0.4 Opus dei book's darkened rizal & Why - chapter 4  (Page 3/9)

What was the main touchy social cancer exposed or attacked by the novel; were there others; can we rank them in relative importance? Did the hero confine his critical attacks to abuses of Spanish regular priests (friars), or include their imposed organized faith itself in his total war with them? Did he critically expose as well (for radical improvement) his own peoples’ so-called complex of weaknesses, defects, and vices? What “superior” modern standards of comparison did he assume to be universally valid? Was his book’s chief aim-and-message, as assumed by the retraction-respecting nationalistic Rizal law of 1956, stirring up thoughts and feelings for a separate nation-state? These all-important questions can be answered with a deep sense of closure by always remembering that a Voltairean freethinker, thus a child and champion of the Enlightenment, wrote that church-condemned book in question. If Filipinos would just critically read De Pedro’s freethinker finds made manifest in the Noli me tangere , this would guide them to the best researched answers to those big questions above. And we wouldn’t debate them endlessly. By “we” or “they” I mean really the very few who care enough to know deeply about their otherwise scorned race and peoples’ finest exemplar ever. And what he regarded as his prime mission, whom he regarded in his book as chief enemy-cancer (the Church-and-its-theocracy, as we shall further see) and why. They would understand as never before why that highly alarmed enemy naturally regarded him in return as the prime enemy-cancer of Spain’s Philippine colony to be removed and neutralized by all means fair or foul, starting with official condemnations as heretic and separatist enemy of Spain deserving arrest and the “meting out of what he deserved,” as religiously controlled media put it.

In spite of my disagreements with him I agree with De Pedro’s assessment of the evidence which clearly showed the mature Rizal at the top of his intellectual and moral development as firmly opposed to the violent rising of 1896. Many pious nationalists have painstakingly tried to show the contrary, as Dr. Quibuyen did mightily in his 1999 ambitious book driven mainly by that aim. Rather than deny the facts waived at them by their more zealous rivals, I’d face it and plumb the depths instead of Rizal’s core identity to understand his categorical opposition to armed revolt in 1896, which put rebel chief Bonifacio to raging against him as coward and deserving to be neutralized somehow. Whether we agree with Rizal or not, he had a historically reasoned dread of the likely horrors of nation-states violently surging ahead from the colonized Fourth and Third Worlds (as Haiti and others did, for instance). His ruthlessly self-critical studies and theory of a “culturally brutalized” people too intellectually and morally handicapped for modern prosperous statehood made him see things differently from the rebel leaders, who falsely used his name to recruit and wage a war with Spain. As a freethinker in the mold of a Masonic scientific humanist he felt naturally compelled to stress the need first for radical individual improvement of mentality and character in a regime of increasingly more earned individual and local freedoms. He felt inherently compelled to prefer reasoned discourse, in the last analysis during his most mature years of total reflections in Dapitan, as the way to resolve conflicts with Spain, not the wasteful carnage of armed violence and war. That’s what he said, wrote, and implied, repeatedly all through the latter-half of 1896 in particular. De Pedro implied agreement with that view more or less. He would certainly testify to Rizal’s heroic love of homeland whose intensity and authenticity no one could possibly question: