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NOSI BAYASI'S HEBIGAT ISSUE#2: RIZAL'S RETRACTION
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Rizal's Retraction: A Note on the Debate
by Dr. Eugene A. Hessel
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Note: This was originally published in The Silliman Journal (Vol. 12, No. 2, April, May, June, 1965), pages 168-183.
Permission has been given by Silliman University and by the author, Dr. Hessel, to reproduce the document on this site.
Originally this was a lecture given at Silliman University, February 15, 1965. Dr. Eugene A Hessel was once a Professor of New Testament at Union Theological Seminary, Dasmariñas, Cavite.
RIZAL’S RETRACTION: A NOTE ON THE DEBATE
Eugene A. Hessel
This is a debate in which this lecturer hesitates to take part. For one thing, I believe there are aspects in the life and thought of Dr. José Rizal which are of far greater significance. I have already expressed this view in my book The Religious Thought of José Rizal, (01) and I shall have more to say about it in the concluding part of this lecture. It is most unfortunate that some people speak and write about the Retraction without really knowing what Rizal did or did not retract, i.e., not sufficient attention has been given to the mature, quite uniform and systematic religious thought of Dr. Rizal. Only when this has been done first can one evaluate the meaningfulness of the Retraction. For some people to retract would mean little, for they have so little to retract. This was not so of Rizal, and I have tried to make this clear in my previous lectures and writing. It is the life and thought of Rizal during his mature years which are of primary interest to me, and not what happened during the last day of his life.
Another reason I hesitate to enter the “debate” is that some of the protagonists have generated more heat than light. There has been a great deal of “argumentum ad hominem,” i.e., vitriolic attacks upon opponents in the debate. I do not wish to engage in such. I have respect for a number of Roman Catholic defenders of the Retraction. I treasure a letter received recently from one who has written four books defending it. He says, after reading my book, “I wish to congratulate you for your . . . impartial appraisal of the man [Dr. Rizal].” Father Manuel A. Garcia, the discoverer of the Retraction Document, has been most gracious in personally helping me with my research.
Recently, however, I have been looking into the question of the Retraction with some interest and I intend to continue my research. I find that there are four common attitudes toward the “Retraction” and its bearing on the life and character of Dr. Rizal:
1. There are those who insist that the Rizal to be remembered and honored is the “converted” Rizal. This is the official Roman Catholic position. In the only “official” book dealing with all aspects of the Retraction (“official” in the sense that it bears the Imprimatur of Archbishop Santos), Rizal’s Unfading Glory, Father Cavanna says in the Preface:
Rizal’s glory as a scholar, as a poet, as a scientist, as a patriot, as a hero, may some day fade away, as all worldly glories, earlier or later do. But his glory of having found at the hour of his death what unfortunately he lost for a time, the Truth, the Way, and the Life, that will ever be his UNFADING GLORY. (02)
This same sentiment is echoed in the statement issued by the Catholic Welfare Organization in 1956 and signed by the Archbishop with regard to the Noli and the Fili:
. . . We have to imitate him [Rizal] precisely in what he did when he was about to crown the whole work of his life by sealing it with his blood; we ought to withdraw, as he courageously did in the hour of his supreme sacrifice, “whatever in his works, writings, publications, and conduct had been contrary to his status as a son of the Catholic Church.
2. There are those who have argued that Rizal throughout his mature life was a “free thinker and unbeliever”; thus the Retraction is of necessity a lie. This is the extreme opposite of the Roman Catholic position. My previous writing has tried to demonstrate that the major premise on which this thesis is based is not true.
3. A third implied view may be summarized as follows: the Rizal that matters is the pre-Retraction Rizal; therefore one can ignore the Retraction. The fundamental assumption here is held by many students and admirers of Rizal, including myself, but the conclusion does not necessarily follow. This brings us to the fourth possible attitude towards the Retraction.
4. Scholarly investigation of all facets of Rizal’s life and thought is desirable. In the interest of truth, the truth to which Rizal gave such passionate devotion, we have every right, and also an obligation, to seek to know the facts with regard to the Retraction. If scholarly research continues, fancy may yet become acknowledged fact.
Before we proceed further it would be well to say something about bibliography and method. More than twenty books and pamphlets, in addition to numerous articles have been surveyed in the course of this study. A number of writings on the Retraction merely repeat the arguments of earlier ones and add nothing new. Others are more sarcastic and sentimental than enlightening. But something of value has been gained from almost all of them. The literature belongs to two general categories: biography, and works dealing specifically with the Retraction. Among the biographers, Guerrero, (03) Laubach, (04) and Palma (05) have given the most adequate treatment of the Retraction, the first accepting it and the other two rejecting it. Of works dealing specifically with the Retraction, the most objective, scholarly and complete are those by Pascual, (06) arguing against the Retraction, and Father Cavanna (07) in its favor. As an almost complete compendium of information and arguments pro and con there is no book to date which is the equal of that of Father Cavanna. The second edition has 353 pages of text, appendices, and bibliographical entries totaling some 123 items. (A new edition just off the press is enlarged further but could not be utilized. Incidentally, Father Cavanna draws heavily upon the documents and information supplied by Father Manuel A. Garcia.) Amongst other writers consulted, special indebtedness to Collas, (08) Ricardo Garcia, (09) and Runes and Buenafe (10) should be mentioned. Garcia is a prolific popular writer in defense of the Retraction; the other two oppose it. All tend to chiefly summarize what has previously argued although Runes introduces several new arguments which will be examined in due course. Much research time has been spent in running down various versions of the Retraction Document appearing in books, articles, newspapers, etc. in writing letters to clarify or verify certain points, and in conferring with individuals. Unfortunately, many documents were destroyed during the war.
The story of the Retraction has been told and retold. Various newspaper reports of the last hours of Rizal were published on Dec. 30, 1896 or the days shortly thereafter. However, the first detailed account came out in a series of anonymous articles in the Barcelona magazine, “La Juventud,” issues of January 15 and 31 and Feb. 14, 1897, republished some months later in a booklet entitled La Masonización de Filipinas -- Rizal y su Obra. Some thirteen years later, Father Vicente Balaguer, S.J., the Jesuit priest who claimed to have secured Rizal’s Retraction, asserted that this account was his work which he originally wrote “that very same night of December 29, 1896. (11) Subsequently, on August 8, 1917, Father Balaguer repeated his story in a notarial act sworn to by him in Murcia, Spain. The only detailed account is that by Father Pio Pi Y Vidal, S. J., Superior of the Jesuits in the Philippines in 1896, who published in Manila in 1909 La Muerte Cristiana del Doctor Rizal and confirmed his account in a Notarial Act signed in Barcelona, April 7, 1917. In brief, the Jesuit account is this: On the 28th of December (the very day Governor General Polaviéja ordered the death sentence) Archbishop Nozaleda commissioned the Jesuits to the spiritual care of Rizal, indicating that it would probably be necessary to demand a retraction and suggesting that both he and Father Pi would prepare “formulas.” Thus, about 7:00 a.m. of the 29th, two of the Jesuits arrived at the temporary chapel where Rizal was to spend his last 24 hours. During this day various Jesuits came in and out together with other visitors, including members of his own family. Rizal also took time to write letters. Arguments with Rizal, with Father Balaguer taking the leading part, continued until dusk, by which time, according to the Father’s account, (12) Rizal was already asking for the formula of retraction. That night Rizal wrote out a retraction based on the formula of Father Pi and signed it about 11:30 p.m. The Retraction contains two significant points: (1) the rejection of Masonry (“I abominate Masonry”) and (2) a repudiation of “anything in my words, writings, publications, and conduct that has been contrary to my character as a son of the Catholic Church,” together with the statement “I believe and profess what it teaches and I submit to what it demands.” During the night there followed, according to the Jesuit accounts, several Confessions (some say five), several hearings of Mass, a number of devotional acts, the asking for and signing of devotional booklets intended for various members of his family, and finally at 6:00 a.m. or thereabouts, some fifteen minutes before he was marched out of Fort Santiago to his execution, a marriage ceremony performed by Father Balaguer for Rizal and Josephine Bracken. So much for the story in outline. Details, including the text of the Retraction, will be presented and discussed later.
Before assessing the validity of the account a brief word should be said about the history of the controversy concerning the Retraction. One way to arrive quickly at an overall view of the course of the debate is to read the titles and dates of pamphlets and books dealing with the subject such as are contained in any good bibliography of Rizal. A seemingly accurate description of the history of the struggle in convenient form is found in Part II of Cavanna’s book which reports the various attacks down to the publication in 1949 of Ozaeta’s translation of Palma’s biography of Rizal. Cavanna seeks to answer the various arguments against the Retraction, and in doing so makes reference to the chief works defending it. The first stage of the Debate lasted for some twelve years after Rizal’s death, and at least overtly was wholly one-sided. Cavanna aptly calls this period one of “Concealed Attacks.” The newspapers published the reports given to them presumably by the Jesuits. Within the first year the Jesuits published a quite complete story, for the time being anonymous in authorship. In successive years other books and booklets were devoted in whole or in part to repeating the same story, culminating in the famous full length biography in Spanish by Wenceslao Retana who incorporates the Jesuit account. Yet even in the early years of this first period there were a few small voices raised in objection, quite surprising since a totalitarian regime combining Church and State was in control. Cavanna himself lists a leaflet dated Manila, December 31, 1896 and several letters questioning the retraction. (13) Their main point, stated or implied, is that the Retraction is not in keeping with the character of Rizal. It is of interest that at the end of the period, just a year after the publication of his own biography of Rizal, Retana has something similar to say in an article dated Dec. 29, 1908. Although still not denying the retraction, he adds:
. . . The fact is that influenced by a series of phenomena, or what is the same, of abnormal circumstances, Rizal subscribed that document, which has been so much talked about, and which no one has seen . . . The conversion of Rizal . . . was a romantic concession of the poet, it was not a meditated concession of the philosopher. (14)
We may accept Cavanna’s dating of the second period as covering from 1908-1935. This is the time of vigorous open attacks, many of them by Masons. Ever since, somewhat unfortunately, an active battle has been waged between Roman Catholic and Masonic protagonists. Early in the period, in 1909 to be exact, Father Pi published his booklet La Muerte Cristiana del Doctor Rizal. This was answered three years later in a long article by Hermenegildo Cruz in which several arguments often repeated subsequently were presented, chief of them being: Where is the Retraction Document? The debate drew forth in 1920 the most serious Roman Catholic answer until recent times, namely Father Gonzalo Ma. Piñana’s Murio el Doctor Rizal Cristianamente? Which is chiefly significant because it reports a series of notarized accounts made in the years 1917-1918 by the chief “witnesses.” The period seemingly closes with victory for the defenders of the Retraction, for after many challenges to show the actual Document of Retraction on May 18, 1935 it was “discovered” by Father Manuel A. Garcia, C.M., while he was archdiocesan archivist [and] was busily sorting through a pile of documents [so] that they might be arranged in orderly fashion in their new fireproof vault. On June 16th the news was released by The Philippine Herald.
I would date the last period of the Debate from 1935 until the present. This is the time when, in the light of the Retraction Document discovery, major and minor works have been written on the subject of Rizal’s life and thought as a whole and on the Retraction in particular. This leads us naturally to an assessment of the chief arguments pro and con which have been raised over the years and systematically dealt with in the last thirty years.
As one examines the issues brought forth in the debate, a tabulation of the chief ones raised since 1935 (the year of the discovery of the alleged Retraction Document) indicates that a sort of impasse has been reached. Similar points are now made over and over again. In what follows I shall not devote myself to presenting detailed answers to detailed arguments. This has been done in book after book. Furthermore, as any college debater or trial lawyer knows, it is possible to present an objection to almost any statement, and the effect so far as the audience is concerned is often the result of a subtle turn of phrase or an appeal to a bit of loyalty or sentiment. Rather, we shall be concerned with the thrust of certain main positions which taken individually and in their accumulative significance serve to swing the weight of unbiased conviction from one side to the other. Finally, we shall offer some suggestions for escaping from the present stalemated debate.
What, then, are the major arguments for the Retraction? Although the arguments had been presented by others before him, Father Cavanna (15) gives a well organized summary which is adopted by most subsequent defenders. The points which follow are based on Cavanna with some minor modifications:
1. Since the discovery in 1935, the Retraction “Document” is considered the chief witness to the reality of the Retraction, itself. In fact, since then, by words or implication, the defenders have said: “the burden of proof now rests with those who question the Retraction.”
2. The testimony of the press at the time of the event, of “eye-witnesses,” and other “qualified witnesses,” i.e. those closely associated with the events such as the head of the Jesuit order, the archbishop, etc.
3. “Acts of Faith, Hope, and Charity” reportedly recited and signed by Dr. Rizal as attested by “witnesses” and a signed Prayer Book. This is very strong testimony if true, for Rizal was giving assent to Roman Catholic teaching not in a general way as in the case of the Retraction statement but specifically to a number of beliefs which he had previously repudiated. According to the testimony of Father Balaguer, following the signing of the Retraction a prayer book was offered to Rizal. “He took the prayer book, read slowly those acts, accepted them, took the pen and saying ‘Credo’ (I believe) he signed the acts with his name in the book itself.” (16) What was it Rizal signed? It is worth quoting in detail the “Act of Faith.”
I believe in God the Father, I believe in God the Son, I believe in God the Holy Ghost, Three distinct Persons, and only One True God. I believe that the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity became Man, taking flesh in the most pure womb of the Virgin Mary, suffered, died, arose again, ascended into Heaven, and that He will come to judge the living and the dead, to give glory to the just because they have kept his holy commandments, and eternal punishment to the wicked because they have not kept them. I believe that the true Body and Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ are really present in the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar. I believe that the Blessed and ever Virgin Mary, Mother of God, was in the first moment of her natural life conceived without the stain of original sin. I believe that the Roman Pontiff, Vicar of Jesus Christ, visible Head of the Church, is the Pastor and Teacher of all Christians; that he is infallible when he teaches doctrines of faith and morals to be observed by the universal Church, and that his definitions are in themselves binding and immutable; and I believe all that the Holy, Roman Catholic, and Apostolic Church believes and teaches, since God who can neither deceive nor be deceived, has so revealed it; and in this faith I wish to live and die.
The signed Prayer Book was amongst the documents discovered by Father Garcia along with the Retraction.
4. Acts of Piety performed by Rizal during his last hours as testified to by “witnesses.”
5. His “Roman Catholic Marriage” to Josephine Bracken as attested to by “witnesses.” There could be no marriage without a retraction.
These arguments are impressive. Many think of them, as Cavanna does, as “irrefutable facts.” But to call them “facts” is to prejudge the case or to misuse the word. That a Retraction Document was discovered in 1935 is probably a fact but that is a document actually prepared and signed by Rizal is the question at issue. AS we shall soon see, many opponents of the Retraction use the Document as their chief argument. So also, there is a signed Prayer Book. But a number have asked, is this really Rizal’s signature? Granted, for sake of argument, that it is, what is the significance of a mere signature apart from the testimony of Father Balaguer as to why Rizal signed?
What about the testimony of the “witnesses?” We may dismiss the newspaper reports as being less significant though of corroborative value. Their news was secured from others. One reporter got into the chapel during part of the twenty-four hours. He states that “studies, frolics of infancy, and boys’ stories, were the subject of our chat.” (17) As for the actual eye witnesses, some eight testified to having seen one or more of the acts mentioned above. Only three testify to having seen the signing of the Retraction. The major witnesses are priests or government officials at a time when Church and State worked hand in hand. The bulk of the testimony comes from notarized statements in 1917 or later. Having made these remarks, it is none the less true that the testimony is impressive. It cannot be dismissed, as some have tried to do, with a few sarcastic comments. The argument from testimony as well as the arguments as a whole can be better judged only after weighing this evidence over against the arguments rejecting the Retraction.
What is the case against the Retraction?
1. The Retraction Document is said to be a forgery. As we have noted, the Document plays a significant part on both sides of the debate. There are four prongs to the case against the document itself.
a. First of all there is the matter of the handwriting. To date the only detailed, scientific study leading to an attack upon the genuineness of the document is that made by Dr. Ricardo R. Pascual of the University of the Philippines shortly after the document was found, a study which he incorporated in his book Rizal Beyond the Grave. Taking as his “standard” some half dozen unquestioned writings of Rizal dating from the last half of December 1896, he notes a number of variations with the handwriting of the Retraction Document, the following being the most significant ones according to the present lecturer: (1) the slant of the letters in the standard writings gives averages several points higher than the average yielded by the Retraction Document, and perhaps more significantly, the most slanted letters are to be found in the Document; (2) there are significant variations in the way individual letters are formed; (3) with reference to the signature, Pascual notes no less than seven differences, one of the most significant being indications of “stops” which, says the critic, are most naturally explained by the fact that a forger might stop at certain points to determine what form to make next; (4) there are marked similarities in several respects between the body of the Retraction and the writing of all three signers, i.e. Rizal and the two witnesses, thus serving to point to Pascual’s conclusion that this is a “one-man document.”
The only scholarly answer to Pascual is that given by Dr. José I. Del Rosario as part of the thesis which he prepared for his doctorate in chemistry at the University of Sto. Tomas, 1937, although most of the details are the result of a later study which Father Cavanna asked him to specifically prepare. (18) Dr. del Rosario’s main criticism may be said to be that Pascual does not include enough of Rizal’s writings by way of comparison. On the basis of a larger selection of standards he is able to challenge a number of Pascual’s statements although this lecturer has noted mistakes in del Rosario’s own data. Dr. del Rosario’s conclusion is that the hand-writing is genuine.
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TEXT OF THE RETRACTION DOCUMENT DISCOVERED BY FATHER GARCIA IN 1935 IN THE ARCHIVES OF THE ARCHDIOCESE *
Me declare católico y en esta Religion en que nací y me eduqué quiero vivir y morir.
Me retracto de todo corazon de cuanto en mis palabras, escritos, impresos y conducta ha habido contrario á mi cualidad de hijo de la Iglesia Católica. Creo y profeso cuanto ella enseña y me someto á cuarto ella manda. Abomino de la Masoneria, como enemiga que es de la Iglesia, y como sociedad prohibida por la Iglesia. Puede el Parelado Diocesano, como Autoridad Superior Eclesiástica hacer pública esta manifestación espontánea mia para reparar el escándalo que mis actos hayan podido causar y para que Dios y los hombres me perdonen.
José Rizal
El Jefe del Piquete El ayudante uplaze
Juan del Fresno Eloy Moure
*Based on a photostat of the Retraction in the files of Rev. Manuel A. Garcia, C.M. seen by this lecturer.
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TEXT OF THE RETRACTION AS REPORTED BY FATHER BALAGUER IN HIS NOTARIAL ACT OF AUGUST 8, 1917 *
Me declare católico y en esta religión en que nací y me eduqué quiero vivir y morir. Me retracto de todo corazon de cuanto en mis palabras, escritos, impresos y conducta ha habido contrario a mi cualidad de hijo de la Iglesia. Creo y profeso cuanto ella enseña; y me someto á cuarto ella manda. Abomino de la Masonería, como enemiga que es de la Iglesia, y como Sociedad prohibida por la misma Iglesia. Puede el Parelado diocesano, como Autoridad superior eclesiástica, hacer pública esta manifestación, espontánea mía para reparar el escándalo que mis actos hayan podido causar y para que Dios y los hombres me perdonen.
Manila, 29 de Deciembre de 1896.
Esta… retractación la firmaron con el Dr. Rizal, el Sr. Fresno Jefe del Piquete y el señor Moure, Ayudantede la Plaza.
* Cf. Gonzalo Ma. Piñana, Murió el Doctor Rizal Cristianamente? (Barcelona: Editorial Barcelonesa, S.A., 1920), p. 155
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b. A second prong directed against the authenticity of the document itself is based on the principles of textual criticism. Several critics, beginning so far as I know with Pascual, have noted differences between the text of the document found in 1935 and other versions of the Retraction including the one issued by Father Balaguer. (19) Since this kind of criticism is related to my work in Biblical studies I am now engaged in a major textual study of my own which consists first of all in gathering together all available forms of the text. To date, it is clear from my own studies that at least from the morning of December 30, 1896 there have been, discounting numerous minor variations, two distinct forms of the text with significant differences. The one form is represented by the Document discovered in 1935 and certain other early records of the Retraction. Two phrases in particular are to be noted: in line 6, “Iglesia Catolica,” and in line 10 “la Iglesia.” The other form of the text is much more common beginning with the text of Balaguer published in 1897. In place of “Iglesia Catolica” in line 6 there is the single word “Iglesia” and in place of “la Iglesia” there appears “la misma Iglesia.” There also tend to be consistent differences between the two types of the text in the use of capital letters. The second form also claims to be a true representation of the original.
The usual explanation of these differences is that either Father Balaguer or Father Pi made errors in preparing a copy of the original and these have been transmitted from this earliest copy to others. Father Cavanna makes the ingenious suggestion that Father Balaguer made corrections in the “formula” which he supplied to Rizal according to the charges which he supplied to Rizal writing out his own, but he didn’t accurately note them all. On the other hand, it would have seemed that the copy would have been carefully compared at the very moment or at some other early date before the “original” disappeared. It is not surprising that some have wondered if the Retraction Document was fabricated from the “wrong” version of a retraction statement issued by the religious authorities.
c. A third argument against the genuineness of the Retraction Document which also applies to the Retraction itself is that its content is in part strangely worded, e.g. in the Catholic Religion “I wish to live and die,” yet there was little time to live, and also Rizal’s claim that his retraction was “spontaneous.”
d. Finally, there is the “confession” of “the forger.” Only Runes has this story. He and his co-author report an interview with a certain Antonio K. Abad who tells how on August 13, 1901 at a party at his ancestral home in San Isidro, Nueva Ecija (when Abad was fifteen) a certain Roman Roque told how he was employed by the Friars earlier that same year to make several copies of a retraction document. This same Roque had been previously employed by Colonel Funston to forge the signature of the revolutionary General Lacuna on the document which led to the capture of Aguinaldo. Runes also includes a letter dated November 10, 1936 from Lorenzo Ador Dionisio, former provincial secretary of Nueva Ecija, who was also present when Roque told his story and confirms it. (20)
On the basis of the above arguments taken as a whole it would seem that there is reasonable ground to at least question the Retraction Document.
