Author’s Note to this 2012 Addition to Epilogue

     This fully turns a by now thick volume into a grand book describable too as Rizal vs Old Catholicism and To-Arms Bonifacianism.  Can you imagine the second topmost PH hero uttering this book’s Rizal-based Epigram? Or the Defiant Death Poem’s soaring clean notes for truth, peace, redeeming progress and brotherhood?  There too his enemy is his Oppressors’ Faith That Kills, whereas Bonifacio’s was Spain itself. The dichotomy between the two topmost PH heroes appears complete, whether we like it or not as the facts show.

     As in last year’s Epilogue, I pile up again more evidence atop what since the first edition I’ve shown to be a Continually Rising Mountain of Conclusive No-Retraction Evidence.  Filipinos, especially from the majority faith, don’t see it looming over their heads, or staring them right in their faces. Not so, however, foreigners, secular scholars and, lately, new pro-choice Catholics, upon serious reading of this book’s chapter three at the very least.

     In this 2012 Epiloque I now fully come out of the closest, at risk of doubling the resistance to and shunning of this enlarged book, against the reigning school falsely promoting a Rizal who deep down in various degrees allegedly supported  the heroic To-Arms Bonifacio. This includes, alas, showing the historical delusions of the post-1913 Dr. Pio Valenzuela, whom I now openly put in the same class as the mythmaking Fr. Balaguer, in both essays, sonnets and poems.

     Another descriptive title I use to refer to this enlarged book is The Rizal Pinoys Shun. Increasingly I also use: Rizal the Accidental Top PH Hero. For, how otherwise explain such highly unlikely elevation of a martyred anti-Catholic freethinker and an anti-Bonifacian by a Catholic pro-Bonifacio nation? Except unknowingly and accidentally from the total world context of the times.

                       R.M. Bernardo, May 7, 2012, Manila

Added UPDATES in Early 2012 to the online Book, which I also now call RIZAL vs Old CATHOLICISM and To-Arms Bonifacianism, include these:

1.Is His Frame-Ups Like Gomburza’s?: Evidence from Cuerpo de Vigilancia

2.Honestly Facing Rizal as the Freethinker-Humanist Author of Noli  (and Others)

3.Facing  More Scorns By Joining the Rizal vs Bonifacio Fray 

4.M.V. Hamada vs M.F. Almario and Other To-Arms Bonifacians on Rizal’s Nature

5.Sonnets and Poems on Rizal vs To-Arms Bonifacio, including PH Astrophysicist Whom Rizal Would Toast and Chief Justice He Would Roast

Rizal Frame-Ups: As In GOMBURZA?

Add  to 3rd ch.’s retraction disproof 

     The 2011 edition of my book which led me to call it Rizal vs Catholicism took strong issue with Dr. Quibuyen’s reigning “Bonifacian marrying of Rizal to Bonifacio”. This fashionable view states that both agreed after all at deeper levels below their surface disagreements. Holders of some version of this view are A.R. Ocampo who stresses that Rizal inspired “1896”; and John Nery’s recent book praising Rizal as such inspirer of violent nationalist uprisings in most of Southeast Asia. In this added update of that edition, however, I record my growing convictions that the Gandhian freethinker-humanist Rizal should be more accurately regarded anti-Bonifacian, even in such details as holding truth-seeking-and-telling to be a sacred spiritual belief. Needless to say all this has more than doubled the ideological blocks to the acceptance of my main intertwined findings. 

      Be that as it may I agree with the otherwise masterful Quibuyen’s view on who in 1872 framed and killed the indigenizing “secular” priests Gomez, Burgos, and Zamora. He gave support to the consensus among scholars of “a conspiracy between the reactionary elements in the Church and the anti-liberal (pro-friar) Governor-General Rafael de Izquerdo.” That quote is from page 105 of Quibuyen’s major work on Rizal from an intense Bonifacian viewpoint, first published in 1999. Here are more quotes from the reported debriefings of two Spanish friars captured in Cavite by Aguinaldo’s forces in 1897:

One of them, Fr.Agapito Echegoyen, a Recollect, said…. The heads of the friar orders [as opposed to “seculars” under Bishops in parish administration] held a conference on how to get rid Burgos and other leaders of the native clergy and decided to implicate them in a seditious plot…a Franciscan disguised as a secular priest was sent, with a lot of money, to Cavite, where he pretended to be Burgos. He fomented a mutiny, then negotiated with a Saldua to denounce Burgos….

The other friar-captive, Antonio Piernavieja, an Augustinian, more less confirmed the account above and its key details. Look it up on page 106 of the book, if you want more on the matter, including sources one might consult. Both Spanish priests agreed that after the mutiny’s suppression, the powerful conservative “friars exerted pressure on the (pro-friar) governor-general… topping the pressure with a gift” of very considerable value, to quote Piernavieja. 

     Similarly in Rizal’s situation at major negative turns of his life we see this collusion between Church and State. Take his known frame-up in mid-1892 with anti-friar and anti-Papal handbills for which he was imprisoned and banished to area-arrest in Dapitan. Then again in late 1896 for instigating sedition as the friars vociferously accused him. But too many letters, diary entries, prison testimonies, enlistment in Spain’s Cuban army capped by the 12/15/1896 Anti-Rebellion Manifesto showed innocence beyond doubt. Yet pro-friar Governor-General Polavieja, his prosecution

team, and the military court systematically discarded all this clearly exonerating evidence, revealing thus underlying religious motivations and such determination to convict regardless of the evidence. Even to the extent of suppressing and explaining away that mentioned Manifesto. Such scholars as Retana and Laubach wrote that the Spanish friars as a whole, for mainly religious reasons, clamored and lobbied for his arrest, trial, conviction and death and I can’t help agreeing with their evidence on the matter.

     So with his retraction-frame-up. Here, from its very first state version of its Cuerpo de Vigilancia we see its military and security’s equally determined role in fabricating a broad-ranging retraction to tell the public. In all the main various versions of how the retraction was extracted we see both church and state working together at it. Recall that the state’s Commanders Fresno and Moure were the only named signing witnesses on the broadly phrased five-sentence retraction document. Right from the very start as we see below. [For the rest, read from cnx.org]

The “Cuerpo” retraction scheme

     From the start upon being read the death sentence early in the morning of December 29, 1896 Rizal’s wardens 

Fresno and Moure went eager into fabricating a credible scheme of retraction to tell the public. That’s one key inference to draw from the earliest version of how it was obtained and extracted from the death-sentenced Rizal. They must have been in cahoots or recruited into the plot by the Chief Inspector of the state’s Intelligence and Security Body called Cuerpo de Vigilancia.  For, in its Chief Inspector Federico Moreno’s filed report for the chain-of-command on the morning of December 30, 1896, after the execution (before appearance on the same day of the friars’ La Voz Española version), he described in some detail an unspecified conversion retraction supposedly written alone and submitted by Rizal at 3 P.M. on the “29th”! It gave prominence to the presumably consulted Fresno and Moure. Let us mainly cite the gist of that “unknown” and ignored report, whose original the National Center for Culture and the Arts keeps, and from whose English transcription this comes: 

At 3:00P.M. Fr. March entered the chapel, to whom Rizal handed over what he had written. Then the commanding officer of the detachment assigned to Rizal, Sir Fresno, and the adjutant of the garrison, Sir Moure, entered the chapel and, together with Rizal, signed the document the convict had written with his own hand.

