Understanding the rage vs ‘dedutertefication’
When I wrote “Dedutertefication” in the Philippine Daily Inquirer last month, I expected pushback. What I did not fully anticipate was the texture of it—the specific, recurring shape of the anger. Reading through the comments across the Inquirer website, the Jakarta Post, Facebook, and beyond, something crystallized for me. The hostility was not just reflexive tribalism. It was, in its own distorted way, deeply felt. And that, I think, is the thing we most need to understand.
The most common reaction from former President Rodrigo Duterte’s defenders followed a predictable script: the piece was “biased,” “paid for by the yellows,” “a Liberal attack.” Some accused me of being a foreign agent, a communist, an enemy of Mindanao. After Duterte’s arrest, I said it was “like 2016 all over again”—the same organized harassment, the same accusations that critics are paid to malign him. The comments under “Dedutertefication” confirmed it.
What struck me was how rarely anyone argued with the facts. The deaths, the documented killings, the testimony of insiders—these were not disputed so much as dismissed as irrelevant. The response was almost always emotional, not evidentiary. That tells us something important.
To understand why, we need to take the denazification analogy seriously—not just as a call to action but as a diagnostic tool. Postwar Germany’s reckoning worked, eventually, because defeat was undeniable and total. The Philippines has experienced nothing remotely similar. Despite his murderous track record, Duterte ended his presidency with a nationwide approval rating of 80 percent. That number should stop every critic cold. It does not mean 80 percent of Filipinos are monsters. It means 80 percent of Filipinos experienced his rule as something other than what the bodies on the streets said it was.
Part of the answer is disinformation, systematic and industrial. The online onslaught after Duterte’s International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest is reminiscent of the well-organized social media campaign in 2016 that propelled him to the presidency. Hundreds of paid advertisements on Facebook reached millions, including videos calling his arrest a “kidnapping,” and merchandise bearing his image with the phrase “I did it for my country.”
Many people sincerely believe the ICC has no jurisdiction, that the victims were criminals who deserved to die, that critics like me are foreign-funded enemies. They believe these things not because they are stupid, but because they have been lied to, efficiently and at scale, for years.
Then there is regionalism, which critics in Manila too often underestimate. Duterte is not merely a politician to Mindanaoans—he is a symbol of long-standing grievances. Calls for Mindanao’s secession have been amplified by his allies and online influencers, playing to resentments about a Manila-centric government. Despite his Visayan settler-colonial roots, Duterte successfully positioned himself as Mindanao’s champion against Manila’s elite. That narrative is powerful because it contains a grain of historical truth, however cynically deployed.
This is where my denazification analogy requires careful handling. Postwar Germany did not succeed by lecturing ordinary Germans about their complicity before first creating the conditions for them to hear it. It required defeat, occupation, reconstruction, and decades of patient civic education. The Philippines has none of those. What it does have is the ICC process—imperfect, slow, but real. It creates a public record. The prosecution’s presentation has harkened back to Duterte’s own words—speeches that nurtured a climate of lethal violence. That record, communicated plainly and widely, can penetrate even hardened loyalties over time.
What will not work is contempt. The instinct to dismiss Duterte supporters as morally broken—an instinct I have felt and sometimes yielded to myself—is understandable but counterproductive. It confirms their suspicion that critics look down on them, that this is Manila versus the provinces.
What might work instead is the painstaking work of humanizing the victims. The photograph that Duterte’s lawyer tried to weaponize in The Hague—a version of Raffy Lerma’s Pietà image of a wife cradling her murdered husband in Pasay—moved millions in 2016. That is the language that can cut through, not abstract rights discourse, not historical analogies, however apt. Human beings shown plainly in their grief are harder to dismiss than ideological arguments.
Dedutertefication must eventually reach the people currently chanting Duterte’s name in The Hague’s gray winter cold. That will require engaging with the legitimate grievances underneath the loyalty while refusing to excuse what was done in his name. It will require a generation of educators and journalists telling the truth persistently, in Cebuano, in Tagalog, in the languages that actually reach people where they live.
The ICC process matters. But a country heals by reckoning, not just by verdict.
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Carlos Conde is a former human rights researcher, now edits Rights Report Philippines.