(2) The second main line of argument against the Retraction is the claim that other acts and facts do not fit well with the story of the Retraction. Those most often referred to by writers beginning with Hermengildo Cruz in 1912 are as follows:
a. The document of Retraction was not made public until 1935. Even members of the family did not see it. It was said to be “lost.”
b. No effort was made to save Rizal from the death penalty after his signing of the Retraction.
The usual rebuttal is that Rizal’s death was due to political factors and with this the religious authorities could not interfere.
c. Rizal’s burial was kept secret; he was buried outside the inner wall of the Paco cemetery; and the record of his burial was not placed on the page for entries of Dec. 30th but on a special page where at least one other admitted non-penitent is recorded (perhaps others, the evidence is conflicting).
It is asked by the defenders of the Retraction, how else could an executed felon be treated? Perhaps the ground outside the wall was sacred also or could have been specially consecrated. To top the rebuttal, Rizal’s “Christian Burial Certificate” was discovered on May 18, 1935 in the very same file with the Retraction Document! The penmanship is admitted by all to be by an amanuensis. Whether the signature is genuine is open to question.
d. There is no marriage certificate or public record of the marriage of Rizal with Josephine Bracken. To say that these were not needed is not very convincing.
e. Finally, Rizal’s behavior as a whole during his last days at Fort Santiago and during the last 24 hours in particular does not point to a conversion. Whether written during the last 24 hours or somewhat earlier, Rizal’s Ultima [Ultimo] Adios does not suggest any change in Rizal’s thought. The letters which Rizal wrote during his last hours do not indicate conversion or even religious turmoil. In the evening Rizal’s mother and sister Trinidad arrive and nothing is said to them about the Retraction although Father Balaguer claims that even in the afternoon Rizal’s attitude was beginning to change and he was asking for the formula of retraction. It is all well and good to point out that all the above happened prior to the actual retraction. A question is still present in the minds of many.
(3) The third chief line of argument against the Retraction is that it is out of character. This argument has been more persistently and consistently presented than any other. Beginning with the anonymous leaflet of Dec. 31, 1896 it has been asserted or implied in every significant statement against the Retraction since that time. It has seemed to many, including the present lecturer, that the Retraction is not in keeping with the character and faith of Rizal as well as inconsistent with his previous declarations of religious thought.
First let us look at the character of the man. Rizal was mature. Anyone acquainted with the facts of his life knows this is so. Thirty-five is not exactly young and Rizal was far more mature than the average at this age. It is not likely, then, that he would have been shocked into abnormal behavior by the threat of death. He had anticipated for some time that the authorities would destroy him, and even the priests admit that during most of his last 24 hours Rizal manifested a type of behavior consistent with all that was previously exhibited during his mature years. I worked closely with prisoners for some ten years and accompanied two of them to the scaffold. Their behavior was restrained and consistent. I would have expected Rizal’s to be the same. Furthermore, in the deepest sense of the word Rizal was already a “believer.” In my book and elsewhere I have argued strongly that Rizal was not a “free-thinker” in the usual sense of the word. History is full of the unchallenged reports of real conversions, but the most significant meaning of true conversion is the change from unbelief to belief, not mere change of ideas.
Rizal’s conversion is also out of keeping with his mature religious thought. It is not as though Rizal had been bowled over by confrontation with the new thought of Europe (and by antagonism towards religious authorities who had injured his family and who worked hand-in-hand with a restrictive colonial regime) but had never fully thought through his religious convictions. As I have written elsewhere: “The fact that similar views are found from writing to writing of his mature years and that they made a quite consistent whole suggest that such theology as he had was fully his own . . . .” (21) Rizal had a consistent and meaningful system of Christian thought, and it is therefore harder to think of his suddenly exchanging it for another.
So much for the debate up to the present. I have tried to state fairly the arguments, and it is perhaps evident on which side the lecturer stands. Nonetheless, I do not feel that the question is settled. What, then, remains to be done? Is there a way out of the impasse? Are there areas for further investigation?
(1) Let a new effort be made to keep personalities and institutional loyalties out of future discussion. It is time for honest investigators to stop speaking of the “Protestant,” the “Masonic,” or the “Roman Catholic” view towards the Retraction. Let the facts speak for themselves.
(2) Let the Retraction Document be subject to neutral, scientific analysis. This suggestion is not new, but in view of the present state of the debate and appropriate to the approaching 30th year since its discovery it would be fitting to at last carry this out. Furthermore, it would be an act of good faith on the part of the Roman Catholic Hierarchy. If the document is genuine, those who favor the Retraction have nothing to lose; in either case the cause of Truth will gain. I would suggest for this analysis a government bureau of investigation in some neutral country such as Switzerland or Sweden.
Should neutral experts claim that the Document discovered in 1935 is a forgery this of itself would not prove that Rizal did not retract. But it would prompt further study.
(3) As a third step, then, to be undertaken only after a new evaluation of the Retraction Document, the Roman Catholic Hierarchy should feel bound to allow its other “documents” pertaining to Rizal’s case to be investigated, i.e. “the burial certificate,” the signature of the Prayer Book, and perhaps also certain other retraction documents found in the same bundle with that of Dr. Rizal’s.
(4) The story concerning the “forger” should be investigated further.
(5) If assurance can be given that the above steps are being undertaken then let there be a moratorium on further debate and greater attention given to the rest of Rizal’s life and thought, in particular to his mature religious faith and thought. Let me close with the words of Senator José Diokno:
Surely whether Rizal died a Catholic or an apostate adds or detracts nothing from his greatness as a Filipino. It is because of what he did and what he was that we revere Rizal. . . Catholic or Mason, Rizal is still Rizal: the hero who courted death “to prove to those who deny our patriotism that we know how to die for our duty and our beliefs” . . . (22)
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(01) Manila: Philippine Education Co., 1961.
(02) Jesus Ma. Cavanna y Manso, C. M. Rizal’s Unfading Glory, a Documentary History of the Conversion of Dr. José Rizal. 2nd. Ed. Rev. and improved (Manila: n. n. 1956), p. vi. Subsequently referred to as “Cavanna.”
(03) Leon Ma. Guerrero, The First Filipino (Manila: National Heroes Commission, 1963). Subsequently referred to as “Guerrero.”
(04) Frank C. Laubach, Rizal: Man and Martyr (Manila: Community Publishers, 1936). Subsequently referred to as “Laubach.”
(05) Rafael Palma, The Pride of the Malay Race. Translated Roman Ozaeta. (New York: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1949). Subsequently referred to as “Palma.”
(06) Ricardo R. Pascual, Rizal Beyond the Grave, Revised Edition (Manila: Luzon Publishing Corp., 1950). Subsequently referred to as “Pascual.”
(07) Jesus Ma. Cavanna y Manso, op cit. in footnote “1”.
(08) Juan Collas, Rizal’s “Retractions” (Manila: n.n. 1960). Mr. Collas was of great help in preparation of my book on Rizal’s religious thought. He handles both Spanish and English with consummate skill and has opened up to many English readers much of Rizal’s thought by translating Rizal’s most important minor writings.
(09) Ricardo P. Garcia, The Great Debate, The Rizal Retraction (Quezon City: R. P. Garcia Publishing Col, 1964). Subsequently referred to as “Garcia.” Starting with a little booklet in 1960, this former school principal turned publisher has since published three enlargements of his original attempt to answer a number of works written against the Retraction, including those by Palma, Collas, Juan Nabong, Judge Garduño, and Runes using as his defense chiefly Cavanna.
(10) Ildefonso T. Runes and Mameto R. Buenafe, The Forgery of the Rizal “Retraction” and Josephine’s “Autobiography” (Manila: BR Book Col, 1962). Subsequently referred to as “Runes.”
(11) Cavanna, p. 24.
(12) Ibid, p. 8. Cavanna has conveniently included in his book most of the pertinent Jesuits accounts.
(13) Cavanna, pp. 144ff.
(14) Ibid, p. 153.
(15) Cavanna, pp. 1-108.
(16) Cavanna, p. 54. A Photostat of the Acts is found facing page 57 of Cavanna and the translated text on pp 57f.
(17) Don Santiago Mataix, correspondent of the Heraldo de Madrid, quoted by Palma, p. 325.
(18) Cavanna, pp. 176ff.
(19) See accompanying page [inserted columns above] for the two “texts.”
(20) Runes, pp. 107ff. As a first check of my own on his evidence I wrote to a professor friend of mine whom I have known intimately for eighteen years. Since he comes from the North I thought he might be able to make some comments on the persons involved. To my surprise I found that my friend is himself a native of San Isidro, knew personally all three men mentioned above, and vouched strongly for their respectability and truthfulness. All had been civic officials. My informant had not heard the above story nor read the book by Runes, but he knows the author personally and vouches for his “reliability and honesty.”
(21) Eugene A. Hessel, The Religious Thought of José Rizal (Manila: Philippine Education Co., 1961), p. 255.
(22) From the Preface to Garcia’s The Great Debate. It is surprising and heartening that the senator would write this in a book defending the Retraction.
Write the Webmaster:
The Life and Writings of Dr. José Rizal
Dr. Robert L. Yoder
DrRobertL_Yoder@excite.com
-------END OF COPIED ARTICLE-------
=================
NB (Nosi Bayasi):
=================
*Note Hessel's photo showing him with a non-malicious open smile showing teeth (or dentures?). His features are what I remember of Americans as a child. I do not know what "kind" or racial type this is.
*I intended to translate the Spanish text to get some practice but I'll just add this later. The ESSENCE of this written RETRACTION is that Rizal himself, in his own words, is denying or negating everything- his past words & deeds- that went against his religion at birth. Furthermore, he is abhoring MASONRY & returning to Catholicism, explicitly expressing his desire to live & die in the RELIGION of the CATHOLIC CHURCH & seeking forgiveness for his past mistakes or errors.
"THOSE WHO CANNOT REMEMBER THE PAST ARE CONDEMNED TO REPEAT IT."
-GEORGE SANTAYANA
Friday, July 9, 2010
POST 0006
Hulyo 10, 2010 Kalendaryong Gregoryan
7:05 am
NOSI BAYASI'S HEBIGAT ISSUES IN PHILIPPINE HISTORY & REVOLUTION:
---------------------------------------------------------------
(EXCELLENT CHOICE TOPIX FOR ARGUMENTATION & DEBATE)
(n)Ninakaw kay Nosi Bayasi
(s)Stolen from Nosi Bayasi
CENTRAL ISSUE IS NUMBERED WHILE RELATED SUB-ISSUES OR QUESTIONS FOLLOW. NOTE THAT THESE ARE IN THE FORM OF PRO VS. CON.
IN ENGLISH
1) WHO SHOULD BE THE PHILIPPINE NATIONAL HERO, RIZAL OR BONIFACIO?
RIZAL: REFORMIST OR REVOLUTIONARY?
WHO REALLY KILLED RIZAL? ("BULLET" IS OUT AS PASSE:) BETTER: WHO WAS REALLY RESPONSIBLE FOR RIZAL'S EXECUTION?
RIZAL'S ALLEGED LAST ACTION: FOR OR AGAINST SPAIN/PHILIPPINES?
2) RIZAL'S ALLEGED RETRACTION: AUTHENTIC OR FORGERY?
3) PHILIPPINE INDEPENDENCE DATE: JULY 4 OR JUNE 12?
HOW MANY PRESIDENTS OF THE REPUBLIC OF THE PHILIPPINES?
4) WHO CONTINUED THE KATIPUNAN REVOLUTIONARY LINE?
WHO IS CARRYING THE AUTHENTIC REVOLUTIONARY TRADITION AT PRESENT?
5) HIMAGSIKANG 1896: TAGALOG OR FILIPINO REVOLUTION?
6) 1896 KATIPUNAN: DISCOVERED BY SPANIARDS OR REVEALED BY BONIFACIO?
7) 1896 PHILIPPINE REVOLUTION: FROM WITHIN OR FROM WITHOUT?
INITIATED ENTIRELY BY NATIVES OR THE LOWER CLASSES OR BY WHOM?
8) MOROS OR FILIPINOS?
MORO PROBLEM?: WHOSE?
BANGSAMORO: PHILIPPINE TERRITORY OR NOT?
9) EL CAVITENYO OR LA CAPAMPANGAN: WHO IS THE TRAITOR?
0) BAYASI OR BAYANI? SON OF THE SUN OR SON OF A _?
Actually, ISSUE#3 is already settled according to public records but it remains an interesting topic for pedagogical purposes. Note that knowledge gained from intensive reading is absolutely necessary prior to any dialectics.
If GMA-TV7 BLOGS wants to capture the masses of bloggers & commenters, then it should immediately set up another blog dedicated to some or all of these topics. I consider Dean Dela Paz's BLOG as focusing essentially on P/Filipinas in general & its HISTORY & INDEPENDENCE in particular.
SA TAGALOG
1) SINO DAPAT ANG PAMBANSANG BAYANI NG PILIPINAS:
SI RIZAL O SI BONIFACIO?
RIZAL: REPORMISTA O REBOLUSYONARYO?
SINO TALAGA ANG NAGPAPATAY KAY RIZAL?
DI-UMANO'Y HULING AKSYON NI RIZAL: PARA O KONTRA SA ESPANYA O PILIPINAS?
2) ANG DI-UMANO'Y RETRAKSYON/PAGBAWI NI RIZAL: TUNAY O PALSO/PALSIPIKADO?
3) PETSA NG KALAYAAN NG PILIPINAS: HULYO 4 O HUNYO 12?
ILAN ANG NAGING PANGULO NG REPUBLIKA NG PILIPINAS?
4) SINO ANG NAGPATULOY NG HIMAGSIKAN NG KATIPUNAN?
SINO ANG NAGDADALA NG TUNAY NA REBOLUSYONARYONG TRADISYON SA KASALUKUYAN?
5) HIMAGSIKANG 1896: REBOLUSYONG TAGALOG O PILIPINO?
6) 1896 KATIPUNAN: NATUKLASAN NG KASTILA O BINISTO NI BONIFACIO?
7) 1896 HIMAGSIKANG PILIPINO: MULA SA LOOB O MULA SA LABAS?
SINIMULAN NG MGA KATUTUBO O MABABABANG URI O NINO?
8) MORO O PILIPINO?
SULIRANING? MORO: KANINO?
BANGSAMORO: TERITORYO NG PILIPINAS O HINDI?
9) EL CABITENYO O LA CAPAMPANGAN: SINO ANG TRAIDOR?
0) BAYASI O BAYANI?: ANAK NG HARI O ANAK NG P_?
ANG TANONG#3 ay nasagot na ayon sa mga inilabas kong opisyal na dokumentong pampubliko, subali't ito'y nananatiling mainam na talakaying pampaaralan. Alalahaning kailangan ang malawak na kaalamang nagmula sa pagbabasa bago ang anumang pagtatalo. (Layas ang tsetseburetse!)
ORIGINAL JOKE (MINE):
TANONG: Ano ang kaibahan ng motel ng baliw sa ordinaryong motel?
SAGOT: Sa motel ng baliw mauuna ka munang mag-check-out bago ka mag-check-in. (Bakit kamo? Aba eh, paano ka makalalabas sa kulungan este sa ospital mo? Subukan mong huwag mag-check-out as in TUMAKAS - ang BAGSAK mo eh parang kaso ni JOHN DOE BALL CROST na WANTED NATION-WIDE sa ADS!:)
Q: What is the difference between a motel for the insane & an ordinary motel?
A: Madmen's motel requires you to check out first before you can check in - check out first of the mental hospital in which you are confined, that is.
Nakuha mo? Got it?
PORQUE AKALA MO NAKARAAN NA EH TAPUS NA? TAPUS TAYO JOHN!
Ang hindi lumingon sa pinanggalingan ay hindi makararating sa paroroonan,
Ang hindi natatandaan ang mga aral ng kasaysayan ay walang patutunguhan.
Ang hindi natututo sa mga leksyon ng nakaraan ay pupulutin sa kangkungan. (Ilan na ang napulot as in na-"salvaje" sa ating mga kalahi?)
ANOTHER GRAN TIRADA
NI NOSI BAYASI
-------
(n)Ninakaw kay Nosi Bayasi
(s)Stolen from Nosi Bayasi
7:05 am
NOSI BAYASI'S HEBIGAT ISSUES IN PHILIPPINE HISTORY & REVOLUTION:
---------------------------------------------------------------
(EXCELLENT CHOICE TOPIX FOR ARGUMENTATION & DEBATE)
(n)Ninakaw kay Nosi Bayasi
(s)Stolen from Nosi Bayasi
CENTRAL ISSUE IS NUMBERED WHILE RELATED SUB-ISSUES OR QUESTIONS FOLLOW. NOTE THAT THESE ARE IN THE FORM OF PRO VS. CON.
IN ENGLISH
1) WHO SHOULD BE THE PHILIPPINE NATIONAL HERO, RIZAL OR BONIFACIO?
RIZAL: REFORMIST OR REVOLUTIONARY?
WHO REALLY KILLED RIZAL? ("BULLET" IS OUT AS PASSE:) BETTER: WHO WAS REALLY RESPONSIBLE FOR RIZAL'S EXECUTION?
RIZAL'S ALLEGED LAST ACTION: FOR OR AGAINST SPAIN/PHILIPPINES?
2) RIZAL'S ALLEGED RETRACTION: AUTHENTIC OR FORGERY?
3) PHILIPPINE INDEPENDENCE DATE: JULY 4 OR JUNE 12?
HOW MANY PRESIDENTS OF THE REPUBLIC OF THE PHILIPPINES?
4) WHO CONTINUED THE KATIPUNAN REVOLUTIONARY LINE?
WHO IS CARRYING THE AUTHENTIC REVOLUTIONARY TRADITION AT PRESENT?
5) HIMAGSIKANG 1896: TAGALOG OR FILIPINO REVOLUTION?
6) 1896 KATIPUNAN: DISCOVERED BY SPANIARDS OR REVEALED BY BONIFACIO?
7) 1896 PHILIPPINE REVOLUTION: FROM WITHIN OR FROM WITHOUT?
INITIATED ENTIRELY BY NATIVES OR THE LOWER CLASSES OR BY WHOM?
8) MOROS OR FILIPINOS?
MORO PROBLEM?: WHOSE?
BANGSAMORO: PHILIPPINE TERRITORY OR NOT?
9) EL CAVITENYO OR LA CAPAMPANGAN: WHO IS THE TRAITOR?
0) BAYASI OR BAYANI? SON OF THE SUN OR SON OF A _?
Actually, ISSUE#3 is already settled according to public records but it remains an interesting topic for pedagogical purposes. Note that knowledge gained from intensive reading is absolutely necessary prior to any dialectics.
If GMA-TV7 BLOGS wants to capture the masses of bloggers & commenters, then it should immediately set up another blog dedicated to some or all of these topics. I consider Dean Dela Paz's BLOG as focusing essentially on P/Filipinas in general & its HISTORY & INDEPENDENCE in particular.
SA TAGALOG
1) SINO DAPAT ANG PAMBANSANG BAYANI NG PILIPINAS:
SI RIZAL O SI BONIFACIO?
RIZAL: REPORMISTA O REBOLUSYONARYO?
SINO TALAGA ANG NAGPAPATAY KAY RIZAL?
DI-UMANO'Y HULING AKSYON NI RIZAL: PARA O KONTRA SA ESPANYA O PILIPINAS?
2) ANG DI-UMANO'Y RETRAKSYON/PAGBAWI NI RIZAL: TUNAY O PALSO/PALSIPIKADO?
3) PETSA NG KALAYAAN NG PILIPINAS: HULYO 4 O HUNYO 12?
ILAN ANG NAGING PANGULO NG REPUBLIKA NG PILIPINAS?
4) SINO ANG NAGPATULOY NG HIMAGSIKAN NG KATIPUNAN?
SINO ANG NAGDADALA NG TUNAY NA REBOLUSYONARYONG TRADISYON SA KASALUKUYAN?
5) HIMAGSIKANG 1896: REBOLUSYONG TAGALOG O PILIPINO?
6) 1896 KATIPUNAN: NATUKLASAN NG KASTILA O BINISTO NI BONIFACIO?
7) 1896 HIMAGSIKANG PILIPINO: MULA SA LOOB O MULA SA LABAS?
SINIMULAN NG MGA KATUTUBO O MABABABANG URI O NINO?
8) MORO O PILIPINO?
SULIRANING? MORO: KANINO?
BANGSAMORO: TERITORYO NG PILIPINAS O HINDI?
9) EL CABITENYO O LA CAPAMPANGAN: SINO ANG TRAIDOR?
0) BAYASI O BAYANI?: ANAK NG HARI O ANAK NG P_?
ANG TANONG#3 ay nasagot na ayon sa mga inilabas kong opisyal na dokumentong pampubliko, subali't ito'y nananatiling mainam na talakaying pampaaralan. Alalahaning kailangan ang malawak na kaalamang nagmula sa pagbabasa bago ang anumang pagtatalo. (Layas ang tsetseburetse!)
ORIGINAL JOKE (MINE):
TANONG: Ano ang kaibahan ng motel ng baliw sa ordinaryong motel?
SAGOT: Sa motel ng baliw mauuna ka munang mag-check-out bago ka mag-check-in. (Bakit kamo? Aba eh, paano ka makalalabas sa kulungan este sa ospital mo? Subukan mong huwag mag-check-out as in TUMAKAS - ang BAGSAK mo eh parang kaso ni JOHN DOE BALL CROST na WANTED NATION-WIDE sa ADS!:)
Q: What is the difference between a motel for the insane & an ordinary motel?
A: Madmen's motel requires you to check out first before you can check in - check out first of the mental hospital in which you are confined, that is.
Nakuha mo? Got it?
PORQUE AKALA MO NAKARAAN NA EH TAPUS NA? TAPUS TAYO JOHN!
Ang hindi lumingon sa pinanggalingan ay hindi makararating sa paroroonan,
Ang hindi natatandaan ang mga aral ng kasaysayan ay walang patutunguhan.
