Man Versus Man | Belmont Club: "It was only later that I ‘got it’, sort of: all he could offer me was hope. A paperback book assuring its readers that there was life even in Auschwitz — and therefore also in Bicutan, Crame or Laur. The name of the prison might change but the nature of the challenge was essentially the same. Auschwitz was eternal and and so was the unchanging human determination to survive. They would always be at war and the miracle, or so Diokno hoped to convince me, was that the prisons would lose in the end.
It was something Pepe Diokno believed which I had yet to to make up my mind about. And I’m still not sure. A guilty civilization emerging from World War II promised posterity that Auschwitz would therafter mean “never again”. But today we know the promise was broken even as it was made; that it really signified — what it will always signify — is “until next time”. For as Camus put it, the plague never dies. The huts, the wire, the silent iron gate only seem harmless now, but they’ll be back. It goes on. The race is not — is never — over."
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