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Showing posts with label Bonifacio. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bonifacio. Show all posts
Dec 14, 2014
Revisiting Andres Bonifacio
by Ignacio Bunye, Manila Bulletin
Using both primary historical documents and interpretative accounts of earlier historians, Dr. Guerrero, et. al., are submitting the proposition that:
1. When the plans of a general uprising were discovered, Bonifacio called a general meeting of the Katipunan on August 24, 1896. According to Santiago Alvarez, a thousand people came, indicating that there was already a government working when they declared the national government.
2. In that meeting, the Katipunan assembly made three decisions:
a. They declared a nationwide armed revolution to win freedom from Spain.
b. They established a national government.
c. They elected officials who would lead the nation and the army.
3. From a secret organization, the Katipunan became an open de facto government.
4. This de facto government had its constitution – the Kartilya ng Katipunan. An important document called “Casaysayan” defined the de facto government’s leadership and various positions.
5. Early documents referred to the de facto government as Haring Bayan ng Katagalugan. Haring Bayan means pamahalaan o republika.
6. Katagalugan encompassed not just the Tagalogs but all ethnic groups from the entire archipelago.
7. Katagalugan was preferred over the use of “Filipinas” to symbolize the complete break of the natives or “Indios” from the “Filipinos.” At the time, “Filipinos” referred only to Spaniards born in the islands – the so-called Insulares.
8. Haring Bayan ng Katagalugan had a near complete cabinet: A Secretary of War, a Secretary of State, a Secretary of Interior, a Secretary of Justice, a Secretary of Finance.
9. Haring Bayan ng Katagalugan had a diplomatic component – a “Commission” which tried to negotiate for Japanese political, military, and financial aid. The same “Commission” also tried to touch base with the US and French governments through their consulates in Hong Kong.
10. Haring Bayan ng Katagalugan had its own flag consisting of a red and white sun with the baybayin K in the center.
11. Haring Bayan ng Katagalugan had its own national anthem “Marangal na Dalit ng Katagalugan” which was composed by Julio Nakpil.
12. Haring Bayan ng Katagalugan commanded the loyalty of a significant portion of the population.
13. While it existed, the government held territory where it exercised the functions of a state, especially in Pasig and Morong.
Feb 12, 2011
Katipunan: Documents and studies
This site is devoted to the study of the Katipunan, the patriotic secret society that in 1896 launched the revolution against Spanish rule in the Philippines.
Although the late 19th century is the most celebrated and studied period in Philippine history, much of what has been published on the Katipunan is unreliable and the surviving primary sources are as yet largely unexplored. The principal aim here is to bring to light a number of important Katipunan documents that have not been published before, or are not readily accessible. Links will be provided to materials on theKatipunan that may be found elsewhere on the web - most notably on the excellent "Bonifacio Papers" site, which this site will seek to complement, and not in any way to contest.
The documents are arranged under eight sub-headings – Foundational documents; Supreme Council (Kataastaasang Sangunian); Supreme Assembly (Kataastaasang Kapisanan); Councils and branches (Sangunian at Balangay); Membership documents; Andres Bonifacio; Emilio Jacinto; and Miscellaneous – and under each sub-heading they are ordered chronologically. The site also includes a number of studies and research notes on the Katipunan, some of which have been posted previously on “BonifacioPapers”.
Comments, corrections, and pointers to other documents that might be posted on the site will be most welcome at kasaysayan@googlemail.com
Jim Richardson
SITE CONTENTS
DOCUMENTS
Foundational documents
Casaysayan; Pinagcasundoan; Manga daquilang cautosan (January 1892)
Supreme Council (Kataastaasang Sangunian)
Supreme Assembly (Kataastaasang Kapisanan)
Councils and branches (Sangunian at Balangay)
Membership documents
Andres Bonifacio
Emilio Jacinto
Miscellaneous
STUDIES
IMAGES
Copyright © Jim Richardson, 2005-2010. Jim Richardson asserts his moral right to be known as the author of the studies and notes posted on this website. Permission is hereby granted to copy and to distribute the pages on the site in their original, unmodified form
Source: http://kasaysayan-kkk.info/
Feb 11, 2011
Outlook: Rizal, Bonifacio and the ‘masa’ myth
By Rigoberto D. Tiglao
Philippine Daily Inquirer
Posted date: December 29, 2010
…It was the historian Teodoro Agoncillo who popularized the myth of the masses with his biography of Andres Bonifacio, “Revolt of the Masses.” Agoncillo claimed that the Katipunan revolutionaries were the masses’ representatives: “despairing spirits, the oppressed, the downtrodden,” from the “lowest stratum of society.” Other writers would expand Agoncillo’s thesis by contrasting the “elite” Rizal against the “proletarian” Bonifacio. Leftist activists have even been brainwashed to hate Rizal and to believe that it was the Americans who just invented him to be our national hero, since he didn’t advocate armed revolution.
However, more up-to-date historians, especially those who mined the archives of the Spanish military, paint an entirely different picture of Bonifacio and the Katipuneros. (See http://kasaysayan-kkk.info).
