Pandemic Belligerence: The Philippine Government's Response to COVID-19 as a Military Spectacle

Abstract

When the coronavirus (Covid-19) was declared a pandemic in March 2020, governments from around the world had swiftly devised strategies to contain its spread despite very little scientific and medical information about the virus at the time. Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte instituted varying degrees of community quarantine, mobility restrictions, and realigning public funds for his government’s pandemic response. To ensure the proper flow of information on health, he used weekly public speeches (Talk to the People) broadcasted on various social media platforms. At first, the messages were meant to allay public fear, guaranteeing that the government is on top of the situation. However, Duterte’s public speeches evolved into hypermediated and spectacularized declarations that framed the pandemic as “a war on an invisible enemy”. In addition, these speeches were also used to throw invectives against critics and to reprimand ‘pasaway’ (‘recalcitrant’) citizens, thus creating a sense that his government is doing something while the ‘enemies’ (i.e., Covid-19, critics, and stubborn Filipinos) are only making matters worse. The presentation aims to examine Duterte’s public speeches to see how his government constructed discourses around the Covid-19 pandemic as a way to legitimize his government’s response. Unpacking the linguistic choices in the addresses (prepared beforehand and containing spur-of-the-moment commentaries), we argue that Duterte largely invoked metaphors of war, typical in his pre-pandemic government policies (e.g., ‘war on drugs’, ‘war on criminality’, ‘war on communists’). The “pandemic belligerence”, or the translation of war metaphors about the pandemic into policies and concrete actions, perpetuates the ‘medical’ as a concern within the ambit of the military. In doing so, this presentation considers the issues surrounding the language of war, the metaphorical construction of power in Covid-19, and the impact of belligerent discourse in handling the pandemic.