WHAT are we to make foreign media accounts of extrajudicial killings? Are they biased?
Yes. They are biased for the truth—the truth so far as foreign journalists can find it.
But is there a larger truth they are missing, which only government knows but cannot reveal?
No. Whatever government says it withholds does not exist. I know. I worked in government, at the very highest level. The ignorance there is breathtaking, and the pretention of knowing is equally so.
Again, is foreign media biased?
Yes. Biased in favor of good journalists with the talent to find the truth. And biased in favor of those with the talent to write or otherwise tell it well.
Yes, but…
But…but what?
Are they paid off?
This kind of story cannot be paid for. And nobody will pay for it; certainly not foreign governments, which do far worse than we do.
I know the foreign media and how hard, and professionally risky, it is for them to be dishonest—unless they cover business, where lying is the truth.
In the West
you have to be the best.
Every other journalist worth his or her salt is out to get you: get you by writing better and getting it more right than you. Everyone wants a crack at Pulitzer.
I have read four foreign articles so far. The last one has nothing to do with drugs and everything to do with why we should have a bigger drug problem among the poor than we do.
I can dispute the first.
I am totally speechless about
the last.
I am amazed at the brilliance of the second and third.
Time magazine describes the killings accurately; especially the exclusive focus on the poor, and the random and reckless disregard evident in the victim selection.
Time is right: Percentage-wise, the crime problem of the United States, of the so-far-still United Kingdom, of Russia and of other major powers are far worse than our own. We have far less rapes; far fewer murders; far-less loose guns; far less drugs for the rich and far less shabu for the poor, than advanced countries do.
But the advanced countries have evolved into police states. The militarization of the police in the US has erased any distinction between cops who go after Americans (especially the swarthy ones) and soldiers who kill Afghans. If the drug problem there gets really out of hand, the problem can be erased overnight.
The police in advanced countries have given up all but one vice: the satisfaction of taking out bad elements. And their legal systems permit any way they choose to do it—or it looks the other way. These powers can eliminate their drug problems overnight. The Philippines cannot.
As early as Corazon C. Aquino—and, therefore, starting with Marcos high-ranking members of the military were involved in the drug trade. The timely intervention of a foreign power stopped its spread. You recall the Magallanes incident.
Bang, bang.
They were dead.
But drug-trade spread, this time among the police—not as addicts, but protectors. Without police protection the drug trade cannot prosper. As a result, the ability of our state to cope with, let alone erase, the drug problem has been seriously compromised.
The Time piece reassures us that, crime-wise statistically, we are better off than rich countries. But the same piece shows us that we better do something about it while we can. (Before it gets completely out of hand because we haven’t the native guts, the necessary training, and the logistical firepower of Central and Latin American security forces. We are just no good at peace and order. And the comparatively better peace and order we enjoy comes from a native inclination to decency and the native criminals’ lack of imagination.)
The next piece is by the LA Times. It is a dark and poignant account of a woman killer for hire who will be the next victim of her profession. Too poor to keep her own kids alive without her night job, she is making orphans of other children.
The LA Times piece shows us that our cops are not doing it alone. They have hired help. This is important because we have to know what the cops are doing, so that when all the wet jobs that are needed to be done are done, the same thing can be done to them. (Duterte has put up a P2- million bounty for dirty cops. Nice. There truly is no problem that cannot be solved permanently by homicide.)
Hitler did it that way. First, use whatever means that lie at hand, however dirty, and then clean up after yourself and throw the dirty rag away.
The last piece appears in the New Yorker. It is by Rachel Aviv. It is a long piece. About the hard, nearly impossible life of a Filipina, like that of many other Filipinas who went from poverty in the Philippines to poverty in the United States. This was an improvement. They had to raise enough money abroad to raise family back home. If that is not a good reason to get stoned, I don’t know what is. And yet, 100 percent of Filipino women working as domestic slaves abroad
Face
Each
Empty
Backbreaking workday,
Stone
Cold
Sober.
2 comments
As always: brilliant and interesting and challenging.
NOW: the big bad problem of building a fair & fast-track Judicial system, … and a prison rehab system THAT WORKS. no bribes.
(well, we can dream can’t we?)
Seriously, Church and State ought to work together as much as possible on such problems.
Well anyway, all things considered: let me just say this and get it all off my chest: with two horrendous and completely insane World Wars in the past century, the Korean War, the Vietnam bloody, stinking war, the Afgan & Iraqi wars, countless civil wars and “lesser” wars, etc. etc. and then the worldwide abortion holocaust, PLUS the so-called “population explosion” and the erosion of natural resources as a result, … well, let me just say that I think THE DEVALUATION of human life (in my life time of about 70 years) is *absolutely horrific,* – and maybe even *that* is an understatement ! It’s way more than sad and bodes ill, very ill for the human race and whatever future may be left to it.