       Read it again and again, please, and compare it well and in detail the later three major retraction-extraction versions reported at the time both in the colony and Spain. The recently discovered Cuerpo de Vigilancia’s version turns out to be the earliest and most different from succeeding ones. It shows the step-by-step evolution of the retraction frame-up into its present ‘canonical’ version, the one I’ve found to have been first announced secretively and suspiciously in 1897 by famous Fr. Pablo Pastells himself. Comparative prominence both versions give to the only co-signing

witnesses Fresno and Moure of the military government, and their supposedly active witnessing and assisting role in the entire retraction process, including pronouncement of the marital formula between the parties concerned sometime before dawn of the execution. Since the two versions are otherwise mutually contradictory and both alleged military witnesses faithfully complied with them both, we have here a self-nullification of the trustworthiness of one’s signature. The Cuerpo’s and the canonical version’s citing of their participation and signatures, moreover, show that both Church and State, as in the case of GOMBURZA, schemed not just in Rizal’s death-dealing conviction for alleged sedition but also in the fabrication of the broad-ranging retraction for overall propaganda purposes. 

      Note both authorities’ evident eagerness for an urgently desired retraction to tell the public. Chief Inspector Moreno said he based his earliest version entirely on his unnamed subordinate agent assigned to monitor goings-on in the death cell. It began right after the reading of the death sentence early on the ‘29th’ and immediate transfer to the death cell with a little corner chapel. Its lead obtainer for the Church was Fr. March, who began as early as 9A.M. By noon when he left for lunch he had by then presented Rizal, to quote again, “with a written document of conversion which he refused to sign.” However, after lunch, he “asked for writing material and, left alone, he spent some time writing. At 3:00 P.M. Fr. March entered the chapel…” 

     So eager were the plotters for the long-desired recantation, clearly for mainly religious reasons, that they first dated its grand signing unrealistically eight-and-a-half hours before the later versions’ more reasonable 11:30 P.M. This bears out the Third chapter’s original claim that animating religious reasons fueled Rizal’s frame-up for sedition. It was the last resort to obtain his retraction, by fair means or foul.  That radically different earliest version of the retraction’s extraction differs  most from the latest and most detailed fourth version. Recall from the Third Chapters Disproof of the Retraction its bizarre secret announcement by installments in January-Febraury, 1897 in Barcelona by Fr. Pastells himself!, as we now know on the evidence. There for the first time the infamous Fr. Balaguer officially replaced Fr. March (and Fr. Faura of the earlier Madrid broadsheets). Like the post-1913 Pio Valenzuela through the decades, Balaguer ever spun tales and more elaborations. At least in the former fraud’s flip-flopping case he at least managed to truthfully relay to his shocked insulting superior Rizal’s No, no, no a 1000 times no, as I’ve detailed elsewhere in poems as well.

HONESTLY FACING RIZAL AS THE FREETHINKER-HUMANIST AUTHOR OF NOLI  ( and Others)

                   “…There live but Boards of clerks,

                  …Priests, second lieutenants, secretaries,

                   Dressed up cavalry heads, law officials.

                 …Could such good-for-nothings

                 Really achieve feats of greatness? Such rats

                 Produce works that are truly extraordinary?

                 [How?]”

                      From Rizal’s Noli’s Epigraph

      You will not find these strong freethinker-humanist words above telling readers, in effect, what the Noli’s grand purpose is. Quick, compare it to your English translation of the book by Catholic biographers such as Leon Guerrero, or by those conscious of writing for a mainly Catholic audience such as that later one by Soledad Locsin. You won’t find there this clearly stated message, nor the entire nine-line epigraph of the author. It has been mistranslated, emasculated or otherwise softened up and sanitized, as has his other works.

      Not that it matters since the PH top hero’s anti-Catholic freethinker’s book still has to be read seriously by his nation. Over the generations and decades I have hardly known anyone who has seriously read it The Rizal-like novelist and searing socio-cultural critic F. Sionil José has repeatedly written on this ignorance-inducing habit of very little serious reading. It is, alas, very true and more so it is shown in regard to the PH Top Hero who is almost shunned in his depths to this day. How often have I heard friends and relatives admit to nearly total ignorance of their top hero’s depths; nor does anyone seem to care doing something about that. Be that as it may, I’ll give the rest of the nine-lines of this purpose-describing epigraph after some more remarks. 

     The fully unretracting freethinker-humanist Rizal, generally unaccepted or unknown as such to this day by his people really did use the Spanish words perdularios (wastrels, good-for-nothings) and ratas (rats). As a modern humanist he strongly and clearly meant to include priests among the “ benighted pre-moderns” his book will severely criticize, along with the comparatively damaged culture and character of his own fellow countrymen when compared to their counterparts in the advanced countries. Only a brave freethinker-humanist at the time would have talked and criticized as he did. Only such a thinker would make the verses above his 1886-published work’s grand ruling epigraph. 

     He was announcing right there in his title-and-author’s page where it prominently appears that he would deal with a roughly similar place with comparable groups of people. To what end? To ask the book’s central question or concern: How could such benighted pre-modern types of people break out of their set ways into greatness of modernity. The book’s dedicatory page, immediately following the epigraph confirms this understanding. There he stressed his free-minded humanistic concern of comparing his cancers-stricken homeland with the modern nations of his travels and studies. In his own words, he said, “Amidst modern cultures I have wanted …to compare you with other nations (more advanced)”.

     Much of the original Spanish epigraph’s nine lines and strong content suffered from mistranslation, emasculation or some such sanitizing by Catholic translators and by those sensitively writing for mostly Catholic and religious groups of readers. Theirs consequently differ a lot from my translation above and below, whether in number of its verse-lines or in the rendering of its strongest words. That reflects, I would say, this top PH hero’s shunning as a fully Gandhian freethinker-humanist figure. I’ve previously discussed all this in detail including how, when still 21, Rizal showed his quick evolution into a rationalist freethinker by joining anti-theocratic Freemasonry at its Acacia Lodge in Madrid. He continued developing as such through intense reading of Voltaire’s works. Other influences were Bruno, Morayta, Pi y Margall, Rousseau, Schiller, Darwin, etc. Endless heated disputes to this day over Noli’s central concern and nature could have been avoided by just honestly recognizing the truth of his being a core-deep rationalist freethinker by the time of writing his book, and it’s finishing it at age 25, as indicated too by its grand ruling epigraph. In effect it says that as you read each of its chapters, ask “How such good-for-nothings and rats produce could possibly modern works truly great?” In modern economic parlance, “How could such a people and nation achieve NIChood?” Did Rizal confine himself to exposing and criticizing priestly abuses? No, since as a core-deep freethinker-humanist he typically criticized Catholicism too as a powerful block to the individual democratic freedoms of thought and expression he sought above all else, along with other aspects of overall modern progress.

     That epigraph is of course not entirely Rizal’s! Its original German is the renowned freethinker-humanist Schiller’s. In fact it is just Rizal’s Spanish translation of a nine-line selection from the literary works of Kantian rationalist Friedrich Schiller. Never mind; its translated use as epigraph of his book is Rizal’s entirely. As such it should be included in the top Philippine hero’s complete collected verses and poems. Here it is in its entire nine-lines in English:

                                    Rizal’s Noli Epigraph

             What?, A Caesar has not appeared yet

             On your Platforms or Boards? Not an Achilles,

              Nor an Orestes or Andromache is to be seen?

              You don’t say! There but live Boards of clerks,

              Priests, second lieutenants, secretaries,

              Dressed up cavalry heads, law officials.

              Hence I asked: “Could such good-for-nothings 

              Really achieve feats of greatness? Such rats

              Produce works that are truly extraordinary?

[How?]”

      Birds of the same feather are those free-minded lines with the much-earlier ones of his poetic challenge (still unmet, as also in F.S. José’s Collected Essays) To

Philippine Youth. Done when he was 17-to-18 in the country’s Catholic Pontifical University it somehow escaped close scrutiny by its guardians of orthodoxy, this being its gist-in-verse (Epigraph too of my above-mentioned book). From my researches I’d say it well defines his core-identity and core-teaching:

        Break free this day timid minds from your chains,

        Shackles fit for brutes bred in dark captivity;

        Climb peaks of thought, talent, art, science,

        Dare thus too redeem self then people and others.

     Don’t all of these lines resonate to the famous lines towards end of his book and repeated in other works?:  “Our freedoms we must earn through hard work and studies, by exalting intelligence, civic-virtues, self-respect, cultivating what is right and just, even to the point of dying for them.”