Ang hindi natututo sa mga leksyon ng nakaraan ay pupulutin sa kangkungan. (Ilan na ang napulot as in na-"salvaje" sa ating mga kalahi?)
ANOTHER GRAN TIRADA
NI NOSI BAYASI
-------
(n)Ninakaw kay Nosi Bayasi
(s)Stolen from Nosi Bayasi
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
POST 0005
Hulyo 01, 2010 4:43am
ART CAPTURES REALITY. HISTORY IN FILMS.
---------------------------------------------
IMPORTANT SCENE from the movie "SAKAY"
---------------------------------------------
Directed by RAYMOND RED, Presented by ALPHA OMEGA PRODUCTIONS, INC.
Starring JULIO DIAZ, TETCHI AGBAYANI, LEOPOLDO SALCEDO et al
(RATED A1/A-OK, EXCELLENT EDUCATIONAL MATERIAL
ON THE HISTORY OF FILIPINO-AMERICAN WAR 1898-1903)
Downloaded FILM SEGMENT from YOUTUBE
[English translation in braces/Alternative translation].
Quotation marks omitted. EMPHASIS mine.
The following dialogue from the film is based on reliable historical research & presents theatrically some details of the HISTORY of the FIL-AM war.
START OF SELECTED PART at "5:45" of Windows Media Player timer
(Sakay is brought to, then taken out of Fort Santiago dungeon-prison for interrogation by two officers, an American & a Filipino.)
START OF SCENE at "6:50" of WMP timer
AMERICAN OFFICER: Mr. Macario Sakay, you are now under the custody of the UNITED STATES ARMY. This interview is being held in view of the possibility of granting you AMNESTY. Because of your incapacity to understand our language, Lt.Cruz here will take charge. Lieutenant Cruz? (American Officer taps Lt.Cruz on the shoulder & stands up.)
LT. CRUZ: Gracias, Senor. (American Officer leaves.) Bueno, ang pangalan mo ay MACARIO SAKAY? [Thank you, Sir. Well, your name is MACARIO SAKAY?]
SAKAY: Oo. [Yes.]
LT. CRUZ: Ano ang iyong trabaho bago ang HIMAGSIKAN laban sa ESPANYA? [What was your occupation before the REVOLUTION against SPAIN?]
SAKAY: Namasukan ako sa isang pagawaan ng kalesa sa TONDO. Sastre din ako. Lumalabas ako sa entablado. Sa MORO-MORO. [I was employed in a calesa factory in TONDO. I am also a tailor. I perform on stage. In MORO-MORO(s)*.]
-------
*MORO-MORO is a publicly-performed stage play depicting the battles between MUSLIMS & CHRISTIANS with the latter invariably winning. It was a common treat for ordinary people during the SPANISH REGIME especially during celebrations or FIESTAs.
LT. CRUZ: Moro-Moro?! Paano kang nasangkot sa himagsikan? [Moro-Moro?! How did you get involved in the revolution?]
SAKAY: Sumapi ako sa KATIPUNAN ni ANDRES BONIFACIO. [I joined the KATIPUNAN of ANDRES BONIFACIO.]
LT. CRUZ: Anong katungkulan mo doon? [What was your position/function there?]
SAKAY: Naging PANGULO ako ng Katipunan sa DAPITAN. Nag-trabaho ako sa imprenta ng Katipunan. [I became the PRESIDENT of the Katipunan in DAPITAN. I worked for the Katipunan (printing) press.**]
-------
**PANGULO is exactly translated as PRESIDENT. HEAD or CHIEF would be
translated as PINUNO. DAPITAN is an area/district in MANILA.
LT. CRUZ: Nasaan ka noong mga buwan pagkaraan ng Marso 23, 1901 noong nadakip si PANGULONG Emilio Aguinaldo ng mga Amerikano? [Where were you during the months following March 23, 1901 after the capture of PRESIDENT Emilio Aguinaldo by the Americans?]
SAKAY: Sa MORONG. [In MORONG***.]
-------
***MORONG is today's RIZAL PROVINCE.
LT. CRUZ: Anong ginagawa mo doon? [What were you doing there?]
SAKAY: Lumalaban. [Fighting/Resisting/Struggling.]
LT. CRUZ: Hindi mo ba alam na iniutos na ni Aguinaldo sa lahat ng opisyal at tauhan ng Republika na sumuko sa mga Amerikano? [Didn't you know that Aguinaldo had already ordered all officers & men of the Republic to surrender to the Americans?]
SAKAY: Alam ko. [I knew.]
LT. CRUZ: Bakit hindi ka sumunod? [Why didn't you obey/follow?]
SAKAY: Hindi si Aguinaldo ang ipinaglalaban ko, kundi ang KALAYAAN. Nang manumpa si Aguinaldo sa gobyerno ng Amerika, ang pamumuno ng Republika ay napunta kay MIGUEL MALVAR. [It was NOT Aguinaldo that I was fighting for but FREEDOM/LIBERTY./I was not fighting for Aguinaldo but for FREEDOM. When Aguinaldo swore allegiance to the government of America, the leadership of the Republic transferred to MIGUEL MALVAR.
LT.CRUZ: Sa mga sandaling ito ay nagliliyab na ang buong lalawigan ng BATANGAS kung saan nagtatago ang iyong Heneral Malvar! Sumuko na ang lahat ng mga heneral ng Republika! Bukas lang, naririto na si Malvar! Pag-isipan mong mabuti ang mga isasagot mo sa mga susunod kong tanong sa'yo, dahil dalawa lamang ang pupuntahan mo magmula rito sa kinalalagyan mo: ang humarap sa BANDILA ng Amerikano o sa BITAYAN.
[This very moment the whole province of BATANGAS where your General Malvar is hiding is already burning/in flames! All the generals of the Republic have already surrendered! (Just) tomorrow, Malvar will be here (too)! Think very carefully about your answers to my next questions, because you have only two destinations to go to from here where you are situated: to face the American FLAG or to the GALLOWS.]
END OF SCENE & SELECTED PART at "9:30" of WMP timer
-------
The AMERICANS proceeded to sentence to DEATH BY HANGING & EXECUTED MACARIO SAKAY, the PRESIDENT of the REPUBLIKA NG KATAGALUGAN, together with some of his officers, as mere TULISANES or BANDITS. This GRAVE HISTORICAL INJUSTICE to the FILIPINO PEOPLE
by the UNITED STATES ARMY, in particular, has NEVER REALLY been accorded any PROPER ATTENTION by either GOVERNMENTS of the REPUBLIC OF THE PHILIPPINES or the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA ever since & UP TO THE PRESENT.
ONE POINT TO THE SIDE OF THOSE WHO CLAIM
THAT "HISTORY IS WRITTEN BY THE VICTORS.": 1-0
HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT:
COMPARE & CONTRAST SAKAY'S fate at the turn of the 20th-CENTURY
with those of IRAQIs or AFGHANS of the 21st-CENTURY.
EXERCISE YOUR IMAGINATION. Do some RESEARCH.
================================
another GRAN TIRADA
ni NOSI BAYASI
SUPREMO ng KKK (KiKilitiin Kita)
================================
ART CAPTURES REALITY. HISTORY IN FILMS.
---------------------------------------------
IMPORTANT SCENE from the movie "SAKAY"
---------------------------------------------
Directed by RAYMOND RED, Presented by ALPHA OMEGA PRODUCTIONS, INC.
Starring JULIO DIAZ, TETCHI AGBAYANI, LEOPOLDO SALCEDO et al
(RATED A1/A-OK, EXCELLENT EDUCATIONAL MATERIAL
ON THE HISTORY OF FILIPINO-AMERICAN WAR 1898-1903)
Downloaded FILM SEGMENT from YOUTUBE
[English translation in braces/Alternative translation].
Quotation marks omitted. EMPHASIS mine.
The following dialogue from the film is based on reliable historical research & presents theatrically some details of the HISTORY of the FIL-AM war.
START OF SELECTED PART at "5:45" of Windows Media Player timer
(Sakay is brought to, then taken out of Fort Santiago dungeon-prison for interrogation by two officers, an American & a Filipino.)
START OF SCENE at "6:50" of WMP timer
AMERICAN OFFICER: Mr. Macario Sakay, you are now under the custody of the UNITED STATES ARMY. This interview is being held in view of the possibility of granting you AMNESTY. Because of your incapacity to understand our language, Lt.Cruz here will take charge. Lieutenant Cruz? (American Officer taps Lt.Cruz on the shoulder & stands up.)
LT. CRUZ: Gracias, Senor. (American Officer leaves.) Bueno, ang pangalan mo ay MACARIO SAKAY? [Thank you, Sir. Well, your name is MACARIO SAKAY?]
SAKAY: Oo. [Yes.]
LT. CRUZ: Ano ang iyong trabaho bago ang HIMAGSIKAN laban sa ESPANYA? [What was your occupation before the REVOLUTION against SPAIN?]
SAKAY: Namasukan ako sa isang pagawaan ng kalesa sa TONDO. Sastre din ako. Lumalabas ako sa entablado. Sa MORO-MORO. [I was employed in a calesa factory in TONDO. I am also a tailor. I perform on stage. In MORO-MORO(s)*.]
-------
*MORO-MORO is a publicly-performed stage play depicting the battles between MUSLIMS & CHRISTIANS with the latter invariably winning. It was a common treat for ordinary people during the SPANISH REGIME especially during celebrations or FIESTAs.
LT. CRUZ: Moro-Moro?! Paano kang nasangkot sa himagsikan? [Moro-Moro?! How did you get involved in the revolution?]
SAKAY: Sumapi ako sa KATIPUNAN ni ANDRES BONIFACIO. [I joined the KATIPUNAN of ANDRES BONIFACIO.]
LT. CRUZ: Anong katungkulan mo doon? [What was your position/function there?]
SAKAY: Naging PANGULO ako ng Katipunan sa DAPITAN. Nag-trabaho ako sa imprenta ng Katipunan. [I became the PRESIDENT of the Katipunan in DAPITAN. I worked for the Katipunan (printing) press.**]
-------
**PANGULO is exactly translated as PRESIDENT. HEAD or CHIEF would be
translated as PINUNO. DAPITAN is an area/district in MANILA.
LT. CRUZ: Nasaan ka noong mga buwan pagkaraan ng Marso 23, 1901 noong nadakip si PANGULONG Emilio Aguinaldo ng mga Amerikano? [Where were you during the months following March 23, 1901 after the capture of PRESIDENT Emilio Aguinaldo by the Americans?]
SAKAY: Sa MORONG. [In MORONG***.]
-------
***MORONG is today's RIZAL PROVINCE.
LT. CRUZ: Anong ginagawa mo doon? [What were you doing there?]
SAKAY: Lumalaban. [Fighting/Resisting/Struggling.]
LT. CRUZ: Hindi mo ba alam na iniutos na ni Aguinaldo sa lahat ng opisyal at tauhan ng Republika na sumuko sa mga Amerikano? [Didn't you know that Aguinaldo had already ordered all officers & men of the Republic to surrender to the Americans?]
SAKAY: Alam ko. [I knew.]
LT. CRUZ: Bakit hindi ka sumunod? [Why didn't you obey/follow?]
SAKAY: Hindi si Aguinaldo ang ipinaglalaban ko, kundi ang KALAYAAN. Nang manumpa si Aguinaldo sa gobyerno ng Amerika, ang pamumuno ng Republika ay napunta kay MIGUEL MALVAR. [It was NOT Aguinaldo that I was fighting for but FREEDOM/LIBERTY./I was not fighting for Aguinaldo but for FREEDOM. When Aguinaldo swore allegiance to the government of America, the leadership of the Republic transferred to MIGUEL MALVAR.
LT.CRUZ: Sa mga sandaling ito ay nagliliyab na ang buong lalawigan ng BATANGAS kung saan nagtatago ang iyong Heneral Malvar! Sumuko na ang lahat ng mga heneral ng Republika! Bukas lang, naririto na si Malvar! Pag-isipan mong mabuti ang mga isasagot mo sa mga susunod kong tanong sa'yo, dahil dalawa lamang ang pupuntahan mo magmula rito sa kinalalagyan mo: ang humarap sa BANDILA ng Amerikano o sa BITAYAN.
[This very moment the whole province of BATANGAS where your General Malvar is hiding is already burning/in flames! All the generals of the Republic have already surrendered! (Just) tomorrow, Malvar will be here (too)! Think very carefully about your answers to my next questions, because you have only two destinations to go to from here where you are situated: to face the American FLAG or to the GALLOWS.]
END OF SCENE & SELECTED PART at "9:30" of WMP timer
-------
The AMERICANS proceeded to sentence to DEATH BY HANGING & EXECUTED MACARIO SAKAY, the PRESIDENT of the REPUBLIKA NG KATAGALUGAN, together with some of his officers, as mere TULISANES or BANDITS. This GRAVE HISTORICAL INJUSTICE to the FILIPINO PEOPLE
by the UNITED STATES ARMY, in particular, has NEVER REALLY been accorded any PROPER ATTENTION by either GOVERNMENTS of the REPUBLIC OF THE PHILIPPINES or the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA ever since & UP TO THE PRESENT.
ONE POINT TO THE SIDE OF THOSE WHO CLAIM
THAT "HISTORY IS WRITTEN BY THE VICTORS.": 1-0
HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT:
COMPARE & CONTRAST SAKAY'S fate at the turn of the 20th-CENTURY
with those of IRAQIs or AFGHANS of the 21st-CENTURY.
EXERCISE YOUR IMAGINATION. Do some RESEARCH.
================================
another GRAN TIRADA
ni NOSI BAYASI
SUPREMO ng KKK (KiKilitiin Kita)
================================
POST 0004
Hulyo 01, 2010 4:40am
Understanding Rizal without Veneration:
Quarantined Prophet and Carnival Impresario
Rizal failed to draw the necessary lessons from his travels in the United States. Perhaps he was too engrossed as a tourist, enthralled by the Golden Gate Bridge, the Indian statues, Niagara Falls, the Statue of Liberty, and New York City where (to quote his words) “everything is new!” But what can we infer from this hiatus between Rizal’s anger in being quarantined and his belief that the “great American Republic” dare not engage in the brutal adventure of subjugating the natives of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines?
By E. SAN JUAN, Jr.
Bulatlat
“…but I rejoice more when I contemplate humanity in its immortal march, always progressing in spite of its declines and falls, in spite of its aberrations, because that demonstrates to me its glorious end and tells me that it has been created for a better purpose than to be consumed by flames; it fills me with trust in God, who will not let His work be ruined, in spite of the Devil and of all our follies.” Jose Rizal, letter to Fr. Pablo Pastells, Nov. 11, 1892, while in exile in Dapitan
“Ang sagot sa dahas ay dahas, kapag bingi sa katuwiran.” Jose Rizal, “Cuento Tendencioso”
It seems fortuitous that Rizal’s birthday anniversary would fall just six days after the celebration of Philippine Independence Day - the proclamation of independence from Spanish rule by General Emilio Aguinaldo in Kawit, Cavite, in 1898. In 1962 then President Diosdado Macapagal, father of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, decreed the change independence day from July 4 to June 12 to reaffirm the primacy of the Filipinos’ right to national self-determination.
Either ironical or prescient, Aguinaldo’s proclamation contains the kernel of the contradictions that have plagued the ruling elite’s claim to political legitimacy: Aguinaldo unwittingly mortgaged his leadership to the “protection of the Mighty and Humane North American Nation.” Mighty, yes, but “humane”? The U.S. genocide of 1.4 million Filipinos is, even today, disputed by apologists of “Manifest Destiny.” But there is no doubt that Aguinaldo’s gratitude to the Americans who brought him back from exile after the Pact of Biak-na-Bato spelled the doom of the ilustrado oligarchy which, despite the demagogic ruses of Marcos, Aquino, Ramos and Estrada and their handlers, has proved utterly bankrupt in its incorrigible corruption, electoral cynicism, and para-military gangster violence.
And so, sotto voce: Long live Filipino Independence Day!
Let us not forget the specific milieu we are inhabiting today: a barbaric war waged by the U.S. ruling elite against any people opposing its imperial will - the exploited and oppressed of the world. For over a century now, the Filipino people, particularly peasants, Moros, women, and the indigenous communities, have paid an exorbitant price to support the affluence, freedom, and democracy of this racial polity. Given the total subservience of the current regime to the dictates of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization (all servicing global capital and primarily U.S. corporate business), as well as the puppetry of previous regimes, the change has proven to be empty ritual.
Memorial to Dr. Jose Rizal in Rizal Park,
Beacon Hill, Seattle, Washington
Photo from myhistorylink.org
This seems a banal truism. We remain a neocolonial dependency of the United States, with the comprador bureaucracy and military beholden to the Washington Consensus and its current authoritarian program enabled by the contested USA Patriot Act. Proof of this is the recent police action against members of the Philippine Forum who were prohibited from joining the New York City Philippine Independence Day Parade. This exclusion of Filipinos by the Philippine Consulate is due to the fact that they were protesting the “obscene” Trump Towers luxury apartment of Consul Cecilia Rebong amid the widespread poverty suffered by millions forced to send fathers and mothers to work abroad as domestics or recruited contract workers, hailed as “bagong bayani” or ignored as unheroic corpses that arrive three-to-five a day at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport.
I.
It is not certain whether Rizal knew or met Aguinaldo - we have no desire to implicate Rizal (as has been done by those sectarians who blindly follow Renato Constantino - see my Rizal For Our Time, 1997) with those who betrayed Bonifacio, Antonio Luna, and others. After the polyphonic novels toying with plural alternatives, Rizal decided on one path: the Liga Filipina. Rizal of course met or was acquainted with Bonifacio and others in the Katipunan who were involved earlier in the Liga. Despite his exile to Dapitan, he was still playing with utopian projects in British Borneo. Historians from Austin Craig to Rafael Palma, Gregorio Zaide, Carlos Quirino, and Austin Coates have already demonstrated that despite Rizal’s reservations about the Katipunan uprising, his ideas and example (all susceptible to a radical rearticulation) had already won him moral and intellectual ascendancy - what Gramsci would call “hegemony”-- whatever differences in political tactics might exist among partisans in the united front.
Pace Constantino, we need understanding before we can have genuine if fallible appreciation. The mythification of Rizal in the popular imagination, as discussed by Reynaldo Ileto in his “Rizal and the Underside of Philippine History,” need not contradict or lessen the secular, libertarian impact of Rizal’s writing and deeds on several generations of organic intellectuals such as Bonifacio, Emilio Jacinto, Apolinario Mabini, Isabelo de los Reyes, up to the seditious playwrights in the vernaculars, the writer/activists such as Lope K. Santos, Amado V. Hernandez, Salvador P. Lopez, and nationalist intellectuals such as Ricardo Pascual, Claro Recto, Baking, Constantino, and others. What is needed, above all, is a dialectical grasp of the complex relations between the heterogeneous social classes and their varying political consciousness—peasantry, workers, petty-bourgeois ilustrado, artisans, etc.—and the struggle for an intelligent, popular leadership of a truly anti-colonial, democratic, mass revolution.
A one-sided focus on Rizal as a sublimation of Christ or Bernardo Carpio, or Rizal as “the First Filipino” (Leon Ma. Guerrero, Nick Joaquin), fails to grasp the “unity of opposites” that conceptually subtends the dynamic process of decolonization and class emancipation traversing different modes of production in a sequence of diverse social formation. We need a historical materialist method to grasp the concrete totality in which the individual finds her/his effective place. After all, it is not individuals or great heroes that shape history, but masses, social classes and groups in conflict, that release the potential of humanity’s species-being from myths, reified notions, and self-serving fantasies partly ascribable to natural necessity and chiefly to history.
Can this explain the limitations of Rizal’s thinking at various conjunctures of his life? Numerous biographies of Rizal and countless scholarly treatises on his thought have been written to clarify or explain away the inconsistencies and contradictions of his ideas, attitudes, and choices. The Yugoslavian Ante Radaic is famous for a simplistic Adlerian diagnosis of Rizal based on his physical attributes. This at least is a new angle, a relief from the exhibitionist posturing of Guerrero and the Creolist obsessions of Nick Joaquin. Radaic, however, failed to honor somehow Rizal’s own psychoanalytic foray into the phenomena of the manggagaway, aswang, and kulam, and other subterranean forms of resistance. How can a person be afflicted with an inferiority complex when he can write (to Blumentritt) a few hours before his death: “When you have received his letter, I am already dead”?
The Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno and the American realist William Dean Howells have recognized Rizal’s subtle analysis of human character and totalizing social critique. For his part, Jose Baron Fernandez’s Jose Rizal: Filipino Doctor and Patriot provides us an updated scenario of late nineteenth-century Spain for understanding the predicament of the Propagandistas in building solidarity, cognizant of Retana’s disingenuous apologia. With tactful lucidity, Rafael Palma’s classic biography, The Pride of the Malay Race, has demonstrated the fundamental secular humanism of Rizal, the inheritor of Spinoza’s Ethics and the Enlightenment’s legacy (Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant). Rizal shared this secular humanism with other propagandistas, a humanism whose utopian thrust was tempered by scientific rigor, self-critical distance, and fin-de-siecle disenchantment. How else could one interpret the exchange between Rizal and Fr. Pastells, Fr. Florentino’s reflections in El Filibusterismo, and the rationalist critique of self-deception and mass hysteria in most of his writings. Ambeth Ocampo has forcefully contributed to the demythologization of Rizal (see his Rizal Without the Overcoat) as well as to the discovery of Rizal’s third novel (on this, more below). Each author responds to the pressure of his moment and the inertia of the past. However, it seems unquestionable that the conventional appreciation of Rizal tends toward an indiscriminate glorification of his mind, his ideas, his “Renaissance” versatility, and so on. Scholastic pedagogy and the opiate of the masses have both contributed to this idealizing, nominalist tendentiousness.
