If there’s anything none of us should be arguing about at this point, it’s the climate of fear as fueled and nurtured by Duterte.

Pre-pandemic, we saw how Duterte and his people’s manipulation of the law could keep Senator Leila de Lima in jail on trumped-up charges. We’ve seen this government unseat Chief Justice Sereno because Duterte considered her as “enemy.” We’ve witnessed Duterte get away with massive violations on our rights, where random statements like, say, “arrest istambays” will mean the warrantless arrests of citizens the following day. Where Presidential fury and finger-pointing is enough to get people removed from their positions, business owners divested from their own ventures, critics or perceived enemies arrested or killed. Let’s begin counting the dead bodies from organized Left organizations, and the drug war dead.

The pandemic was just what Duterte needed to further clamp down on our rights, lock us down in our homes, and ensure our silence. We were afraid of the virus, of course and expectedly, but this government was not satisfied with just our fear of getting sick in a time and place with no reliable healthcare system. They wanted to bury that last nail into the coffin of possible resistance, and what better way to do it than by passing the Terror Law and throwing the ABS-CBN shutdown our way?

After all, if a cultural monolith like ABS-CBN could be shut down by this government based solely on Duterte’s pettiness, what can it NOT do? In the course of the Congressional inquiry on the franchise, we also realized that much of it had to do with the content of the network’s shows—and they weren’t just talking about news coverage (!!!), but about the portrayal of politicos in soap operas and teleseryes.

And what is the Terror Law and the contingent soundbites from military officials about regulating social media and the President about cracking down on dissent which government equates with terrorism? What else could the push of the MTRCB to regulate Netflix, and of the FDCP to have all film, advertising, and digital content pass through its office, be about? What could all of these be but the multifarious ways in which this government tries to restrict what we say and what we create, online and beyond? And if they don’t push through with these policies, then at the very least it has made us quake in our boots a little more and has distracted us from the incompetence and corruption that permeates government.

If we, in our cloistered, privileged, middle-class to wealthy spaces, can feel this fear; if we acknowledge that a major stressor the past seven months has been both the virus and the incompetent and violent governance, complete with a President who randomly drops shoot-them-dead orders, and military officials deciding on our lives with not a smidgen of compassion. If we can be afraid, what more the majority in the vulnerable communities? (more…)