He first challenged Donald Trump to a fist fight for calling a ban on Filipinos from entering the US; he then went on to slur President Obama for taking up the issue of "endorsed" extra-judicial killings of drug abusers in the Philippines. Well, apologies and denials by him have followed, but he has earned his country and himself some four days of negative fame globally. Did Duterte say what he did to prove something to his people? Did he think his sinking ratings would go up? After all "breaking bad" is in vogue. Good of him not to have threatened President Obama with extra-judicial killing for having experimented with weed in his college days.
President Obama, however, is made of better stuff. He comes across as very dignified, humble, and a man with a great sense of humour. More so, he seems to be quite forgiving. He forgave Hillary for her racial slurs against him in the 2008 elections, and he forgave Mr T too for calling him the worst President in US history. Forgave or not, he did meet his latest offender too, where the latter sought pardon and called it one big misunderstanding. Lately, the use of politically correct and parliamentary language has taken a back seat if not entirely pushed out of the car, even by the best educated.
President Duterte, a very educated man, a lawyer, had been expelled from a couple of schools for misconduct, which could be interpreted as smashing a square peg in a round hole. It is possibly the same attitude that has got him this far in politics in a nation notorious for an extremely high crime rate, which most experts believe has police, political and even judicial backing. In such a situation, would a tame parliamentarian survive? When the law becomes the very tool for the lawless to prosper and fails to protect the innocent, does the system not gravitate towards abandoning the legal system and do what is needed to restore the right order? Tough questions. In the long run, the vigilantism slips into excesses. No one obeys the law and extra-judicial methods only encourage settling of personal scores, more human rights violations, an even greater rebuttal by those with power; the result, total anarchy in society. In this case too, hard to tell if drug offences will go down. In my own nation too, there has been a crackdown on corruption. Frankly, at one level I would have wished our leader too endorsed the extra-judicial killing of the corrupt given its rise, but thankfully that's not the case. It keeps the faith alive in the system. It's a different matter that corruption has actually gone up and not down after the crackdown measures have been put in place. There is growing anger and impatience waiting and wanting to vent, and those in power, the world over have to cure and not exploit it. One can only hope we don't drift in a different direction, though the latest violent attacks on police personnel for enforcing law and order is pointing at a very frightening social order ahead in time.
The world was more or less outraged by the "son of a whore remark", but does the world show the same outrage when most US services (naval) personnel still consider Duterte's nation as a country of prostitutes? Something to think about when the leaders of many powerful nations are themselves guilty of showering leaders of various less powerful nations and organisations with derogatory names and titles that sound worse than being called a "son of a whore or bitch or gun or whatever."
No comments:
Post a Comment