Facing More Scorns by Joining the Rizal vs Bonifacio Fray 

     Throughout the lonely unsupported years of research researching and writing of this book, I focused mostly on one thing. I concentrated on producing from my excavated evidence a conclusive disproof of Philippine and Spanish Catholicism’s Rizal-Retraction Document. That alone, I thought, was a tremendous worthy achievement and I believe on the evidence that I’ve done it here. Incidentally the effectively utter Philippine indifference to my project, if not hostility, explains why I have to ask readers to bear with me remaining uncorrected errors, whether typographical or grammatical, and maybe even some substantive ones.  

      Then my project expanded into the related detailing of too many negative effects to this day of the reigning promotion, or respect at least, for the Church’s broad-ranging five-sentence retraction document. I couldn’t help expanding like a cultural imperialist into this separate, though related field. And this work didn’t stop there. Another separate though highly related field needed to be addressed, one I dreaded even more but which I couldn’t avoid.  I tried hard to avoid expanding fully and openly this time into contentious and ideology-driven field of the Rizal vs Bonficacio issues. I’d lost many friends and supporters before on saying that the fully unretracting freethinker-humanist Rizal of my research’s findings turned out to be fully anti-Bonifacian.  He could not have consciously and calculatedly lied in his reasoned and explained 12/15/1896 categorical opposition to Bonifacio’s revolt. Not even to save his own life, for, honest truth-telling and word of honor were virtues sacred to him. Maybe even to a fault, whether we like it or not, as when he wrote mother on September 2, 1896 that he was determined to prove to Governor-General

Blanco that his word of honor was truth that could be trusted. We should then trust his word when at his defense he told the Court of his strong opposition to Bonifacio which Valenzuela conveyed to him. I’d trust his word even when he further explained that the latter apparently got convinced by why the revolt was collective suicide and folly because at around the revolt’s outbreak, he surrendered to the authorities to avail of amnesty. We need reminding here by the Defiant Death Poem’s searing “As a Ringing Clean Note I’ll resound in your ears…Constant, I’ll repeat essentials of my creed.”

       These two great issues of PH history concerning the retraction and the opposition to Bonifacio are deeply intertwined at many points.  See for yourself, if you haven’t yet seen why.  An honest objectively oriented history of Rizal which lets the facts fall where they may—as opposed, say, to Dr. Quibuyen’s Bonifacian “critical historiography and hermeneutics” approach, couldn’t really avoid fully joining the fray, from the side of a radically reforming humanist freethinker that Rizal was.  So, even at the cost of multiplying the ideological blocks to acceptance of my mainly anti-retractionist book, and losing possible support and endorsements, I now fully and openly join this mentioned contentious fray. Now it is not just traditional Catholic believers who will shun me and my book but also believers in the various reigning schools of Bonifacian Rizalism, especially the ideology-driven ones.  Many times in the past I experienced polite withdrawals of initial invitations to speak at colleges and other supposedly intellectual places upon informing its organizers of my wish to present either my anti-Bonifacian or anti-retraction findings. 

PDI’S BONIFACIANS

       The promoters of Bonifacian Rizalism mentioned below finally pushed me into openly coming out of the closet, so to say, to fully join the Rizal vs Bonifacio Fray. I do so here not just in these essays but in Sonnets and other poems mobilized for the purpose. Look at this 2012 Update’s table of contents and take in an advance rough view of what I mean.

      Early in this year on January 20, the Philippine Daily Inquirer’s historian-columnist A. R. Ocampo reminded readers of his moderate Bonifacianism. His books books have taken that stand, and so readily repeated in his mentioned column that “Rizal was not against [Bonifacio’s] Revolution … [just] that it was premature.”  Catholic nationalist Denis Murphy re-echoed that teaching in his pro-poor column of March 27 when he lauded the poor and the youth’s get-to-know Bonifacio field trips and shared in their joy at learning that  the latter “was more than the warrior with a bolo, [just] as Jose Rizal was much more of a warrior than the peaceful non-violent leader” supposedly taught in the old textbooks. These are all attempts to marry Bonifacio to Rizal and vice-versa at various levels of togetherness, with  some more extreme than the others. I wondered yet again as I did at various places of the 2011 edition: “Why don’t these promotions-aspiring  academics and scholars devote,

instead, their precious  time and effort to  further checking out and investigating the claimed falsehood of the Church’s retraction teachings. Included in these much more productive pursuits to uncover new ground is how acceptance or at least the ongoing  respect  paid to to Churchmen’s mentioned teaching darkens  or even totally distorts how we Filipinos perceive this PH Top Hero’s core-identity and core-teachings. And whether it is true indeed that the two referred-to great issues of what increasingly should be acknowledge as the dark, tragic-comic state of Philippine history to this day.

      The most extreme Bonifacian Rizalist contributor to retraction-respecting Bonifacian PDI, against whom I and the scholar-educator M.V. Hamada wrote rejected rejoinders, has been the veteran journalist-historian Manuel F. Almario. This leading broadsheet gave his long article on Rizal’s alleged Bonifacian nature special prominence in its 12/31/2011 issue, running it from front page to other pages inside. He painted its full gory details, as he’d done before in cyberspace: a Rizal as nationalistically revolutionary and terroristic as Bonifacio and Rizal’s famous Simoun character, and hailed for it. He conspired and fought violently for political independence after all, contrary to what some nationalistic historians and intellectuals had deplored in earlier times. As such a rebel for armed seizure of the state from the colonial foreign power, he approved of using calculated deceitful lying for the cause. He resorted to this, for example, in the case of his anti-rebellion manifesto calculated to save his own neck, to protect the cause, and for other related reasons. 

      Note that even if he does not say so outright, Almario implicitly agrees with Churchmen’s reigning teachings that Rizal’s theocratic killers tried him correctly exclusively for seditious political treason. This sharply contradicts this online book’s findings of being tried against the overwhelming facts of innocence for mainly religious reasons underneath the seeming legality. Almario would also implicitly agree with Rizal’s devoutly Catholic prosecutors, including the religiously partisan Governor-General, that it was right to rule as inadmissible his innocence-proving Manifesto, since it was a desperate lying rebel’s attempt to save his own neck. In fact their telling rejection of it as conclusive evidence of innocence revealed their Church-influenced determination to kill the notorious Voltairean heretic which had hurt both Church and its theocracy, as no other native had done so before. Hence they rode roughshod over the Manifesto under the flimsiest of invented interpretations and reasons. Almario also ignores a big finding of my  book that the main religious reasons for killing the innocent, in fact rebellion-fighting Rizal, included the religious determination to yet succeed in extracting from him the long-hoped-for retraction. This by fair means or foul,  by hook or by crook, even if they had to kill him for it, then tell a pious lie.  

     In my brief protest-letter to the earlier-mentioned paper during the first days of January 2012, I mentioned Dr. Quibuyen’s heroic attempt in establishing the basic common identity between Rizal and Bonifacio in regard to what they stood for and

championed. This in a big book first published in 1999 by the Jesuits’ Ateneo University Press. Its readers should reread how his proudly hoisted banner of “historiography with critical hermeneutics” went through the painstakingly heroic act of applying that fancy method to marrying the two top PH heroes to each  other, so to say.  As in that book, a very important part, if not main driver,  of Almario’s highly nationalistic belief in a completely pro-revolution Rizal comes from the post-i913 Dr. Pio Valenzuela, the national hero for whom Valenzuela City is named. That whole new story is tragi-comic for  brazenly without shame or conscience contradicting his earliest conclusively verified accounts, and whose repeated basic version he himself conveyed from Rizal to Bonifacio, some others, and to his Spanish jailers some three months later.