Rizal was a product of his place and time, as everyone will concur. But due to desperate conditions, others credit Rizal with superfluous charismatic powers that he himself will be the first to disavow. We do not need the pasyon or folk religion to illuminate this mixed feudal-bourgeois habitus (to borrow Bourdieu’s term). We are predisposed by social habit to focus on the role of the individual and individual psychology so as to assign moral blame or praise. This is the self-privileging ideology of entrepreneurial neoliberalism. But there is an alternative few have entertained.
As I have tried to argue in previous essays, Rizal displayed an astute dialectical materialist sensibility. One revealing example of concrete geopolitical analysis is the short piece on Madrid and its milieu excerpted in Palma’s The Pride of the Malay Race (pp. 60-62). He was neither an environmental determinist nor social Darwinist. While gauging the force of social circumstances, he did not succumb to mechanical determinism - although the weight of his familial and religious upbringing may be said to condition the limits of possible variations in his thinking and actions. This materialist intuition is leavened with praxis-oriented realism, as glimpsed from this passage in a letter to Fr. Pastells:
“It is very possible that there are causes better than those I have embraced, but my cause is good and that is enough for me. Other causes will undoubtedly bring more profit, more renown, more honors, more glories, but the bamboo, in growing on this soil, comes to sustain nipa huts and not the heavy weights of European edifices….
“As to honor, fame, or profit that I might have reaped, I agree that all of this is tempting, especially to a young man of flesh and bone like myself, with so many weaknesses like anybody else. But, as nobody chooses the nationality nor the race to which he is born, and as at birth the privileges or the disadvantages inherent in both are found already created, I accept the cause of my country in the confidence that He who has made me a Filipino will forgive the mistakes I may commit in view of our difficult situation and the defective education that we receive from the time we are born. Besides, I do not aspire to eternal fame or renown; I do not aspire to equal others whose conditions, faculties, and circumstances may be and are in reality different from mine; my only desire is to do what is possible, what is within my power, what is most necessary. I have glimpsed a little light, and I believe I ought to show it to my countrymen.
“…. Without liberty, an idea that is somewhat independent might be provocative and another that is affectionate might be considered as baseness or flattery, and I can neither be provocative, nor base, nor a flatterer. In order to speak luminously of politics and produce results, it is necessary in my opinion to have ample liberty.”
A dialectical process underlies the link between subjective desire and objective necessity/possibility traced in this revealing passage. Its working can be discerned in most of Rizal’s historical and political discourses. They are all discourses on the permanent crisis in the condition of the colonial subject, a crisis articulating danger with opportunity. The virtue of Rizal’s consciousness of his limitations inheres in its efficacy of opening up the horizon of opportunities—what he calls “liberty”-- contingent on the grasp and exploitation of those same limits of his class/national position in society and history. In short, the value and function of human agency can only be calculated within the concrete limits of a determinate, specific social location in history, within the totality of social relations in history.
II.
Granted Rizal’s strategic wisdom, how can we explain Rizal’s failure to predict the role of the United States in intervening and colonizing the Philippines? In his otherwise perspicacious analysis of the past, present, and hypothetical future in “Filipinas dentro de cien anos” (The Philippines within a century, published in La Solidaridad, 1889-1890), Rizal mentions the United States as a possible player in international geopolitics:
“If the Philippines secure their independence after heroic and stubborn conflicts, they can rest assured that neither England, nor Germany, nor France and still less Holland, will dare to take up what Spain has been unable to hold… Perhaps the great American Republic, whose interests lie in the Pacific…may some day dream of foreign possession. This is not impossible, for the example is contagious, covetousness and ambition are among the strongest vices… the European powers would not allow her to proceed… North America would be quite a troublesome rival, if she should once get into the business. Furthermore, this is contrary to her traditions.”
There is a curious breakdown of dialectics, if not knowledge of history, here. How could Rizal be so blind? Maybe blindness is a function of insight, as American deconstructionists conjecture. It may be that Rizal had been reading too many eulogistic accounts of the United States circulated in Britain, France, Germany—too much de Tocqueville, perhaps? Rizal’s prophetic stance allows him to moralize on the “strongest vices” of “covetousness and ambition,” but somehow his vision can not permit the “traditions” of the “Great American Republic” from being contaminated by the imperialist virus. He mentions Samoa and the Panama Canal, but seems oblivious of the Monroe Doctrine and the nightmarish fear of the Haitian revolution, the first successful revolution of slaves in history. He settles on the fact that U.S. territory was not yet congested; and besides, the European powers will check any imperial ambition the U.S. might show.
What happened to this universalist historian and globalizing polymath? Was Rizal a victim of temporary amnesia in discounting his memorable passage through the United States in his second trip to Europe?
It is indeed difficult to understand how Rizal failed to draw the necessary lessons from his travels in the United States. Perhaps he was too engrossed as a tourist in novelties, enthralled by the Golden Gate Bridge, the Indian statues everywhere “attired in semi-European suit and semi-Indian suit,” Niagara Falls, the Statue of Liberty, and New York City where (to quote his words) “everything is new!”. Unlike his adventures in Europe, he did not find any inamorata—didn’t have time for dalliance. His travel diary was, in Ocampo’s judgment, sparse and hasty; but his letter to Mariano Ponce (dated 27 July 1888 two months after his passage) reveal a somewhat traumatic experience:
“I visited the largest cities of America with their big buildings, electric lights, and magnificent conceptions. Undoubtedly America is a great country, but it still has many defects. There is no real civil liberty. In some states, the Negro cannot marry a white woman, nor a Negress a white man. Because of their hatred for the Chinese, other Asiatics, like the Japanese, being confused with them, are likewise disliked by the ignorant Americans. The Customs are excessively strict. However, as they say rightly, America offers a home too for the poor who like to work. There was, moreover, much arbitrariness. For example, when we were in quarantine.
“They placed us under quarantine, in spite of the clearance given by the American Consul, of not having had a single case of illness aboard, and of the telegram of the governor of Hong Kong declaring that port free from epidemic.
“We were quarantined because there were on board 800 Chinese and, as elections were being held in San Francisco, the government wanted to boast that it was taking strict measures against the Chinese to win votes and the people’s sympathy. We were informed of the quarantine verbally, without specific duration. However, on the same day of our arrival, they unloaded 700 bales of silk without fumigating them; the ship’s doctor went ashore; many customs employees and an American doctor from the hospital for cholera victims came on board.
“Thus we were quarantined for about thirteen days. Afterwards, passengers of the first class were allowed to land; the Japanese and Chinese in the 2nd and 3rd classes remained in quarantine for an indefinite period. It is thus in that way, they got rid of about Chinese, letting them gradually off board.”
Evidence by this and other works, Rizal definitely understood racism in theory and practice. But it is not clear to what extent he recognized how the absence of “real civil liberty” extends beyond the everyday life of African Americans, beyond the Asians—it is not even clear whether he considered himself Asian, though in his reflections on how Europeans treated him, he referred to himself as “dark skinned,” a person of color, especially in relation to European women. Rizal never forgot that in spite of being a relatively privileged Chinese mestizo, the Spaniards uniformly considered him an “Indio.”
Was Rizal so magnanimous or charitable that he expunged the ordeal of being quarantined soon after? Not at all. In his travel diary concerning a train ride from Paris to Dieppe in 1889, Rizal encountered an arrogant American taunting his other companions (an Englishman and two Frenchmen). His comments indicate that he never forgot the quarantine, surveillance, and exclusionist procedures he went through:
“I was beginning to be annoyed by the fury of the traveler and I was going to join the conversation to tell him what I have seen and endured in America, in New York itself [Rizal doesn’t disclose what he “endured” in New York], how many troubles and what torture the customs [and immigration] in the United States made us suffer, the demands of drivers, barbers, etc., people who, as in many other places, lived on travelers….I was tempted to believe that my man’s verbosity, being a good Yankee, came from the steam of a boiler inside his body, and I even imagined seeing in him a robot created and hurled to the world by the Americans, a robot with a perfect engine inside to discredit Europe….” (Quoted in Ambeth Ocampo, Rizal Without the Overcoat, 1990; see also Gregorio Zaide and Sonia Zaide, Jose Rizal, 1984).
What can we infer from this hiatus between Rizal’s anger in being quarantined and his belief that the “great American Republic” dare not engage in the brutal adventure of subjugating the natives of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines? Two years after his visit, in Brussels, Rizal replied to Jose Alejandrino’s question what impression did he have of America: “America is the land par excellence of freedom but only for the whites.” This insight is quite remarkable for a Filipino traveler then and today. It exceeds the intelligence of Filipino American pundits who boast of 200 percent “Americanism,” of Filipinos as hybrid transnationals or transmigrants capable of besting white supremacy. But Rizal did not pursue the inferences from his insight. While recognizing the denial of civil liberties to “Negroes” and the degrading treatment of Chinese and Japanese in San Francisco, Rizal was unable to connect these snapshots and observations to the history of the United States as one of expansion, genocidal extermination of Native Americans, slavery of Africans, violent conquest and subjugation of indigenous Mexicans in Texas, California and the territory seized after the Mexican-American War of 1845-1848.
What is the historic context surrounding Rizal’s tour of the U.S. in 1886? A historic violent railroad strike had already occurred in 1877; in 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act effectively barred the Chinese from entry, a move which did not prevent twenty-eight Chinese from being massacred in Rock Springs, Wyoming, in the summer of 1885. Meanwhile, in the post-bellum South, the basis for segregation was being laid by Ku Klux Klan raids throughout the 1860s and 1870s following the Compromise of 1877 and severe economic depression. In 1886, two years before Rizal’s travels, the Haymarket riot in Chicago led to the hanging of eight anarchists innocent of the crimes they were charged with. It was the era of robber barons, workers’ strikes, immigrant rebellions, and ferocious class wars (as detailed by Howard Zinn in A People’s History of the United States). In 1890, the massacre of Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee marked the culmination of the genocidal campaign against the original inhabitants and the closing of the internal frontier.
Rizal seemed not to have followed U.S. history along these tracks, isolating only the puritan revolt against religious persecution and the colonial, quasi-feudal imposition by the British monarchy. So this tradition of struggling for liberty, for separation from European feudalism and the authoritarian English monarchy, was what Rizal associated with the U.S. as an emerging nation-state when he was preoccupied with demanding Filipino representation in the Cortes in 1889-1890. The United States stood for Rizal as an example of a country or people that demanded representation – “no taxation without representation” was a slogan that must have appealed to the ilustrado assimilationists, not an Anglo state whose “Manifest Destiny” was already nascent from the time of the massacre of the Pequot Indians in 1636, through the institutionalized slavery of Africans, to the savage colonization of Mexican territory in 1848. White supremacy acquired its slogan of “Manifest Destiny” in the U.S. victory over Mexico and its annexation of substantial territory once owned by Spain.
III.
We can understand this omission of the U.S. from the ilustrado consciousness then. So concentrated were the energies and time of Rizal and his compatriots Marcelo del Pilar, Graciano Lopez Jaena, Mariano Ponce, and others on stirring up the conscience of the Spanish public in Madrid and Barcelona that they neglected studying closely the political history of the United States. They missed the “signs of the times.” It could not be helped. And so little did Rizal suspect that the “great American Republic” would be the next executioner of Filipino nationalists and radical democrats, the global gendarme of terrorists like the New People’s Army combatants, the Moro separatists, Fidel Castro, Zapatistas in Chiapas, and Maoists in Nepal.
Europe was the arena of battle, but more specifically Spain. During Rizal’s first sojourn in Europe (1882-1887), social ferment was quietly taking place between the dissolution of the First International Working Men’s Association in 1881 and the founding of the Second International in Paris in July 1889 with Marxism as its dominant philosophy. Marx died in 1883. Meanwhile two volumes of Capital have been published and were being discussed in Europe during Rizal’s first visit to Paris. Engels was still alive then, living in London when Rizal was annotating Morga’s Sucesos at the British Museum in 1888-1889. During his second sojourn (1888-1891), Rizal completed El Filibusterismo published in Ghent, Belgium, in 1891. Engels’ writings, in particular Anti-Duhring (1877-1878), have been widely disseminated in German periodicals and argued over. Given his numerous visits to Germany, Austria, France, Belgium, England, and Spain, and his contacts with intellectuals (Blumentritt, Rost, Jagor, Virchow, Ratzel, Meyer, aside from the Spaniards Morayta, Pi y Margall, Becerra, Zorilla, and others), it was impossible for Rizal to escape the influence of the socialist movement and its Spanish anarchist counterpoint. Indeed, a letter (dated 13 May 1891) by his close friend, the painter Juan Luna, conveyed Luna’s enthusiasm over Le socialisme contemporaine by E. de Laveleye, “which is a conflation of the theories of Karl Marx, La Salle, etc; Catholic socialism, the conservative, evangelical,…which stresses the miseries of contemporary society.”
Based on an inspection of Rizal’s library in Calamba and citations in the Epistolario, Benedict Anderson concludes that Rizal had no interest, or awareness, of socialist currents except those filtered through Joris Karl Huysmans. Rizal’s singular modernity, in my view, cannot be so easily Orientalized by U.S. experts like Anderson, Karnow, Glenn May, and their ilk. On the other hand, Anderson’s presumptuous reference to the “narrow nativism” and “narrow obsession with America” of Filipino intellectuals will surely delight the Westernized Makati enclave and his acolytes in Diliman and Loyola Heights. Or even those speculating on Rizal’s homosexual tendencies despite his insouciant flirtations with las palomas de baja vuela (as attested to by close companions Valentin Ventura and Maximo Viola).
In his Solidaridad period, Rizal was just beginning to learn the fundamentals of geopolitics. The United States was out of the picture. It is foolish to expect Rizal and his compatriots to know more than what their circumstances and class orientation allowed. Scarcely would Rizal have a clue then that the U.S. control of Filipino sovereignty would continue through the IMF/WB stranglehold of the Philippine economy for over 40 years after nominal independence in 1946, an unprecedented case—the only country so administered for the longest period in history! This can throw some light on the country’s chronic poverty, technological backwardness, clientelist slavishness to Washington, witnessed of late by the export of over 9 million contract workers as “servants of globalization” and the dependence on the 8.5 billion dollars worth of overseas annual remittances to service the humongous foreign debt and the extravagant “indolence” of the few rich families and their politician flunkeys. Rizal’s memory of his ordeal in San Francisco, had he lived longer, might have resonated beyond his detention in the prison-fortress of Montjuich in Barcelona (where Isabelo de los Reyes was also confined) and influenced the ilustrado circle of Trinidad Pardo de Tavera and other supporters of “Benevolent Assimilation” in the early decades of the last century.
Finally, we return to confront once again Rizal’s “Manifesto” of 1896 written in his prison cell in Fort Santiago. Against the gradualist thrust of this Manifesto (surely a ruse to gain time) can be counterposed the overwhelming evidence of Rizal’s conviction that where the other party cannot listen to reason, force must be used (while civic education proceeds), with separatist liberation the only ultimate alternative. Padre Florentino’s invocation (“God will provide a weapon…”) was fulfilled in Rizal’s banishment and the replacement of the Liga by the Katipunan. It is enough to cite again Rizal’s resolute determination to give his life for the liberation of his people (in the two letters to his brother and to his family) as well as many confessions to Blumentritt, Ponce, Del Pilar, Fr. Pastells, and others, of his readiness to sacrifice his life for the redemption of the masses. The itinerary of his activities in Europe, Hong Kong, and Dapitan suffice to quell any doubt about his commitment. Recall his words to General Alejandrino: “I will never head a revolution that is preposterous and has no probability of success because I do not like to saddle my conscience with reckless and fruitless bloodshed; but whoever may head a revolution in the Philippines will have me at his side.”
IV.
In the long run, the criterion of solidarity with the masses imposes its critical verdict without reprieve. Rizal struggled all his life against the tendency toward individualism. He confided to Del Pilar: “What I desire is that others appear…” To Padre Vicente Garcia: “A man in the Philippines is only an individual, he is not a member of a nation.” But he also will not submit to tradition for its own sake, to unreasoned conformism: “I wish to return to the Philippines [he wrote to Ponce], and though it may be a temerity and an imprudence, what does it matter? Filipinos are all so prudent. That is why our country is as it is…. And since it seems to me that we are not doing well on the road of prudence, I will seek another road.” Several paths were tested in the Noli and Fili, including Simoun’s “anarchical nationalism,” Cabesang Tales’ guerilla foco, urban insurrection, etc. In the opinion of Eugenio Matibag, both novels were multivoiced, intricately dialogic in nature, and so open to the “play of an emancipatory desire that continues to move the Philippines today.” Of course, we don’t need to read Rizal to seek to overthrow the current intolerable system. Limited by his ilustrado class conditioning, but open to the influence of collective projects and spontaneous popular initiatives, Rizal was a nationalist democrat “of the old type,” as the idiom goes. But proof of a more genuinely populist and radical conception of change may be found in the third novel, recently recovered for us by Ambeth Ocampo in Makamisa (Anvil 1992),
Would Rizal’s stature be altered if he had completed this novel? Since this is not the occasion to elaborate on the insurrectionary imagination of Rizal, I can only highlight two aspects in Makamisa. First, the boisterous entrance of the subaltern masses into historical time and space. In the two novels, Elias, Sisa, Cabesang Tales, and others interrupted the plot of individual disillusionment, but never moved to the foreground of the stage. This new mise en scene is rendered here by the demystification of religious ritual via the physical/sensory motion of crowds, rumor, money talk, animal behavior, Anday’s seduction, and so on, escaping from the symbolic Order (sacred space) represented by the Church, as dramatized in the multiaccentual speculations on why Padre Agaton disrupted his public performance. The play of heteroglossia, the intertextuality of idioms (indices of social class and collective ethos), and the stress on the heterogeneous texture of events, all point to the mocking subversive tradition of the carnivalesque culture and Menippean satire that Mikhail Bakhtin describes in his works on Rabelais, Menippean satire, and Dostoevsky (see The Dialogic Imagination). This is the root of the polyphonic modernist novel constituted by distances, relationships, analogies, non-exclusive oppositions, fantasies that challenge the status quo. Rizal could have inaugurated the tradition of an antiheroic postmodernist vernacular centered on the antagonism of ideological worlds.
Second, the tuktukan game accompanying the Palm Sunday procession is Rizal’s proof that folk/indigenous culture, a spectacle staged at the site of the monological discourse of the Church, transgresses prohibitions and allows the body of the earth, its sensory process and affective becoming, to manifest itself. We confront the unconscious of the colonial structure in the essential motifs of carnivalesque ribaldry and topsy-turvy outlawry: “the high and low, birth and agony, food and excrement, praise and curses, laugher and tears “(in Julia Kristeva’s gloss). Paradoxes, ambivalences, Dionysian fantasies, odd mixtures of styles that violate orthodox decorums, and diverse expressions of ideological themes and chronotopes - all these characterize the Menippean satirical discourse exemplified here as well as in Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, De Sade, Lautreamont, Dostoevsky, Kafka and Joyce. (One wonders if Rizal read Dostoevsky or Gogol’s Dead Souls?) According to Bakhtin, we find in Rabelais’ work the dramatic conflict between the popular/plebeian culture of the masses and the official medieval theology of hegemonic Christianity.
Variants may be found in postmodernist works of magical realism (Garcia Marquez, Ondaatje, Salman Rushdie). In brief, Makamisa is the moment of Rabelaisian satire and carnival feast in Rizal’s archive. It may be read as Rizal’s attempt to go beyond the polyphonic relativizing of colonial authority and Christian logic in the Noli and Fili toward a return to the body of the people, not just folkways and customs but the praxis of physical labor, the material/social processes of eating and excretion, sexual production and reproduction, collective dreams and the political unconscious. It is the moment of unfinalizable becoming, the moment of the Katipunan revolution.
Once more, we encounter the spectre of Rizal at the barricades, arming the spirit for storming the entrenched fortifications of Makati or Malacanang Palace, envisioning a land where “there are no slaves, no hangmen, no oppressors,/where faith does not slay,” “Pearl of the Orient Seas, our Eden lost….”
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
E. SAN JUAN is co-director of the Board of Philippine Forum, New York City, and heads the Philippine Cultural Studies Center in Connecticut, USA He was recently visiting professor of literature at the National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan, and professor of American Studies at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium. Among his recent books are BEYOND POSTCOLONIAL THEORY (Palgrave), RACISM AND CULTURAL STUDIES (Duke University Press), and WORKING THROUGH THE CONTRADICTIONS (Bucknell University Press). Three books in Filipino were launched in Manila, Philippines, recently: HIMAGSIK (De La Salle University Press), TINIK SA KALULUWA (Anvil), and SAPAGKAT INIIBIG KITA (University of the Philippines). His award-winning book of criticism, TOWARD A PEOPLE’S LITERATURE, is being re-issued by the University of the Philippines Press.
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My Comment (MC):
Isang MAINAM na artikulong babasahin para sa mga interesado sa kasaysayan ng Pilipinas at ng mga bayani nito. Hindi aku sanay sa istilo ng pagsulat ni SAN JUAN kaya pabaligtad ko itong binasa, mula hulihan patungo sa simula. Maaaring akalain sa unang pagsipat ng isang bumabasa na may ere o pasikat lamang ang may-akda dahil sa kanyang wika at sa pagbanggit ng maraming dayuhang personalidad o manunulat. Subali't mayroon din talagang mahalagang nilalaman na dapat suriin at pag-isipan. Hindi pang-masa ang sanaysay, kundi para sa may sopistikasyon, maraming nabasa, at malawak na kaalaman. Halimbawa, kailangang pamilyar sa Marxismo at sa kasulatang Pranses ang bumabasa. Mahalaga lamang banggitin ang mga sumusunod:
-Ipinapakita kung gaano ka-talas ang obserbasyon o puna ni Rizal sa ipinahayag niyang kasagutan kay Jose Alejandrino.
-Dapat na basahin ang ikatlong nobela ni Rizal. Ang pagkaka-alam ko lang ay may tinanggal na kabanata sa isa sa dalawang aklat na NOLI at FILI para makatipid sa pagpapalimbag. Ito yata yung "ELIAS AT SALOME". Mainam na pag-debatehan ang awtentisidad ng ikatlong aklat.
