Libel, resistance and the law of karma

So, the Supreme Court ruled that the law against cyber-libel is constitutional.  And many howled in protest as if it is the end of the world.

Well, let me tell you this.  I am not bothered at all.

I have been libeled in the past when I was unfairly accused of being a plagiarist.  Such has created so much havoc in my professional career and brought so much pain to my personal life and my family that I thought we would never recover.  Fortunately, we did and with a vengeance.

Lately, I have been libeled several times by just writing articles for this on-line blog, in comments coming from anonymous netizens.  I have been called ignorant by people who do not even know me. But that is perfectly okay with me.  I consider this simply as part of the hazards of free speech. 

Of course, I have also the option to libel those who libel me. 

If you can dish out libelous remarks against me from the comfort of your anonymous handles, I can very well libel you back. If you call me ignorant, then I will call you a stupid coward.  And while I could not sue you for libel since you are too coward to hide in a false identity and you can always argue that calling me ignorant is fair comment, you could not sue me either since who I just called stupid is an anonymous troll.  See.  That’s how democracy and free speech work.

I have long settled it in me, when I took up a career in social criticism, that I will be an iconoclast and challenge dominant practices and abusers of power that oppress people, particularly those who live at the margins of society, and I did not expect it to be a walk in the park.  I chose to be a rebel with a cause without expecting to be treated nicely by those I piss off, or that I will be elevated to become the darling of the establishment.  I have been unfairly and unjustly treated many times, and I did not complain.  I simply fought back in more ways than one.

Thus, I simply could not understand why those who break rules in the name of political resistance expect to be treated well by those whose power they challenge.  When you choose to be a rebel, or a terrorist with a cause, you have to be ready for the consequences, and do not expect that the regime or the system you fight or terrorize will reward you.

Hence, those who call an abusive official a dumb ass and a corrupt pig, and publish it in the internet, must have the courage to face the law, even if the law is unjust.  

To expect otherwise is almost like expecting that your boss will fight tooth and nail to push for your promotion when you fight him tooth and nail every day of your lives.

Oh yes, we have rules of fairness. There are manuals of operations that provide protection, and bind the hands of those in management not to abuse their powers.  There is the bill of rights that limits the power of the State to inflict abuses on you.  There are civil laws that constrain private persons not to unjustly vex you.

Except that you tend to forget one small but important fact.  That boss that you just quarrelled with in a meeting is also human.  And he can use his position to inflict on you pain and suffering, and make your office life miserable.  And he can even get away with it if he is creative enough to cast your persecution in the form of passive aggression, and not as blatant bullying.  

And those senators and congressmen you called dumb asses, as the passage of the cyber-libel law just proved, can exact their revenge by pushing for a law that they can use to get back at those who would dare call them corrupt idiots.

Of course, they may or may not know that their being public figures becomes a valid defense in libel cases.  But perhaps, they were wisely advised that having a cyber-libel provision can make people who may otherwise freely launch attacks against them in cyberspace think twice.  After all, being sued for libel, even if eventually dismissed, can become an inconvenience and could cost money and time to people who have other better things to do.

And suing for libel is also as costly and emotionally wrenching.  I sued for libel that person who maligned me and unfairly called me a plagiarist for an innocent mistake committed by my research assistant.  He failed to cite in the main body of our report the sources for information that actually did not need any citation since they were public knowledge.  It was just plain human error, of which I also did not detect considering the nature of the information.  There was no intent to plagiarize considering that the sources were listed among our references at the end of the report. On the other hand, what was clear was the malice in such persecution since the person in question and I had a history of personal conflict.  

But the law on libel actually could work on the side of libel, particularly if the person who libeled you happens to be your supervisor.  My complaint was dismissed simply because the one who maligned and falsely accused me was judged to be cloaked with immunity as she was the Director of the research program under which my study was conducted.  The investigator gave credence to her defense that she was just performing her duty to pass judgment on my work, her malicious intent to put my name in disrepute notwithstanding. 

This incident led me to become pragmatic, if not cynical, in my resistance, that I do not expect to be treated fairly anymore, and that much as I expect that all people appointed to positions of power are like me, I am perhaps an endangered species facing extinction.  

You see, I can fight for the promotion of my enemies.  This has happened several times already.

This is because I distinguish the personal from the official.  I tend to treat persons who try to undermine me as having the right to do so, and I can retaliate by exercising my right within the purview of our democratic institutions.  But preventing their promotion is not one of the ethical and just options. I tell myself that they should be promoted not because they are nice to me, but because they are professors that excel in their academic fields.  Thus, while it is painful to defend enemies, I reminded myself that I am passing judgment on them as their academic peer, and not their friend.  And my father always told me not to abuse any power given to me.

And this is precisely why I am livid when others abuse theirs.  

Faced with the realization that I may indeed be a rare species, I stopped expecting that I would get fairness from everyone,

But I also learned how to fight oppression in a more creative way.

Acts of resistance are not actually parties, but sometimes they could be turned on their heads, and you can be creative so that you can enjoy every moment you break or challenge rules and sabotage the comfort of the powerful to deflate their egos, even if it is only for a moment.  And you can get away with it with an impish smile on your face. These you can do, libel laws notwithstanding.

