Happy to hang

President Duterte has returned to a favorite topic and a favorite form of discourse, and criticized the European Union with violent, threatening language. “You fools, you sons of bitches, stop interfering with us,” he said at a news conference. “No one will tell you, so I will tell you: You are all fools.”

Then followed the quote that was heard around the world: “I will just be happy to hang you. If I have the preference, I’ll hang all of you.”

Would that our Fearless Leader indulged his sense of outrage and took to the warpath against enemies deserving of the Filipino people’s condemnation — perhaps a country like Russia, which supports both the murderous Assad government in Syria and the increasingly dictatorial Erdogan administration in Turkey.

Or perhaps — much closer to home — a country like China, which has buried its policy of a “peaceful rise” in the world and replaced it with a policy of assertive and overreaching nationalism. Criticizing Beijing would have the advantage of aligning with Philippine popular opinion about Chinese aggressiveness in the West Philippine Sea.

But no. Mr. Duterte has chosen instead to continue his fight against the human rights hegemony of those terrifying, faceless, paper-pushing antideath bureaucrats in Brussels: “You are putting us down. You are exerting pressure in [sic] every country with the death penalty.”

As far as we can tell, the President is grinding his much-used axe against the European Union again because the European Parliament passed a resolution calling on the Philippines not to reimpose the death penalty, and because the country’s European allies and trading partners continue to voice their opposition to the Duterte administration’s ultraviolent war on drugs.

In other words, the President’s latest tirade is in defense of his administration, not of the country; it is in response to what he perceives to be criticism of his policies, and therefore of himself.

The telltale sign that the criticism has gotten under his skin is the language that he uses; when he feels greatly offended he goes beyond the rhetoric of abuse (cursing the previous president of the United States or the present pope, for instance) and deploys the tropes of violence: “I will just be happy to hang you. If I have the preference, I’ll hang all of you.”

This is what people say when they’ve lost the argument — or when they cannot brook any argument.

Presidential Spokesperson Ernesto Abella, who once recommended that the public use its “creative imagination” when parsing the President’s often intemperate statements, was reduced to explaining his principal’s unstatesmanlike remarks against longstanding allies and partners as a symbolic expression. “I’m sure by this time we understand that it’s more than being literal. He basically speaks about an attitude of, you know, emphasizing that we should be left alone to be able to do our part.”

We note that President Duterte approves publicly of Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping in part because they don’t criticize his war on drugs for human rights violations.

But we also note that the President knows his people well enough to know that he cannot make his fight with the European Union and with European allies and partners solely about death vs life. That would be an ultimately losing proposition. As even the surveys show, a great majority of Filipinos want due process to be followed; they do not want mere suspects killed.

So President Duterte uses the Western history card. He traces EU opposition to the death penalty to Western imperialism and the massive death toll of two world wars. “Your guilt, your conscience, is almost genetics. It is passed on from generation to generation.”

This is macabre, and downright mistaken. Modern opposition to the death penalty is based on the experience of all of humanity; that experience shows that the penalty claims the lives of mostly poor people. Reimposing it is a backward step—like going back to hanging.