On This Hallowed Spot

7/31/2019 On This Hallowed Spot

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On this hallowed spot, scene of tragedy and glory, we hail the immortal spirit of Jose Rizal. Fifty years ago today

this patriot sage joined the ranks of libertys martyrs. Fifty years ago, the brilliant flame of his life was violentlysnuffed out by imperial minions who did not comprehend the truth that men may be killed, but ideas are

indestructible.

On this same spot, six months ago, our nation became a free Republic. That monumental event Rizal foresaw. It

was fitting that the symbolic ceremonial of independence should have been performed on the ground consecratedby the blood of the great leader and prophet.

It is not without significance that Rizal, peering into the inscrutable mists of the future, predicted that one day the

American Republic, in his time still untested as a world power, would play a major role in the history of hishomeland. True to his prophecy, it was America who bestowed the boon of freedom, Rizals greatest dream, upon

the people and land he loved so well.

In the half century since his death, Rizal has dominated our national consciousness more completely than any

other figure of our history .We pay our tributes to a long and swelling rank of heroes from Gat Pulintang toBonifacio to Abad Santos and Quezon, but Rizal towers over them all, as he inspired all who came after him.

Distilled from a turbulent ever-searching spirit, Rizals writings whether in prose or in verse, are lyric truths,

sounding every note of our national character, our national dreams, our national needs. He did not neglect totouch, nor to examine the frailties. and faults of his countrymen.

Who among us will not still wince at some of the truths which shine forth undimmed from the immortal pages oftheNoli Me Tangere? Who will not still quail and blush at his diatribes against the proneness of some of our

people to place conceit and dignity above our nations good?

In a major measure, his words are as true today as when they were written. They express a basic fault of our

national character and underlie many of our vexing problems. Yet Rizal understood with crystal clarity, andexalted in immemorable prose and verse, our national glories, the shining virtues of our racethe courage, the

loyalty, the patience, the tenacity and endurance, the love of music and the love of noble glory, the sensitivity and

the innate graciousness of our people.

His philosophic understanding of the problems of his day, and of the problems of the generations that were to

come after him are profound and prophetic. He examined, with fierce and pitiless disinterest, all the axioms and

assumptions of his time. Those he found false in the glaring light of fact and experience he rejected and stripped

of sanctity. With equal fervor he embraced the great ethical concepts of Liberalism and Humanity, the concept ofMankinds Greatest Martyr, Jesus Christ. Human dignity and individual worth, human equality before God and

Governmentthose were the revolutionary banners carried by Jose Rizal.

The proposition of racial superiority Rizal abhorred and confounded. The corollary that some men are made to

rule and others to be enslaved he denounced with acidic irony. As to the gross apology of the Spanish rulers, who

claimed superior rights over Filipinos because the latter were brown of skin and wide of nostrils, Rizal thundered,Law knows no color of skin, nor does reason differentiate between nostrils. That was blasphemy in his day. But

Rizal dared to blaspheme. He feared neither King nor clergy. He was first to acknowledge the reasonable authorityof Government; but he would neither bend the knee nor bow his head to what he called the false pretensions and

petty persecutions of sham gods. He sharply attacked the shibboleths of prestige and of face. The prestige

of a nation, Rizal wrote, is preferable to that of a few individuals.

Heroically he demanded a free press, and assaulted every reason put forward against it. With his mind and heartfull of the liberal traditions of the western world, Rizal agitated for a removal of the iron restraints on freedom of

thought and expression imposed by petty tyrants who greatly feared the light of truth and knowledge. Solemnly he

warned the colonial rulers when he said: History shows that uprisings and revolutions have always occurred in


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countries where tyranny rules, in countries where human thought and the human heart have been forced to remain

silent. It is in his tradition, which is also the tradition of Voltaire and Peter Zenger and Thomas Paine, that wemaintain today and will defend with all our vigor full freedom of mind and speech. That is the essential

distinction, the touchstone which Rizal well knew, spelling the difference between dictatorship and democracy,

between freedom and slavery. Where men are free to speak their minds, to air their dreams, to petition theirGovernment, to assemble peaceably, to discuss their grievances, fancied or realthere true freedom dwells.

Where these rights are not implicit, and are not guaranteed to the people, even against the Government itself, that

is not freedoms realm, whatever the name, whatever the form.

Jose Rizal was not an advocate of revolution nor of violence. Yet in the absence of essential reforms, he clearlysaw the inevitability of revolution and uprising. Because he understood this alternative and stated his belief

without subterfuge or evasion, he was pilloried, exiled, persecuted, tortured, and then destroyed. This great mind

recognized that education and peaceful progress toward the lofty goals of freedom are preferable to strife, death,and bloodshed. But when the light of truth was arrogantly challenged, when men were refused the right to worship

God in a manner of their own choosing, when his countrymen were denied the opportunity to learn and to be

taught, when official injustice and cruelty went unchecked and unpunished, when he perceived the gatheringstorms of hate and fury in the hearts of his people, he issued a clear and certain warning, documented by history,

that liberty would prevail in the end against tyranny.

Rizal found his country prostrated, exploited and oppressed, its mind and soul smothered by political intoleranceand religious bigotry. He endeavored to lift up the spirit of the common man and make him aware of his dignity.He taught his countrymen their rights as well as their obligations. He tore from their eyes the veil of impotence,

and showed them, with measured logic, that a people united against oppression, is irresistible; and that there is no

punitive power sufficiently great to keep forever chained an aroused nation armed with a love of liberty and

justice.

Rizal struck oft the shackles from the peoples minds; he led them to the realms of unfettered thought. Freedom

and justice were depicted by Rizal as the noblest aspiration of a nation. With skilled and steady hands, unshaken

by fear of reprisal, Jose Rizal forged the solidarity of our people. He scourged with bitter invective the pettydivisions of province against province, which permitted the masters to rule by setting one group against another.

