Crimes against humanity: Inflection point

The inflection is on the word humanity. These are not crimes against humans alone.

There are crimes and there are crimes. For most part, these are wrongs visited on individuals. Often, too, groups, and even fairly large communities, are violated, mostly at frays or breaking points of the ways the many human societies weave themselves together.

Occasionally, the transgressions are shocking, even to humans with a cultivated cynicism. Euphemisms are invented to soften the impact of such deeds on the squeamish, for instance: collateral damage.

Human beings are collectively the only species known to kill for pleasure. But even the brutishness of pathological human predators (for instance, serial killers) are globally assumed to be aberrations that can be neutralized by the various human societies within the order of things each subscribes to.

Crimes against humanity are an entirely different matter. These threaten the definition of being human and transcend boundaries between and among human communities.

HUMANITY
The accusations against former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, lodged with the International Criminal Court (ICC), are of crimes against humanity. It bears reiterating: not against humans alone.

The details of each instance of horrendous death — about which Duterte is charged with ordering, or inspiring, or creating the environment for — concern individuals on the wrong side of his “policies.” Without an assiduous press and civil society, the victims would have remained anonymous.

Many Filipinos regard these as crimes against humans that can be processed into retributive outcomes within the Philippine legal system.

There is considerable noise about sovereignty at stake: that the “foreign,” in this case the ICC, transgresses the Filipino right to self-determination. That, yet again, the colonial powers (the hoary ghosts!) are trampling Philippine independence underfoot. Even senators who should know better, snivel thus.

There is even bigger noise about the “right” of Philippine society to its own definition of human rights. They mistakenly cite the beheadings that are part of Saudi Arabia’s criminal justice system, for instance, to argue that crime and punishment are culture based and should allow for radical variation.

And this is the point where “culture” is hauled in to refract the very idea of crimes against humanity.

THE ANONYMOUS
The relative or metaphoric anonymity of the victims of Duterte’s drug war seems to support this abominable twisting of the global consensus on crimes against humanity.

Anonymity allows for victims to be tarred, wholesale, as a threatening group of humans — drug addicts or dealers whose numbers are so large they require extermination as vermin — and consigned to a collective image of a scourge on society.

Typically, these are the poor. Their crimes are (also typically) misdemeanors. Only a few actual drug dealers were brought to punishment, and these and the rest of the cases are extrajudicial kills.

Moreover, the kills were deliberately made out to be pictures that horrify. In fact, maximum horrification. (And woefully, maximum stretch of language use to encompass terror.)

For Filipinos to agree, as a nation, to be terrified into submission to a rule and environment of extrajudicial killings, is to succumb to blindness to the staging, the performance of the terrifying.

And submission and blindness are only possible if the individual victims are not people, really, but a collectivity defined exclusively by the executioners and the source of orders to kill.

To many privileged Filipinos, even to the middle class, the poor are not people.

And when the president of the Philippines avowed that “drug addicts are not human,” the stage was set for impunity.

THE PROPOSITION
To be sure, the overt victims of Dutertean horror-making are individuals with lives to live — many, youth who merit presumption of hopefulness about better futures than the abject circumstances of their time of death.

But what constitutes crimes against humanity is more than their violent ends. Which, yes, indeed, can be or should be dealt within the Philippine criminal justice system.

The larger picture includes dehumanizing the poor and treating them as props to power-mongering, the staging of bodies for a years-long stretch of terrorizing images, the pressuring of the Filipino national community towards acceptance of a politics of fatal hatred, the parading of grisly executions in front of the global community of nations as a Filipino version of justice, and the appropriation of cultural explanation to rationalize validity for this form of madness.

All these are a single proposition to the world: that being human, at this point of human history, includes horror-making as a form of governance. That the victims are inconsequential humans, indeed non-humans.

That the state is entitled to exercise lethal power outside the legal system. That theater as governance can take the form of the theater of the macabre.

That being human includes the deadly irony that extrajudicial killings can be judicial for a “good” cause, which, in the Philippines under Duterte, was the false narrative of national salvation from narco-economics.

This proposition — snuff pornography writ large is a form of humanity — is a crime against humanity.

Marian Pastor Roces is an independent curator and critic of institutions. Her body of work addresses the intersection of culture and politics.