Summary of Some People Need Killing by Patricia Evangelista:A Memoir of Murder in My Country E-Book

SUMMARY GP

• Herausgeber: BookRix
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

DISCLAIMER
 
This book does not in any capacity mean to replace the original book but to serve as a vast summary of the original book.
 
Summary of Some People Need Killing by Patricia Evangelista:A Memoir of Murder in My Country
 
IN THIS SUMMARIZED BOOK, YOU WILL GET:
 

• Chapter astute outline of the main contents.
• Fast & simple understanding of the content analysis.
• Exceptionally summarized content that you may skip in the original book

 
Patricia Evangelista's "journalistic masterpiece" is a detailed account of the Philippines' state-sanctioned killings of its citizens. The book, which was published by The New Yorker, is a deeply humane chronicle of the country's drug war. Evangelista, who came of age after a street revolution, documented the killings carried out by police and vigilantes under President Rodrigo Duterte's regime. The book captures the atmosphere of fear created when an elected president decides to prioritize certain lives over others. It also delves into the grammar of violence and human impulses to dominate and resist.

Leseprobe

GP SUMMARY

Summary of Some People Need Killing by Patricia Evangelista:A Memoir of Murder in My Country

Patricia Evangelista's "journalistic masterpiece" provides a detailed account of the Philippines' state-sanctioned killings, capturing the atmosphere of fear and the grammar of violence under President Duterte's regime, as well as human impulses to dominate and resist.BookRix GmbH & Co. KG81371 Munich

Page title

Summary of Some People Need Killing

A

Summary of

Patricia Evangelista’s Book

A Memoir of Murder in My Country

GP SUMMARY

Summary of Some People Need Killing by Patricia Evangelista: A Memoir of Murder in My Country

By GP SUMMARY© 2023, GP SUMMARY.

All rights reserved.

Author: GP SUMMARY

Contact: [email protected]

Cover, illustration: GP SUMMARY

Editing, proofreading: GP SUMMARY

Other collaborators: GP SUMMARY

NOTE TO READERS

This is an unofficial summary & analysis of Patricia Evangelista’s “Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country” designed to enrich your reading experience.

DISCLAIMER

The contents of the summary are not intended to replace the original book. It is meant as a supplement to enhance the reader's understanding. The contents within can neither be stored electronically, transferred, nor kept in a database. Neither part nor full can the document be copied, scanned, faxed, or retained without the approval from the publisher or creator.

Limit of Liability

This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. You agree to accept all risks of using the information presented inside this book.

Copyright 2023. All rights reserved.

Prologue

For over seven months, the Philippine Daily Inquirer maintained a Kill List, a public record of the dead, fed by reports from correspondents across the country. The circumstances of death were brief, with entries numbered and chronological. The victims were suspected drug pushers, suspected drug dealers, at large on drug charges, and on the local drug list. The methods were limited only by the killers' imaginations, with the daily death toll sometimes rising to double digits.

These deaths were drug-related, illegal, targeted assassinations, salvagings, body dumps, and drive-by shootings. The term "extrajudicial killings" became commonplace on the street and on television, leading to a Senate resolution calling for sessions investigating "the recent rampant extrajudicial killings and summary executions of criminals." The press used the term as a qualifier, victims' families used it as a verb, and critics used it as an accusation.

The volume of Duterte's dead was at times overwhelming, as was covering the powerful in a country where the powerful refuse to be held to account.

The author ran away halfway through the Philippine drug war, investigating a series of killings in the capital. They were a reporter who had learned to qualify statements and burn transcripts, and had paranoia about the possibility of criminal libel. They were unsure of the truth about the killings and were constantly searching for gaps in their stories.

After crossing the Pacific in October 2018, the author signed a three-month residency at a wooded estate in upstate New York. The residency required them to produce a book proposal, which they did, detailing their identity, origin, and experience of standing over a corpse at two in the morning. The author signed with a publisher at the end of the residency, committing to a first-person account of the Philippine drug war.

