JAVIER, Bryle Felix A.
A Critique on The Act of Killing When Adolf Eichmann, the SS-Obersturmbannführer who was responsible for the mass deportation of Jews in Eastern Europe to the death camps, was put on trial by the Israeli government for crimes against humanity, he constantly justified that he was acting upon that which was ordered upon him as well as going with the tide of the powers that be. This remorseless defense was famously chronicled and evaluated upon by the German Jew, Hannah Arendt, who had released a book about it, “A Report on the Banality of Evil”, in 1963. This confronted the audacity of perpetrators of heinous crimes, like Eichmann and his role in the Holocaust, to defend or justify at their actions in the face of the …show more content…
“The Act of Killing”, a 2013 documentary, is not a tell-all on this unbelievable chain of circumstances. Instead, it revolves around facets of contemporary Indonesia’s perceptions towards these past events and how they’re remembered. It largely focuses on a group of gangsters, particularly Anwar Congo, who from being a hustler that dealt with illegal movie tickets, led a government-sanctioned extrajudicial death squad that hunted down suspected communists, most of whom were innocent. The subjects come together to make a film about their deeds during those days, displayed in some rather fantasized lenses like as a cowboy Western and as a …show more content…
There’s this common justification throughout the film, and I paraphrase, that “if it were left to the government, it would be a company of bureaucrats that wouldn’t do anything right. That’s why we have the gangsters, free independent people and the Pancasila to take care of our problems independently.” Indonesia, or at least the area of Medan, seemed like a dystopian anarchic society: the government is an invisible entity and its largely the criminal and paramilitary organizations that exercise any real, albeit illegitimate, authority. If we were to compare the situation in our country to that of Indonesia in the context of the aforementioned paraphrased quote, the Philippines might fit the description of leaving everything to the government. Indeed, most of our people are attracted to the electoral promises made by politicians without having the guts to complain should these promises not be fulfilled. Crime roams free as it often intertwines with the private affairs of those in power. These social ills are constantly shouted out and parroted, but hardly is anything ever done. And in recent times, the Marcos era is slowly becoming glossed over, giving a degree of acceptance to the possibility of authoritarianism as
A Critique on The Act of Killing When Adolf Eichmann, the SS-Obersturmbannführer who was responsible for the mass deportation of Jews in Eastern Europe to the death camps, was put on trial by the Israeli government for crimes against humanity, he constantly justified that he was acting upon that which was ordered upon him as well as going with the tide of the powers that be. This remorseless defense was famously chronicled and evaluated upon by the German Jew, Hannah Arendt, who had released a book about it, “A Report on the Banality of Evil”, in 1963. This confronted the audacity of perpetrators of heinous crimes, like Eichmann and his role in the Holocaust, to defend or justify at their actions in the face of the …show more content…
“The Act of Killing”, a 2013 documentary, is not a tell-all on this unbelievable chain of circumstances. Instead, it revolves around facets of contemporary Indonesia’s perceptions towards these past events and how they’re remembered. It largely focuses on a group of gangsters, particularly Anwar Congo, who from being a hustler that dealt with illegal movie tickets, led a government-sanctioned extrajudicial death squad that hunted down suspected communists, most of whom were innocent. The subjects come together to make a film about their deeds during those days, displayed in some rather fantasized lenses like as a cowboy Western and as a …show more content…
There’s this common justification throughout the film, and I paraphrase, that “if it were left to the government, it would be a company of bureaucrats that wouldn’t do anything right. That’s why we have the gangsters, free independent people and the Pancasila to take care of our problems independently.” Indonesia, or at least the area of Medan, seemed like a dystopian anarchic society: the government is an invisible entity and its largely the criminal and paramilitary organizations that exercise any real, albeit illegitimate, authority. If we were to compare the situation in our country to that of Indonesia in the context of the aforementioned paraphrased quote, the Philippines might fit the description of leaving everything to the government. Indeed, most of our people are attracted to the electoral promises made by politicians without having the guts to complain should these promises not be fulfilled. Crime roams free as it often intertwines with the private affairs of those in power. These social ills are constantly shouted out and parroted, but hardly is anything ever done. And in recent times, the Marcos era is slowly becoming glossed over, giving a degree of acceptance to the possibility of authoritarianism as