TELLING BONI SAME GIST-STUFF

       Margarita Ventenilla Hamada’s protest-essay, like my short one, was likewise rejected for airing by PDI, and I abridge for inclusion in this 2012 Update of my online book. It is the next following item for separate presentation. Our independently arrived at findings on the matter agreed with each other. We accept the basic truth of the earliest Valenzuela reports and both find deceitful his post-1913 flip-flopping revisionism in hopes of turning the now top PH hero into a full fighting and calculating Bonifacian. Thus Rizal now cautiously emphasized being arms-ready before  waging war; he advised in the recruiting, in his name too, of educated and rich Filipinos.  But he said emphaticallt:  “Go ahead, you must fight if discovered and pursued.”  

      He thus turned in 1914 and 1917 his own earliest relayed message from Rizal to Bonifacio of “No, no, no, a thousand times no,” into a joyous “Yes, yes, yes, ah revolution at long last!”  Quibuyyen lists the alleged sources and documents in the literature regarding this, to me, tragic-comic big issue of PH history. Readers who want more documentation  are directed to consult his academically scholarly endnotes and references, in addition to that of others I mention here.

       The well-known (to scholars) independent testimonies of top insider-rebels like Jose Dizon confirm Rizal’s opposition to Bonifacio, as conveyed to him through his emissary to Dapitan, Pio Valenzuela. Dizon is also a source on Bonifacio’s unrealized plan to have operatives abduct Rizal from Dapitan to wherever his silence  might be assured and his probable mounted opposition neutralized.  

      Another top insider, General Alvarez confirmed in his memoirs Rizal’s opposition to rebellion. The Bonifacian author, John Nery, quoted from it in his 2011 book;  he also reproduced it in his PDI July 8, 2011 column: “The silence of Bonifacio and Valenzuela gave meaning to the belief of everyone that Dr. Rizal did not agree with rising in arms.” However, the most important witness in all this, more than anyone else, is Rizal himself and what he solemnly and repeatedly declared at the time in sworn testimonies, writings, diary entries and letters. They all declare his opposition

to the 1896 rebellion and his many reasons why. They in effect, as I do, call the post-1913 Valenzuela a deluded liar. Imagine reporting that in their short one-session exchange on these dangerous secret matters at Rizal’s clinic near his bamboo house the latter shared at length his pro-rebel reasons for going to Cuba (which he couldn’t have as it was some three weeks later when final news on it arrived and he had lost interest). “That bad General Weyler (who carried out the Calamba eviction) might see you in Cuba and shoot you!” allegedly joked to that effect, to which he got the cocky reply of “I might shoot him first.” That’s not Rizal’s voice nor thoughts at all to say the least, but Valenzuela’s;  just as the broad-ranging dogmatic sentences of the Church’s retraction document is not at all its hardcore freethinker’s voice but that of the times’ Catholic absolutists.

LAST REVELATIONS

       The 82-years-old Dr. Pio Valenzuela’s December 29, 1951 report-interview in the iconic Philippines Free Press of that date on the eve of Rizal Day caps his career of self-appointed spokesman of the top PH hero to the Tagalog Katipunan and eventually the whole nation. He related yet again how with great care to avoid suspicions he journeyed with two medically-needy companions to heavily watched Dapitan. Thus he planned a relatively long stay the more not to draw suspicions. As soon as he arrived, “We talked secretly in whispers as I asked his advice about the planned revolt of the KKK,” he recalled. Characteristically he elaborated with more details, mainly new ones such as this through him for relaying: “Tell Bonifacio (and the others)… that I had to borrow two hundred thousand pesos … to but the equipment [and arms from Japan, which fell through]…” How could that be? Before that only one short meeting he didn’t know of Bonifacio’s planned uprising. So, why should he seriously try borrowing and ordering arms for the revolt? “You must wait until you have secured arms and ammunitions,” Rizal allegedly advised. But, “Go ahead if you must start the revolt…? Especially if the KKK were found out and hounded.

      When I departed the following day (why such a hurried unexpected departure?), continued Valenzuela, his host gifted him  with a cane, to which he reciprocated with a revolver! What ridiculous nonsense is this gift of a gun? No sane emissary of rebel chief Bonifacio would foolishly endanger an entire secret mission including Rizal’s as a watched area-prisoner by smuggling on board and into Dapitan a revolver, what with so many alerted watchdogs of the regime during those very tense times. Recalling the long marathon impeachment trial of the PH Chief Justice and its many illustrated examples of the art of cross-examination designed to test the testifier’s credibility, all PH historians and serious readers should reject Valenzuela’s post-1913 testimonies on Rizal that totally reversed his verified earliest testimonies. And in conclusion face up to this Sonnet’s challenge:

Those scheming two, faced with this Great Refusal

Saw no recourse but to stitch and embroider

Falsehoods up to and after Holy Murder,

In theo-ruled land, of free-mind Rizal.

Now Boni gone, thanks to bloody Emilio,

Pio survived, with no need to rehearse,

Spun yarns to rival those of Balaguer’s

Short of decking Joe out in rayodillo!

To some extent most are now Bonifacians

Be they in Academe, in Church, in State;

Retractionists who falsely venerate

One who might in sheer disgust, impatience,

Jump off his Monument there at the Park

And leave Pinoys in their own chosen dark.

M.V. Hamada vs M.F. Almario and Other Bonifacians on Rizal’s Nature

Backdrop

     Perhaps a clearer grip on PH illiteracy’s depths during Spanish theocratic times needs to be made, to explain why the martyred freethinker-educator Rizal saw no choice between education and revolution. The sharp voracious Fil-American reader in late March this year paraphrased for us netizens passages from Rizal’s own Spanish contemporary, Miguel Barrrantes, from the latter’s  “La instruccion primaria en  Filipinas…” I quote from it: “The sorry social and intellectual state of the [native] peoples is so far below our Atlantic possessions…. The law gave priests responsibility for our schools; they made all primary education in every way sterile and illusory …” That’s precisely Rizal’s own reasons for pleading for radical educational reforms above all else. Recall his many passages on “brutalizing education of the indios … deepening in them superstitions, hatred of books, scientific critical thinking, etc. …” and other such loud ringing complaints.

       This piece of context should help us further appreciate Ms. Hamada’s researched anti-Bonifacian article I’ve abridged below with some editing to suit space limitations and requirements of online posting. It is surely one of her most scholarly contributions to Rizal studies. Its gist and related formulation she tried to present last year to the prestigious once-in-a-lifetime International Conference on Rizal held at the premier University of the Philippines. Perhaps to the advanced world’s stupefaction (since the matter concerned no less than clearing up alleged falsehoods about the country’s top hero) and to that Conference’s shame and stupidity  it turned down her proposed

timely paper. Get a hold of the papers presented there, compare their quality and claims to this online book’s, including M.V. Hamada’s documented essay on Rizal’s core-identity, and weep at the differences.

       I should mention again experiencing a similar shunning from this mentioned Conference. I proposed presentation of this online book’s reported disproof of Catholicism’s alleged broad-ranging retraction of the PH Top Hero. So, is this our joint “sweet revenge” at the Bonifacian retraction-respecting establishment’s shunning of our research findings? Not intentionally!  I never expected receiving just recently from educator Hamada, who heads elementary schools in Lingayen and Dagupan, her long article directed against the veteran journalist-historian M.F. Alamario, and impliedly other to-arms Bonifacians.  Hence I never planned to include something like it here in this supplemental update to the earlier 2011 edition at cnx.org.  

     No, I consciously did not join any conspiracy against Rizal’s rampant misinterpreters and detractors. I never expected Manuel F. Almario would get the major PDI broadsheet  to prominently publish his fully to-arms Bonifacian article, which I immediately thought deserved  a decisive refutation from objectively oriented scholars and other informed readers. For instance, from the presumably caring informed Descendants and Knights of Rizal, or from the latter’s fellow Freemasons too, for that matter. But no one apparently cared nor knew or well-read enough to respond. Only M.V. Hamada and I found ourselves writing refutations. Which just confirms yet again what historian Mona Quizon reminded her PDI December 30, 2011 readers that Filipinos aren’t really interested in knowing  or seriously reading things about their topmost hero. He’s just the face on the one-peso coin, the one shot by the colonial Spaniards at the Luneta. The famous historian Agoncillo did declare that Rizal never really succeeded reaching the masses. How he became top hero may have been truly accidental from the unexpected combination of local and world events.  This is not the place to probe this tantalizing insight; yet how else explain quick turning of a church-martyred anti-Catholic and anti-Bonifacian into topmost hero by an overwhelmingly Catholic pro-Bonifacian nation?

