Collateral damage

Jayeel Cornelio

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Collateral damage
For every life lost is a constellation of dreams forever gone. And a lifetime, no matter how long, can never be enough to count those dreams.

Duterte has no qualms that his war on drugs is bloody. He is even proud of it. But when his war kills innocent lives, his administration and supporters have a ready excuse: collateral damage.

The case of Kian Loyd delos Santos is only the latest in a series of official dismissals.  

“Collateral damage” is a euphemism. Any student of ethics would easily recognize this. In any war, the military uses the term to refer to unintended human casualties. Its usefulness thus lies in softening the psychological impact of any war’s atrocities on the military, the government, and the wider public.

The idea is useful but it is dehumanizing. By calling these cases collateral damage, innocent lives are transposed into insignificant and heartless statistical data.

Spilled blood, in a manner of speaking, is just a miscalculation.

The bigger problem

The problem though with euphemisms is that they conceal a lot more problems.

First, to frame the death of innocent lives as collateral damage deflects the moral culpability of the administration. Forget the fact that Duterte has in many ways called for the death of every drug user in the country. Forget the fact that the president has thrown his weight behind the police. He has even allowed them to do whatever it takes to eradicate drug addiction: “If he has no gun, give him a gun.” 

By invoking collateral damage, the administration cannot be held responsible for the excesses of the police force. 

The euphemism in this light is an essential part of a bigger script. Think about it: Calling the entire effort as a war already preempts the possibility of these unintended consequences. Wars, of course, have collateral damage. 

Second, invoking collateral damage lends itself to the mindset that it is a necessary evil. The killing of innocent lives serves a bigger purpose for the public. On social media, defenders of the war on drugs chant like a well-rehearsed army. They repeatedly point us back to the victims of illegal drug users.

This too is a sleight of hand. It creates a false dichotomy that we either accept the collateral damage or allow illegal drugs to continue destroying the country. Lives must be sacrificed, as it were, on the altar of national cleansing.

In this sense, its defenders are celebrating too the imagined successes of the war on drugs.  

Not just a euphemism

My view is that calling the death of innocent lives as collateral damage is not just an exercise in euphemistic speech writing. It is fundamentally a morally deprived take on murder.

It not only softens the moral impact of the war on drugs that already enjoys massive public support in the first place. It rids the war of any moral obligation to set things right the right way. The euphemism parallels the systematic attack on human rights activists as people who, in Duterte’s view, are getting in his way.

Has he not also called for the shooting of these activists? I dread the day when the killing of human rights activists becomes collateral damage too.   

To frame the death of so many young people in terms of collateral damage cannot be a matter of statistical recording that pits losses against gains. This, unfortunately, has become the moral calculus of this administration.

In the final analysis, the collateral damage is not just the loss of one innocent life.

For every life lost is a constellation of dreams forever gone. And a lifetime, no matter how long, can never be enough to count those dreams.

Kian dreamt of becoming a policeman.

But alas, Duterte’s devotees keep applauding. They even keep laughing. – Rappler.com

                 

Jayeel Serrano Cornelio, PhD (https://ateneo.academia.edu/JayeelCornelio) is the Director of the Development Studies Program, Ateneo de Manila University.  The National Academy of Science and Technology has named him one of the 2017 Outstanding Young Scientists of the country.  Twitter: @jayeel_cornelio 

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