The term "death by a thousand cuts" comes from the Chinese word "lingchi", which, according to Wikipedia, translates as "lingering death" or "slow process". In case your imagination isn't gory enough, lingchi was a torture and execution practice for roughly a thousand years, and in some cases there could be as many as three thousand cuts to the human body in the awful ordeal. Death could be achieved in as little as fifteen minutes, although some emperors ordered as many as three days of cutting. Three days is minuscule compared to four years, which is how long Rodrigo Duterte and his ruling PDP-Lapang Party have controlled the Philippines. Elected in 2016 as a populist and nationalist, Duterte is notorious around the world for the extra-judicial killings as a result of his so-called War on Drugs. News organizations and human rights groups have claimed that the death count may be as high as 12,000, including 54 children in the first year.
Duterte may be infamous abroad, but he is beloved at home. The majority of my Filipino friends strongly support Duterte and his War on Drugs. The reasons why never really make sense to me; they'll usually say something about Filipinos needing a paternalistic or authoritarian figure to manage things and keep order. Opinion polls also show clear evidence that Duterte (sometimes nicknamed "Duterte Harry") remains popular, with numbers as high as 91 percent, even as the COVID-19 pandemic ravages the country and the War on Drugs continues. Typically, Filipino presidents rank much lower.
His popularity has remained sky-high despite critical reporting from journalists like Maria Ressa, co-founder of the online news site Rappler. Ressa, a 2018 Time magazine Person of the Year, has been a critic of Duterte's, and she has paid the price for it. The documentary A Thousand Cuts, directed by Ramona Diaz, focuses on Ressa and Rappler's reporting on the War on Drugs and the government's draconian response to their work. In addition to following Ressa's story, A Thousand Cuts also shows its audience other journalists at Rappler, like Pia Ranada and Patricia Evangelista, as well as the senatorial campaigns of Samira Gutoc (a Duterte critic) and Ronald dela Rosa, a big, bald, and bold police general who is short on policy specifics (other than that he's with Duterte) but does a lot of out-of-tune singing for his supporters at rallies. Duterte does not appear as frequently as Ressa, but his presence is always there, whether it be through his government's targeting of journalists or another dead body in the streets.
Some critics (especially those who admire Duterte) might describe A Thousand Cuts as one-sided, but this would be unfair. If an audience member is looking for balance, they would surely see it in the senate races; both of the candidates get about equal screen time to share their point of view. Beyond that, a "both-sides-of-the-argument" type of approach in this documentary would have made it too thoroughly bland and didactic in the wrong way. And for authoritarian leaders, a fair-and-balanced approach is not appropriate. Does a guy who has an approval rating in the nineties (despite botching a pandemic response and murdering thousands of people) really need a film to present his side of the story?
Riaz and her team have done a commendable job editing all their footage and archival footage covering so many complex topics and getting their audience invested. People from the U.S. may take special interest in such a film because of the similarities between Donald Trump and Duterte, but there's no reason why someone from Canada or Sweden or Japan, for example, wouldn't also find the film fascinating. One element that will help keep audiences' attention is Sam Lipman's score, which, while not an omnipresent part of the documentary, does help A Thousand Cuts feel increasingly like a political thriller as it inches its way towards the denoument.
With the way Diaz has presented everything, it's difficult to watch A Thousand Cuts and not notice obvious similarities between the Trump experiment in the United States and the Duterte experiment in the Philippines. Both have demonstrated the dangers of populism and "law-and-order" brutality, as well as attacks on the media. Early in the documentary, Duterte calls Rappler a "fake news outlet...pregnant with falsity." Both Trump and Duterte certainly have benefited from actual fake news and vitriol on social media sites like Facebook. (The #ArrestThoseBitches is seen in A Thousand Cuts, presumably referring to Ressa, Renada, Evangelista, and others.) Duterte is much more blunt than Trump. With Trump, he would often test limits by "joking" or re-tweeting someone. Duterte doesn't do that. He's much more direct. "If you end up dead," we hear him tell a journalist in the film, "it's your own fault." They both boast about their genitals, but even in that Duterte is more descriptive, as we see here. Ressa notes that while her sister lives in New York and she lives in Manila, both of them are ruled by similar leaders, "macho, populist, sexist at best," she says, "misogynistic at worst." They both use anger and fear to divide and conquer, she tell us.
The difference between the Philippines and the United States, though, is that Trump eventually lost in the U.S. True, Trump came to power (by losing the popular vote and with the help of Russia) and then won the second-most votes in the 2020 campaign. He tried to overturn the results, and his supporters violently stormed the Capitol to try and prevent the transfer of power. But it failed. Journalists haven't been convicted in the U.S. for reporting on politicians. Ressa notes that if authoritarians can get away with it in countries like the U.S., they surely can get away with it in countries like the Philippines.
But alas, it seems she's wrong. Trump is out of power and unusually mute, facing possible (yet increasingly unlikely) conviction. His approval rating was in the thirties, not nineties, and the growing consensus is that he will be historically ranked as one of the worst, if not the worst. Duterte, however, while term-limited, seems to be readying the presidential palace for his daughter. His war has been a failure but continues nevertheless. Ressa has been convicted of cyberlibel. It's possible that Trump or someone like him could win in 2024 or beyond, but it's just as likely that this will not be the case. Duterte's legacy, popularity, War on Drugs, and persecution of journalists, however, seems unlikely to go away. The cuts could keep coming.
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