Elected earlier this year as an anti-establishment populist promising tough-on-crime policies, Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte has already instigated the deaths of several thousand people killed by police or vigilantes in his war on drugs. The former mayor of the country’s third-most populous city faced allegations during the presidential race that he enabled death squads to fight drugs, something he took as a compliment. This Trump-like figure even proudly made grotesquely sexist comments during the campaign.
However, words simply cannot describe how unspeakably disturbing his latest comments are:
“Hitler massacred three million Jews,” Mr. Duterte said after returning to the Philippines from a trip to Vietnam, understating the toll cited by historians, which is six million. “Now there is three million, there’s three million drug addicts. There are. I’d be happy to slaughter them.”
Killing that number of drug users would “finish the problem of my country and save the next generation from perdition,” he said.
This is the democratically elected president of a country of 103 million people openly invoking Adolf Hitler in a favorable manner to advocate an unimaginable mass murder. Incredibly, Duterte even commands wide popularity among Filipino voters. Hopefully, this rhetoric is just that—talk—but the world must stay vigilant and even be prepared to intervene if necessary when leaders like Duterte make these sorts of genocidal statements.
Such populist strongmen are a warning for the dangers of electing Donald Trump as president here. Trump is not just your everyday Republican extremist: He’s an outright fascist who has little regard for established democratic norms. Some might say, “It can’t happen here,” but it can. We must say never again and emphatically reject candidates like Trump.