The first draft was a detailed 73,000-word reportage, describing the circumstances of every death and the crime scenes. The author's inability to hold themselves to account was due to a misguided commitment to objectivity and a failure of nerve. The book is a personal story, written in the author's own voice, as a citizen of a nation they cannot recognize as their own. The thousands who died were killed with the permission of their people, and the author refuses to offer their own.

I

MEMORY

POSITIVE

Lady Love, an eleven-year-old girl from Manila, lives in the slums of Manila with her grandmother and mother. She is known by the name Love-Love, which she uses only for school papers. Her father, Dee, calls her Love, but she is not called Lady. Love-Love worries about her family's health and the rumors of her father using drugs.

Ma and Dee are fine, and they have surrendered to the new government and promised to never touch drugs again. Love-Love asks her father to move away, but Ma insists they need to save up first. One night, a bullet slammed into her head.

A reporter named Pat, born in 1985, goes to places where people die, packing bags, talking to survivors, and writing stories. She has collected a new handful of words since the election of President Rodrigo Roa Duterte, such as "kill" and "punish," which she uses to describe the victims.

The president uses the word "kill" at least 1,254 times in the first six months of his presidency, promising to kill people who get in the way of their future, overseas workers, mayors accused of drug dealing, human rights activists, and police. He also threatens to kill human rights activists if the drug problem worsens.

Love-Love knows only a few dozen of the dead by name, but the president has enough names for them all. They are addicts, pushers, users, dealers, monsters, and madmen.

In 1945, reporter Wilfred Burchett covered the story of a nuclear warhead exploding over Hiroshima for the London Daily Express. He covered the most terrible and frightening desolation in four years of war. Love-Love, a Filipino reporter, spent the last decade flying into bombed-out cities, counting body bags, and reporting on the disasters that continue to plague her own country.

The author, a Filipino living in the Philippines, has spent the last six years documenting the killings committed under the administration of President Rodrigo Duterte. The brutality reduced to a paragraph, sometimes only a sentence each, and there are no synonyms for blood or bleed. The blood doesn't gush by the time I walk into a crime scene, it sits in pools under doorways or streams out of the mouth in rivulets.

Dead is a good word for a journalist in the age of Duterte. Dead doesn't negotiate, requires little verification, and has bones, skin, and flesh. It can be touched, seen, photographed, and blurred for broadcast. When they left, the hole inside Ma's head was found, and Dee lay where he fell.

In conclusion, the story of Love-Love and the killings committed under Duterte's administration highlights the brutality of war and the importance of capturing the truth.

The author, a Filipino journalist, shares her experiences during the war in the Philippines, highlighting the complex nature of guilt and the role of the Catholic Church in addressing the deaths of those involved. She explains that President Duterte's actions led to the deaths of many people, including drug dealers, mayors, and lawyers. The author also mentions the tragic story of a young girl named Danica Mae, who was shot with a bullet meant for her grandfather. The author, Maximo, a drug dealer, was not present at her granddaughter's funeral, but he remained silent, allowing the men in masks to finish the job. He left the situation to God, who knows who the sinners are and who is telling the truth.

The author, who was previously a practical cynic, now understands the importance of acknowledging the tragic events that have occurred in the country. She also shares her own personal experiences with the war and the importance of recognizing the sacrifices made by those who have died.

The author, a citizen of the oldest democracy in Southeast Asia, believed in democracy as a general good opposed to a general wrong. They believed in the nation, a community of millions who saw brutality as an aberration to be condemned as often and as vigorously as necessity demanded. However, they began counting President Duterte's dead, not understanding that the democracy their journalism depended on was particular only to themselves and a minority of others.

In the world as imagined by Rodrigo Duterte, the Philippines was a badlands, where peace was broken, and every addict was armed and willing to kill. Duterte promised to save the Republic of the Philippines, promising an end to crime, corruption, and drugs.

In December, five months into the war, a fourteen-year-old girl named Christine saw her father die. She was told by the police that he had fought back and was a drug dealer. The police shot her father, and Christine was there when he was shot in self-defense.

The author's first words were sorry, but she later apologized to her grandmother and siblings, expressing her regret for letting go of her father on the morning he was killed.