British historian Jim Richardson examined the dossiers of over 200 leaders of the Katipunan, and concluded that they were not poor laborers but mostly white-collar employees and what we may call the intelligentsia, the petty bourgeoisie. Yes, Bonifacio was a bodeguero, but this didn’t refer to a downtrodden laborer carrying heavy stuff on his shoulder. Bonifacio was the employee in a German-owned company who made sure that the contents of the warehouse matched the company’s books. In that listing of 200 Katipuneros, only one was identified as a laborer.
This actually is the characteristic of the Katipunan’s model itself, the French Revolution, which was a lower-middle class revolution. It is probably the pattern of all revolutions. Mao Zedong, Chou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping came from the landlord class, Pol Pot from a wealthy family who could afford to send him to Paris, and of course Jose Ma. Sison from the landlord class.
There is furthermore a distinctly elite dimension to the Katipunan, the opposite of being masa. The single most common characteristic among the leaders of the Katipunan was their membership in a secret elite group: Freemasonry. Stripped of its abracadabra, Freemasonry was based on the pillars of the power of rationality and individual freedom, as against the superstition and blind obedience to the Catholic Church in the 17th to 19th centuries. The Katipunan’s original core group—Bonifacio, Deodato Arellano, Valentin Diaz, Teodoro Plata, Ladislao Diwa and Jose Dizon—as well as 16 other officers were all Freemasons.
Bonifacio and Rizal were actually comrades: they were both Freemasons. This provided them with the necessary world-view to defy Catholicism which was the nearly overpowering ideological base of Spanish colonialism. Rizal was recruited to Freemasonry during his stay in Madrid starting 1882, when the society in Spain had a renaissance of sorts after many years of persecution. Bonifacio joined Freemasonry much later, in 1892, at the Taliba Lodge No. 165.
The Left’s narrative has been that Rizal’s Liga Filipina was the reformist group while the Katipunan was Bonifacio’s armed revolutionary organization. This is false. The Liga was in fact swiftly established by Rizal upon his return from Spain since he utilized his network of Masonic lodges. Many Katipunan leaders were also members of the Liga.
The Katipunan, an organization of Freemasons and petty-bourgeois intellectuals, led the revolution, with the masses—as always—constituting the warm bodies, and sadly the cannon fodder.
It has been mainly communist parties, especially Mao’s—based on Marx’s Hegelian notion of the proletariat becoming conscious of its destiny—which have propagated the notion that the masses have an intrinsic wisdom that civilization’s vanguards don’t have. In terms of political philosophy, the masa myth is the antithesis of representative democracy.
Indeed, “masses” got to be translated to “masa” only in the 1970s when Maoists had to translate Mao’s works, which are replete with the word “masses”—with real workers even ridiculing it as meaning “dough” in Tagalog. On the other hand, with their penchant for mythicizing, and with the very wrong notion that Jesus was a laborer, liberation-theology Christians substituted the Deity for “Masses,” quite obvious in that line from Atenean Eman Lacaba’s poem, “The Masses are Messiah.”
The myth of the masses is a very dangerous one. Academics and professionals were sent to China’s hinterlands—many to die or be killed—“to learn from the masses” in the disastrous Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s which resulted in five million Chinese killed and utter political and economic chaos. College graduates were either massacred in the Khmer Rouge’s killing fields, or sent to rural areas to be “re-educated by the masses.” The myth of the masses has even wormed its way into Philippine political thinking as opinion polls (which by definition is what the masses feel at a point in time) are taken to be moral imperatives to violate representative democracy. The masa myth nearly hijacked the spirit of the Edsa 1986 Revolution in “Edsa 3” and the several attempts at fake “people power” movements in the past several years.
It is a dangerous myth that rabble-rousers and totalitarians cultivate since it easy to claim that one speaks for the faceless masses—as New People’s Army spokesmen always do. The Masses are Messiah? It was the masses that asked for Jesus’ head on that fateful day.
Feb 9, 2011
The court-martial of Andres Bonifacio
| Author: | Kalaw, Teodoro M. (Teodoro Manguiat), 1884-1940. |
| Title: | The court-martial of Andres Bonifacio : with prefatory notes / by Teodoro M. Kalaw, tr. by Paz Policarpio-Mendez. |
| Publication Info: | Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Library 2005 |
| Availability: | These pages may be freely searched and displayed. Permission must be received for subsequent distribution in print or electronically. Please go to http://www.umdl.umich.edu/ for more information. |
| Print source: | The court-martial of Andres Bonifacio : with prefatory notes / by Teodoro M. Kalaw, tr. by Paz Policarpio-Mendez. Kalaw, Teodoro M. (Teodoro Manguiat), 1884-1940., Mendez, Paz Policarpio. Manila: Manila Book Co., 1926. |
| Subject terms: | Courts-martial and courts of inquiry -- Philippines. Philippines -- History |
| URL: | http://name.umdl.umich.edu/ADL9481.0001.001 |
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