Duterte’s Hitler remarks insensitive, unjustifiable—lawyer

NUPL secretary general Edre Olalia. INQUIRER FILE PHOTO

President Rodrigo Duterte’s controversial remarks that drew parallels with his bloody war on drugs and Adolf Hitler’s killing of the Jews during the Holocaust were “insensitive” and “unjustifiable,” a lawyer said on Sunday.

Edre Olalia, secretary general of the National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers, called the pronouncement of the President or anyone for that matter using Hitler as a model as “grotesquely gratuitous.”

SEE: FULL TEXT + VIDEO: ‘I’d be happy to slaughter them all’ | Duterte ‘Hitler’ talk reaps international censure

“Remarks by anyone on Hitler as a model or standard instead of a despicable evil, whether uttered in levity or pique, are grotesquely gratuitous and insensitive,” Olalia said in a statement.

“The audacity is simply unjustifiable by any measure. Let us all pull the breaks on this compulsive obsession before things irreparably go berserk beyond redemption,” he added.

Upon arriving from an official visit to Vietnam, Duterte on Friday said he would be “happy to slaughter” three million drug addicts in the Philippines by himself in the same way that Hitler murdered millions of Jews before and during the Second World War.

“If Germany had Hitler, the Philippines would have …,” Duterte told reporters in Davao City, before pausing and pointing to himself.

The President’s remarks drew a barrage of condemnation from the United Nations, German and Israeli governments, the Pentagon, and international rights groups.

Noting that “words are expressions of a state of mind” and “symbols also matter,” Olalia called for a “sense of proportion if not tact.”

“We shudder at the thought that the road to hell is unstoppably being paved by good intentions. But heaping studied praise to things that are profoundly good should not disable us from harping principled dissent on things profanely bad,” he added.

Malacañang on Saturday rejected Duterte’s picture as a mass murderer, saying he did not in any way praise Hitler as a model in his remarks, which the presidential palace called an “oblique deflection” of what the President really meant. Presidential Spokesperson Ernesto Abella said it was Duterte’s rivals in the May elections who first created the Hitler analogy./rga