0.5 Opus dei book's darkened rizal & Why - chapter 5  (Page 10/14)

Quibuyen’s Retraction-Respecting Nationalism

The imprisoned Valenzuela and rebel inmate Jose Dizon testified to having firsthand knowledge of top rebel Bonifacio’s fury over this, and his secret plans to do away with Rizal or neutralize him somehow, as he did with rich Filipinos who opposed him. Whether we like what they testified to or not should be irrelevant to objective historians and investigators. Yet in his big celebrated book, Dr. Quibuyen rejected all those earliest testimonies, including those from the hero himself as documented by the Jesuit historian De la Costa and others. He blames America for the Filipino’s false, poor and distorted knowledge of the hero. Isn’t that nationalistic scapegoating and mythmaking? Weren’t Filipinos at fault, as critiqued by Rizal himself in writings and letters, for being lazy to read these and know more of their hero’s depths? Quibuyen forced the Constancy Swan Song’s second stanza to yield what he longed for: Rizal’s support for the violent rebellion. I fell for that same error many years ago in my first book. Margarita Hamada in hers later straightened me out of that delusion. I indeed had nationalistically forced out that rebel meaning. I glossed over vaguely troubling concepts in it like “battling delirious…. not doubting, nor troubled….” Rather was the somewhat vague stanza more of a generous respectful goodbye to the rebels as fellow patriots defending country and home in their own way, even if delirious and dying wastefully.

Quibuyen’s uncritical use of the very problematic Josephine (and its implied antedating of “Adios”) to further prove Rizal’s violent separatism suffers from the same fantastic stretching of the facts. Relying uncritically as he did with Valenzuela’s decades-later edited memories, he likewise endorsed General Alvarez’s decades-later memoirs which fantastically told that before dawn of execution morning Josephine, Trinidad and Paciano riskily skipped town for rebel headquarters in Cavite: to show the poem to rebel chief Bonifacio, who allegedly translated it into Tagalog before his May execution by fellow rebels under General Aguinaldo. For that matter Josephine herself was partly a teller of tall tales such a pre-execution church marriage to the hero, being official heir of he hero’s library and such other claims along with hard-to-believe rebel exploits in Cavite. Quibuyen accused many nationalist partisans of grossly misreading Rizal, yet he does the same piously nationalistic thing.

Did his “Aborted [Rizal-Envisioned] Nation” respect the Church’s retraction document and teaching? Yes, by totally ignoring and avoiding that all-influencing issue in a work intended to be comprehensive and definitive. Yes, by implying that Rizal held Spain to be his main enemy, which itself killed him for alleged violent rebellion. De Pedro said as much. In view of chapter three’s disproof of the alleged retraction, all the more do we have proof that our hero in question was a nonviolent patriotic humanist, innocent of the church-and-its-theocracy’s trumped up rebellion charge, one mainly religiously driven in order to kill him and successfully pull of the retraction frame-up as well. Yes, Quibuyen’s very ambitious thick volume on the hero falls under the retraction-respecting perspective for its antedated over-nationalistic version of the death poem conspicuously avoiding focus on its defiant constancies to old dreams, clamors, honor, own creed and omission of its martyred freethinker-author’s identification of who really killed him underneath the appearances of legality.