There are many creative ways to fight back against your oppressors. James Scott gave us a menu to choose from, and he called this list the “weapons of the weak.”  The list includes sabotage, pilferage, feigned ignorance, and rumor-mongering.

The most relevant to libel is rumor-mongering.   The power of rumor mongering lies in the anonymity of the source, and that you can start one without owning up to it, and when confronted you can always give as defense that you only heard it from someone else you could not remember.  It becomes an effective way to assassinate the character of abusive officials and to undermine the powerful.

In cyberspace, you could become a stalker of posts of others who are vocal critics of public officials, who are in fact the enemies of your enemy, and therefore could become your “friend” not only metaphorically but in Facebook-terms.  The key lies in the “like,” “share” and “re-tweet” options available for you on their critical posts.  “Liking,” “sharing” and “re-tweeting” posts critical of abusive and corrupt government officials until they become viral and trending, without adding a libelous commentary, is the cyber-equivalent of innocently spreading a rumor, and is not considered as cyber-libel, thanks to the Supreme Court ruling.

In the current libel law, including cyber-libel, libeling an anonymous or unnamed person, as in blind-items, is not actionable.  But what is the use of this strategy if the corrupt and abusive official we want to shame remains unnamed?  Rumor-mongering provides the other side of this, where the one who libels could become anonymous.

And the platform of social media simply gave a new potency to anonymity in the act of rumor-mongering and character assassination through the use of fictitious accounts.  Anonymous accounts become creative and effective tools to resist when they are used to launch the most vitriolic and libelous diatribe against abusive officials or corrupt politicians or even against people who use their power to infringe you rights or the rights of others. 

There is one other creative weapon against abusers of power that we can deploy in cyberspace.  And we Pinoys have an over-supply of this kind of creativity.  We use our sense of humor to survive amidst the fiercest of typhoons.  Thus, we can easily rely on parody to denounce the most corrupt abusers, where we turn them into objects of our laughter, and make the act of libeling them a collective act of fun.  The birth of internet memes allowed the fictitious characters of Donya Angelica Santibanez and Donya Ina to become mouthpieces for our collective rage now masked by humor. 

And in our culture where we easily turn our tragedies into comedies and our tormentors into sources of comic relief, the “pikon” is always “talo.”

Of course, malicious minds can also use these creative mechanisms to malign an enemy, outside the bounds of righteous resistance. I should know.  Insults have been heaped upon me by anonymous trolls on this page and in FB.  

For me, using anonymous accounts to launch libelous remarks against others outside the boundaries of righteous anger and principled resistance, and done simply to harass or bully someone who is different or whose views we do not like, is devoid of any political justification.  For me, trolls who populate cyberspace are a scourge to free speech.  They corrupt this option as a venue for meaningful struggle by using anonymity as a refuge for making cowardly insults aimed to cause personal hurt, rather than as a tactical haven for resistive words aimed to liberate and transform politics. 

In the end, the beauty of resistance lies in the possibility for creativity to occupy its otherwise painful and difficult spaces.  And if everything else fails, there is one final weapon, albeit beyond the control of anyone, that always works on the side of the right and the wronged.

We call it karma.

I always remember that painful episode which I cited above, when I was unfairly libeled for allegedly being a plagiarist.  While I was not found guilty of plagiarism, I was punished with a one-month suspension for allegedly failing to practice due diligence in supervising the work of my research assistant.  I tried to make the libel account for her unfair accusations of plagiarism, which in academe is almost tantamount to professional death, but failed since the laws on libel protected her act as privileged.

Well, that incident forced me to make a life-changing career move.  The injustice and the hostility in my old workplace, where she was able to cultivate an institutionalized lynch mob against me, led me to move to another place where I later reaped good karmic energies, where I was amply rewarded not only with administrative but also with academic recognition.  The latter was always for my scholarly works published in refereed and abstracted academic journals.  This was indeed a powerful symbol for my vindication, since it redeemed my reputation from that unfair accusation of being a plagiarist.  In being promoted for my original scholarly works, I proved to the whole world that I am not a plagiarist, never was, never is, and never will be.  I am not in the habit of copying the work of others to further my career.

What about that person whose malice brought me and my family pain and suffering, but eventually also in the end the blessings?  She whose malice even went beyond the confines of my old workplace, and even attempted to derail my hiring, and later on collaborated with unnamed others in undermining me in my new found home by causing the anonymous circulation of a libelous dossier that repeated the false accusations of plagiarism.

Well, they say you could not libel the dead. And in our culture, we should not libel the dead.  

In fact, I have long forgiven her, and even thanked her for helping to push me out of the door to another waiting door of wonderful opportunities, not to mention of a higher salary. I had to make peace with her in her wake, since I do not want to go through with anything like what I and my family had to go through ever again because of her in my next life.

Karma indeed never fails.  It is the ultimate Fury that hounds and punishes the one who libels maliciously and the fine Muse that vindicates and blesses the one libeled unfairly.