IT comes as no surprise that Senator Vicente Sotto III was one of the first to come to President Duterte’s defense when he joked about rape to soldiers of the 2nd Mechanized Infantry Brigade. It was Sotto, after all, who made a snide, sexist remark that denigrated single mothers, then tried to pass it off as joke that his critics didn’t get.
Speaking to the troops in Iligan City Friday, President Duterte joked that he would even go to jail for them if they raped up to three women, but if they took a fourth, he would have Defense Secretary Delfin Lazaro beat them up.
This may seem par for the course for Mr. Duterte, who once joked that he wish he had raped an Australian missionary before convicts had done so and killed her.
Sadly, Duterte and Sotto seem cut from the same Stone Age cloth, of men who believe that manliness is somehow enhanced by the degradation of and violence toward women.
The opposite is true.
If Mr. Duterte simply sought to fire up the troops ahead of battle, he could have easily drawn inspiration from the many examples that history provides.
Napoleon Bonaparte rallied his troops before the Battle of Marengo in Italy in 1800 by asking—and answering—a key question.
“Shall we allow our audacious enemies to violate with impunity the territory of the Republic? Will you permit the army to escape which has carried terror into your families? You will not. March, then, to meet him. Tear from his brows the laurels he has won. Teach the world that a malediction attends those that violate the territory of the Great People. The result of our efforts will be unclouded glory, and a durable peace.”
As Germany invaded France in May 1940, Winston Churchill rallied his people for the coming war with confident defiance.
“[We] shall fight on the seas and oceans… we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender…”
Speaking to his demoralized troops before they defeated Rommel’s Afrika Corps in August 1942, General Sir Bernard Montgomery said: “Here we will stand and fight; there will be no further withdrawal. I have ordered that all plans and instructions dealing with further withdrawal are to be burned, and at once. We will stand and fight here. If we can’t stay here alive, then let us stay here dead.”
Another example, perhaps more to Mr. Duterte’s liking, comes from General George S. Patton, who exhorted the Third Army in the Spring of 1944: “I don’t want to get any messages saying, ‘I am holding my position.’ We are not holding a goddamned thing. Let the Germans do that. We are advancing constantly and we are not interested in holding onto anything, except the enemy’s balls. We are going to twist his balls and kick the living shit out of him all of the time.”
Great leaders can inspire men without degrading the opposite sex. Real men understand that.