The upcoming visit of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte will give Americans a chance to look at a politician who actually gets things done by doing “whatever it takes” to relieve his country of a runaway drug epidemic, one that promises to kill millions of people in the future.
Drugs had already brought uncountable human misery as families were torn apart, making addicts an army of the living dead, slaking their habit by tearing apart the social fabric. Meanwhile, the status quo was being insulated from reform by a centrist liberal establishment, but backed by an entrenched legal system that was entirely self-serving, welcoming due process for purposes of monetary enrichment.
Duterte applies the principle of apparently inhumane means justifying a humanitarian end. Kill a few up front to save so many more later on. Sure, the liberal media can rig up a here-and-now sense of injustice, inciting a sense of outrage, but who will take a stand to help future victims? Duterte’s course of activism is the only one actually open. “It all boils down to biology,” he asserts.
It has been reported (in The Conversation) that in his first State of the Nation address, President Duterte “adopted a distinctly humanist note” that reveals a reality-based compassion: “No amount of cash assistance or the number of medals can compensate the loss of a human life. Sorrow cuts across every stratum of society. It cuts deeply and the pain lasts forever.”