      Ms. M.V. Hamada is a distant relation of the hero through his mother’s Quintos side. Whether mother’s side or father’s, or both as with the direct descendants, she stands, incredibly, all alone  among them all openly defending  their greatest relation’s core-identity from its still reigning retraction-respecting Bonifacian distorters and ideologically driven misinterpreters. Her portrait of a lying post-1913 Velenzuela is fully confirmed by my own studies reported in this 2012 Update. In closely reading her shortened meaty essay below, ever slightly edited to suit mentioned constraints, please confirm for yourselves that this online  book’s portrait of a freethinker-humanist martyr conforms to her facts-based findings of a would-be radical changer of Filipino character towards parity with modern advanced peoples responsibly enjoying their individual freedoms. Devoted to such above all else, he was in principled opposition to Bonifacio in their respective devotion to truth, fairness and

morals, and in basic religious and sociopolitical convictions. No, we cannot honestly explain away the dichotomy between these two topmost PH heroes. Whether you like it or not, whether you agree with one to the exclusion of the other, the facts say so. 

HERE IS HER ABRIDGED ARTICLE

     Manuel F. Almario wrote an article [PDI, 12/31/2011] extolling Jose Rizal, not as a reformer but as the

opposite of that,  a man “generally acknowledged as the inspiration, if not instigator of national          independence  and unity.”  He ran roughshod over historical facts, twisting them to justify, even peddle his dangerous shallow nationalistic trinket: political independence for an as yet unprepared people, and its very criminal means [including malicious use of Rizal’s name and those of others], and of getting it through armed revolution. 

      Almario concluded among his other claims that  the La Solidaridad  “propagandists” led by Rizal who asked for equal status as the citizens of Spain  and representation in the Spanish Parliament were “revolutionary” because, he writes, “when a slave demands to be equal to  his master, it is a revolution”. Does Almario’s position as official spokesperson for the Movement for Truth in History give him the license to make sweeping, unsupported conclusions such as this?  Almario also sweeps aside what Rizal himself had said about his purpose in writing the Fili and gives the impression that he knows Rizal’s purpose better than Rizal himself by saying:  “Rizal took a leave from the newspaper, La Solidaridad, to devote his time to writing a novel, El Filibusterismo,  that would more dramatically denounce the tyranny of the Spanish regime, and thus arouse the fury and igniting the latent nationalism of the Filipinos into the conflagration of revolution.”  Not at all!  The Fili is a sequel to the Noli, whose purpose, wrote Rizal to his critic, Barrantes, was not to incite a revolution, but to effect the Filipinos’ mental and moral evolution.  Let us read Rizal’s own words:

     Yes, I have depicted the social sores of ‘my homeland’;  in it are ‘pessimism and darkness’ and it is because I see much infamy in my country; there the wretched equal in number the imbeciles.  I confess that I found a keen delight in bringing out so much shame and blushes, but in doing the painting with the blood of my heart, I wanted to correct them and save the others. (Reply to Barrantes’ criticism of the Noli, 15 Feb 1890, La Solidaridad).

     Its sequel, the Fili, wrote Rizal, is a  study of subversion, to make his readers see “the structure of its skeleton”, not an enticement for it. Note its purpose in his words of inviting study and thought, not enticing to subversion. “If the sight should lead our Country and its Government to reflection, we shall be happy no matter how our boldness may be censured...” (Dedication page, El Filibusterismo, Europe, 1891).  Then Rizal ends the Fili with this following paragraph:

He (Father Florentino) then hurled the steel chest which contained Simoun’s fabulous treasure into the sea and prayed, “When men should need you for a purpose holy and sublime, God will know how to raise you from the bottom of the seas.  Until then, you will do no evil there, you will not thwart justice nor incite greed.

     Does this sound like an enticement to subversion?  Rizal made it so clear that revolution is evil because it thwarts justice and incites greed.  Yet Almario, who is hell-bent in supposedly redeeming Rizal by elevating him as a terrorist to fit his idea of a true hero, gives us another impetuous and jolting insight. “Ibarra morphs into the terrorist, revolutionary, separatist Simoun.  A tight parallel could be drawn between the real life of Rizal and the fictional life of Ibarra turned Simoun.”

       But Rizal says he is neither Ibarra or Simuon! He said so in his letter to Barrantes which was published in the La Solidaridad. “I myself, ‘the man’, the Ibarra of Your Excellency (I know not why, for I am neither rich nor a mestizo, nor an orphan, nor do the qualities of Ibarra coincide with mine.)”  See La Solidaridad of Ferbruary 15, 1890. On a later date, Rizal reinforces previous clarifications on the matter. “That was my purpose in depicting the dark character of Simuon, so that it might be realized that the members of the La Solidaridad are not subversive.” See his letter to M.H. del Pilar on May23, 1892.

     Next, Almario holds up the warnings on revolution contained in Rizal’s essay, The Philippines, a Century Hence and in a proclamation Rizal addressed to Our Dear Mother Country Spain as proofs that Rizal had preached revolution.  Had Almario made preliminary studies first, he would not have missed what Rizal said about these  so-called warnings. Listen to what Rizal said about them.  “I have also believed that, if Spain systematically denied democratic [individual] rights to the Philippines, there would be insurrections and so I have said in my writings, deploring any such eventuality, but not hoping for it.” See for this his Memorandum for My Defense of December 12, 1896.

     Almario must not dismiss this Memorandum as a desperate, out-of-character attempt of Rizal to get himself off the hook, as he, Almario has just done. For, Rizal’s aversion to revolutions was patently consistent and clear from the beginning of his writing career.  Let’s take a look at how he described revolutions years before he was accused as the instigator of the Katipunan. In an article he contributed to the La Solidaridad, “The Truth for All”, on May 31, 1889, he warned the Spanish government in the Philippines:

If you continue the system of banishments, imprisonments and sudden assaults for nothing, if you will punish the people for your own faults, you will make them desperate, you take away from them the horror of revolutions and disturbances, you harden them and excite them to fight.

He used the word, ‘horror’.  Does this not say the opposite of what Almario is trying to prove.

       Almario now turns to La Liga Filipina’s constitution as another proof that Rizal, its founder, was a subversive.  He wrote that “The constitution of the La Liga Filipina was in actuality a separatist document, a virtual declaration of independence.”  After quoting the purposes of the Liga, he declares:  “In effect, Rizal was proposing a separate government.  In the indictment of treason against the Spanish regime, the formation of the Liga was one of the charges against him.”  To this charge, Rizal had countered brilliantly and truthfully:

Let them show the statutes of the Liga and it will be seen that what I was pursuing were union, commercial and industrial development and the like.  That these things---union and money---after years could prepare for a revolution, I don’t have to deny; but they could also prevent all revolutions, because people who live comfortably and have money do not go for adventures. For this see his Data for my Defense, dated December 12, 1896 at Fort Santiago.

Two weeks later, Rizal added:

       The Liga  was not an association with harmful purposes and that is proven by the fact they had to abandon it to organize the Katipunan which perhaps was the one that fulfilled their purposes.  For the little that the Liga might have served for the rebellion they would not have abandoned it.  Instead they would have simply modified it, for if, as someone alleges, I’m the chief, out of consideration for me and for the prestige of my name, they would have preserved the name Liga.  For having rejected it, name and all, for creating the Katipunan, clearly proves that neither did they count on me nor did the Liga serve their purposes, for another association is not formed when there is one already established.  See his Additions to my Defense, December 26, 1896, Fort Santiago.

