filipinos. It appears they suffer from collective amnesia as they conveniently and subjectively forget the mistakes of history.
Still, we are reminded that history never forgets. It may repeat itself to teach its citizens about ignorance, empowerment and authentic leadership—but history should never be forgotten. We can never run away from who we are. To young Filipinos who are fairly gullible and the ‘young once’ who are becoming forgetful, as proven by the results of last month’s presidential election, what Pope Francis had told the Jewish service group known as B’nai B’rith International (the Hebrew name means ‘Children of the Covenant’): “Remembrance is an antidote to the escalation of evil,” applies almost perfectly to our situation.
* * *
