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11 hours ago
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MALAYBALAY CITY (MindaNews / 15 March) – The executioner is both loved and shunned. In a society seen or portrayed as heading into lawlessness and chaos, people consider his presence a necessary evil. They see him as the tool to achieve their collective goal to get rid of the scums of the earth, what Marxists would call the lumpen proletariat — thieves, drug dealers and other underworld characters.
In times of desperation — either real or imagined — the people wouldn’t mind seeing bodies on the streets or in ditches, butchered by him who believes that some wretched individuals need to be eliminated even if it means ignoring the limits set by law and civilization.
This unfolds whenever law grinds slow, often hostage to the glitter of gold, influence and power.
When the law is seen as ineffective, and its agents corrupted, the image of the executioner looms large in the troubled social landscape. People would yearn for the quick justice he’s willing to dispense and is capable of dispensing.
Damn due process, damn the law, we need to sleep in peace at night. We need an arbiter of who lives and who dies so that citizens would fall in line. Fear is the one true law, the executioner is the true enforcer.
In reality, however, the same people who admire the executioner and the favor he does for them would not break bread with such a man. He is loved only because his amorality is deemed a necessity under certain conditions.
Yet, they would recoil from the images of his touch. They could not bear witnessing firsthand and up close the moment he squeezes the trigger or buries the dagger, acts they themselves would not do. That’s why they need somebody who is willing to play God without personal malice, somebody who can feel no tinge of guilt and remorse, unlike the biblical murderer Cain.
This is the enigma and contradiction of the executioner — wanted and shunned like a plague at the same time.
(MindaViews is the opinion section of MindaNews. H. Marcos C. Mordeno can be reached at boymords@mindanews.com)
