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By TILDE ACUÑA

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They have taken our liberty to move freely. They claimed that the COVID-19 virus remains invisible and largely unknown. For more than two months even if we had our reservations, we obeyed.

But mass testing, contact tracing and isolation did not come with what they called “quarantine” even if it is just a euphemism for a lockdown. We waited and waited. We called for health measures, as well as social protection for the economically displaced. Government gave us checkpoints, canned goods and cash good for only a few days while many stomachs grumbled. Indeed, fathers and mothers now eat anxiety for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Those who could not contain their anger and frustration used their voice as a weapon. The middle class turned to social media while the urban poor with no access to the Internet made their hand-painted placards, “Gutom na kami. Nasaan ang ayuda?” (We’re hungry. Where’s government aid?)

Now government wants to lock down even the faintest voices of dissent.

No, it did not matter if Ronnel Mas or Ronald Quiboyen were merely exaggerating. How could a teacher afford P50 million, or a construction worker give P100 million to anyone who would kill President Rodrigo Duterte? Aren’t the authorities aware that rhetorical hyperbole is protected speech?

Presidential Security Group (PSG) Chief Col. Jesus Durante III said, “I would just like to convey to the people not to be involved in any way of threatening the President or anybody, especially with the use of social media.” “Anybody could be held liable if he threatens to harm or kill a person. What more if the one (who) is threatened is the President of the Republic?” he added.

Durante knows that no ordinary citizen could even get close to him, without having to pass through the PSG.

In a span of a week, two others were arrested and charged with inciting to sedition and violations of Republic Act No. 10175 or the Cybercrime Prevention Act. The message is clear: Shut up or you’ll end up in jail.

While it is true that ordinary citizens are expected to maintain civility, speaking out should not be criminalized. We are being punished for demanding from government what it should have been doing in the midst of a health crisis.

We are being treated as enemies by those who should be held accountable for where we are now, still locked up in our homes because government continues to disregard science in its fight against the deadly virus.

Even journalists who perform truth-telling are now fair game to the resident of Malacañan Palace and his minions. They want to silence, nay, control like a rag doll tied to the hands of a tyrant, media giant ABS-CBN. The five-month provisional franchise is a message to behave.

Supporters who rally behind the media network are demonized and called all sorts of names. Copy-paste trolls are mobilized to drown out posts by real people who have been affected by the other virus called government. Using our money as taxpayers, government spends millions to intimidate us into silence.

Speak we must. Speech is a weapon we must wield to prevent evil from becoming more evil. If we allow the powers-that-be to take it away from us, we might wake up one day deprived of our other rights. It is our civic duty to fight fear and spread courage.

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The proclamation of the state of health emergency was hijacked by the government to dismantle people’s solidarities and put in place dictatorial rule that wiped out human, civil and political rights. Thus grotesquely rises, in the quasi-hobbesian sense, an all absorbing Leviathan.

By TOMAS TALLEDO*
Bulatlat.com

“This hyper vigilant, threat-seeking way of living is exhausting…they build a bomb shelter and live out of it, eating canned beans until the inevitable apocalypse comes.” — Jordan Grey

I. We’re all prisoners

Our days of being lockdowned will soon total into months. There are of course variations in our respective experience but only as circumstance warrants. But what’s common in our predicament is the enforced immobility, shrinkage of space and shackled sociality. In a broad meaning of experiences, we are all prisoners. And the uncertainty or absence of deadline for our ultimate release from this confinement exacerbates our isolation and suffering.

Some of us have access to food but many others don’t because of strict regulations or limited supply. This is no different from packed mega jails in the country. We cannot receive visitors nor we can visit our significant others for consociation. We are required to accomplish sets of documents just to enjoy a modicum range of liberties. We are treated as convicts but without our day in Court.

While on government imposed quarantine, feelings of helplessness, ennui and anxiety assault our equanimity, our well being. We watch the world shrinks as our physical body morphs into Kafka’s cockroach as in diurnal dreams. Nightmare is our unwelcomed companion. This imprisonment sentences death of our fun, our desires, our freedoms.

II. Shrinkage of our sociality 

The government imposed quarantine shrunk our sociality that results in narrowing of our humanity, the single dimensionality of vision that are dominated by fear and finally by paranoia. These fear and paranoia are darkly projected on “outsiders,” on those who aren’t part of our immediate circle of people.

While safety rests with the in-groups of household and close neighbors, edginess spurts from possible encounter with strangers, those unfamiliar but suspected to be lethal “contaminants”. We don the cloak of the irascible. Little of our knowing, we slide into behaving as primitive kids of the Lord of Flies tribe.

The pandemic virus appears to be the apparent reason for the shrinkage of our interactivity but the composite of governmental agencies is the responsible machine that shredded the fabric our sociality. We became estranged from each other when we’re classified by the sanitary regime. And the regime’s project of estrangement is accomplished when “hating each other” comes as default norm.

A living witness, Ai Xiaoming, in his Wuhan Diary with anguish cried: “We need to ask ourselves about the root causes of this behaviour—of abandoning others, and even inciting hatred. How can we have become so cruel, inhuman and barbaric? It seems that when we are confronted with this epidemic, we lose the capacity for rational analysis and thinking, resorting to methods that are primitive, uncivilized and inhumane” [NEW LEFT REVIEW March-April 2020].

The proclamation of the state of health emergency was hijacked by the government to dismantle people’s solidarities and put in place dictatorial rule that wiped out human, civil and political rights. Thus grotesquely rises, in the quasi-hobbesian sense, an all absorbing Leviathan.

III. The rise of Hobbesian authority and the Philippine state 

The rise of an intolerant authority presiding over the existence of the state was the pet idea of Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), an English philosopher loyal to monarchy. That the intolerant authority is hostile to the primacy of individual freedom and liberties portrays our current situation. We detect that the Constitutional Declaration (Article II) that the Philippines is a democratic and republican state is hastily now being dismantled. Ironically the insidous instrument in the dismantling of our republican state are unjust executions of laws weaponized against Justice.

Parenthetically, in democracy emergency type of laws exist in principle as temporary remedy to defend the life of the state or when “state of exeption” occurs just like the ancient Roman notion of Justitium. The reigning person in this condition claims for himself the auctoritas (necessary authority) that temporarily suspends ordinary laws but never to abrogate them. Justitium was and is to be interpreted as life preserving, never life extinguishing as in the frightening death of the discharged army Corporal Winston Ragos.

The democratic emergency law never inaugurates the lease-majeste that criminalised an offense against the dignity of the person of the President of the Republic. The holder of that position is not the personification of the state as he is only mortal and ephemeral. The claim for instance of Col. Jesus Durante (Chief of Presidential Security Group) that “threatening people was not right, especially if the target was the President” in the context of an exaggerated social media post of killing Rodrigo Roa Duterte reads absolutist if not ancient.

But we have already left the baggage of past absolutisms behind. We now live in the age of modern global epoch of decolonization, of revolutions and of the expansion and deepening rights of persons as citizens of nation-states. And the citizen’s ultimate power to check the rise of a Hobbesian ruler resides in their right to revolution. This right is unstated in the Constitution because is lodged in the hearts of the people. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1787, “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure”.

*Faculty Member of the Division of Social Sciences, U. P. Miag-ao, Iloilo Campus

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