Rizal the Subversive

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Rizal as a Rational Thinker

During his life, Jose Rizal was described as a heretic and subversive, an enemy of both the Church and Spain. He has made tremendous contributions to the progress of the Filipino society. His political works and essays, being anti-clerical and anti-colonial, frankly aimed to expose the maladies of his time and cure the Philippines of what he calls “the social cancer”. Rizal had been the progressive radical thinker, and promptly answered the ailing call of his Motherland, who cries for a cure.

Rizal had been a subversive in his own time. The Church had him excommunicated, and the Spaniards had him imprisoned, and then executed in Bagumbayan. However, that does not mean that he will always be a subversive, provided that he lives in a time aside from his, as if it really is his own identity, rather than an act or decision based on the call of situations and events. And in the first place, Rizal did not go to Europe just to harbor revolutionary ideas from the people there. He sought knowledge in foreign lands, so that he may use it and the Filipinos may benefit from it. Rizal did not intentionally want to make waves or a revolution, at all situations and regardless of events. And if he really favored revolution, that would be because of necessity. Rizal is a rational thinker, will surely analyze the situations first, and then make decisions based on his analyses, just like what doctors do when treating their patients.

Throughout the entire article, one could often read the communistic word, “struggle”—struggle against foreign tyranny, against the ruling class, etc. This was what Jose Ma. Sison was aiming at since the start. He believed that individual freedom can only be achieved through national freedom and that political unity could only be gained by removing all foreign threats to it. Then, he calls for a revolution, a Philippine Revolution, so that all the struggles that the mass is currently facing, according to him, will be finally put to an end.

Perhaps Sison is missing a point in this one simple thing: that this world is not perfect, and in every aspect of the society, there would always be a weakness. It is true that a revolution could end the situation, but how many revolutions? In this state of frailty and weakness, the Philippines could no longer afford another radical revolution.

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