Patricia (author) Evangelista

A Memoir of Murder in My Country

Some People Need Killing

The truth was simpler: It takes longer to type a sentence than it does to kill a man.

nice

Diving deeper into Some People Need Killing right after finishing Qiang Jin Jiu, I'm doused with the cold realization that I might be actually living in a reality very similar to QJJ; except there seems to be no hope for a Shen Lanzhou, Xiao Chiye, Qi Huilian, Hai Liangyi, or Xue Xiuzhuo to appear and upend this corrupt government.

The first few times I wrote back. I said, with considerable righteous naiveté, that no person deserved abduction and torture, Communist or otherwise. It was a truth I thought was self-evident. I thought the problem was that the public didn't know, because if it did, it would rise up in the same roiling mass that had protested the atrocities of the 1970s and '80s.

I was wrong, of course. People knew, but by then the disappeared were no longer people.

her words are so gripping with every page i turn gosh

camie⁷ 𓂃⊹ ˚ ༘`✦

chills down my spine! my brother my executioner moment 

“In my absolute loyalty to [the mayor’s] campaign, I had my own two brothers killed.”

I was born in the year democracy returned to the Philippines. I am here to report its death.

Sometimes the dead weren't drug dealers or corrupt mayors or human rights law- yers. Sometimes they were children, but they were killed anyway, and the president said they were collateral damage.

A salvage yard is not a fenced-in patch of concrete with secondhand cars and vintage lamps for thrifting. A salvage yard is a street corner in Tondo, or the right lane of an overpass at dawn.

The discovery of those lies, and the subsequent case that was lost, were due only to a single irregularity in the daily circumstances of fatal police encounters under the administration of Rodrigo Duterte. That irregularity is named Efren Morillo.

...He is an irregularity, not because he is poor or illiterate or brave, but because he is alive.

Erwin Lemuel Oliva

   “In the eyes of the state, they were not fathers or mothers, sons or daughters. They were addicts, and addicts are disposable.”

   “The silence that follows a gunshot is not just the absence of sound; it is the heavy weight of complicity, the collective sigh of a society that has chosen to look away.”

   “When the state decides who lives and who dies, every bullet fired is a moral judgment, every death a testament to the fragility of human life in the face of power.”

4. On the aftermath of loss:   “For those left behind, the dead do not rest easy. They linger in the memories of those who loved them, haunting the spaces by where their absence is felt most keenly.”

5. On the importance of truth: “To tell the truth in times of war is an act of defiance. To reveal the lies, the half-truths, the hidden stories, is to wage a war of words against a war of bullets.”

“Some People Need Killing” is a searing indictment of the Duterte administration’s brutal campaign and a moving tribute to the victims who have been silenced by it. Patricia Evangelista’s work is not just a journalistic endeavor but a moral inquiry into the value of human life and the consequences of state-sponsored violence. It is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the complex and often painful realities of contemporary Philippine society.

If he wins, his dictatorship will not be thrust upon us. It will be one we will have chosen for ourselves.

Some People Need Killing quotes

Join the club