       Then, Almario invents a historical information about the reasons for Rizal’s deportation to Dapitan.  He writes:  “Within three days after the founding of the Liga, Rizal was arrested and exiled to Dapitan.  The authorities correctly apprehended that Rizal had transgressed the bounds of reformism, stepping into the dangerous grounds of revolution.”  Where did Almario get this information about the authorities’ reason in exiling Rizal to Dapitan?  He or his sources must have made it up because according to Leon Ma. Guerrero, the reason Despujol had exiled Rizal was because of the anti-papal pamphlets found in the luggage of his sister who arrived with him from Hongkong.  Being a devoted papist, Despujol was livid.  Guerrero based his statement on what Rizal had written down in his diary. He wrote, After we had conversed a while he (Despujol) told me that I had brought some [anti-Catholic—RB] proclamations in my baggage;  I denied it.  He asked me to whom the pillows and sleeping mat might belong and I said they were my sister’s.  See his Diary entry of  July 6, 1892.

      Guerrero continues, “He was kept eight days in the Fort.  On the 14th July he was notified that he would be taken to Dapitan in Mindanao at 10 o’clock that night.” (Guerrero, “The First Flipino”).

Not having read this entry in Rizal’s diary, or disregarding it if he had, Almario then makes an impetuous and dubious conclusion:  “Indeed, his exile was the blow that convinced the followers of Rizal that seeking reforms through peaceful means was pointless.”  Where is his proof of this?  According to some extant letters unearthed, his exile was the opportunity that Marcelo del Pilar seized upon to organize a separatist club.  With Rizal out in Mindanao, del Pilar could now push for independence through armed revolution—an issue that Rizal had blocked at every opportunity while they were together in Europe.  Del Pilar told his brother-in-law, Deodato Arellano to organize the Katipunan in preparation for an armed revolution for immediate political independence.

ALMARIO’S WITNESS, VALENZUELA

       Now Almario turns to the aid of hearsay, dignifying Pio Valenzuela’s four different accounts of his meeting with Rizal, in his zeal to reinvent Rizal into his one-dimensional idea of a hero.  But first, let us read Pio Valenzuela’s first account of his meeting with Rizal in Dapitan, as it is more credible, because it is consistent with Rizal’s writings as early as 1884.   Leon Ma. Guerrero tells us from sources he cited in his book, The First Filipino that Bonifacio had at first been reluctant to believe Valenzuela’s report of Rizal’s attitude.  (No, no, no!  A thousand times no!) But, once convinced of its truth, he reportedly “began to insult Rizal, calling him a coward and other offensive names.” Bonifacio for his own reasons, forbade Valenzuela to reveal Rizal’s rejection of the Revolution. He did so anyway, and numbers of those who had offered contributions backed out. Yet Almario deliberately and conveniently disregards this more credible immediate report of Pio Valenzuela, which nationalists like Guerrero gave credence to. Instead, he chose to completely embrace and champion the  very suspiciously revised versions of Valenzuela’s conversation with Rizal, as was recorded in Valenzuela’s much later memoirs. Rizal supported Bonifacio, after all on second thought, and this in turn suited Almario’s purpose, and served it very well. However, they are so at variance with Rizal’s convictions and sentiments about revolutions as to be absolutely comical and entirely false. 

      Thus Almario wrote that Rizal and Valenzuela conversed conspiratorially in a shady nook away from Rizal’s house on June 21, 1896. He was elated by the news of the Katipunan’s existence and murmured, “So the seed grows,” ecstatic that the seed of revolution he had sown was sprouting. Then he cites the opinion of historian Teodoro A. Agoncillo that upon hearing of the Katipunan from Pio Valenzuela, Rizal gave no objection to armed revolution but only cautioned that if an insurrection was to be staged, all efforts should be exerted to gather sufficient arms in order to ensure success and avoid unnecessary casualties and sufferings of civilians and

insurrectionists. Ideology-driven Almario was just too glad to see Agoncillo fall for Pio Valenzuela’s revised version of that meeting with Rizal that he quotes Agoncillo’s opinion:  “It is obvious that Rizal was not against revolution itself but was only against it in the absence of preparation and arms on the part of the rebels.”       

But Rizal, who is not known to be a flip-flop, wrote down his own account of that meeting with Pio Valenzuela.  This is what he wrote:

            I have always been opposed to rebellion because I was hoping Spain would give us soon liberties (note he meant human rights), as I told Pio Valenzuela, because I could see that in order to forestall future events, a very close union between Spain and the Filipino people was necessary. Since 6 of July 1892 I have absolutely not taken up politics until first of July this year when, informed by Mr. Pio Valenzuela that an uprising was planned, I advised the opposite, trying to convince him with reasons.  Mr. Pio Valenzuela separated from me seemingly convinced, so much so that instead of taking part later in the rebellion, he presented himself to the authorities for a pardon. Mr. Pio Valenzuela came to advise me to put me in safety, for, according to him, it was possible that they would complicate (sic) me.  As I considered myself entirely innocent and I didn’t know the how and the wherefore of the movement (besides I believed I had convinced Mr. Valenzuela), I took no precautions, except that when the Most Excellent Governor General wrote me advising me of my departure for Cuba, I embarked immediately, abandoning all my affairs. (From “Data for my Defense”, dated December 12, 1896)

     Even Rizal’s intention to volunteer as military doctor in Cuba was fictionalized by Pio Valenzuela and his piece of fiction is swallowed hook, line and sinker by Almario. “My intention,” Rizal whispered to Pio, “is to study the war in a practical way, to go through the Cuban soldiery and find something to remedy the bad situation in our country.  Then after a time, I would return to our native land when necessity arises.” In short, exclaimed Almario, “He (Rizal) was preparing himself for the revolution.”

     Almario would not have swallowed this piece of fiction and made this ludicrous conclusion had he done some serious reading and research.  First, Blanco’s letter of approval of Rizal’s request to be sent to Cuba arrived on 30 July 1896, about three weeks after Pio Valenzuela’s departure from Dapitan.  How could he (Valenzuela) have known that Rizal was going to Cuba?  Could Rizal have told him about his trip to Cuba when his application wasn’t approved yet?  The fact is, during Pio Valenzuela’s visit, Rizal had given up his plan to go to Cuba.  Then, suddenly, about three weeks after Valenzuela had left Dapitan, Blanco’s approval arrived. He wrote Blumentritt about the news some time after and explained:  “I no longer planned to go to Cuba since more than six months had passed since my application, but, fearing that my refusal to go at that time might be attributed to some other cause, I decided to abandon everything and leave immediately.” 

     From Rizal’s letters to his sister, Trinidad and his best friend, Blumentritt, we can surmise why he agreed to take the suggestion of Blumentritt to go to Cuba.  “With

regard to your advice on going to Cuba as a doctor, I think it is an excellent idea.  I am writing immediately to the Governor General,” he wrote Blumentritt on November 20, 1895.  He was tired of his exile and of the relentless efforts of the religious there to re-convert him to Catholicism.  He also felt bad that these same religious refused his request to marry Josephine Bracken unless he retracted his views on religion and the religious. “I am beginning to feel unwell,” he explained to his sister Trinidad.  “I do not think I can endure much longer the kind of life I lead here: much work, poor food, and not a few troubles.”

     If Rizal had indeed confided his plans to learn the art of war in Cuba to a complete stranger like Pio Valenzuela, why didn’t he do the same—confide the same to his best friend, Blumentritt?  Almario should have critically and honestly asked himself this question first before entirely swallowing Pio Valenzuela’s fictionized memoirs, to blindly bolster of course his preposterous arguments and his own historical inventions.