-Isa ito sa interes ko: Bakit hindi nadala agad nina Rizal ang Marxismo-Sosyalismo sa Pilipinas? Masyado bang avant-garde ang mga sulating nasabi at hindi maunawaan o gamay ng ating mga PROPAGANDISTA?
-Totoo bang binanggit ni Rizal ang salitang "ROBOT"?
-Totoo bang tatlong bagong bayaning bangkay kada araw ang dumadating sa NAIA?
Understanding Rizal without Veneration:
Quarantined Prophet and Carnival Impresario
Rizal failed to draw the necessary lessons from his travels in the United States. Perhaps he was too engrossed as a tourist, enthralled by the Golden Gate Bridge, the Indian statues, Niagara Falls, the Statue of Liberty, and New York City where (to quote his words) “everything is new!” But what can we infer from this hiatus between Rizal’s anger in being quarantined and his belief that the “great American Republic” dare not engage in the brutal adventure of subjugating the natives of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines?
By E. SAN JUAN, Jr.
Bulatlat
“…but I rejoice more when I contemplate humanity in its immortal march, always progressing in spite of its declines and falls, in spite of its aberrations, because that demonstrates to me its glorious end and tells me that it has been created for a better purpose than to be consumed by flames; it fills me with trust in God, who will not let His work be ruined, in spite of the Devil and of all our follies.” Jose Rizal, letter to Fr. Pablo Pastells, Nov. 11, 1892, while in exile in Dapitan
“Ang sagot sa dahas ay dahas, kapag bingi sa katuwiran.” Jose Rizal, “Cuento Tendencioso”
It seems fortuitous that Rizal’s birthday anniversary would fall just six days after the celebration of Philippine Independence Day - the proclamation of independence from Spanish rule by General Emilio Aguinaldo in Kawit, Cavite, in 1898. In 1962 then President Diosdado Macapagal, father of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, decreed the change independence day from July 4 to June 12 to reaffirm the primacy of the Filipinos’ right to national self-determination.
Either ironical or prescient, Aguinaldo’s proclamation contains the kernel of the contradictions that have plagued the ruling elite’s claim to political legitimacy: Aguinaldo unwittingly mortgaged his leadership to the “protection of the Mighty and Humane North American Nation.” Mighty, yes, but “humane”? The U.S. genocide of 1.4 million Filipinos is, even today, disputed by apologists of “Manifest Destiny.” But there is no doubt that Aguinaldo’s gratitude to the Americans who brought him back from exile after the Pact of Biak-na-Bato spelled the doom of the ilustrado oligarchy which, despite the demagogic ruses of Marcos, Aquino, Ramos and Estrada and their handlers, has proved utterly bankrupt in its incorrigible corruption, electoral cynicism, and para-military gangster violence.
And so, sotto voce: Long live Filipino Independence Day!
Let us not forget the specific milieu we are inhabiting today: a barbaric war waged by the U.S. ruling elite against any people opposing its imperial will - the exploited and oppressed of the world. For over a century now, the Filipino people, particularly peasants, Moros, women, and the indigenous communities, have paid an exorbitant price to support the affluence, freedom, and democracy of this racial polity. Given the total subservience of the current regime to the dictates of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization (all servicing global capital and primarily U.S. corporate business), as well as the puppetry of previous regimes, the change has proven to be empty ritual.
Memorial to Dr. Jose Rizal in Rizal Park,
Beacon Hill, Seattle, Washington
Photo from myhistorylink.org
This seems a banal truism. We remain a neocolonial dependency of the United States, with the comprador bureaucracy and military beholden to the Washington Consensus and its current authoritarian program enabled by the contested USA Patriot Act. Proof of this is the recent police action against members of the Philippine Forum who were prohibited from joining the New York City Philippine Independence Day Parade. This exclusion of Filipinos by the Philippine Consulate is due to the fact that they were protesting the “obscene” Trump Towers luxury apartment of Consul Cecilia Rebong amid the widespread poverty suffered by millions forced to send fathers and mothers to work abroad as domestics or recruited contract workers, hailed as “bagong bayani” or ignored as unheroic corpses that arrive three-to-five a day at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport.
I.
It is not certain whether Rizal knew or met Aguinaldo - we have no desire to implicate Rizal (as has been done by those sectarians who blindly follow Renato Constantino - see my Rizal For Our Time, 1997) with those who betrayed Bonifacio, Antonio Luna, and others. After the polyphonic novels toying with plural alternatives, Rizal decided on one path: the Liga Filipina. Rizal of course met or was acquainted with Bonifacio and others in the Katipunan who were involved earlier in the Liga. Despite his exile to Dapitan, he was still playing with utopian projects in British Borneo. Historians from Austin Craig to Rafael Palma, Gregorio Zaide, Carlos Quirino, and Austin Coates have already demonstrated that despite Rizal’s reservations about the Katipunan uprising, his ideas and example (all susceptible to a radical rearticulation) had already won him moral and intellectual ascendancy - what Gramsci would call “hegemony”-- whatever differences in political tactics might exist among partisans in the united front.
Pace Constantino, we need understanding before we can have genuine if fallible appreciation. The mythification of Rizal in the popular imagination, as discussed by Reynaldo Ileto in his “Rizal and the Underside of Philippine History,” need not contradict or lessen the secular, libertarian impact of Rizal’s writing and deeds on several generations of organic intellectuals such as Bonifacio, Emilio Jacinto, Apolinario Mabini, Isabelo de los Reyes, up to the seditious playwrights in the vernaculars, the writer/activists such as Lope K. Santos, Amado V. Hernandez, Salvador P. Lopez, and nationalist intellectuals such as Ricardo Pascual, Claro Recto, Baking, Constantino, and others. What is needed, above all, is a dialectical grasp of the complex relations between the heterogeneous social classes and their varying political consciousness—peasantry, workers, petty-bourgeois ilustrado, artisans, etc.—and the struggle for an intelligent, popular leadership of a truly anti-colonial, democratic, mass revolution.
A one-sided focus on Rizal as a sublimation of Christ or Bernardo Carpio, or Rizal as “the First Filipino” (Leon Ma. Guerrero, Nick Joaquin), fails to grasp the “unity of opposites” that conceptually subtends the dynamic process of decolonization and class emancipation traversing different modes of production in a sequence of diverse social formation. We need a historical materialist method to grasp the concrete totality in which the individual finds her/his effective place. After all, it is not individuals or great heroes that shape history, but masses, social classes and groups in conflict, that release the potential of humanity’s species-being from myths, reified notions, and self-serving fantasies partly ascribable to natural necessity and chiefly to history.
Can this explain the limitations of Rizal’s thinking at various conjunctures of his life? Numerous biographies of Rizal and countless scholarly treatises on his thought have been written to clarify or explain away the inconsistencies and contradictions of his ideas, attitudes, and choices. The Yugoslavian Ante Radaic is famous for a simplistic Adlerian diagnosis of Rizal based on his physical attributes. This at least is a new angle, a relief from the exhibitionist posturing of Guerrero and the Creolist obsessions of Nick Joaquin. Radaic, however, failed to honor somehow Rizal’s own psychoanalytic foray into the phenomena of the manggagaway, aswang, and kulam, and other subterranean forms of resistance. How can a person be afflicted with an inferiority complex when he can write (to Blumentritt) a few hours before his death: “When you have received his letter, I am already dead”?
The Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno and the American realist William Dean Howells have recognized Rizal’s subtle analysis of human character and totalizing social critique. For his part, Jose Baron Fernandez’s Jose Rizal: Filipino Doctor and Patriot provides us an updated scenario of late nineteenth-century Spain for understanding the predicament of the Propagandistas in building solidarity, cognizant of Retana’s disingenuous apologia. With tactful lucidity, Rafael Palma’s classic biography, The Pride of the Malay Race, has demonstrated the fundamental secular humanism of Rizal, the inheritor of Spinoza’s Ethics and the Enlightenment’s legacy (Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant). Rizal shared this secular humanism with other propagandistas, a humanism whose utopian thrust was tempered by scientific rigor, self-critical distance, and fin-de-siecle disenchantment. How else could one interpret the exchange between Rizal and Fr. Pastells, Fr. Florentino’s reflections in El Filibusterismo, and the rationalist critique of self-deception and mass hysteria in most of his writings. Ambeth Ocampo has forcefully contributed to the demythologization of Rizal (see his Rizal Without the Overcoat) as well as to the discovery of Rizal’s third novel (on this, more below). Each author responds to the pressure of his moment and the inertia of the past. However, it seems unquestionable that the conventional appreciation of Rizal tends toward an indiscriminate glorification of his mind, his ideas, his “Renaissance” versatility, and so on. Scholastic pedagogy and the opiate of the masses have both contributed to this idealizing, nominalist tendentiousness.
Rizal was a product of his place and time, as everyone will concur. But due to desperate conditions, others credit Rizal with superfluous charismatic powers that he himself will be the first to disavow. We do not need the pasyon or folk religion to illuminate this mixed feudal-bourgeois habitus (to borrow Bourdieu’s term). We are predisposed by social habit to focus on the role of the individual and individual psychology so as to assign moral blame or praise. This is the self-privileging ideology of entrepreneurial neoliberalism. But there is an alternative few have entertained.
As I have tried to argue in previous essays, Rizal displayed an astute dialectical materialist sensibility. One revealing example of concrete geopolitical analysis is the short piece on Madrid and its milieu excerpted in Palma’s The Pride of the Malay Race (pp. 60-62). He was neither an environmental determinist nor social Darwinist. While gauging the force of social circumstances, he did not succumb to mechanical determinism - although the weight of his familial and religious upbringing may be said to condition the limits of possible variations in his thinking and actions. This materialist intuition is leavened with praxis-oriented realism, as glimpsed from this passage in a letter to Fr. Pastells:
“It is very possible that there are causes better than those I have embraced, but my cause is good and that is enough for me. Other causes will undoubtedly bring more profit, more renown, more honors, more glories, but the bamboo, in growing on this soil, comes to sustain nipa huts and not the heavy weights of European edifices….
“As to honor, fame, or profit that I might have reaped, I agree that all of this is tempting, especially to a young man of flesh and bone like myself, with so many weaknesses like anybody else. But, as nobody chooses the nationality nor the race to which he is born, and as at birth the privileges or the disadvantages inherent in both are found already created, I accept the cause of my country in the confidence that He who has made me a Filipino will forgive the mistakes I may commit in view of our difficult situation and the defective education that we receive from the time we are born. Besides, I do not aspire to eternal fame or renown; I do not aspire to equal others whose conditions, faculties, and circumstances may be and are in reality different from mine; my only desire is to do what is possible, what is within my power, what is most necessary. I have glimpsed a little light, and I believe I ought to show it to my countrymen.
“…. Without liberty, an idea that is somewhat independent might be provocative and another that is affectionate might be considered as baseness or flattery, and I can neither be provocative, nor base, nor a flatterer. In order to speak luminously of politics and produce results, it is necessary in my opinion to have ample liberty.”
A dialectical process underlies the link between subjective desire and objective necessity/possibility traced in this revealing passage. Its working can be discerned in most of Rizal’s historical and political discourses. They are all discourses on the permanent crisis in the condition of the colonial subject, a crisis articulating danger with opportunity. The virtue of Rizal’s consciousness of his limitations inheres in its efficacy of opening up the horizon of opportunities—what he calls “liberty”-- contingent on the grasp and exploitation of those same limits of his class/national position in society and history. In short, the value and function of human agency can only be calculated within the concrete limits of a determinate, specific social location in history, within the totality of social relations in history.
II.
Granted Rizal’s strategic wisdom, how can we explain Rizal’s failure to predict the role of the United States in intervening and colonizing the Philippines? In his otherwise perspicacious analysis of the past, present, and hypothetical future in “Filipinas dentro de cien anos” (The Philippines within a century, published in La Solidaridad, 1889-1890), Rizal mentions the United States as a possible player in international geopolitics:
“If the Philippines secure their independence after heroic and stubborn conflicts, they can rest assured that neither England, nor Germany, nor France and still less Holland, will dare to take up what Spain has been unable to hold… Perhaps the great American Republic, whose interests lie in the Pacific…may some day dream of foreign possession. This is not impossible, for the example is contagious, covetousness and ambition are among the strongest vices… the European powers would not allow her to proceed… North America would be quite a troublesome rival, if she should once get into the business. Furthermore, this is contrary to her traditions.”
There is a curious breakdown of dialectics, if not knowledge of history, here. How could Rizal be so blind? Maybe blindness is a function of insight, as American deconstructionists conjecture. It may be that Rizal had been reading too many eulogistic accounts of the United States circulated in Britain, France, Germany—too much de Tocqueville, perhaps? Rizal’s prophetic stance allows him to moralize on the “strongest vices” of “covetousness and ambition,” but somehow his vision can not permit the “traditions” of the “Great American Republic” from being contaminated by the imperialist virus. He mentions Samoa and the Panama Canal, but seems oblivious of the Monroe Doctrine and the nightmarish fear of the Haitian revolution, the first successful revolution of slaves in history. He settles on the fact that U.S. territory was not yet congested; and besides, the European powers will check any imperial ambition the U.S. might show.
What happened to this universalist historian and globalizing polymath? Was Rizal a victim of temporary amnesia in discounting his memorable passage through the United States in his second trip to Europe?
It is indeed difficult to understand how Rizal failed to draw the necessary lessons from his travels in the United States. Perhaps he was too engrossed as a tourist in novelties, enthralled by the Golden Gate Bridge, the Indian statues everywhere “attired in semi-European suit and semi-Indian suit,” Niagara Falls, the Statue of Liberty, and New York City where (to quote his words) “everything is new!”. Unlike his adventures in Europe, he did not find any inamorata—didn’t have time for dalliance. His travel diary was, in Ocampo’s judgment, sparse and hasty; but his letter to Mariano Ponce (dated 27 July 1888 two months after his passage) reveal a somewhat traumatic experience:
“I visited the largest cities of America with their big buildings, electric lights, and magnificent conceptions. Undoubtedly America is a great country, but it still has many defects. There is no real civil liberty. In some states, the Negro cannot marry a white woman, nor a Negress a white man. Because of their hatred for the Chinese, other Asiatics, like the Japanese, being confused with them, are likewise disliked by the ignorant Americans. The Customs are excessively strict. However, as they say rightly, America offers a home too for the poor who like to work. There was, moreover, much arbitrariness. For example, when we were in quarantine.
“They placed us under quarantine, in spite of the clearance given by the American Consul, of not having had a single case of illness aboard, and of the telegram of the governor of Hong Kong declaring that port free from epidemic.
“We were quarantined because there were on board 800 Chinese and, as elections were being held in San Francisco, the government wanted to boast that it was taking strict measures against the Chinese to win votes and the people’s sympathy. We were informed of the quarantine verbally, without specific duration. However, on the same day of our arrival, they unloaded 700 bales of silk without fumigating them; the ship’s doctor went ashore; many customs employees and an American doctor from the hospital for cholera victims came on board.
“Thus we were quarantined for about thirteen days. Afterwards, passengers of the first class were allowed to land; the Japanese and Chinese in the 2nd and 3rd classes remained in quarantine for an indefinite period. It is thus in that way, they got rid of about Chinese, letting them gradually off board.”
Evidence by this and other works, Rizal definitely understood racism in theory and practice. But it is not clear to what extent he recognized how the absence of “real civil liberty” extends beyond the everyday life of African Americans, beyond the Asians—it is not even clear whether he considered himself Asian, though in his reflections on how Europeans treated him, he referred to himself as “dark skinned,” a person of color, especially in relation to European women. Rizal never forgot that in spite of being a relatively privileged Chinese mestizo, the Spaniards uniformly considered him an “Indio.”
Was Rizal so magnanimous or charitable that he expunged the ordeal of being quarantined soon after? Not at all. In his travel diary concerning a train ride from Paris to Dieppe in 1889, Rizal encountered an arrogant American taunting his other companions (an Englishman and two Frenchmen). His comments indicate that he never forgot the quarantine, surveillance, and exclusionist procedures he went through:
“I was beginning to be annoyed by the fury of the traveler and I was going to join the conversation to tell him what I have seen and endured in America, in New York itself [Rizal doesn’t disclose what he “endured” in New York], how many troubles and what torture the customs [and immigration] in the United States made us suffer, the demands of drivers, barbers, etc., people who, as in many other places, lived on travelers….I was tempted to believe that my man’s verbosity, being a good Yankee, came from the steam of a boiler inside his body, and I even imagined seeing in him a robot created and hurled to the world by the Americans, a robot with a perfect engine inside to discredit Europe….” (Quoted in Ambeth Ocampo, Rizal Without the Overcoat, 1990; see also Gregorio Zaide and Sonia Zaide, Jose Rizal, 1984).
What can we infer from this hiatus between Rizal’s anger in being quarantined and his belief that the “great American Republic” dare not engage in the brutal adventure of subjugating the natives of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines? Two years after his visit, in Brussels, Rizal replied to Jose Alejandrino’s question what impression did he have of America: “America is the land par excellence of freedom but only for the whites.” This insight is quite remarkable for a Filipino traveler then and today. It exceeds the intelligence of Filipino American pundits who boast of 200 percent “Americanism,” of Filipinos as hybrid transnationals or transmigrants capable of besting white supremacy. But Rizal did not pursue the inferences from his insight. While recognizing the denial of civil liberties to “Negroes” and the degrading treatment of Chinese and Japanese in San Francisco, Rizal was unable to connect these snapshots and observations to the history of the United States as one of expansion, genocidal extermination of Native Americans, slavery of Africans, violent conquest and subjugation of indigenous Mexicans in Texas, California and the territory seized after the Mexican-American War of 1845-1848.
What is the historic context surrounding Rizal’s tour of the U.S. in 1886? A historic violent railroad strike had already occurred in 1877; in 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act effectively barred the Chinese from entry, a move which did not prevent twenty-eight Chinese from being massacred in Rock Springs, Wyoming, in the summer of 1885. Meanwhile, in the post-bellum South, the basis for segregation was being laid by Ku Klux Klan raids throughout the 1860s and 1870s following the Compromise of 1877 and severe economic depression. In 1886, two years before Rizal’s travels, the Haymarket riot in Chicago led to the hanging of eight anarchists innocent of the crimes they were charged with. It was the era of robber barons, workers’ strikes, immigrant rebellions, and ferocious class wars (as detailed by Howard Zinn in A People’s History of the United States). In 1890, the massacre of Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee marked the culmination of the genocidal campaign against the original inhabitants and the closing of the internal frontier.
Rizal seemed not to have followed U.S. history along these tracks, isolating only the puritan revolt against religious persecution and the colonial, quasi-feudal imposition by the British monarchy. So this tradition of struggling for liberty, for separation from European feudalism and the authoritarian English monarchy, was what Rizal associated with the U.S. as an emerging nation-state when he was preoccupied with demanding Filipino representation in the Cortes in 1889-1890. The United States stood for Rizal as an example of a country or people that demanded representation – “no taxation without representation” was a slogan that must have appealed to the ilustrado assimilationists, not an Anglo state whose “Manifest Destiny” was already nascent from the time of the massacre of the Pequot Indians in 1636, through the institutionalized slavery of Africans, to the savage colonization of Mexican territory in 1848. White supremacy acquired its slogan of “Manifest Destiny” in the U.S. victory over Mexico and its annexation of substantial territory once owned by Spain.
III.
We can understand this omission of the U.S. from the ilustrado consciousness then. So concentrated were the energies and time of Rizal and his compatriots Marcelo del Pilar, Graciano Lopez Jaena, Mariano Ponce, and others on stirring up the conscience of the Spanish public in Madrid and Barcelona that they neglected studying closely the political history of the United States. They missed the “signs of the times.” It could not be helped. And so little did Rizal suspect that the “great American Republic” would be the next executioner of Filipino nationalists and radical democrats, the global gendarme of terrorists like the New People’s Army combatants, the Moro separatists, Fidel Castro, Zapatistas in Chiapas, and Maoists in Nepal.
Europe was the arena of battle, but more specifically Spain. During Rizal’s first sojourn in Europe (1882-1887), social ferment was quietly taking place between the dissolution of the First International Working Men’s Association in 1881 and the founding of the Second International in Paris in July 1889 with Marxism as its dominant philosophy. Marx died in 1883. Meanwhile two volumes of Capital have been published and were being discussed in Europe during Rizal’s first visit to Paris. Engels was still alive then, living in London when Rizal was annotating Morga’s Sucesos at the British Museum in 1888-1889. During his second sojourn (1888-1891), Rizal completed El Filibusterismo published in Ghent, Belgium, in 1891. Engels’ writings, in particular Anti-Duhring (1877-1878), have been widely disseminated in German periodicals and argued over. Given his numerous visits to Germany, Austria, France, Belgium, England, and Spain, and his contacts with intellectuals (Blumentritt, Rost, Jagor, Virchow, Ratzel, Meyer, aside from the Spaniards Morayta, Pi y Margall, Becerra, Zorilla, and others), it was impossible for Rizal to escape the influence of the socialist movement and its Spanish anarchist counterpoint. Indeed, a letter (dated 13 May 1891) by his close friend, the painter Juan Luna, conveyed Luna’s enthusiasm over Le socialisme contemporaine by E. de Laveleye, “which is a conflation of the theories of Karl Marx, La Salle, etc; Catholic socialism, the conservative, evangelical,…which stresses the miseries of contemporary society.”
Based on an inspection of Rizal’s library in Calamba and citations in the Epistolario, Benedict Anderson concludes that Rizal had no interest, or awareness, of socialist currents except those filtered through Joris Karl Huysmans. Rizal’s singular modernity, in my view, cannot be so easily Orientalized by U.S. experts like Anderson, Karnow, Glenn May, and their ilk. On the other hand, Anderson’s presumptuous reference to the “narrow nativism” and “narrow obsession with America” of Filipino intellectuals will surely delight the Westernized Makati enclave and his acolytes in Diliman and Loyola Heights. Or even those speculating on Rizal’s homosexual tendencies despite his insouciant flirtations with las palomas de baja vuela (as attested to by close companions Valentin Ventura and Maximo Viola).
