Empires are often in the habit of producing brutes. Colonies, once left to their own devices, can either improve in the face of history, or degenerate. The Philippines provides an example of cruelty fashioned into office: dictatorships with a pro-US strain; subservient administrations.
What is in power in Manila is Rodrigo Duterte, a figure from that same cloth, albeit of a different, independent strain. For the first time in decades, the Philippines has a leader who insists on the sovereign issue against the interests of the United States. Even when it comes to the extrajudicial killing of 1,300 drug suspects over the last two months.
Pointedly, he has emphasised the obvious, but sometimes forgotten point in Washington, that “I am a president of a sovereign state and we have long ceased to be a colony. I do not have any master but the Filipino people.”
In fighting fashion, Duterte was keen to throw the book back at the United States at his now famous press conference at Davao International Airport. It was the language of one brute against another, the pupil of history turned teacher. “Who is he [Obama] to question me about human rights and extrajudicial killings?”
In deciding to rebuke and rubbish the US president, Duterte was touching a rich vein of tortured history. The statement of Obama being “a son of a whore” should not have caused much fuss. Duterte has not been discriminating in his remarks. He also feels that Pope Francis is such a…