Refocusing Rizal
Editor's Note: This short article was take from Mike’s inputs to the question of whether the photos of Polavieja and Nozaleda should be included in the Rizal website of Dr. R. Yoder.
It would be misguided for us to try to refocus a Rizal discussion group into mainly centering on the relevance of Rizal to solving the Philippine political problems of today. Even though Rizal had enormous foresight, and even though most of his predictions were accurate, Rizal addressed himself to the world of the 1880s and 1890s.
As has been eloquently explained by Dean Jorge Bocobo,the religious bureaucracy is still a terrible enemy of the Filipino people, but in different guises than during the time of Rizal. For this current time in the 2000s we need new analyses and new solutions, drawing many ideas and much inspiration from Rizal, but not depending too much on him, as was frequently argued by Renato Constantino. See for example his essay “Veneration without Understanding” where if anything, Constantino may have gone a little too far in downplaying Rizal.
I myself am interested in everything about Rizal, from the smallest trivia to the most radical sweeping analysis, and to new discoveries about him, which are still forthcoming. I don't see anything wrong with pinpointing the masterminds of the official murder of Rizal, such as Polavieja.It is undeniable that the Spanish, ad the Americans shortly thereafter, decimated an entire generation of Filipino freedom fighters and supporters. The crimes of those oppressors should be exposed and remembered. Would there be objections if the photo of Polavieja were properly labeled, not just with his name and title, but with the information that he was a vicious mass murderer, not only of Rizal and the members of La Liga Filipina and others who were suspected of sympathy for independence, but of entire villages of helpless noncombatants?
In recent Filipino writings about Rizal, something believed to be from an American source is liable to be downgraded for that reason alone. In formal logic there is an error termed argumentum ad hominem, whereby it is considered invalid to disparage someone's information, ideas, or opinion merely on the basis of who they are. A flagrant example of this is Rizal According to Retana: Portrait of a Hero and a Revolution by Elizabeth Medina, who belittled the Rizal biography of Austin Coates due to his American cultural biases and mental direction (page 168). While this might of course be true about some other writers, Medina was unaware that Austin Coates was not an American, but rather was British, had lived for many years in the Far East, and was a close friend of the surviving family members of Rizal. Medina, therefore, made the double error of argumentum ad hominem on the basis of nationality, and then getting the nationality wrong. Medina then goes on to accept the friar version of Rizal's retraction wholeheartedly.
