There are the hard realities and truths and then there are the democratic institutions built by a people who presumably aspire to live by said truths as closely as human thinking faculties permit.
The trouble with the way Filipinos have applied their expensive Made-in-the-USA criminal justice system is that they did not put such a presumed aspiration behind it. And so the result is evident today. Nobody in the Philippines can establish with a widely-enough recognised measure of authority whether or not the Marcoses, say, are guilty of the crimes against freedom, human rights, and the American Way that Filipinos have made a fad out of accusing them of.
If there was, to run with that example, any “spitting on heroes’ graves” going on here by proposing that the late former President Ferdinand E. Marcos be buried at the Fort McKinley Libingan ng mga Bayani, it was done by Filipinos as a whole. As a people. They did it by failing to muster a collective resolve to see to it that the proper investigations are routinely mounted and justice served to its full conclusion via institutional channels whenever a crime is alleged.
So it goes back to that familiar question whenever the chattering classes are up in arms over the way allegedly “bad” people continue to galivant all over society with supposed impunity:
Where are the convictions?
If there are none to serve as the bases for punitive action then guess what:
Tough luck.
Do we want to be a country where the law and the due process built around it so it is applied fairly rule over everyone? Or do we want to be a primitive society where justice is delivered by shills and vigilantes?
All evidence so far shows that Filipinos prefer the latter — because primitivism has long been a Filipino comfort zone where there is very little hard thinking to be expected and mediocrity and chronic wretchedness prevail as a persistent normal. Look no further than the circus kicked up by the Iglesia Ni Cristo in late August that caused a particularly wretched form of traffic gridlock to sweep across much of Metro Manila. This was all about a monumental tantrum the INC leadership chucked over an investigation being conducted by the Department of Justice (DOJ) following allegations of kidnapping involving key INC officers.
This is the sort of attitude that makes resolving crimes in the Philippines such an appallingly negotiable undertaking. The INC top guns apparently thought they are entitled to negotiate with the government for a waiver on that investigation. But in most modern societies, investigating a crime is absolutely non-negotiable. When a crime is reported, it is investigated. No questions asked. Resist the investigation, and you get thrown into jail. Simple.
Indeed, that INC stunt is an act of disrupting a police investigation under some kind of idiotic assumption that they are exempt from investigation. But the Philippines’ Revised Penal Code is quite clear on the Number One criteria that constitutes a legal exemption from criminal liability:
Art. 12. Circumstances which exempt from criminal liability. — the following are exempt from criminal liability:1. An imbecile or an insane person, unless the latter has acted during a lucid interval.When the imbecile or an insane person has committed an act which the law defines as a felony (delito), the court shall order his confinement in one of the hospitals or asylums established for persons thus afflicted, which he shall not be permitted to leave without first obtaining the permission of the same court.
It is safe to assume, therefore, that Filipinos who see themselves as exempt from investigation when they are accused of a crime can be legally regarded as imbeciles. Perhaps the INC had that in mind when they trooped to EDSA and gridlocked half the metropolis last August.
Stepping back from that, consider the whole notion that one can continue accusing someone of a crime after one had massively failed to convict that person of said crime. Before one can even take seriously such a position upheld by various shills and emo “activists”, we should first ask why…
Why was a crime (if, in fact, one was committed) allowed to go unpunished for decades?
Was the person accused of said crime an imbecile? If so then Filipinos should be ashamed of themselves, as they’ve been had by an imbecile. For that matter, that is what seems to be the broader insight one can derive from observering the way Filipinos continue to be routinely ruled by criminals year after year, election after election. Filipinos are a people who bow to imbeciles.
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