Going over the pointedly partisan reactions to the International Criminal Court (ICC) confirmation hearings against former strongman Rodrigo Duterte gave us a clearer sense of the tragic truths of political philosopher Hannah Arendt’s famous insight on the “banality of evil.”
Arendt’s “banality of evil” is the idea that evil isn’t just the handiwork of the Satan-like, of the twisted men and women whom we typically associate it with.
Rather, evil is just as equally malevolent as when ordinary people, going about their lives, normalize over time immoral principles that these twisted people kick-started.
And, once this evil becomes commonplace, when it becomes the everyday, ordinary people become either complicit actors in a shameless system perpetuating evil or are desensitized enough to believe nothing is wrong with murdering millions.
Though Arendt wrote about the “banality of evil” after closely examining the crimes of Nazi Germany, she expressly warned that the gradual normalization of evil can occur anywhere, anytime and on any scale.
Tragically, Arendt’s prescience about such a form of evil engulfed us too, shrouding even the methodical scrutiny of the former strongman’s brutal war on illegal drugs by the ICC where, in an aside by a chuckling pundit, lawyers are simply called Mister or Miss, to the eternal embarrassment of the pro-Duterte, title-conscious Filipino “tornis” sent as props to the hearings.
Anyway, of the declarations during the hearings, human rights lawyer Joel Butuyan’s powerful legal brief last Monday before the ICC judges made Arendt’s warning a damning reality.
“Mr. Duterte has created clones of himself. He converted millions of peace-loving citizens into bloodthirsty disciples who have become converts to the belief that violence and killings are valid solutions to social problems,” Butuyan declared at one point.
Butuyan’s legal brief wasn’t just a contemptuous damning of the former strongman or his cohorts for their alleged crimes against humanity but was also, as one saddened observer reacted, “talking about us,” particularly the perversion of our very souls.
It was about many of us who at one time laughed and applauded Duterte’s promise to dump thousands of Filipinos in Manila Bay to fatten the fish.
It was about many of us who “convinced ourselves that extrajudicial killings were acceptable as long as they happened to ‘other people’s sons and brothers and fathers;’” or the many of us who didn’t know they were blindly walking into a moral depravity when they decided that some people’s lives were not important or not as valuable as others.
Butuyan, in short, laid out the tragic case that the warped, inhumane values of the Duterte hallucinatory, tropically-fevered regime still lives rent-free in our heads, between people, in the home, everywhere.
As such, Arendt’s central claim that great evil is not only enabled by cult-like fanatics but also by ordinary individuals who still fail to think, still surrendering their moral judgements to authority and sinister, mercenary influencers to this day.
Worse is the fact that trying to cut down the “banality of evil” tree is a hard slog. Scores of Filipinos are still bamboozled by various dishonest schemes of evil forces, ensuring that many remain incapable of distinguishing between fact and fiction.
So much so that instead of many seeing the ICC hearings as finally a legitimate turning point for freely thinking or making informed judgements about the systemic wrongdoings or the accountabilities of those who once held power over life and death, they are being misled and lied to.