[Pastilan] Cult of personality: From Charles Manson to Rodrigo Duterte

It is one of the darker ironies of our political age that a former president, once lionized and strutting as the high priest of toughness, appealed for temporary liberty before the very tribunal he once mocked. On November 28, the appeals chamber of the International Criminal Court (ICC) denied Rodrigo Duterte’s plea for interim release.

One factor was that the ICC judges looked, not only at Duterte, but also at the people who orbit him. They saw the DDS, the Duterte Diehard Supporters, and the digital herd that repeats whatever they are told, like a congregation chanting liturgy without understanding a word of it. The court saw this online battalion, along with Duterte’s family members in power and his other associates, as a network over which the former president maintains overwhelming influence.

From the ICC’s vantage point, this network would make any grant of temporary liberty hazardous, because the DDS have long been a cult of personality that rivals some of the strangest cases in recent years.

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If one wonders what a 21st-century cult looks like, they need look no further than the DDS, who treat Duterte as part folk hero, part father figure, as if he were some sort of demigod. They bring to mind the tragicomic saga of the Manson Family.

To be clear, the DDS is not a doomsday cult in the wilderness like that of the late Charles Manson. It is an anomaly in the Philippine system — an unintended political byproduct of a country worn down by the failures of its own democracy. 

Most of its members are not killers in the Manson mold, but they display the same reflex for submission and helped, wittingly or unwittingly, to enable and even hail a bloody campaign that claimed thousands of Filipino lives in a counterfeit drug war. The resemblance to Manson’s doomsday disciples is not exact, but it is impossible to miss.

Manson attracted hippie followers in California in the late 1960s, convincing them of an impending apocalypse. He manipulated them into committing murders in the name of “Helter Skelter,” his false prophecy of an imagined race war shaped by his delusions and a twisted reading of one of the Beatles’ loudest songs.

During the Tate-LaBianca murders in 1969, Manson did not wield a gun or knife himself, much like Duterte. But he made suggestions and directed his followers, who became his murder weapons. He was a principal by inducement, just as in the brutal Duterte drug war decades later.

When the court decided that Manson could not represent himself, he showed up the next day with the letter X carved into his forehead. It looked like his way of sending a bold and ridiculous message of defiance. But what was more absurd was that his female co-defendants, like robots taking the cue and eager to show loyalty, followed suit and also etched Xs into their own foreheads. It was a disturbing show of gullibility.

Just as Manson commanded obedience with showmanship and mind games, Duterte commanded loyalty with bluster and threats, with a dose of the mind-altering, highly addictive Fentanyl on the side. 

Manson treated the courtroom like a stage, grinning, shouting, and mocking the authority of the court. Wasn’t that a semblance of how Duterte behaved when faced with hard questions about his drug war before lawmakers in 2024? Lest we forget, Duterte turned the Senate and House panel hearings into a circus.

Outside the court, Manson’s followers gathered sporadically, creating a strange and unsettling spectacle that reflected their devotion to their leader. It was a troubling kind of loyalty — blind, unquestioning, and total — a readiness to follow a conman anywhere, very much like what is happening outside the ICC.

Look at Duterte’s faithful in The Hague. They do not carve symbols into their skin, not yet, but outside the detention facility they chant, cry, and pose for selfies with cardboard standees like it’s a carnival.

The pattern is clear. Both Duterte and Manson understood that if you speak loudly, crudely, and wildly enough, some will mistake noise for leadership. Duterte relied on profanity and macho threats of violence, while Manson used mystical gibberish and drug-fueled riddles. Here we see charismatic nonsense turned into power.

Both of them preached doom. Duterte warned of narco-politics and said the country was drowning in drugs. Manson warned of “Helter Skelter.” They made it look like they were the only ones with a map out of the mess, and their followers nodded along like bobblehead toys on a dashboard.

Of course, there are differences, but the psychology of their followers is painfully familiar.

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Which brings us back to the ICC ruling. The judges saw not only a man facing accusations of crimes against humanity. They saw an entire ecosystem of sycophants ready to swarm, distort, and intimidate. 

The ICC saw a political machine masquerading as a grassroots movement. It saw a man who still commands a fervor capable of bending facts and stifling witnesses enough to bring him back to power. Their conclusion was that justice already struggles enough without competing with an aggressive following that acts based on a holy scripture written in emojis on Facebook.

The decision to uphold the denial of interim release was a recognition that justice cannot function in the presence of a mob that parades life-size cardboards and chants battle cries, who think that loyalty can substitute for international law and who mistake devotion for duty and idolatry for citizenship. They are deeply and colossally wrong.

The ICC has spoken with calm finality. No volume of hysteria, no chorus of online parrots, and no cultish exhibition can change the stubborn fact that international justice does not bow to fantasies. It listens only to evidence, reason, and the silent testimony of the dead.

If the DDS find that intolerable, then all the more reason why the ruling stands. Pastilan. – Rappler.com