The Contemporary History of Duterte's Mass Murder

Abstract

118 A & Q The Contemporary History of Duterte’s Mass Murder Lisandro E. Claudio How does one write contemporary history amid mass murder? This A&Q asks us to reflect on the historian’s responsibility to current events, so I would like to take the opportunity to discuss the crimes against humanity happening in my country. A historian of Philippine politics must confront the gruesome reality of more than four thousand poor Filipinos (the most conservative estimate ) butchered in President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs (Talabong 2018). That same historian must also grapple with the fact that few object to these murders and that their perpetrator remains wildly popular (Talabong 2018). The images are familiar by now: dead bodies on the street, with cardboard signs declaring “I’m a pusher; don’t imitate me”; morgues with bodies stacked like firewood; families who wail outside police cordons, as onlookers take selfies with the lifeless fathers, husbands, or brothers of the bereaved. It is the poor who are murdered. And in class-­stratified Philippines, it is easy for someone of my class background to ignore them. I work in a university in downtown Manila, where killings are common, and a short walk from my office takes me to an urban poor slum subjected to periodic police brutality. But that is not a walk I have to take. I can wall myself off in my gated university, my gated subdivision, and my air-­conditioned car. And since I have not had the stomach to join journalists reporting on the killings, I have not seen dead bodies. Yet while I have avoided these bodies, I struggle to avoid their ghosts. It is historiography that forces me to confront the bloodshed. I could try burrowing my head in the not-­so-­distant past, since, like many Filipino historians, I have a fascination with the nineteenth century—­the period of Jose Rizal and the Philippine Revolution. But the topics I write about—­ the state and the ideas that shape it—­draw me to the blood-­soaked present . I once wrote about the history of Filipino socialism (Claudio 2013), and now, amid what some consider a reactionary turn, I write about the history of Philippine liberalism (Claudio 2017). And the question I ask myself is, Whither these political traditions in the age of Duterte’s populism ? I have no idea. But even if I did, I would not trust myself, because my powers of prediction are shot. Historians of contemporary history are perennially tempted to predict , believing as they do that historical training accords them a unique A & Q 119 insight into the patterns of sociopolitical change. I once shared in this conceit—­ a conceit I can no longer maintain today. In my hubris, I once believed in the stability of Philippine liberal democracy . I did not acknowledge it before, but I may have, in retrospect, fallen into the liberal trap of foreseeing an end of history. I certainly did not believe that my country had solved its major problems, and I accepted the clichés about its political economy: oligarchic, corrupt, unequal. But I also thought that the Philippines, with its vibrant activist community and long democratic heritage, was strengthening its political institutions. I marveled at our breakneck economic growth under the presidency of Benigno Aquino III (2010–­ 16). To friends who found my optimism ill-­ founded, I replied with a facetious, comparative area studies–­ inspired quip: “At least we’re in better shape than Malaysia with its racist ruling coalition, or Thailand with its junta.” My country’s history “ended” in February 1986, after the overthrow of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos and the installation of Corazon Aquino as president. The bloodless EDSA (Epifanio delos Santos Avenue, where the revolution occurred) “People Power” Revolution not only ended a dictatorship but also blunted the appeal of the Maoist Left. For much of Marcos’s thirty-­ year rule, it was the Maoist Communist Party Philippines (CPP) that led opposition to authoritarianism, with the bourgeois opposition asserting itself only in the 1980s. But when Aquino ran against Marcos in the snap election of 1985, the Maoists and their legal fronts boycotted the election. Most of them were likewise absent from protests against Marcos’s...