     Then again, Almario’s lack of research makes him commit the unconscionable.  He calls Rizal a conspiratorial accomplice of the insurgents because he writes, “Rizal never betrayed his knowledge of the plot to the authorities…” In fact, the historical record shows unmistakably that Rizal did.   He most categorically declared in his Manifesto of December 15, 1896:

     When later, despite my counsels, the uprising broke out, I offered spontaneously, not only my services, but also my life, and even my name so that they might use them in the way they deem opportune in order to quench the rebellion; for, convinced of the evils that it might bring, I considered myself happy if with any sacrifice, I could forestall so many needless misfortunes.  This is also on record.        

     Why doesn’t Almario believe Rizal?, whose reputation for truth-telling and integrity hardly has equals among Philippine heroes. Why does he choose to believe Pio Valenzuela, a flip-flopping liar, as Dr. R. M. Bernardo [see my previous piece on him—RB], a Rizal scholar calls him?  Because his purpose is not to tell the truth, as he should do, being the official spokesperson of the Movement for Truth in History, but to fit Rizal into his one-dimensional idea of a limited shallow nationalist’s hero—a delirious revolutionary like Andres Bonifacio and an ambitiously cunning Emilio Aguinaldo—those trinkets-dazzled ideological nationalists so adored by shallow nationalists like him.  

BACK TO THE MANIFESTO 

       Almario’s repudiation through misinterpretation of Rizal’s December 15, 1896 Manifesto as being a truly genuine document of his teachings is the most dismaying yet.  In this Manifesto, Rizal denounced the Katipunan in the strongest terms, calling it absurd, fatal, savage, criminal, and a dishonor to Filipinos. He asked the rebels to go home.   So, Almario tells his readers to view it “from the circumstances of its writing.  Not only did he face a death sentence, Rizal must have also been thinking of trying to save his family from further persecution.” [A consciously calculating liar for causes,

as Bonifacio and Valenzuela were, Rizal was definitely not, if I may interject.—RB] How can Almario say this when Rizal’s Manifesto wasn’t the first article he wrote against armed revolutions for independence?  As early as 1884, up till a few hours before his execution, he had been denouncing armed revolutions for immediate political independence while preaching on the Philippines’ future assimilation with Spain as co-equals with Spaniards! 

     Recall these words from  his 1884 (June 25) Speech at the Luna-Hidalgo banquet in Madrid: We have all come here to this banquet to join our wishes, in order to give form to the mutual embrace of two races that love one another and like one another, morally, socially and politically united for a period of four centuries so that they may form in the future one single nation in spirit, in their duties, in their views, in their privileges.

       Recall these words from his May 31, 1889, “The Truth for All” in La Solidaridad: 

And we say loyally to the Spanish government:  We shall say what we think, even though many may be displeased.  We want to be loyal to the Metropolis and to her high officials.

      Recall too these telling passages from his masterly February 1, 1890 Treatise, “The Philippines a Century Hence” in La Solidaridad:

            The Philippines, then, either will remain under Spain but with more rights and freedom, or will declare itself independent after staining herself and the Mother Country with her own blood.  As no one should wish or hope for such an unfortunate rupture of relations which would be bad for all and should only be the last argument in a most desperate case, let us examine the forms of peaceful evolution under which the Islands could remain under the Spanish flag without injuring in the least the rights, interests, or dignity of both countries.....We know that the lack of enlightenment, the pusillanimity, the selfishness of many of our compatriots, and the audacity, the astuteness, and the powerful means at the command of those who want obscurantism to prevail there can convert the reform into an obnoxious instrument.  But we wish to be loyal to the government and we point out to it the road that seems to us best so that its efforts would not come to naught, so that the discontented elements would disappear. If after such a just as well as necessary measure is implemented, the Filipino people are so foolish and pusillanimous that they would turn against their own interests, then, let them bear the responsibilities and suffer all the consequences.  Every country meets the fate that she deserves, and the government can say that it has fulfill

NO REBEL-TERRORIST AT ALL

      In closing let me recall as well a February 1894 letter to Governor General Blanco from Dapitan:

My crime would be for having desired what the Constitution and our laws assign to us, for having wanted our liberty, and I say liberty [as in liberties, plural] and not independence because I know very well that people can be independent and a slave at the same time, like many peoples of Asia, and on the contrary, one can be a colony and dependent but equally free and happy as we see in many countries in Oceania.

      And from his December 12, 1896 Data for my Defense, once more: 

Well now, many have interpreted my phrase ‘to have liberties as to have independence’ which are two different things.  A people can be free without being independent and a people can be independent without being free.  I have always desired liberties for the Philippines and I have said so.  Others who testify that I said Independence either have put the cart before the horse or they lie. I cannot deny that sometimes rebellious and punishable ideas have crossed my imagination, especially when my family was being persecuted, but afterwards reflection, the reality of facts, the absurdity of the thought, made me recover my senses, because I don’t believe I’m stupid or foolish to want an impossible and senseless thing.

       At “crunch time” with just over seven more hours before his execution he finished a final letter to Ferdinand Blumentritt informs him of his innocence, as he did in a late September one when aboard ship to Cuba he first learned of his arrest:  

My dear brother, When you receive this letter I shall be dead.  I shall be shot tomorrow at seven o’clock, but I am innocent of the crime of rebellion. I am going to die with a clear conscience. Farewell, my best, my dearest friend, and never think ill of me! Immediately after, he wrote Paciano repeating towards the end the falseness of the rebellion charge against him.

        Finally, Almario uses Rizal’s “Adios” to prove, by his own subjective interpretation, that he, (Rizal) applauded the rebels and wished them to succeed in winning independence for his beloved country.  A closer, more objective study of the Adios, however, shows the opposite.  Rizal described the rebels as an unthinking, delirious mob, who know not the consequences of their action, too easily seduced by the trinkets-dazzled nationalists’ favorite slogan—“for country and home”, a slogan abused by terrorists all over the world until now.  He is willing to die, if his death will stop the carnage, and his beloved country will live and find redemption (Note: not independence!), at last.  His death indeed stopped the carnage, albeit for a while, because demoralized by his unjust and cruel death, and tempted by the cash reward offered, the rebels sold out the Katipunan to the authorities barely a year later (December 15, 1897), at the Pact of Biak na Bato.  But his country only got political independence 50 years later from another foreign power and not yet the redemption (the people’s mental and moral evolution) he tried so hard to bring about.

(Published 27/12/2011 in www.mabuhayradio.com)

Yet Another Dark Chapter in PH History

Reconversion, Retraction, these flip-flopping

Moves of a Church-State separatist on dying

Still are imputed  to one, the best of our race:

Might as well call this deist Son of a Whore.

The slow-fading theocracy & faith that killed him,

Hand-in-hand with unreading indifferent People

Produced a top hero confusedly praised & taught;

Didn't he hope to save them from brutish ignorance?

Also from amoral indolence not just physical?

Instead to such Church-State darkened themes

Masses & their heads he had hoped to redeem

Have uncaringly nursed their line-toeing dance.

They're all over not just online these detractors

And blinded venerators deaf to his core's cries;

These are the covert malefactors still dominant:

Trapos, priests, professors, historians, leaders.

Brownnosers they are to the faith-powers that reign,

Nosing them all out are his Knights & Descendants

Supportive, mum or neutral on the base Retraction;

His core’s cries they badly need to know & defend.

Diehard Nazareno Nation, 2012

Faith-besotted enlarged crowds benighted 

Nazareno Nation falls for magical rites,

Teems with Mom Mary & Son’s worshippers,

Likes its heroic “Wielder of the Bolo”

Cut down to size unread “Pride of Malayans”.

Know they Freethinker's anti-Church anti-armsness?

If so, they’d have hailed Bonifacio Top Hero!,

Not U.S. choice of the Gandhian rights-champ.

Those Brights liked too his modern Enlightenism,

But Nazarenos took him for armed Catholic.

Church-fought freethought Noli ‘s Epigraph dared:

"How can such wastrels & rats to greatness rise?"

Yet none read that work as such, nor care to reread.

IQ-ethics-incomes scores rank Nation “Sick”,

Custom-made butts for scornful Brights to kick.

