Today I’ll tell you a story about a butcher. Not the kind who works behind a market counter with a weighing scale and a clean, blood-streaked apron, but the variety that history produces with exhausting regularity, a man who convinces himself that blood is a form of governance and that terror can pass for order.
It is an old, predictable rhythm. A hard man rises from the provinces with a scowl and a swagger, promising to tear down a “rotten” world so a better one can be built from its ashes. He persuades a restless, weary nation that the law is a luxury it can no longer afford, and that his judgment alone is the only gospel worth following.
For a while, the story feels triumphant, even intoxicating. But as the winter air of The Hague settles over the Netherlands and drifts across the warm, messy circuitry of Philippine politics, the familiar ending is finally coming into view. Power obeys a simple, unforgiving physics: the higher the rise on a throne built of bone, the more spectacular the fall when gravity eventually reasserts itself.
The butcher in this narrative is Rodrigo Duterte, a provincial mayor who ascended to the presidency speaking the dialect of vengeance. This is the man who famously declared he would be “happy to slaughter” millions to save the nation, governing as if the Philippines were merely an enlarged city precinct and as if the rules constraining other leaders were mere inconveniences to be swiped away.
To play God is to operate under the delusion that you are the author of the rules rather than a subject of them. In our streets, this manifested as the “War on Drugs,” a campaign that transformed Manila and Cebu into killing fields for the destitute while the high-fliers remained untouched in their gated sanctuaries. Duterte didn’t light a beacon of freedom; he lit a bonfire of due process, and the acrid smoke from that pyre is now billowing through the chimneys of the ICC halls.
The “strongman” myth officially shattered on March 11, 2025. In a moment of delicious irony, Philippine authorities, coordinated by the very Interpol he once mocked, arrested Duterte at NAIA upon his arrival from Hong Kong.
He has spent nearly a year in an ICC detention cell in Scheveningen, traded the comforts of his home for a stark room in the North Sea. Now, in February 2026, the theater has reached its apex. We are in the middle of the critical confirmation of charges hearing. From February 23 to 27, prosecutors are dismantling the legend, laying out evidence of a “common plan” to neutralize citizens, linking him to three counts of crimes against humanity that span from the dark Davao Death Squad days of 2011 to the peak of his bloody presidency in 2019.
Yet, the most unsettling part of this theater isn’t the man in the dock; it’s the audience. Even as the evidence mounts, the fanatics remain, weeping over the “persecution” of their idol. They wait for a man who never shed a single tear for the thousands of orphans left in the wake of his “cleansing” fire. To watch grown men and women lose their dignity over a politician is to witness a total psychological surrender.
It is a level of devotion I can never emulate, and frankly, I find it pathetic. Politics is not a religion, and politicians are not messiahs; they are temporary employees, and usually, they are the most flawed, ego-driven among us. We must stop treating these people like gods. Politics is the dirtiest game ever invented, a blood-soaked arena where the price of entry is one’s soul. Every player who steps onto that stage will eventually find blood on their hands. You cannot navigate a system built on manipulation and power-grabbing without becoming stained. To treat these players as saints is to ignore the gore on their gloves.
Duterte’s 2019 withdrawal from the ICC was political theater disguised as sovereignty, a desperate attempt to sever himself from accountability. It was presented as a proud national stand, but beneath the rhetoric lay a coward’s calculation to escape a court already gathering receipts. Yet, the law is not so easily outrun. You cannot set a house on fire and expect immunity from arson simply because you walked away from the address. The ICC’s jurisdiction is anchored to the years we were members, and justice has a significantly longer memory than the fickle voters of a populist era.
The legend of the “Davao Butcher,” the myth that executions manufacture order, is colliding with a different kind of power: the slow, methodical machinery of international law. Bullets delivered instant silence, but legal records deliver permanent consequence. What was once enforced in darkened alleys is being reconstructed line by line, affidavit by affidavit, until the mythology of fear meets the discipline of evidence.
Power always ends the same way, not with a bang or a round of applause, but with paperwork.
Rodrigo Duterte once ruled like a man who believed consequences were for “the little people.” Today, those consequences are being assembled thousands of miles away, piece by piece. The man who mocked international law now finds himself shivering inside its reach.
In the wild, balance is everything. Remove the apex predator and the ecosystem unravels. Nations are no different. Remove the Law, and the collapse begins in ways that are quiet but lethal. Power fills the vacuum, and violence learns to pass for order. The drug war did not leave behind a drug-free country; it left a scarred, traumatized one still learning what it costs when authority replaces justice.
The Davao Butcher governed with the certainty that force could outrun judgment. But like Icarus, the ascent feels limitless until the heat begins to rise. The sun does not care about your “Pulse Asia” ratings. The fall is indifferent to your social media trolls. And the distance downward is always greater than it first appears.
As the country edges toward another transfer of power, the warning grows sharper. Nations that elevate men into myths discover too late that myths demand human offerings. The age when power could excuse bloodshed is closing. The message is simple. No nation is beyond memory, and no leader stands above the bill.
Whether he ultimately faces judgment in the Netherlands or behind the walls of Muntinlupa is almost a footnote. Legal outcomes belong to judges. History delivers a different, colder verdict, one that is taking shape as we speak. History has a habit of digging where power once tried to bury. Testimonies resurface. Paper trails outlive reputations. The forgotten acquire names again, and the silence that once protected the powerful begins to fracture.
Strongmen always insist their moment is unique, that necessity excuses everything. But power is designed to expire.
So, I’ll end with a simple truth. Anyone can play God for a season. Power makes it easy to command loyalty and inspire fear. But authority ends where truth begins. And truth is patient. It does not yield to threats or insults. It cannot be mocked into submission or voted out of existence. Long after the speeches fade and the reputations fracture, it waits, quiet, exacting, and impossible to escape.
