0.5 Opus dei book's darkened rizal & Why - chapter 5  (Page 11/14)

For objectivity’s sake, Quibuyen should have accepted the zealous nationalists’ hard facts glaringly staring at him about Rizal clearly opposing the revolt of 1896. This is more honest than embarrassingly denying facts by drastically reinterpreting them away in fancy educated moves that take one’s breath away for sheer ideological cheek. The only honest way to deal with those anti-rebellion facts is to probe deeply for the reasons that drove the hero to boldly, if not heroically, oppose rebel chief Bonifacio’s misrepresented revolt (waged falsely under Rizal’s banner). I didn’t plan on a review too of Quibuyen’s celebrated and much-quoted work of 1999. I guess I managed to do it here in its essentials which remains valid through his book’s updating several years ago. I remain, however, awed by his masterful analysis of the essay on “Indolence”, the best and most knowledgeable I have read on it. Please read it as your guide to the original classic itself. Quibuyen stressed that the essay’s author to did stress the indolence predisposition’s existence, which many among the retraction-respecting nationalist camp still deny and that Rizal used the “i-word” in its general physical, mental and moral senses. Such as the laziness to know more, for example, about this now chief hero’s depths. I remain awed by his equally masterful analysis of the essay on “Morga”. I am similarly awed by it and its noting of Rizal’s view of Catholicism as not being superior to the original native religion. And which the natives complicitously exchanged for theirs at too great a total cost. Of course we may not agree, but that was Rizal’s view of the matter. On page 310 and other pages we read, “Rizal was skeptical of the idea that revolutionary violence creates the new society or the new man.” Again an awesome valid finding. I wish Quibuyen had deeply heeded that big part of his iconic hero’s creed. If he did maybe he would not have seduced himself and others into believing that Rizal deep down supported violent separatism in 1896. I wish he’d been a lot more impressed with his iconic hero’s Masonic scientific humanism. For, in the last analysis, this compelled him to espouse nonviolent reasoned discourse over the wasteful carnage of violent conflict and war. In his philosophy this was not the way to obtain more and more earned individual and local freedoms. Nor robust ethical statehood eventually.

More ‘Mierda’ Thrown at Him

Let us say again that De Pedro solved his retraction-rooted problem of how at core Rizal remained Catholic, in spite of having discovered the young Rizal to be freethinker at 22 in Masonic freethinking Paris. Here’s where confusedly he partially takes back what he announced as a hypothesis: He was only at most a half-freethinker after all! And he solved his other self-imposed artificial problem of why and how the “half-freethinker” Rizal terrorized Spanish religious of the theocratic colony as the fully profane Voltairean liberal seeking their destruction? He was only maliciously pretending in Machiavellian fashion all the more to inflict pain on hi personally hated abusive friars. That was just “bold, boasting palaver,” De Pedro has the cheek and malice to say. Sham-freethinker too he turned out to be after all. To what ridiculous lengths must we go in attacking Rizal’s character and he bone-deep quality of his Masonic scientific humanism just to make his retraction reasonable and credible?