In his Solidaridad period, Rizal was just beginning to learn the fundamentals of geopolitics. The United States was out of the picture. It is foolish to expect Rizal and his compatriots to know more than what their circumstances and class orientation allowed. Scarcely would Rizal have a clue then that the U.S. control of Filipino sovereignty would continue through the IMF/WB stranglehold of the Philippine economy for over 40 years after nominal independence in 1946, an unprecedented case—the only country so administered for the longest period in history! This can throw some light on the country’s chronic poverty, technological backwardness, clientelist slavishness to Washington, witnessed of late by the export of over 9 million contract workers as “servants of globalization” and the dependence on the 8.5 billion dollars worth of overseas annual remittances to service the humongous foreign debt and the extravagant “indolence” of the few rich families and their politician flunkeys. Rizal’s memory of his ordeal in San Francisco, had he lived longer, might have resonated beyond his detention in the prison-fortress of Montjuich in Barcelona (where Isabelo de los Reyes was also confined) and influenced the ilustrado circle of Trinidad Pardo de Tavera and other supporters of “Benevolent Assimilation” in the early decades of the last century.
Finally, we return to confront once again Rizal’s “Manifesto” of 1896 written in his prison cell in Fort Santiago. Against the gradualist thrust of this Manifesto (surely a ruse to gain time) can be counterposed the overwhelming evidence of Rizal’s conviction that where the other party cannot listen to reason, force must be used (while civic education proceeds), with separatist liberation the only ultimate alternative. Padre Florentino’s invocation (“God will provide a weapon…”) was fulfilled in Rizal’s banishment and the replacement of the Liga by the Katipunan. It is enough to cite again Rizal’s resolute determination to give his life for the liberation of his people (in the two letters to his brother and to his family) as well as many confessions to Blumentritt, Ponce, Del Pilar, Fr. Pastells, and others, of his readiness to sacrifice his life for the redemption of the masses. The itinerary of his activities in Europe, Hong Kong, and Dapitan suffice to quell any doubt about his commitment. Recall his words to General Alejandrino: “I will never head a revolution that is preposterous and has no probability of success because I do not like to saddle my conscience with reckless and fruitless bloodshed; but whoever may head a revolution in the Philippines will have me at his side.”
IV.
In the long run, the criterion of solidarity with the masses imposes its critical verdict without reprieve. Rizal struggled all his life against the tendency toward individualism. He confided to Del Pilar: “What I desire is that others appear…” To Padre Vicente Garcia: “A man in the Philippines is only an individual, he is not a member of a nation.” But he also will not submit to tradition for its own sake, to unreasoned conformism: “I wish to return to the Philippines [he wrote to Ponce], and though it may be a temerity and an imprudence, what does it matter? Filipinos are all so prudent. That is why our country is as it is…. And since it seems to me that we are not doing well on the road of prudence, I will seek another road.” Several paths were tested in the Noli and Fili, including Simoun’s “anarchical nationalism,” Cabesang Tales’ guerilla foco, urban insurrection, etc. In the opinion of Eugenio Matibag, both novels were multivoiced, intricately dialogic in nature, and so open to the “play of an emancipatory desire that continues to move the Philippines today.” Of course, we don’t need to read Rizal to seek to overthrow the current intolerable system. Limited by his ilustrado class conditioning, but open to the influence of collective projects and spontaneous popular initiatives, Rizal was a nationalist democrat “of the old type,” as the idiom goes. But proof of a more genuinely populist and radical conception of change may be found in the third novel, recently recovered for us by Ambeth Ocampo in Makamisa (Anvil 1992),
Would Rizal’s stature be altered if he had completed this novel? Since this is not the occasion to elaborate on the insurrectionary imagination of Rizal, I can only highlight two aspects in Makamisa. First, the boisterous entrance of the subaltern masses into historical time and space. In the two novels, Elias, Sisa, Cabesang Tales, and others interrupted the plot of individual disillusionment, but never moved to the foreground of the stage. This new mise en scene is rendered here by the demystification of religious ritual via the physical/sensory motion of crowds, rumor, money talk, animal behavior, Anday’s seduction, and so on, escaping from the symbolic Order (sacred space) represented by the Church, as dramatized in the multiaccentual speculations on why Padre Agaton disrupted his public performance. The play of heteroglossia, the intertextuality of idioms (indices of social class and collective ethos), and the stress on the heterogeneous texture of events, all point to the mocking subversive tradition of the carnivalesque culture and Menippean satire that Mikhail Bakhtin describes in his works on Rabelais, Menippean satire, and Dostoevsky (see The Dialogic Imagination). This is the root of the polyphonic modernist novel constituted by distances, relationships, analogies, non-exclusive oppositions, fantasies that challenge the status quo. Rizal could have inaugurated the tradition of an antiheroic postmodernist vernacular centered on the antagonism of ideological worlds.
Second, the tuktukan game accompanying the Palm Sunday procession is Rizal’s proof that folk/indigenous culture, a spectacle staged at the site of the monological discourse of the Church, transgresses prohibitions and allows the body of the earth, its sensory process and affective becoming, to manifest itself. We confront the unconscious of the colonial structure in the essential motifs of carnivalesque ribaldry and topsy-turvy outlawry: “the high and low, birth and agony, food and excrement, praise and curses, laugher and tears “(in Julia Kristeva’s gloss). Paradoxes, ambivalences, Dionysian fantasies, odd mixtures of styles that violate orthodox decorums, and diverse expressions of ideological themes and chronotopes - all these characterize the Menippean satirical discourse exemplified here as well as in Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, De Sade, Lautreamont, Dostoevsky, Kafka and Joyce. (One wonders if Rizal read Dostoevsky or Gogol’s Dead Souls?) According to Bakhtin, we find in Rabelais’ work the dramatic conflict between the popular/plebeian culture of the masses and the official medieval theology of hegemonic Christianity.
Variants may be found in postmodernist works of magical realism (Garcia Marquez, Ondaatje, Salman Rushdie). In brief, Makamisa is the moment of Rabelaisian satire and carnival feast in Rizal’s archive. It may be read as Rizal’s attempt to go beyond the polyphonic relativizing of colonial authority and Christian logic in the Noli and Fili toward a return to the body of the people, not just folkways and customs but the praxis of physical labor, the material/social processes of eating and excretion, sexual production and reproduction, collective dreams and the political unconscious. It is the moment of unfinalizable becoming, the moment of the Katipunan revolution.
Once more, we encounter the spectre of Rizal at the barricades, arming the spirit for storming the entrenched fortifications of Makati or Malacanang Palace, envisioning a land where “there are no slaves, no hangmen, no oppressors,/where faith does not slay,” “Pearl of the Orient Seas, our Eden lost….”
___________
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
E. SAN JUAN is co-director of the Board of Philippine Forum, New York City, and heads the Philippine Cultural Studies Center in Connecticut, USA He was recently visiting professor of literature at the National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan, and professor of American Studies at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium. Among his recent books are BEYOND POSTCOLONIAL THEORY (Palgrave), RACISM AND CULTURAL STUDIES (Duke University Press), and WORKING THROUGH THE CONTRADICTIONS (Bucknell University Press). Three books in Filipino were launched in Manila, Philippines, recently: HIMAGSIK (De La Salle University Press), TINIK SA KALULUWA (Anvil), and SAPAGKAT INIIBIG KITA (University of the Philippines). His award-winning book of criticism, TOWARD A PEOPLE’S LITERATURE, is being re-issued by the University of the Philippines Press.
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My Comment (MC):
Isang MAINAM na artikulong babasahin para sa mga interesado sa kasaysayan ng Pilipinas at ng mga bayani nito. Hindi aku sanay sa istilo ng pagsulat ni SAN JUAN kaya pabaligtad ko itong binasa, mula hulihan patungo sa simula. Maaaring akalain sa unang pagsipat ng isang bumabasa na may ere o pasikat lamang ang may-akda dahil sa kanyang wika at sa pagbanggit ng maraming dayuhang personalidad o manunulat. Subali't mayroon din talagang mahalagang nilalaman na dapat suriin at pag-isipan. Hindi pang-masa ang sanaysay, kundi para sa may sopistikasyon, maraming nabasa, at malawak na kaalaman. Halimbawa, kailangang pamilyar sa Marxismo at sa kasulatang Pranses ang bumabasa. Mahalaga lamang banggitin ang mga sumusunod:
-Ipinapakita kung gaano ka-talas ang obserbasyon o puna ni Rizal sa ipinahayag niyang kasagutan kay Jose Alejandrino.
-Dapat na basahin ang ikatlong nobela ni Rizal. Ang pagkaka-alam ko lang ay may tinanggal na kabanata sa isa sa dalawang aklat na NOLI at FILI para makatipid sa pagpapalimbag. Ito yata yung "ELIAS AT SALOME". Mainam na pag-debatehan ang awtentisidad ng ikatlong aklat.
-Isa ito sa interes ko: Bakit hindi nadala agad nina Rizal ang Marxismo-Sosyalismo sa Pilipinas? Masyado bang avant-garde ang mga sulating nasabi at hindi maunawaan o gamay ng ating mga PROPAGANDISTA?
-Totoo bang binanggit ni Rizal ang salitang "ROBOT"?
-Totoo bang tatlong bagong bayaning bangkay kada araw ang dumadating sa NAIA?
POST 0003
Hulyo 01, 2010 4:37am
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THE TRUE HISTORY OF PILIPINAS WITH EMPHASIS ON THE KATIPUNAN SECRET SOCIETY & THE 1896 REVOLUTION WHICH GAVE BIRTH TO THE PILIPINAS NATION-STATE: A CABALISTIC-CONSPIRATORIAL PERSPECTIVE
OR
"ANG TUNAY NA KASAYSAYAN NG SANIPILIP AYON KAY NOSI BAYASI"
(BATAY SA KANYANG TEORYA AT MEMORYA NA NABABAWASAN NA)
============================================================
(n)-niNAKAW mula kay WALANG PAG-ASA [El Presidente del PNP (Partido Nuebe de Pebrero*)]
[Played to the tune of YOYOY VILLAME'S "MAGELLAN" song followed by JUDAS "TAYO'Y MGA PINOY"]
*Nov. 9 is NOT A DATE - it is an ADDRESS!:D
CRUSADES (WESTERN CALENDAR just started registering FOUR DIGITS)
TWO IBERIAN-EUROPEAN RIVAL WORLD POWERS, PORTUGAL & SPAIN, DIVIDE THE WORLD BETWEEN THEM thru TREATY OF TORDESILLAS 1494 [Rest of the GLOBE, especially the realm of MUSSULMANS (MUSLIMS), is considered NOT PART of EUROCENTRIC WRITTEN HISTORY]
The NEW WORLD, the AMERICAN CONTINENTS (named after Italian AMERIgo Vespucci) originally inhabited by REDSKINS (native American Indians), is discovered for the WEST in 1492 by CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS (who was financed by QUEEN ISABELLA, the CATHOLIC QUEEN of SPAIN), colonized & gradually populated by WHITE European migrants, also BLACKs from AFRICA arrive as SLAVES
PORTUGUESE take MALACCA in 1511
SPANIARDS ARRIVE in SAMAR 1521 - a Portuguese explorer who took part in the previous event, FERNAO DE MAGALHAES (hispanized FERNANDO MAGALLANES or anglicized FERDINAND MAGELLAN), & working for the KING OF SPAIN, discovers for the IBERIANS a WESTWARD ROUTE to the EAST avoiding rival/MUSLIM-held territories; EUROcentric HISTORY credits him as the 1st CIRCUMNAVIGATOR of the GLOBE. BUT equally if not more qualified are ENRIQUE DE MALACCA & SEBASTIAN DEL CANO
SPAIN begins COLONIZATION & CHRISTIANIZATION of what is now the PHILIPPINE ARCHIPELAGO; Similar activities of PORTUGAL elsewhere
RISE OF EUROPEAN NATIONS with their corresponding COLONIAL PROJECTS - DUTCH, ENGLISH, FRENCH, ITALIAN, even GERMAN & RUSSIAN
MEANWHILE in the NUSANTARA (DUNIA M'LAYU/MALAY WORLD/OCEANIA)
Using VISAYAN allies as shock troops, SPAIN takes LUSONG kingdom from TAGA-ILOGs by defeating RAJAH SULAYMAN of MANILA. RAJAH ACHE MATANDA of SAPA & LAKANDULA of TUNDUK, the RULING FAMILIES are BLOOD-RELATIVES of the SULTAN OF SULU (SULU SULTANATE presently DORMANT/SUBSUMED under AUTONOMOUS REGION FOR MUSLIM MINDANAW as SULU PROVINCE) & the SULTAN OF BRUNEI (SULTANATE now a SOVEREIGN SOUTHEAST ASIAN NATION)
TONDO CONSPIRACY 1588
Former MUSLIM rulers, already CONVERTED TO CATHOLICISM, attempt to organize a REBELLION & overthrow the Spaniards expecting SUPPORT from BRUNEIAN RELATIVES, PLAN is EXPOSED by SPANISH INTELLIGENCE from tactical INFORMATION in CALAMIANES between MANILA & BRUNEI; CABALISTS CAUGHT & EXECUTED, some EXILED TO MEXICO: Magat Salamat, Felipe Salonga, Geronimo Basi, Antonio Tuambasan, Pitonggatang, atbp
NATIVE ISLANDERS SPLIT INTO INDIOS, MOROS, INFIELES, AETAS ETCETCETC
------------PLEASE CONSULT HISTORY BOOKS---------------------
SPANISH-MORO WARS
LONG PERIOD OF UNORGANIZED INDIO RESISTANCE AGAINST SPAIN, ISOLATED REBELLIONS & REVOLTS FOR VARIED GRIEVANCES & REASONS NOTABLY:
FRANCISCO DAGOHOY IN BOHOL
HERMANO PULE IN TAYABAS (NOW QUEZON PROVINCE)
BASI REVOLT
MALONG REVOLT
DIEGO & GABRIELA SILANG of ILOKOS
ETC ETC ETC
CAVITE MUTINY 1872
GOM-BUR-ZA (DIRECTLY AFFECTED RIZAL & others)
-------------------------------------------------------------
DUTCH & CHINESE ATTACKS
BRITISH SACKING OF MANILA
ETCETCETC
LAST DECADE of 19th-CENTURY
STIRRINGS OF NATIONALISM AMONG INTELLIGENT NATIVES
RISE of ILUSTRADOs (EDUCATED CLASS of INDIO NATIVES & MESTIZOS) & PROPAGANDA MOVEMENT based in SPAIN seeking REFORMS - Included such PERSONALITIES as MARCELO H. DEL PILAR, JOSE RIZAL, MARIANO PONCE, LUNA BROTHERS, GRACIANO LOPEZ JAENA ETCETC
RIZAL ARRESTED & EXILED TO DAPITAN
RIZAL's LA LIGA FILIPINA DISSOLVED & BREAKS UP INTO TWO GROUPS:
MABINI's moderate CUERPO DE COMPROMISARIOS & BONIFACIO'S militant SECRET SOCIETY, KATIPUNAN. The former consists of members from upper classes of society while the latter are from middle & lower working classes, even mass-based.
FOUNDING of KATIPUNAN (KKK or KATAAS-TAASAN at KAGALANG-GALANGANG KATIPUNAN ng manga ANAK nang BAYAN) on JULY 07, 1892 (the evening of Rizal's deportation to Dapitan) in a house along ELCANO ST. & AZCARRAGA in present-day DIVISORIA; KATIPUNAN allegedly traces its origins up to the TONDO CONSPIRACY some THREE HUNDRED YEARS EARLIER; OBJECTIVE is FULL INDEPENDENCE & COMPLETE BREAK AWAY FROM SPAIN
NOTE VERY WELL: RIZAL was a REFORMIST, BONIFACIO was a REVOLUTIONARY
RIZAL NABBED while on the way to CUBA as volunteer doctor & INCARCERATED in FORT SANTIAGO; ACCUSED of INCITING SEDITION &/or FOMENTING REBELLION through his BOOKS NOLI ME TANGERE & EL FILIBUSTERISMO which primarily attack the Catholic FRIARs & not so much the SECULAR civilian or military administration
KATIPUNAN EXPOSED after PERSONAL SPAT between TEODORO PATINO & APOLINARIO DE LA CRUZ leads latter's sister to report to religious authorities. He CONFESSES to FR. MARIANO GIL about existence of cabal with KKK receipt printing paraphernalia & knife in DIARIO DE MANILA printing shop as evidence. Gil REPORTS to HIGHER AUTHORITES including the GUARDIA CIVIL & the GOVERNOR-GENERAL.
MANILA ALARMED, KATIPUNEROS HUNTED, Many Manilenos including some elite are taken in for questioning, imprisoned & even executed. Leaders decide to launch REVOLUTION. KATIPUNEROS tear their CEDULAs as EXPRESSION or SYMBOL of DEFIANCE. Full-blown FIGHTING, Start of 1896 PHILIPPINE REVOLUTION, the first by an ASIAN nation against a WESTERN COLONIAL POWER
Many SUSPECTED cabal-participants executed in BAGUMBAYAN including such personalities as DON FRANCISCO ROXAS, TEODORO PLATA, LUIS VILLAREAL, JOSE DIZON, DIONISIO VILLARUEL, even a few junior officers of the SPANISH ARMY
RIZAL EXECUTED in BAGUMBAYAN (LUNETA) on DECEMBER 30, 1896
Allegedly, as he falls, he makes a final effort to turn around & face the firing squad (consisting of natives!) to show his innocence
A HISTORIC BLUNDER by SPAIN [Like US BUSH ATTACK ON IRAQ]
SPAIN declares STATE OF WAR & MARTIAL LAW in EIGHT PROVINCES including MANILA - the SUN's EIGHT RAYS in THE PHILIPPINE FLAG. Various BATTLES, BONIFACIO'S MANILA-MORONG group face numerous defeats on the ground while AGUINALDO's CAVITENOS win through BETTER ORGANIZATION & aided by such talents as EDILBERTO EVANGELISTA, a BELGIAN-TRAINED ENGINEER who built reliable TRENCHES
TEJEROS CONVENTION
Internal POWER STRUGGLE among REVOLUTIONARY LEADERS threaten to SPLIT THE RANKS in the MIDDLE between the MAGDALO & the MAGDIWANG factions. First ELECTION CHEATING in Pilipinas on record.
BONIFACIO BROTHERS are NABBED, TRIED for TREASON, SENTENCED to DEATH & EXECUTED by AGUINALDO'S MEN particularly LAZARO MAKAPAGAL, AGAPITO BONZON (who allegedly raped BONIFACIO'S WIFE & KATIPUNAN LAKAMBINI, GREGORIA DE JESUS) & GEN. JOSE PAUA, the CHINESE General in the PHILIPPINE REVOLUTION.
AGUINALDO takes over both de facto & de jure LEADERSHIP of PHILIPPINE REVOLUTION; MABINI becomes SECRETARY OF WAR/FOREIGN MINISTER
INTERNATIONAL/GLOBAL SCENE: 1898 SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR
BATTLE OF MANILA BAY between U.S. NAVAL FORCE under Admiral GEORGE DEWEY & SPANISH NAVY under Admiral PATRICIO MONTOJO. SPANISH FLEET obliterated. BEGINNING of RISE of U.S.A to WORLD POWER STATUS
"FARCE SURRENDER OF MANILA" - to save face, Spanish troops surrender not to native Filipinos but to fellow whites, the Americans
TREATY OF PARIS 1898, SPAIN cedes/sells PILIPINAS (now ANGLICIZED to "PHILIPPINES"), including MOROLAND which it never conquered, to the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA for 20 MILLION U.S. DOLLARS [ORIGIN of MORO PROBLEM in MINDANAW - MOROs SOLD & BOUGHT BY TWO THIEVES!]
"FILIPINOS" CONTINUE TO FIGHT, this time against a new FOREIGN INVADING POWER, AMERICA, against which the MALOLOS CONGRESS FORMALLY DECLARED WAR [FILIPINO-AMERICAN WAR relatively-INVISIBLE as in UNEMPHASIZED or GLOSSED OVER in HISTORY BOOKS used or taught in PHILIPPINE primary & secondary schools]
Filipinos gradually DEFEATED by Americans through latter's superior organization & technology; Crumbling LEADERSHIP flees northwards
BATTLE OF TIRAD PASS where GREGORIO DEL PILAR, the youngest general & AGUINALDO'S REAR GUARD tasked to delay the enemy was KILLED-IN-ACTION thru alleged TREACHERY of a NATIVE who revealed a SECRET ROUTE to the Americans
AGUINALDO CAPTURED in PALANAN, ISABELA after a long chase/march
running through TARLAC, PANGASINAN, LA UNION, ABRA, BENGUET; CAPTORS relied on MACABEBE SCOUTS from PAMPANGA, a mixed NATIVE FILIPINO INDIO & HISPANIZED MEXICAN INDIAN MERCENARY FORCE, to penetrate through AGUINALDO's inner cordon. Aguinaldo swears ALLEGIANCE to America.
OVERALL COMMAND of WAR/RESISTANCE TAKEN OVER by GEN. MIGUEL MALVAR of BATANGAS who continues to resist until 1903 when FRANKLIN BELL adopts SCORCHED EARTH policy in his province forcing the former to surrender to stop further suffering & massacre of NATIVES.
Scattered ORIGINAL KATIPUNEROS under EMILIO JACINTO & others who refused to recognize AGUINALDO, including CARREON & SAKAY, who had retreated to MORONG (RIZAL PROVINCE today), continue ORGANIZED RESISTANCE against Americans.
MACARIO SAKAY CONTINUES TO DEFY AMERICANS & HEADS THE "REPUBLIKA NG KATAGALUGAN" with a few ORIGINAL KATIPUNEROS; Guerilla Warfare; "FIRST VIETNAM"; Skirmishes, raids, & ambushes continue for a few more years; Americans apply counter-insurgency ZONING to such areas as BATANGAS to contain SAKAY's forces; Similar resistance elsewhere
AMERICANS TRAP SAKAY, by using another FILIPINO, DOMINADOR GOMEZ, he was lured with FALSE PROMISES to go down from the mountains & enticed to attend a DINNER PARTY; SAKAY TRIED & EXECUTED UNJUSTLY as a TULISAN (a mere CRIMINAL & NOT a REBEL or POLITICAL FIGURE!)
