OP ED COLUMN: OPINION ON PAGE ONE- When words lose their meaning
FRANCISCO S. TATAD
US President Donald Trump may have set the tone for others when he told the 73rd session of the UN General Assembly on September 25 that in less than two years, his administration “has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country.” This was not quite the same as saying US history began with the Trump presidency, but it was close enough, and it provoked derisive giggles and laughter from the world leaders at the hall.
To this, Mr. Trump said, “I didn’t expect that reaction, but that’s OK.”
It was the first time that laughter, rather than applause or catcalls, greeted a world leader’s set-piece speech at the UN. Some years ago, I witnessed a prolonged ululation from a young African woman in the UN gallery after an African leader addressed the assembly. UN security promptly removed her from the gallery. It took me a while to sort out whether her ululation, which I found a novelty, signified approval or dissent, but I don’t recall CNN, BBC, the Guardian or The New York Times making a federal case of it.
Manners over matter
This time the Western media, no great admirer of Mr. Trump, instantly raked him over the coals for his obvious inanity, as though his display of ego was the more serious matter than the real geopolitical issues involved—the scrapping of the US nuclear deal with Iran, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the denuclearization of North Korea, the trade war with China and Canada, the status of 2,000 US troops in eastern Syria, and the rapidly deteriorating relations with Nicolas Maduro’s Venezuela.
On the Iranian nuclear issue and the Israeli-Palestinian question alone, there was already enough red meat for Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, who accused Trump of having a Nazi streak, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, with whom he met, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who extolled his outstanding leadership, and everybody else to grab at. But many seemed more interested in his ego-trip. One New York Times commentator spent an entire piece pointing out that terror, rather than laughter, should have been the proper reaction to Trump’s self-praise.
Imitating Trump
Still, while the world leaders at the assembly found his egocentricity laughable, some other people must have thought it worth imitating. This is how some observers I have talked to regard our own foreign secretary, Alan Peter Cayetano, who proxied for President Rodrigo Duterte at the UN. Speaking for the Philippines a few days ago, while DU30 was trying to ward off an imagined “Red October” plot to oust him from Malacañang, Cayetano tried to imitate Trump’s landfall by telling the assembly that “as a sovereign and democratic country led by a duly elected president we are on track of salvaging our deteriorating country from becoming a narco-state, or a state held hostage by the rich and powerful who ignore the plight of the poor, powerless and marginalized or both.”
It was a lot of hot air. The DU30 administration, Cayetano said, has put in a lot of reforms to snatch the poor from the grip of drug addicts who threatened to turn the country into a narco-state. He did not say what these reforms were. At least 25,000 drug suspects from the slums and the ghettos have been killed in the drug war since July 1, 2016; the poor have not been the beneficiary but rather the primary victims of this war. Cayetano made his bold claim while the drug killings continued, and the country lay in the grip of a runaway inflation that threatens mass starvation, massive unemployment, economic collapse, and a general social and political meltdown.
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The UN chief delegates whom Trump had amused by his exuberance were no longer in the hall when Cayetano spoke; and the UN-based media must have thought the Filipino speaker could use a little kindness by not being quoted on any of his statements to the empty hall. But what the international media mercifully ignored somehow managed to land in some less discriminating sections of the Manila press.
DU30’s ‘only sin’
While Cayetano was trying to sell this line to the UN, whose previous secretary-general (Ban Ki-moon) and present special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings (Agnes Callamard) had expressed serious concern about the killings, DU30 was trying to undo his gratuitous admission that, “my only sin is EJK.”
DU30’s spokesmen have gone into all sorts of verbal acrobatics to claim that DU30’s statement was not an admission of guilt, but merely an acknowledgment of the fact that he has been “unjustly accused of EJK by his critics and detractors.” DU30 himself has not explained what he meant by his statement, and why he said it; the only “explanation” has come from his official spokesmen and subalterns, who all seem to be doing a uniformly bad job.
They all seem to have entered the world of Alice in Wonderland, where Humpty Dumpty says, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean.” Thus, they interpret DU30’s statement, “my only sin is EJK,” to mean the exact opposite — that DU30 did not commit any EJK at all. The trouble is, millions have heard him say repeatedly, kill, kill, kill; thousands have been killed, not one of which has been a suicide; and none of the killers have been arrested and jailed.
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Two inept claims
DU30’s defenders have made two claims. The first is that the accusation against DU30 is coming from his “critics and detractors” alone. The second is that the drug syndicates, none of which have been named, are responsible for all the killings. Both are inept and incompetent claims. They are not based on facts, but on their sense of power.
First of all, DU30’s defenders do not even seem to understand the words they are using. Take the word, “detractors.” A “detractor” commits the sin of “detraction” when he or she reveals the private or personal fault of an individual without sufficient or just public motive. Thus, when they say it’s only DU30’s “detractors” who accuse him of extrajudicial killing, they are not denying the killings, they are simply saying they are a private personal matter that does not deserve any public airing.
The correct word is “critics, adversaries, or enemies,”— so the claim should read: “DU30’s critics, adversaries, or enemies are the only ones who accuse him of the killings.” But would that be a true and factual statement? This is the more important question. The answer is evident. The facts are not coming from DU30’s “critics, adversaries, or enemies” alone. To begin with, many of them have been silenced by the reign of terror arising from the killings. The facts speak for themselves without any political color.
As for the second claim, this is a harebrained allegation supplied by DU30’s buffonic legal counsel. If there is the tiniest sliver of truth in it, it is the most damning official admission that the government has failed beyond belief in dealing with what it considers the most pervasive crime. DU30 will not simply have to fire his legal counsel for making this damning admission, he may have to sack himself, without waiting to be pushed out of office by the imaginary beast he calls “Red October.”
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