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Tuesday, January 9, 2007

RIZAL, THE LIBERATOR OF THE PHILIPPINES

Rizal's execution further srtenghtened the resolve of the revolutionaries. They declared independence on June 12, 1898, in a document echoing phrases from the U.S. Declaration of Independence and established a republican form of government. The Philippines was the first colony in Asia to stage a national revolution, declare independence, form a republic and, thereby, send a discomforting message to the colonial powers in that vast area.

The republic, however, was short lived, because the United States of America, in fulfillment of its "Manifest Destiny", embarked upon its own colonial enterprise. While the new Philippine Republic was consolidating its governance of the entire country, Spain ceded the Philippines to the United States for $20 million. The American military then successfully subdued the islands in a bloody conflict kinown in American records as the "Philippine Insurrection", but called by Filipino historians the "Philippine-American War." Though the aim of independence was frustrated by the American intervention, the execution of Rizal ands its aftermath awakened the peoples of the rest of Asia to the essential fragility of colonial rule and to their own capacity to form themselves into modern nations. The message was not lost on Rizal's contemporaries, Gahndi (1869-1948) and Sun Yat-Sen (1866-1925), or on a much younger man, Nehru (1889-1964).

In recent decades, historians of Marxist orientation have characterized Rizal as a bourgeois thinker repudiating a proletarian revolution. They also attribute his apothesis as a national hero to the new American government, which preferred the non-violent Rizal over the revolutionary Bonifacio, as a model for the Filipinos. But Rizal, weho defies Marxist molds, has survived such iconoclastic efforts. The fact is that Bonifacio's rebel band of common people had idolized Rizal even before his death, using his name as a password in their secret meetings and as a rallying cry in battle.

In Rizal's writings, particularly the novels and the farewell ode to his country, "Ultimo adios,"written just before his death, Filipinos see themselves, their history, culture and ethos. A case in point is the "little revolution" of 1986 against Ferdinand Marcos, when tanks on the Epiphania de los Santos Avenue, a thoroughfare in Quezon City that runs between the military installations Camp Auginaldo and Camp Crame, were stopped by prayers, flowers and people power. Suddenly concrete meaning was given to Rizal's words: "I do not mean to say that our freedom must be won at the point of the sword.... But we must win our freedom by deserving it...by loving what is just, what is good, what is great to the point of dying for it. When a people reach these heights, God provides the weapon, and the idols and tyrants fall like a house of cards, and freedom shines with the first dawn."

Rizal's political thought is critical to the current peace process in Mindanao, as Filipino Muslim schloars point out. His search for the common past, for what Filipinos had been before Spain

What is particularly distinctive in Rizal's concept of the Filipino nation is its emphasis on education. While some nationalist movements in 19th-century Africa and Asia assigned primacy to the state, which was often viewed as a means to nationhood, Rizal considered the basis of nationhood not to be race, ethnic origin, religion or language, but a commonality that derives from education. The binding factor is the broadening of the mind.

That quest invariably links the Philippines to the rest of Asia, which today has the world's fastest growing economies and is moving, after five centuries of marginalization, to center stage in world affairs. What Asia needs for its "renaissance," stated Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim in an international conference on Rizal held in Kuala Lampur, is the humanism of Asian thinkers like Rizal. Economic prosperity and political stability, Asia's twin obsessions, must be guided by those universal moral principals and human values, ancient and ever new----the dignity of the human person, equality, justice, human rights---for which Rizal gave his life. The pursuit of prosperity within the context of freedom and democracy, against the contrary advice of such sages as Lee Kuan Yew, the long time leader of Singapore, and the tempting examples of some neighboring countries, flows from Rizal's political philosophy. It may likewise be the unique contribution of the newly emerging Philippine economy to the growth and development of the Asia Pacific region.

SOURCE: America magazine (December 7, 1996)
stopped the advance of Islam and set clear demarcation lines between Christianized inhabitants and Muslim communities, provides a historical perspective within which to search for a common ground between Muslims and Christians. The recent peace agreement with the once secessionist Moro National Liberation Front is, in fact, an effort to integrate the Muslim minority into the nation.


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