  TWO SONNETS on RIZAL vs To-Arms BONIFACIO

      

I

The comic sight of hot-to-trot Andy

And ragtag troop tearing up the cedulas

Is seen as grand as a gambit of Gandhi

And draws out ecstatic Oh’s and Ah’s

From such dumb molehill-enlargers who

Over any Andy’s caper—be it

Never so trifling—go gaga, too

And give it “PC” Patriotic Fiat.

They cover up Rizal as deep Freethinker.

They go bananas over their “Man of Action,”

Swallowing his lead hook, line, and sinker,

To down Rizal to mere “Dreamer of Nation”.

These “treasonous clerks,” in J. Benda’s words,

Are in our punch bowl like loathsome turds.

                    II

This faith-besotted archipelago

Bristles with unread revolutionaries

In whose book hailed “Wielder of the Bolo”,

Cuts down to size our “Pride of theMalayans”.

Sez who? Is it because, as academics,

Rizal puts them all to shame and levels them

With fans of the ubiquitous Komiks?;

Which fact, in so many words, labels them

Illiterate, dim bulbs, mere chatterers,

Non-conversers, chuckleheads, or solemn bums,

Of platitudes inveterate utterers,

Proponents the mode that dulls & dumbs?

From such Bonifacians, take you pick:

Custom-made butts for scornful Brigths to kick.

Three Sonnets On Rizal vs Bonifacio (Feb. 2012)

I

     Still wet-behind-the-ears Valenzuela

     Was sent by the Supremo to Dapitan

     To get Rizal aboard  Katipunan.

      It’s wrong that theme to treat as zarzuela:

      For, stunned Pio could not take the chidings

     As shocked Rizal countered him and Boni thus:

     Romantics, your underground—uh—antics,

     Which the Taga-Ilogs have long itched to mount.

     Shouldn’t redemptive greatness inform issues?

     How would the Poor’s vague plans, bolos, some guns

     Give birth to works great, to virtues and riches?

     To that and rights aspire first, he reasoned so.

     To well-replace Spain’s Theo-Rule and Troops,

     You just can’t come up short and then cry ‘Oops!’ 

II

    Let us zoom in on Pio V. as he mulled 

   The “bad news” he had to break to his boss;

   Soonest he did, to cries of Too Big This Loss;

   Shit him; he dares stop our using his Name?

   Gone would be our cause with his opposing!

   Andres B. kept up fire from ire with “ No Shame!”

   Blinded, he had assumed Rizal  would jump

   Onto the Katipunan cart he had contrived

    Out of junk odds and ends for his romanced

    Revolution over many a bump. He fired:

   “Alas, here we’ve got that traitor and coward

   Afraid to lunge with us in battle forward!”

  The two covered up Harsh Truth but schemed some more

  Even to abduct Rizal to keep using his Name.

III

  Those scheming two, faced with the Great Refusal

   Saw no way out but covering up truth further

   With well-honed lies and tales to embroider

   Right up to and beyond the death of Rizal.

   With Boni gone himself, thanks to “Emilio,”

   Our pious fraud flipped-flopped through the years

   Spun yarns to rival those of Münchhausen’s

   Short of suiting up Joe in rayodillo!

   Now all we have are types of  Bonifacians,

   “Retraction-respecters” in most places

   Lazily nursing lies and still failing him.

   Rizal might just one day in sheer disgust 

   Jump off his Monument there at the Park

    And leave Pinoys in their own chosen dark.

3 More SONNETS with Coda on Rizal vs To-Arms Bonifacio (March 2012)

I

Still wet-behind-the-ears, Valenzuela

Excitedly took ship for Dapitan

To get Rizal aboard Katipunan.

Thereby hangs a black tale, not zarzuela;

For his outraged host’s words tore Pio’s hopes:

“How could benighted premodern people

“A well-entrenched Spain’s Theo-Rule topple?

“You first must learn redemption-worthy ropes!”

Pio, at sea, now rushed back to his Boss

To report this veto of their Movement,

That held first for mentality improvement.

Torn Pio turned, tossed in his sleep, heard Joe’s voice:

“Bolos, sharp sticks, few guns against Spanish Troops?

“For that you’d  need the cannons of the Krupps!”

                        II

His freethought humanist words kept Pio up.

Straight on arrival at the city docks

On the Supremo’s door he rained down knocks

Then spilled the fart-productive beans. Full stop.

Our Man of Action was beside himself;

With frightful rage he kicked a nearby stool:

“What, more good works and back to hard school?

“More reforms; he dares put Movement on shelf?”

Then with a shush-ing finger to his lips

He motioned Pio not to leak to the Boys

Rizal’s rejection of their Games & Toys.

He could not with Rizal’s words come to grips:

“Shouldn’t redemptive worth be reckoned first,

“A must requirement of our freedom-thirst?”

                       III

Those scheming two, faced with this Great Refusal

Saw no recourse but to stitch and embroider

Falsehoods up to and after Holy Murder,

In theo-ruled land, of free-mind Rizal.

Now Boni gone, thanks to bloody Emilio,

Pio survived, with no need to rehearse,

Spun yarns to rival those of Balaguer’s

Short of decking Joe out in rayodillo!

To some extent all are now Bonifacians

Be they in Academe, in Church, in State;

 Retraction-dimmed they falsely venerate,

While the covered-up one gets shunned, irate,

Tempted to jump off his Tomb at the Park

 Leaving Pinoys to their self-induced dark.

                     Coda

Not mere millennia of tragic abuse

Can grow required IQ & Impetus;

Not even ranting Henley’s Invictus:

With scant sci-informed virtues, what’s the use?

Rizal’s enduring pains of martyrdom

Ends when Pinoys, about him, stop being dumb!

PH  ASTROPHYSICIST RIZAL WOULD TOAST (3/23/2012)

Free-mind Reynabelle Reyes & profession

You’d not expect from Jesuit production:

To fathom what may be fathomless depths

Since their taught faith plants fears in truth’s seekers.

One in a million’s too tame a description

Short of exactitude by power of ten;

That shows the courage of her ambition

On earning rare doctorate at Einstein’s Princeton.

Free-mind yet priest-schooled Rizal would toast her

Glad to cite Al’s infinity quip to her:

“I’m not sure of it except on observing

Infinite human stupidity!”  No kidding!

Rizal’s enduring pains of martyrdom

Ends when Pinoys, about him, stop being dumb!

IMPEACH-DAY OF INFAMY ON 3/22/2012 (4/23/2012)

Came ‘Mayor’ Atienza to the rescue

Of C J Corona & wife of his:

O what miscue! Also in Judge Joker’s view!

For, in shock, he cried: “Tell me! What’s all this?”

None in Court said straight: “You smelled stink of rats

Three weavers of webs to hide their misdeeds,”

Still confirming: ‘PH, Sick Ladrones Islas.’

It burst in their faces on Dark Day 34

What the Coronas kept well-hidden heretofore

In doctored statements and machination

To steal too ‘BGEI’ funds sans question.

C J & team’s foul tech-plays with Court Rules 

Would give cause for truth-bound Rizal to puke,

It gives lawyering dirty names of shame.

Would Rizal Toast Our LADY MIRIAM?  (4/2012)

In a nutshell: This Ms. Santiago

Descends to screaming at colleagues, Gago!

But the finger that she points at her foes

Points back surely at her  in 3’s & 4’s!

Some wags have nicknamed her, Brendaah!

Broad hint that she’s brain-damaged mad?

Yet she lashes back: “Return To Sender”

And leaves us feeling  we’ve been had:

To have voted again for a misfit

To such high places of leadership clout;

This surely puts us in the deep shit

Unless we smarten up to vote her out.

Or else bear more tragic-comic saga

Of our local brand of Lady Gaga;

Her show’s long reign Rizal would quip serves us right!

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This work is licensed by Roberto Bernardo under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 3.0), and is an Open Educational Resource.

Last edited by Roberto Bernardo on May 10, 2012 9:42 pm -0500.