Not his province, not his section but his country, gem of the Orient Sea, he said, was inhabited by one people,one nation, a nation which he acclaimed as indestructible by tyranny or by terror .

Dream of my life, my living and burning desire,

All hail!

he cried,

And sweet it is, for thee to expire,

To die for thy sake, that thou mayst aspire.

Those flaming words fused the soul of the Filipino people. By their passion and beauty, Rizals farewell verses

became a seal of brotherhood by which the Filipinos recognized their affinity, one with another, and by which theland, from an archipelago, became a nation.

This poet, statesman, dreamer-seer held high the torch of freedom when the night was darkest. When some

despaired of liberation, confronted with the entrenched power and might of Imperial Spain, Rizal fastened his

smiling hopes upon his nations youth, turning to those who still today hold the promise of our future glories. Hesaid:


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Hold high the brow serene,

O youth, where now you stand;

Let the bright sheen

Of your grace be seen,

Fair hope of my fatherland!

A youth himself, he died, his golden pen laid to rest, his restless intellect destroyed, his brilliant talents suspended

at their full. But the imperial minions killed only Rizals body. They found out too late that his unvanquished

spirit led his people on.

The poet, Cecilio Apostol, spoke thus to the martyred Rizal:

Your brain was stilled by a bullets thrust,

But your spirit soars oer an empires dust.

Jose Rizal sealed with his young life our compact with destiny.

Whatever our difficulties may be today, however impoverished we are by war, we are rich in our heritage of

Rizals patriotism and wisdom. It is a constant spur to our national endeavors to merit, in our daily lives, our claimto his noble sacrifice.

There are no better guides to national glory and worth than the precepts, which this great soul set forth for our

people. He distilled them from his deep knowledge of our past and his bright hopes for our future. We would do

well to steep ourselves in the wisdom he taught us. I am not one of those who would mortgage the living future tothe claims of the dead past. Yet in Rizal, we have a man whose wisdom was universal, whose thoughts were true

not only for his time, but for ours. There are few geniuses of any age of whom that can be truly said.

William Tell, hero of Switzerland, died a soldiers death, but he left no living truths to guide his country across

the future years. Napoleon was a winner of battles and even a giver of laws, but he did not give lasting inspirationto his country, nor was he a prophet of peace. Savonarola died for his beliefs, but his was a martyrdom of faith

rather than of patriotism. England has had her great statesmen and soldiers, but no single one of them combined

the vaulting love of his people with the transcendental wisdom, which gives Rizal his eternal fame. The onlyparallel of history who comes immediately to mind is that patient, brooding spirit, Abraham Lincoln, like Rizal, a

martyr to human freedom.

Today we need men of RizaIs mold. The cause of liberty cries for new recruits. The heavy hand of oppression

casts its shadow over much of the earth. A new philosophy opposes our own, one which would substitute thepromise of bread for the reality of freedom. While proposing to free men from economic thralldom, it imposes

upon them a mental serfdom, an intellectual regimentation which denies selection and inquiry.

Economic injustice and oppression are hateful and destructive of the individual. Freedom from want and freedom

from economic slavery must be achieved. We must never rest until we have established the opportunity of all mento live in comfort and security. But must we, to gain our ends, place our necks in the yoke of dictatorship,

whatever its excuses? Must we accept the tablets of law and wisdom from self-anointed leaders claiming to

represent a single economic class and imprison our minds and our childrens minds in hoops of sacrosanct


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doctrine? That is too heavy a price for the promise of economic equality. Power is too intoxicating a wine to be

entrusted, without the peoples check, to a single party or oligarchy, or despot.

No, we will work in the pervading light of day, and expose our intellectual wares in the free market of democracy,

and let the people choose. When they have chosen, we will use the powers of constitutional government, with

unstinted vigor, to lead the people to security and prosperity. But the people must be free to approve or reject their

leaders, after the constitutional term of stewardship, and to express their views, through the press and other media,to compel officials of high or low rank to answer for their deeds in the public plaza of free sentiment, freely

expressed.

That is our credo, that is our basic principle. That is the teaching of Jose Rizal. He was no absolutist. He did notfight and die to substitute a Filipino master for the Spanish. He was full of trust in the basic wisdom of his people.

A people must have the government that they deserve, he said. Through education and the spread of knowledge,

through full and free inquiry into ideologies and beliefs, through public discussion and debate, truth is established;

men are made free. He hated tyranny. But tyranny, he knew, is possible for any length of time only when there aremen who will accept tyranny. There can be no tyrants without slaves, was his injunction to his people. And

today in the Philippines, there can be no tyrants, because there are none who would accept slavery or oppression.

As long as we love freedom, we shall honor Rizal. When this nation turns its back upon liberty, and chooses the

degrading road of dictatorship, we shall have to exalt another hero, certainly not Rizal, the Apostle of libertyssacred creed.

How happy and proud we can be as we say to him today: Your faith has been vindicated; your dreams have come

true. The seeds of liberty you sowed flower everywhere in your native land. Here democracy rules. Here the voiceof the people prevails. Here freedom reigns. And here freedom will abide, protected and defended by your

countrymen who, in unshakeable loyalty to your memory, cannot conceive of life without liberty.

How can we be sufficiently grateful to the immortal soul of the man who passed on to us this noble heritage? How

can we pay adequate tribute, or do him proper honor? We can only say, as it was said of another deathlesschampion of his country: Rizal,

Your nations heart, your grave will be,

Your monument, a nation free.


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Documents

On This Hallowed Spot