The book title comes from the words of a vigilante named Simon.
“‘I’m really not a bad guy,’ said Simon. ‘I’m not all bad. Some people need killing.'”
Some People Need Killing, by Philippine journalist Patricia Evangelista, is about the democratically elected presidency of Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines. He served from 2016 to 2022.
Duterte campaigned on a controversial platform. He wished to eradicate illegal drugs from the Philippines within six months. He would do this by killing those who imported, sold, or became addicted to illegal drugs. He wished to kill people without offering them rights to due process, such as a trial. He wished to presume people guilty and shoot on sight. He wished to do this in spite of all human rights organizations and advocates who might try to stop him.
Evangelista explains why, in the pre-election campaign period of 2015-16, people might have believed in the goodness of Duterte and decided to vote for him:
“To believe in Rodrigo Duterte, you had to believe he was a killer, or that he was joking when he said he was a killer. You had to believe in the specter of a narco state, or you had to believe that he was only playing to the crowd. You had to believe drug addiction is criminal, that drug addicts are not human, and that their massacre can be considered acceptable public policy. You had to believe he could make crime and corruption and illegal drugs disappear in three to six months. . . .”
In this blog post, I’d like to leave aside the question of whether or not drugs should be legal and focus on the matter of killing people on sight, denying them basic human rights.
In her devastating book, Evangelista chronicles numerous instances, during Duterte’s presidency, of extrajudicial killings. Police, as well as vigilantes encouraged by the police, killed suspected drug users without due process or trial. Instead of arresting someone, they simply found that person and shot them.
Taking away the people’s right to the presumption of innocence, and to a fair trial, opens the door to atrocities. The road of justice is long, and it doesn’t always work as intended, but it’s much better to follow the road of justice and carefully determine a person’s actions and the appropriate judgement, as opposed to taking the irreversible action of brutally shooting a person just because someone put their name on a list.
Other horrors happened, too. Evangelista documents an instance in which a man went to a friend’s house to ask him to repay a loan. He was shot along with his friend, because his friend was a drug user, and he was assumed to be one just because he was there. She documents an instance of a child who begged for mercy from his killer, saying he needed to live because he had an exam the next day at school. She explains that police and vigilantes often shot citizens who had their hands up in surrender, and then later falsely claimed that those citizens had guns and were fighting back and so were killed in the “self-defense” of the police and vigilantes.
This is relevant to the United States. To believe in the current Republican front-runner, you have to believe that he wishes to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country”—or that he was joking when he said that. Comparing citizens to “vermin” is the same tactic that Duterte used when he took the stance that drug addicts are somehow not human. And it is the same exact word (in translation, obviously) used by Adolf Hitler. To read what Hitler said in a 1942 speech about “vermin,” see the paragraph at the top of page 96 here.
To believe in the current Republican front-runner, you have to believe in the specter of a dictatorship, or that he was merely playing to the crowd when he said he wouldn’t be a dictator “other than day one.” A dictator, according to Merriam-Webster, is “a person with unlimited governmental power.” Such a person has no constraint to follow reasonable steps to protect people from being wrongfully accused; Duterte did not concern himself with such steps. Becoming a dictator of the United States for any amount of time, even for one second, is surely enough time to dismantle the Constitution and all human rights guaranteed therein.
Words mean things. People should have human rights.
Do you think all people are human?
