0.2 Opus dei book's darkened rizal & Why - chapter 2  (Page 15/16)

Those students and graduates of yours I’ve met have told me about your classrooms’ over-cultivated nationalistic Rizal. Thus his main enemy, colonial Spain, naturally killed him as a separatist rebel for political nationalistic reasons and the like. If you look beneath the legalities of his death in its full religious context since 1887 he died for actually principally attacking Catholicism and its theocracy (a brain-and- progress-stunting). He regarded that as his main enemy, though equally did he hate his peoples’ benightedness (all blocking entry into the First World). Spain’s maladministration, its injustices and ineptness he attacked. But a critical admirer of enduring civilizing Spain itself he remained, encouraged too by its agonizing efforts at modern liberal reforms. He hated most as a so-called cancer his Fourth-and-Third-World peoples’ dysfunctional mentality in a damaged culture blocking achievement parity with the First World. Dr. Paz P. Mendez observed of the two Rizal novels in her great 1970s book that it was ethnographically and anthropologically accurate. And that Rizal ultimately put the main responsibility for their comparative backwardness on individual Filipinos’ deficits and faults, which by far exceeded their assets and virtues. Not just the novels but the other writings, in gave priority to the need for radical self-improvement and responsibility-taking before anything else.

How ironic that you as society’s supposedly objectively truth-seeking and honest teachers and historians should turn out to be what this research-based work of mine calls faith-inspired cultural ‘eliminationists’ of the real historical Rizal: his true scientific humanist nature and prime mission that led to his death ultimately at the hands of the times’ theocratic church. You continue to do this with your propagation of the various retraction-influenced views about him like the highly nationalistic one that Spain, his alleged main enemy, killed him for pro-independence sedition. Religiously safe, isn’t it, this over-cultivation of his nationalism even in directions he did not intend. He never called for violent separatism. Nor would he inspire such a rising in 1896. Not even in the second novel’s treatment of rebellion. His loyal-to-Spain nationalism sought to transcend the evils of ethnic, regional and tribal conflicts; the absence of disciplined civic consciousness; racial discrimination against natives by Spaniards. Nor did he like a partisan nationalist blame the prime cancer of character-ills mainly on Spain. Nor mainly on the church, though the latter and its theocracy compounded the ills. Remember his famous “our ills let us not blame others for it” speech? No, don’t believe what your fellow Catholic nationalists popularized in their old books that Filipinos seemed rationally incapable of cold reality-facing discussions of Rizal’s alleged retraction. So, just let it be and stop raking its the fires of verbal combats. In other words, just leave the touchy issue alone, let’s just respect each other’s beliefs about that specific Rizalian matter. It didn’t matter anyway to the assessment an appreciation of his heroism, his excellence, his works, greatness and significance. What reality-evading and dishonest baloney that has been in practice. In regard to “the Adios” alone, the nationalistic retractionists De Veyra, Guerrero, Joaquin, and others, with some Rizal descendants going along, were falsely led to antedate its finishing. And accordingly, to invent on flimsy evidence its mode of delivery to the world in order to make the Retraction as Rizal’s True Swan Song.