(IMPORTANT LESSON: NEVER ATTEND A PARTY HOSTED BY YOUR ENEMY:)
AMERICAN-SPONSORED GOVERNMENT, Beginning of PHILIPPINE BODY POLITIC
& Governance, AMERICAN EDUCATION of "LITTLE BROWN BROTHERS"; PHILIPPINE CONSTABULARY (Today's PHILIPPINE NATIONAL POLICE!!) created by Americans to watch & police the natives. "P.I."
NACIONALISTA PARTY (NO CONNECTION to latter day NP) organized by some of the original LEADERS of the REVOLUTION including SAKAY associates CARREON, VILLAFUERTE, etc, FEDERALISTAs, P.K.P. etc
ELECTIONS: AGUINALDO is DEFEATED by QUEZON when the latter, exploiting the exhumation of alleged bones of the SUPREMO, revives the ISSUE concerning BONIFACIO's DEATH [EARLY DIRTY PHILIPPINE ELECTION TACTIX]
PHILIPPINE COMMONWEALTH GOVT. under MESTIZOs QUEZON (Tagalog) & OSMENA (Cebuano)
WORLD WAR II, ASIAN THEATER OF WAR: JAPAN INVADES SOUTHEAST ASIA
GEN. ARTEMIO RICARTE (nom-de-guerre: VIBORA), [An original MAGDIWANG KATIPUNERO & PHILIPPINE REVOLUTIONARY GENERAL who fought BOTH SPAIN & AMERICA, & who together with APOLINARIO MABINI & MARIANO LLANERA were exiled to GUAM; after persistently refusing to swear ALLEGIANCE to America ended up in HONGKONG, CHINA & YOKOHAMA, JAPAN] finally RETURNS HOME as a JAPANESE MILITARY OFFICER. He DIES in the mountains of BENGUET still RESISTING AMERICA up to the very end. He organized & headed the PRO-JAPANESE MAKAPILI.
[NO SURRENDER: Filipino Gen. RICARTE & Japanese Lt. HIROO ONODA of LUBANG ISLAND FAME]
RETREAT to BATAAN of USAFFE; MACARTHUR ESCAPES TO AUSTRALIA, QUEZON FOLLOWS & GOES TO U.S. where he dies of TB at SARANAC LAKE N.Y. in 1944. AMERICAN forces overall command taken over by GEN. JONATHAN WAINWRIGHT who surrenders & announces over Radio KZRH the capitulation & calls on all fighting units to give up.
[MNLF comment: PINOYS FOND OF CELEBRATING "FALL" of Bataan, "FALL" of Manila, WATERs FALL etcetc INSTEAD of "VICTORY" OVER etcetc]
JAPANESE OCCUPATION OF THE PHILIPPINES, GEACPS, KALIBAPI, JAPANESE ECONOMIX & MONEY, PUGO & TUGO(?:)
GUERRILLAS CONTINUE DEFYING JAPANESE; MARXIST-ORIENTED ANTI-JAPANESE, PRO-CHINESE HUKBALAHAP; SAKDALISTA, ETC
LITTLE BOY & FATMAN devastate HIROSHIMA & NAGASAKI; JAPAN SURRENDERS UNCONDITIONALLY; WORLD WAR II ENDS
PRES. MANUEL ROXAS, GRANDFATHER of defeated 2010 VP CANDIDATE MAR ROXAS, DIES of HEART ATTACK in CLARK AIR FIELD HOSPITAL
PHILIPPINE ELECTIONS of 1948/1949 won by ELPIDIO QUIRINO, allegedly the MOST CORRUPT PHILIPPINE PRESIDENT [PERSONAL INFO myself]
RAMON MAGSAYSAY as DEFENSE SECRETARY captures the whole POLITBURO of LAVA-led PARTIDO KOMUNISTA NG PILIPINAS (PKP) in LIGHTNING RAID. Among those CAPTURED was an AMERICAN New Yorker, WILLIAM POMEROY
1957 PRES. MAGSAYSAY DIES IN CRASH IN MT. MANUNGGAL CEBU
His DC-3 airplane was named MT. PINATUBO after a mountain in his province; A journalist NESTOR MATA survives the crash.
SUCCESSION OF ELECTED PHILIPPINE-PRESIDENTS INCLUDING CARLOS P. GARCIA (Filipino-First Policy), DIOSDADO P. MACAPAGAL (Land Reform), FERDINAND E. MARCOS (This nation shall be great again.)
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*CONSULT OLD NEWSPAPERS DURING THIS PERIOD ESPECIALLY MANILA TIMES*
etcetc
HARRY STONEHILL CASE
CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION
RUBY TOWER EARTHQUAKE
MAGGIE DE LA RIVA RAPE CASE
FORBES PARK BUTLER HOSTAGE-TAKING
PLAZA MIRANDA BOMBING of LP STALWARTS
JABIDAH MASSACRE
FOUNDING OF MNLF, CPP-NPA
U.P.'s FIRST QUARTER STORM
1972 DECLARATION OF MARTIAL LAW
NEW SOCIETY
"SA IKAUUNLAD NG BAYAN, BISIKLETA/DISIPLINA ANG KAILANGAN"
DAILY EXPRESS NEWSPAPER
KABATAAANG BARANGAY
etcetc
PATIKUL MASSACRE
etcetc
SNAP ELECTIONS Marcos-Tolentino
1986 PEOPLE POWER REVOLT against MARCOS, ACTUALLY a FAILED COUP initiated by a faction of the MILITARY particularly the RAM of junior-grade officers led by Lt. Col. GRINGO HONASAN, plus Defense Minister ENRILE in CAMP AGUINALDO & Chief of Staff RAMOS in CAMP CRAME, was defended by civilian MASS-SUPPORT of METRO PEOPLE called by MANILA ARCHBISHOP CARDINAL SIN via RADIO VERITAS; Successive turn-about by military personnel against MARCOS who flees MALACANANG. He dies in HAWAII.
etcetc
CORY AQUINO takes oath as president, opts for revolutionary gov't.
etcetc
CAMP CAWA-CAWA INCIDENT & RIZAL ALIH
etcetc
COUP D'ETAT vs. CORY AQUINO GOVERNMENT led by RAM-SFP-YOU
etcetc
FIDEL RAMOS elected as PRESIDENT; Allegedly massive cheating in ARMM to defeat MIRIAM DEFENSOR-SANTIAGO, the alleged real winner
etcetc
GRP-MNLF FINAL PEACE AGREEMENT (Final DAW!)
BAGUIO EARTHQUAKE 1990
ERUPTION OF MT. PINATUBO 1991
CLOSURE OF US BASES AT SUBIC & CLARK
etcetc [CONSTRUCTION OF MALLS & NEW METRO RAILWAY SYSTEMS, "MEGA"]
EDSA 2 removes PRESIDENT-ELECT ERAP ESTRADA replaced by VP GMA, DIOSDADO's daughter
OAKWOOD MUTINY led by MAGDALO officers
HELLO GARCI, NBN-ZTE DEAL
etcetc
MAGUINDANAO MASSACRE
etcetc
2010 SEMI-AUTOMATED PHILIPPINE ELECTIONS
IT'S MIDNIGHT & I FEEL SOOOO SLEEPY HISTORY TEMPORARY ON HOLD
=======
*PLEASE CLICK ON IMAGE TO MAGNIFY*
N.B.:
Note the three prongs of historical development WITHIN what is now PILIPINAS. What VIETNAM experienced in the 1960'-70's & what IRAQ & AFGHANISTAN are just undergoing at present were experienced by PILIPINAS 100 years ago. The "Pilipinos" effectively struggled & fought against the de facto WORLD POWERS during that time: namely, SPAIN then followed by AMERICA. THEREFORE, any rising GLOBAL POWER today will have to deal with PILIPINAS & its always-defeated-&-dominated-but-never-really-completely-subjugated NATIVE inhabitants.
"HISTORY IS WRITTEN BY THE VICTORS."- ANON.
"MAN IS A POLITICAL BEING."- ARISTOTLE
"WAR IS DECEPTION."- SUN TZU
"ANG KASAYSAYAN AY DAPAT KATAKUTAN."- ORIANG de Jesus, KKK LAKAMBINI
"ANG HINDI LUMINGON SA PINANGGALINGAN
AY HINDI MAKARARATING SA PAROROONAN."
(One who does not look back to his origin
will not reach his destination.)
"ANONG GAGAWIN MO KAPAG MAY PULIS SA LIKURAN MO?"- TAKBO, The Youth
"SAAN KA MAN NAROROON... KAYTAGAL MO NANG NAWALA, BABALIK KA RIN... SA NAKALIPAS NA PANAHON, SA IYONG KAHAPON, SA ALA-ALANG NAGHIHINTAY SA 'YO"- BABALIK KA RIN, Gary Valenciano
"LOVE ME WITH ALL OF YOUR HEART..."- Engelbert Humperdinck OOOPS!!
The influence, if not actual involvement or participation, of FOREIGN ENTITIES, e.g., Muslim Fundamentalists/Islamists on the separatist BANGSAMORO struggle, possibly TAIWAN aboriginal nationalist groups on the CORDILLERA people's movement, foreign Marxists support of NPAs or militarists/fascists of right-wing putschists, etc is a POLITICAL REALITY that must be taken into account. In fact, there is a claim that any present-day "local" REVOLUTIONARY movement will need the support of a foreign SOVEREIGN power to succeed. Proxy-war between regional or bigger GLOBAL powers complicates matters. Historically, TONDO CONSPIRATORs sought the help of BRUNEI SULTAN, KATIPUNAN sought JAPANESE support.
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***PAID ADVERTISEMENTS***
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WANTED DEAD NOT ALIVE
---------------------
NAME: DR. ANDREW D'CASTRIO BONIFACE, Doctor of REVOLUTION
ALIASES: "WITH HOPE", "SUPREMO"
SPECIALIZATION/: Political Surgical Operations, Underground Cabal EXPERTISE Organizing, Initiation of Social Upheaval, Revolt, Insurrection, Rebellion, Sedition, Coup d'etat
COVER: Selling CANES & HATS, PRINT AD-DESIGN, MESSENGER, WAREHOUSEMAN/STOREKEEPER
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ANNOUNCEMENT: The PNP (Partido Nuebe de Pebrero) is holding its plenary meeting tonight. All members are enjoined to participate. Top Agenda is the upcoming 2010 AUTOMATED SANIPILIP SELECTIONS (A.S.S.). Officials of the COMSELEC & technical representatives from GLOBEMATIC will be in attendance. Contact El Presidente for details.
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MISSING/ESCAPEE: The PUBLIC is hereby WARNED that the individual in the picture (see PHOTO), JOHN DOE BALL CROST, is an escaped patient of the Sanipilip N.M.H.; Missing since last year; Solitarily-confined in padded Cell 69, Ward 13 of Bldg 2, patient has long history of involvement in violent & bloody altercations. Likes to talk & argue about the PAST, public-oration, texting, blogging. Goes by many aliases such as "NO HOPE", Jose Lizard, Bonny Anderson, etc. Penchant for wearing red, curved jackets & 19th-century military uniform. EXTREMELY DANGEROUS WHEN ARMED & PROVOKED. CASH REWARD shall be given to anyone who can provide INFO on his whereabouts. Please notify DR. VAN LOONY at CP#0918273645 or NOV. 9 INSTITUTION.
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TODAY'S HOROSCOPE
by LING MI TAN-ONG ng Programang "I-tan-ong mo-kay Ling-Mi" Radyo DZZZ 1896 outside your radio dial
SABITARYUS: Huwag kang dadalo sa anumang kasayahan o pupunta sa matataong lugar. Mapanganib.
BEERGO: Iwasan ang makipag-argumento. Delikado.
KAPRECORN: Ito na ang hinihintay mong pagkakataon. Gawin at isakatuparan ang matagal mo nang pinaplano.
JIMMYNAY: Ngayon na ang iyong "one moment in time". Aksyon na.
ULCER: Madilim ang iyong gabi. Magdala ng plaslayt. Mag-ingat.
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TXT MSG & GREETINGS/MGA PAGBATI (FREE 2 ALL JEJEMARS):
Happy Anniversary kay Tito K. Tumawag po yng Pnuno nyo may meeting daw po kaU mamyang PM - Bin
4 JDB: 'Tol, dumating na yung PINYA at 9M/45 na PnaBli mo. +100 bilogs. Ang bigat nga eh. Daanan mo na lang. El Ticol
TNX 2 U Cool-Shack
Choy, Etxt @ isama mo C DALDAL sa miting para masaya, Ko-Aks
Toks, He-2 na nman ang opor2nidad 4U ma-praktis sa DEBATE Attend ka mmyang gabi sa grupo nmin Nvite & Sagot kita OK? Vice
Argo, Dalo ka mamya. Hehe Tyak GULO dahil tata-pun C Toktok- Mento
Prof matatawa k pag nakits m ang get-up ni chief. Namumulang kamatis! De-Boga pa! Parang Brit officer noong panahon ng US Civil War. Hahaha. Pero Tpong HAYBLAD. C U sa miting 2nayt! Doc
Pat, Tie tayo, Jan
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WORD FOR TODAY: rumble
rumble - n. gangfight, free-for-all, confusion, panic, mayhem
Ex. Red Rum Rose is revved up, roaring, and ready to rumble tonight.
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TV/MOVIE SKED:
WATCH TONIGHT's PREMIERE of "AQUA OXIGENADA" ABC-DEF Channel 69
"JOSALKA: Ang JOSANG May KURBA"[re-issued "JOSALKA, DUMERECHO KAW!"]
"BRITIS LIIT" Starring Delma Santa (X-mayor ngayon govna sensadoka!)
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ANO?! AUDIENCE KA LANG O SASALI KA?
HINDI ITO TV GAME SHOW, HA!
===================================
(n)Ninakaw kay Nosi Bayasi
SUPREMO ng KKK (KiKilitiin Kita)
============================================================
THE TRUE HISTORY OF PILIPINAS WITH EMPHASIS ON THE KATIPUNAN SECRET SOCIETY & THE 1896 REVOLUTION WHICH GAVE BIRTH TO THE PILIPINAS NATION-STATE: A CABALISTIC-CONSPIRATORIAL PERSPECTIVE
OR
"ANG TUNAY NA KASAYSAYAN NG SANIPILIP AYON KAY NOSI BAYASI"
(BATAY SA KANYANG TEORYA AT MEMORYA NA NABABAWASAN NA)
============================================================
(n)-niNAKAW mula kay WALANG PAG-ASA [El Presidente del PNP (Partido Nuebe de Pebrero*)]
[Played to the tune of YOYOY VILLAME'S "MAGELLAN" song followed by JUDAS "TAYO'Y MGA PINOY"]
*Nov. 9 is NOT A DATE - it is an ADDRESS!:D
CRUSADES (WESTERN CALENDAR just started registering FOUR DIGITS)
TWO IBERIAN-EUROPEAN RIVAL WORLD POWERS, PORTUGAL & SPAIN, DIVIDE THE WORLD BETWEEN THEM thru TREATY OF TORDESILLAS 1494 [Rest of the GLOBE, especially the realm of MUSSULMANS (MUSLIMS), is considered NOT PART of EUROCENTRIC WRITTEN HISTORY]
The NEW WORLD, the AMERICAN CONTINENTS (named after Italian AMERIgo Vespucci) originally inhabited by REDSKINS (native American Indians), is discovered for the WEST in 1492 by CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS (who was financed by QUEEN ISABELLA, the CATHOLIC QUEEN of SPAIN), colonized & gradually populated by WHITE European migrants, also BLACKs from AFRICA arrive as SLAVES
PORTUGUESE take MALACCA in 1511
SPANIARDS ARRIVE in SAMAR 1521 - a Portuguese explorer who took part in the previous event, FERNAO DE MAGALHAES (hispanized FERNANDO MAGALLANES or anglicized FERDINAND MAGELLAN), & working for the KING OF SPAIN, discovers for the IBERIANS a WESTWARD ROUTE to the EAST avoiding rival/MUSLIM-held territories; EUROcentric HISTORY credits him as the 1st CIRCUMNAVIGATOR of the GLOBE. BUT equally if not more qualified are ENRIQUE DE MALACCA & SEBASTIAN DEL CANO
SPAIN begins COLONIZATION & CHRISTIANIZATION of what is now the PHILIPPINE ARCHIPELAGO; Similar activities of PORTUGAL elsewhere
RISE OF EUROPEAN NATIONS with their corresponding COLONIAL PROJECTS - DUTCH, ENGLISH, FRENCH, ITALIAN, even GERMAN & RUSSIAN
MEANWHILE in the NUSANTARA (DUNIA M'LAYU/MALAY WORLD/OCEANIA)
Using VISAYAN allies as shock troops, SPAIN takes LUSONG kingdom from TAGA-ILOGs by defeating RAJAH SULAYMAN of MANILA. RAJAH ACHE MATANDA of SAPA & LAKANDULA of TUNDUK, the RULING FAMILIES are BLOOD-RELATIVES of the SULTAN OF SULU (SULU SULTANATE presently DORMANT/SUBSUMED under AUTONOMOUS REGION FOR MUSLIM MINDANAW as SULU PROVINCE) & the SULTAN OF BRUNEI (SULTANATE now a SOVEREIGN SOUTHEAST ASIAN NATION)
TONDO CONSPIRACY 1588
Former MUSLIM rulers, already CONVERTED TO CATHOLICISM, attempt to organize a REBELLION & overthrow the Spaniards expecting SUPPORT from BRUNEIAN RELATIVES, PLAN is EXPOSED by SPANISH INTELLIGENCE from tactical INFORMATION in CALAMIANES between MANILA & BRUNEI; CABALISTS CAUGHT & EXECUTED, some EXILED TO MEXICO: Magat Salamat, Felipe Salonga, Geronimo Basi, Antonio Tuambasan, Pitonggatang, atbp
NATIVE ISLANDERS SPLIT INTO INDIOS, MOROS, INFIELES, AETAS ETCETCETC
------------PLEASE CONSULT HISTORY BOOKS---------------------
SPANISH-MORO WARS
LONG PERIOD OF UNORGANIZED INDIO RESISTANCE AGAINST SPAIN, ISOLATED REBELLIONS & REVOLTS FOR VARIED GRIEVANCES & REASONS NOTABLY:
FRANCISCO DAGOHOY IN BOHOL
HERMANO PULE IN TAYABAS (NOW QUEZON PROVINCE)
BASI REVOLT
MALONG REVOLT
DIEGO & GABRIELA SILANG of ILOKOS
ETC ETC ETC
CAVITE MUTINY 1872
GOM-BUR-ZA (DIRECTLY AFFECTED RIZAL & others)
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DUTCH & CHINESE ATTACKS
BRITISH SACKING OF MANILA
ETCETCETC
LAST DECADE of 19th-CENTURY
STIRRINGS OF NATIONALISM AMONG INTELLIGENT NATIVES
RISE of ILUSTRADOs (EDUCATED CLASS of INDIO NATIVES & MESTIZOS) & PROPAGANDA MOVEMENT based in SPAIN seeking REFORMS - Included such PERSONALITIES as MARCELO H. DEL PILAR, JOSE RIZAL, MARIANO PONCE, LUNA BROTHERS, GRACIANO LOPEZ JAENA ETCETC
RIZAL ARRESTED & EXILED TO DAPITAN
RIZAL's LA LIGA FILIPINA DISSOLVED & BREAKS UP INTO TWO GROUPS:
MABINI's moderate CUERPO DE COMPROMISARIOS & BONIFACIO'S militant SECRET SOCIETY, KATIPUNAN. The former consists of members from upper classes of society while the latter are from middle & lower working classes, even mass-based.
FOUNDING of KATIPUNAN (KKK or KATAAS-TAASAN at KAGALANG-GALANGANG KATIPUNAN ng manga ANAK nang BAYAN) on JULY 07, 1892 (the evening of Rizal's deportation to Dapitan) in a house along ELCANO ST. & AZCARRAGA in present-day DIVISORIA; KATIPUNAN allegedly traces its origins up to the TONDO CONSPIRACY some THREE HUNDRED YEARS EARLIER; OBJECTIVE is FULL INDEPENDENCE & COMPLETE BREAK AWAY FROM SPAIN
NOTE VERY WELL: RIZAL was a REFORMIST, BONIFACIO was a REVOLUTIONARY
RIZAL NABBED while on the way to CUBA as volunteer doctor & INCARCERATED in FORT SANTIAGO; ACCUSED of INCITING SEDITION &/or FOMENTING REBELLION through his BOOKS NOLI ME TANGERE & EL FILIBUSTERISMO which primarily attack the Catholic FRIARs & not so much the SECULAR civilian or military administration
KATIPUNAN EXPOSED after PERSONAL SPAT between TEODORO PATINO & APOLINARIO DE LA CRUZ leads latter's sister to report to religious authorities. He CONFESSES to FR. MARIANO GIL about existence of cabal with KKK receipt printing paraphernalia & knife in DIARIO DE MANILA printing shop as evidence. Gil REPORTS to HIGHER AUTHORITES including the GUARDIA CIVIL & the GOVERNOR-GENERAL.
MANILA ALARMED, KATIPUNEROS HUNTED, Many Manilenos including some elite are taken in for questioning, imprisoned & even executed. Leaders decide to launch REVOLUTION. KATIPUNEROS tear their CEDULAs as EXPRESSION or SYMBOL of DEFIANCE. Full-blown FIGHTING, Start of 1896 PHILIPPINE REVOLUTION, the first by an ASIAN nation against a WESTERN COLONIAL POWER
Many SUSPECTED cabal-participants executed in BAGUMBAYAN including such personalities as DON FRANCISCO ROXAS, TEODORO PLATA, LUIS VILLAREAL, JOSE DIZON, DIONISIO VILLARUEL, even a few junior officers of the SPANISH ARMY
RIZAL EXECUTED in BAGUMBAYAN (LUNETA) on DECEMBER 30, 1896
Allegedly, as he falls, he makes a final effort to turn around & face the firing squad (consisting of natives!) to show his innocence
A HISTORIC BLUNDER by SPAIN [Like US BUSH ATTACK ON IRAQ]
SPAIN declares STATE OF WAR & MARTIAL LAW in EIGHT PROVINCES including MANILA - the SUN's EIGHT RAYS in THE PHILIPPINE FLAG. Various BATTLES, BONIFACIO'S MANILA-MORONG group face numerous defeats on the ground while AGUINALDO's CAVITENOS win through BETTER ORGANIZATION & aided by such talents as EDILBERTO EVANGELISTA, a BELGIAN-TRAINED ENGINEER who built reliable TRENCHES
TEJEROS CONVENTION
Internal POWER STRUGGLE among REVOLUTIONARY LEADERS threaten to SPLIT THE RANKS in the MIDDLE between the MAGDALO & the MAGDIWANG factions. First ELECTION CHEATING in Pilipinas on record.
