How the Philippines became corrupt
MANILA, Philippines - Poet and writer Domingo de Guzman has come up with a 120-page blockbuster entitled The Evil that Men Do, where he identifies, and excoriates the heroes and anti-heroes of the Philippine revolution against colonial Spain in the 19th century.
The book was launched at the ROC (Restaurant of Choice) Café at the University of the Philippines Alumni Center on June 19, the regular venue of the UP Booklovers Club headed by Henson Tiu-Laurel of which De Guzman is a member. It is a shortened version of a 500-page tome expected to see print soon, and which the author aspires to expand into four volumes if his prolific attack on the characters that shaped and betrayed the Philippine Revolution and other subsequent infamies holds out.
De Guzman’s unparalleled take on history puts down Jose Rizal, the national hero, and Emilio Aguinaldo, the first president of the Philippine Republic, as counter-revolutionaries. He traces the failure of our historians and contemporary writers to interpret the signal event in our history truthfully as the real source of a growing culture of corruption in the Philippines.
“We are uniquely corrupt because the colonial middle class (where Rizal and Aguinaldo belong) has had a long history of collaboration with our three colonial rulers, the Spanish (from the 15th to the 19th century), the Americans (from early to mid 1900), and the Japanese Imperial Army (from 1942 to 1945),” says De Guzman.
The tradition of naming counter-revolutionaries as heroes began after the colonial middle class or the Ilustrados betrayed the revolution against the colonial masters — unlike what happened in many colonized countries in South America.
Andres Bonifacio, the founder of the Katipunan, was the only exception to this anomaly because he launched the revolution and remained true to its ideals, which resulted in his assassination, allegedly by Aguinaldo and his cohorts. De Guzman castigates National Artist Nick Joaquin, for instance, for writing that Bonifacio never won a single battle.
The author blames Rizal, for not joining the revolution, withholding his heart and soul from it at a crucial time. This, De Guzman believes, led to a fatal consequence: a tie-up with Spain and mock sea-battle after which we became America’s colony, the subsequent struggle resulting in the death of two million Filipinos during the Philippine-American war.
Instead of blaming Rizal and Aguinaldo alone for their historical misdeeds, De Guzman extends his obloquy to the family members, the academicians, the historians, and the media for continually failing to separate the true from the bad, perpetuating the lie because it is the ruling elite’s eternal itch to “project and validate their own existence.”
De Guzman distinguishes himself from other historical writers and thinkers by claiming he had seen through the deception; studying closely all the documents pertaining to the revolutionary event; and rejecting Rizal and Aguinaldo after years of studying closely all the documents pertaining to the revolutionary event; and rejecting Rizal and Aguinaldo after years of studying how they acted and thought in relation to it. To do otherwise, he says, is “to commit the same treason that the (Philippine) intellectuals did.”
Dr. Ed Clemente, owner of Capitol Medical Center and the book’s publisher, says De Guzman’s “combative” and “obnoxious” style of writing is different from those of a majority of academic writers.”
“He’s trying to be a writer of history for popular consumption,” says Clemente, adding that the completion of De Guzman’s four-volume work “will be the best ever written (on Philippine history) in the 21st century.”
De Guzman teaches philosophy at the Polytechnic University of the Philippines and was a Palanca winner in poetry in 1977. He has published three books on philosophy: Praxis and Philosophy (1990); The Pre-Socrates: Philosophy, Science, and Metaphysics Before Socrates (1996); and The Power to Die, the Ontological Difference and the Logic of Absolute Violence (2007).