BONIFACIO BROTHERS are NABBED, TRIED for TREASON, SENTENCED to DEATH & EXECUTED by AGUINALDO'S MEN particularly LAZARO MAKAPAGAL, AGAPITO BONZON (who allegedly raped BONIFACIO'S WIFE & KATIPUNAN LAKAMBINI, GREGORIA DE JESUS) & GEN. JOSE PAUA, the CHINESE General in the PHILIPPINE REVOLUTION.
AGUINALDO takes over both de facto & de jure LEADERSHIP of PHILIPPINE REVOLUTION; MABINI becomes SECRETARY OF WAR/FOREIGN MINISTER
INTERNATIONAL/GLOBAL SCENE: 1898 SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR
BATTLE OF MANILA BAY between U.S. NAVAL FORCE under Admiral GEORGE DEWEY & SPANISH NAVY under Admiral PATRICIO MONTOJO. SPANISH FLEET obliterated. BEGINNING of RISE of U.S.A to WORLD POWER STATUS
"FARCE SURRENDER OF MANILA" - to save face, Spanish troops surrender not to native Filipinos but to fellow whites, the Americans
TREATY OF PARIS 1898, SPAIN cedes/sells PILIPINAS (now ANGLICIZED to "PHILIPPINES"), including MOROLAND which it never conquered, to the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA for 20 MILLION U.S. DOLLARS [ORIGIN of MORO PROBLEM in MINDANAW - MOROs SOLD & BOUGHT BY TWO THIEVES!]
"FILIPINOS" CONTINUE TO FIGHT, this time against a new FOREIGN INVADING POWER, AMERICA, against which the MALOLOS CONGRESS FORMALLY DECLARED WAR [FILIPINO-AMERICAN WAR relatively-INVISIBLE as in UNEMPHASIZED or GLOSSED OVER in HISTORY BOOKS used or taught in PHILIPPINE primary & secondary schools]
Filipinos gradually DEFEATED by Americans through latter's superior organization & technology; Crumbling LEADERSHIP flees northwards
BATTLE OF TIRAD PASS where GREGORIO DEL PILAR, the youngest general & AGUINALDO'S REAR GUARD tasked to delay the enemy was KILLED-IN-ACTION thru alleged TREACHERY of a NATIVE who revealed a SECRET ROUTE to the Americans
AGUINALDO CAPTURED in PALANAN, ISABELA after a long chase/march
running through TARLAC, PANGASINAN, LA UNION, ABRA, BENGUET; CAPTORS relied on MACABEBE SCOUTS from PAMPANGA, a mixed NATIVE FILIPINO INDIO & HISPANIZED MEXICAN INDIAN MERCENARY FORCE, to penetrate through AGUINALDO's inner cordon. Aguinaldo swears ALLEGIANCE to America.
OVERALL COMMAND of WAR/RESISTANCE TAKEN OVER by GEN. MIGUEL MALVAR of BATANGAS who continues to resist until 1903 when FRANKLIN BELL adopts SCORCHED EARTH policy in his province forcing the former to surrender to stop further suffering & massacre of NATIVES.
Scattered ORIGINAL KATIPUNEROS under EMILIO JACINTO & others who refused to recognize AGUINALDO, including CARREON & SAKAY, who had retreated to MORONG (RIZAL PROVINCE today), continue ORGANIZED RESISTANCE against Americans.
MACARIO SAKAY CONTINUES TO DEFY AMERICANS & HEADS THE "REPUBLIKA NG KATAGALUGAN" with a few ORIGINAL KATIPUNEROS; Guerilla Warfare; "FIRST VIETNAM"; Skirmishes, raids, & ambushes continue for a few more years; Americans apply counter-insurgency ZONING to such areas as BATANGAS to contain SAKAY's forces; Similar resistance elsewhere
AMERICANS TRAP SAKAY, by using another FILIPINO, DOMINADOR GOMEZ, he was lured with FALSE PROMISES to go down from the mountains & enticed to attend a DINNER PARTY; SAKAY TRIED & EXECUTED UNJUSTLY as a TULISAN (a mere CRIMINAL & NOT a REBEL or POLITICAL FIGURE!)
(IMPORTANT LESSON: NEVER ATTEND A PARTY HOSTED BY YOUR ENEMY:)
AMERICAN-SPONSORED GOVERNMENT, Beginning of PHILIPPINE BODY POLITIC
& Governance, AMERICAN EDUCATION of "LITTLE BROWN BROTHERS"; PHILIPPINE CONSTABULARY (Today's PHILIPPINE NATIONAL POLICE!!) created by Americans to watch & police the natives. "P.I."
NACIONALISTA PARTY (NO CONNECTION to latter day NP) organized by some of the original LEADERS of the REVOLUTION including SAKAY associates CARREON, VILLAFUERTE, etc, FEDERALISTAs, P.K.P. etc
ELECTIONS: AGUINALDO is DEFEATED by QUEZON when the latter, exploiting the exhumation of alleged bones of the SUPREMO, revives the ISSUE concerning BONIFACIO's DEATH [EARLY DIRTY PHILIPPINE ELECTION TACTIX]
PHILIPPINE COMMONWEALTH GOVT. under MESTIZOs QUEZON (Tagalog) & OSMENA (Cebuano)
WORLD WAR II, ASIAN THEATER OF WAR: JAPAN INVADES SOUTHEAST ASIA
GEN. ARTEMIO RICARTE (nom-de-guerre: VIBORA), [An original MAGDIWANG KATIPUNERO & PHILIPPINE REVOLUTIONARY GENERAL who fought BOTH SPAIN & AMERICA, & who together with APOLINARIO MABINI & MARIANO LLANERA were exiled to GUAM; after persistently refusing to swear ALLEGIANCE to America ended up in HONGKONG, CHINA & YOKOHAMA, JAPAN] finally RETURNS HOME as a JAPANESE MILITARY OFFICER. He DIES in the mountains of BENGUET still RESISTING AMERICA up to the very end. He organized & headed the PRO-JAPANESE MAKAPILI.
[NO SURRENDER: Filipino Gen. RICARTE & Japanese Lt. HIROO ONODA of LUBANG ISLAND FAME]
RETREAT to BATAAN of USAFFE; MACARTHUR ESCAPES TO AUSTRALIA, QUEZON FOLLOWS & GOES TO U.S. where he dies of TB at SARANAC LAKE N.Y. in 1944. AMERICAN forces overall command taken over by GEN. JONATHAN WAINWRIGHT who surrenders & announces over Radio KZRH the capitulation & calls on all fighting units to give up.
[MNLF comment: PINOYS FOND OF CELEBRATING "FALL" of Bataan, "FALL" of Manila, WATERs FALL etcetc INSTEAD of "VICTORY" OVER etcetc]
JAPANESE OCCUPATION OF THE PHILIPPINES, GEACPS, KALIBAPI, JAPANESE ECONOMIX & MONEY, PUGO & TUGO(?:)
GUERRILLAS CONTINUE DEFYING JAPANESE; MARXIST-ORIENTED ANTI-JAPANESE, PRO-CHINESE HUKBALAHAP; SAKDALISTA, ETC
LITTLE BOY & FATMAN devastate HIROSHIMA & NAGASAKI; JAPAN SURRENDERS UNCONDITIONALLY; WORLD WAR II ENDS
PRES. MANUEL ROXAS, GRANDFATHER of defeated 2010 VP CANDIDATE MAR ROXAS, DIES of HEART ATTACK in CLARK AIR FIELD HOSPITAL
PHILIPPINE ELECTIONS of 1948/1949 won by ELPIDIO QUIRINO, allegedly the MOST CORRUPT PHILIPPINE PRESIDENT [PERSONAL INFO myself]
RAMON MAGSAYSAY as DEFENSE SECRETARY captures the whole POLITBURO of LAVA-led PARTIDO KOMUNISTA NG PILIPINAS (PKP) in LIGHTNING RAID. Among those CAPTURED was an AMERICAN New Yorker, WILLIAM POMEROY
1957 PRES. MAGSAYSAY DIES IN CRASH IN MT. MANUNGGAL CEBU
His DC-3 airplane was named MT. PINATUBO after a mountain in his province; A journalist NESTOR MATA survives the crash.
SUCCESSION OF ELECTED PHILIPPINE-PRESIDENTS INCLUDING CARLOS P. GARCIA (Filipino-First Policy), DIOSDADO P. MACAPAGAL (Land Reform), FERDINAND E. MARCOS (This nation shall be great again.)
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*CONSULT OLD NEWSPAPERS DURING THIS PERIOD ESPECIALLY MANILA TIMES*
etcetc
HARRY STONEHILL CASE
CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION
RUBY TOWER EARTHQUAKE
MAGGIE DE LA RIVA RAPE CASE
FORBES PARK BUTLER HOSTAGE-TAKING
PLAZA MIRANDA BOMBING of LP STALWARTS
JABIDAH MASSACRE
FOUNDING OF MNLF, CPP-NPA
U.P.'s FIRST QUARTER STORM
1972 DECLARATION OF MARTIAL LAW
NEW SOCIETY
"SA IKAUUNLAD NG BAYAN, BISIKLETA/DISIPLINA ANG KAILANGAN"
DAILY EXPRESS NEWSPAPER
KABATAAANG BARANGAY
etcetc
PATIKUL MASSACRE
etcetc
SNAP ELECTIONS Marcos-Tolentino
1986 PEOPLE POWER REVOLT against MARCOS, ACTUALLY a FAILED COUP initiated by a faction of the MILITARY particularly the RAM of junior-grade officers led by Lt. Col. GRINGO HONASAN, plus Defense Minister ENRILE in CAMP AGUINALDO & Chief of Staff RAMOS in CAMP CRAME, was defended by civilian MASS-SUPPORT of METRO PEOPLE called by MANILA ARCHBISHOP CARDINAL SIN via RADIO VERITAS; Successive turn-about by military personnel against MARCOS who flees MALACANANG. He dies in HAWAII.
etcetc
CORY AQUINO takes oath as president, opts for revolutionary gov't.
etcetc
CAMP CAWA-CAWA INCIDENT & RIZAL ALIH
etcetc
COUP D'ETAT vs. CORY AQUINO GOVERNMENT led by RAM-SFP-YOU
etcetc
FIDEL RAMOS elected as PRESIDENT; Allegedly massive cheating in ARMM to defeat MIRIAM DEFENSOR-SANTIAGO, the alleged real winner
etcetc
GRP-MNLF FINAL PEACE AGREEMENT (Final DAW!)
BAGUIO EARTHQUAKE 1990
ERUPTION OF MT. PINATUBO 1991
CLOSURE OF US BASES AT SUBIC & CLARK
etcetc [CONSTRUCTION OF MALLS & NEW METRO RAILWAY SYSTEMS, "MEGA"]
EDSA 2 removes PRESIDENT-ELECT ERAP ESTRADA replaced by VP GMA, DIOSDADO's daughter
OAKWOOD MUTINY led by MAGDALO officers
HELLO GARCI, NBN-ZTE DEAL
etcetc
MAGUINDANAO MASSACRE
etcetc
2010 SEMI-AUTOMATED PHILIPPINE ELECTIONS
IT'S MIDNIGHT & I FEEL SOOOO SLEEPY HISTORY TEMPORARY ON HOLD
=======
*PLEASE CLICK ON IMAGE TO MAGNIFY*
N.B.:
Note the three prongs of historical development WITHIN what is now PILIPINAS. What VIETNAM experienced in the 1960'-70's & what IRAQ & AFGHANISTAN are just undergoing at present were experienced by PILIPINAS 100 years ago. The "Pilipinos" effectively struggled & fought against the de facto WORLD POWERS during that time: namely, SPAIN then followed by AMERICA. THEREFORE, any rising GLOBAL POWER today will have to deal with PILIPINAS & its always-defeated-&-dominated-but-never-really-completely-subjugated NATIVE inhabitants.
"HISTORY IS WRITTEN BY THE VICTORS."- ANON.
"MAN IS A POLITICAL BEING."- ARISTOTLE
"WAR IS DECEPTION."- SUN TZU
"ANG KASAYSAYAN AY DAPAT KATAKUTAN."- ORIANG de Jesus, KKK LAKAMBINI
"ANG HINDI LUMINGON SA PINANGGALINGAN
AY HINDI MAKARARATING SA PAROROONAN."
(One who does not look back to his origin
will not reach his destination.)
"ANONG GAGAWIN MO KAPAG MAY PULIS SA LIKURAN MO?"- TAKBO, The Youth
"SAAN KA MAN NAROROON... KAYTAGAL MO NANG NAWALA, BABALIK KA RIN... SA NAKALIPAS NA PANAHON, SA IYONG KAHAPON, SA ALA-ALANG NAGHIHINTAY SA 'YO"- BABALIK KA RIN, Gary Valenciano
"LOVE ME WITH ALL OF YOUR HEART..."- Engelbert Humperdinck OOOPS!!
The influence, if not actual involvement or participation, of FOREIGN ENTITIES, e.g., Muslim Fundamentalists/Islamists on the separatist BANGSAMORO struggle, possibly TAIWAN aboriginal nationalist groups on the CORDILLERA people's movement, foreign Marxists support of NPAs or militarists/fascists of right-wing putschists, etc is a POLITICAL REALITY that must be taken into account. In fact, there is a claim that any present-day "local" REVOLUTIONARY movement will need the support of a foreign SOVEREIGN power to succeed. Proxy-war between regional or bigger GLOBAL powers complicates matters. Historically, TONDO CONSPIRATORs sought the help of BRUNEI SULTAN, KATIPUNAN sought JAPANESE support.
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***PAID ADVERTISEMENTS***
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WANTED DEAD NOT ALIVE
---------------------
NAME: DR. ANDREW D'CASTRIO BONIFACE, Doctor of REVOLUTION
ALIASES: "WITH HOPE", "SUPREMO"
SPECIALIZATION/: Political Surgical Operations, Underground Cabal EXPERTISE Organizing, Initiation of Social Upheaval, Revolt, Insurrection, Rebellion, Sedition, Coup d'etat
COVER: Selling CANES & HATS, PRINT AD-DESIGN, MESSENGER, WAREHOUSEMAN/STOREKEEPER
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ANNOUNCEMENT: The PNP (Partido Nuebe de Pebrero) is holding its plenary meeting tonight. All members are enjoined to participate. Top Agenda is the upcoming 2010 AUTOMATED SANIPILIP SELECTIONS (A.S.S.). Officials of the COMSELEC & technical representatives from GLOBEMATIC will be in attendance. Contact El Presidente for details.
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MISSING/ESCAPEE: The PUBLIC is hereby WARNED that the individual in the picture (see PHOTO), JOHN DOE BALL CROST, is an escaped patient of the Sanipilip N.M.H.; Missing since last year; Solitarily-confined in padded Cell 69, Ward 13 of Bldg 2, patient has long history of involvement in violent & bloody altercations. Likes to talk & argue about the PAST, public-oration, texting, blogging. Goes by many aliases such as "NO HOPE", Jose Lizard, Bonny Anderson, etc. Penchant for wearing red, curved jackets & 19th-century military uniform. EXTREMELY DANGEROUS WHEN ARMED & PROVOKED. CASH REWARD shall be given to anyone who can provide INFO on his whereabouts. Please notify DR. VAN LOONY at CP#0918273645 or NOV. 9 INSTITUTION.
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TODAY'S HOROSCOPE
by LING MI TAN-ONG ng Programang "I-tan-ong mo-kay Ling-Mi" Radyo DZZZ 1896 outside your radio dial
SABITARYUS: Huwag kang dadalo sa anumang kasayahan o pupunta sa matataong lugar. Mapanganib.
BEERGO: Iwasan ang makipag-argumento. Delikado.
KAPRECORN: Ito na ang hinihintay mong pagkakataon. Gawin at isakatuparan ang matagal mo nang pinaplano.
JIMMYNAY: Ngayon na ang iyong "one moment in time". Aksyon na.
ULCER: Madilim ang iyong gabi. Magdala ng plaslayt. Mag-ingat.
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TXT MSG & GREETINGS/MGA PAGBATI (FREE 2 ALL JEJEMARS):
Happy Anniversary kay Tito K. Tumawag po yng Pnuno nyo may meeting daw po kaU mamyang PM - Bin
4 JDB: 'Tol, dumating na yung PINYA at 9M/45 na PnaBli mo. +100 bilogs. Ang bigat nga eh. Daanan mo na lang. El Ticol
TNX 2 U Cool-Shack
Choy, Etxt @ isama mo C DALDAL sa miting para masaya, Ko-Aks
Toks, He-2 na nman ang opor2nidad 4U ma-praktis sa DEBATE Attend ka mmyang gabi sa grupo nmin Nvite & Sagot kita OK? Vice
Argo, Dalo ka mamya. Hehe Tyak GULO dahil tata-pun C Toktok- Mento
Prof matatawa k pag nakits m ang get-up ni chief. Namumulang kamatis! De-Boga pa! Parang Brit officer noong panahon ng US Civil War. Hahaha. Pero Tpong HAYBLAD. C U sa miting 2nayt! Doc
Pat, Tie tayo, Jan
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WORD FOR TODAY: rumble
rumble - n. gangfight, free-for-all, confusion, panic, mayhem
Ex. Red Rum Rose is revved up, roaring, and ready to rumble tonight.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
TV/MOVIE SKED:
WATCH TONIGHT's PREMIERE of "AQUA OXIGENADA" ABC-DEF Channel 69
"JOSALKA: Ang JOSANG May KURBA"[re-issued "JOSALKA, DUMERECHO KAW!"]
"BRITIS LIIT" Starring Delma Santa (X-mayor ngayon govna sensadoka!)
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===================================
ANO?! AUDIENCE KA LANG O SASALI KA?
HINDI ITO TV GAME SHOW, HA!
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(n)Ninakaw kay Nosi Bayasi
SUPREMO ng KKK (KiKilitiin Kita)
POST 0002
Hulyo 01, 2010
LYRICS OF PHILIPPINE NATIONAL ANTHEM IN TAGALOG & ENGLISH
LUPANG HINIRANG (1950's & later)
---------------
Bayang Magiliw
Perlas ng Silanganan,
Alab ng puso
Sa dibdib mo'y buhay.
Lupang hinirang,
Duyan ka ng magiting;
Sa manlulupig,
Di ka pasisiil.
Sa dagat at bundok,
Sa simoy at sa langit mong bughaw
May dilag ang tula at awit
Sa paglayang minamahal.
Ang kislap ng watawat mo'y
Tagumpay na nagniningning
Ang bituin at away niya
Kailan pa ma'y di magdidilim.
Lupa ng Araw ng luwalhati't pagsinta,
Buhay ay langit sa piling mo,
Aming ligaya na pag may mang-aapi,
Ang mamatay ng dahil sa 'yo.
PHILIPPINE HYMN (AMERICAN OCCUPATION OR REGIME)
---------------
Land of the morning
Child of the sun returning
With fervor burning
Thee do our souls adore
Land dear & holy
Cradle of noble heroes
Ne'er shall invaders
Trample thy sacred shores
Ever within thy skies & through thy clouds
And o'er thy hills & seas
Do we behold the radiance,
feel the throb,
Of glorious liberty.
Thy banner dear to all our hearts
Its sun & stars alight,
Oh, never shall its shining field
Be dimmed by tyrant's might!
Beautiful land of love,
O land of light,
In thine embrace 'tis rapture to lie
But it is glory ever,
When thou art wronged,
For us, thy sons to suffer & die.
PROVIDED FREE & EASY TO THE GENERAL READING PUBLIC WORLDWIDE (WEB)
by: NAKS
LYRICS OF PHILIPPINE NATIONAL ANTHEM IN TAGALOG & ENGLISH
LUPANG HINIRANG (1950's & later)
---------------
Bayang Magiliw
Perlas ng Silanganan,
Alab ng puso
Sa dibdib mo'y buhay.
Lupang hinirang,
Duyan ka ng magiting;
Sa manlulupig,
Di ka pasisiil.
Sa dagat at bundok,
Sa simoy at sa langit mong bughaw
May dilag ang tula at awit
Sa paglayang minamahal.
Ang kislap ng watawat mo'y
Tagumpay na nagniningning
Ang bituin at away niya
Kailan pa ma'y di magdidilim.
Lupa ng Araw ng luwalhati't pagsinta,
Buhay ay langit sa piling mo,
Aming ligaya na pag may mang-aapi,
Ang mamatay ng dahil sa 'yo.
PHILIPPINE HYMN (AMERICAN OCCUPATION OR REGIME)
---------------
Land of the morning
Child of the sun returning
With fervor burning
Thee do our souls adore
Land dear & holy
Cradle of noble heroes
Ne'er shall invaders
Trample thy sacred shores
Ever within thy skies & through thy clouds
And o'er thy hills & seas
Do we behold the radiance,
feel the throb,
Of glorious liberty.
Thy banner dear to all our hearts
Its sun & stars alight,
Oh, never shall its shining field
Be dimmed by tyrant's might!
Beautiful land of love,
O land of light,
In thine embrace 'tis rapture to lie
But it is glory ever,
When thou art wronged,
For us, thy sons to suffer & die.
PROVIDED FREE & EASY TO THE GENERAL READING PUBLIC WORLDWIDE (WEB)
by: NAKS
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