BAGUIO is a university town. Crammed into so small a place are four huge universities, a University of the Philippines branch, so many colleges, high schools-yes, a Philippine Science High School extension! That Baguio is the most intensely intellectual city in the Philippines is arguable.
That an intellectual newspaper column like this one should prosper here is arguable...The only reason it has not done so is because there never was such a thing. But now it’s here.
PROF. Ferdinand Veridiano who taught history in UP and who has since transferred to PSCIE invited me to lecture there on this Rescued History four years ago -- in the open forum. My student audience repeatedly and with great passion denounced, in light of what they just learned from my lecture, how DepEd, all the historians, all the textbooks, all their history teachers, the NCCA, the government, the mass media, all the journalists, had lied to them and cheated them about their country’s history.
“LIE” is not exact, is misleading, and in many places quite plainly wrong. You know you lie when you lie, and that which you thus know is something of the truth; which, as you lie, you willfully diminish or suppress. Truth is, except for the original sources of the hoax, they, namely all the historians, were, are, brainwashed and brainwashingly obtuse (mapurol:--which was why none of them could in all these hundred years and more, unbrainwash himself/herself...).
As for the subtitle “& OTHER POETIC-PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS,” this mammoth unfinished work (originally envisioned to be all of 10 volumes, the contemplated theoretical-philosophical final one will make it eleven when completed) of demolishing that mountain of lies and bloody inversions that was this establishment history and in the process of annihilation giving rise to the truth that is this rescued history, this itself is possible only in its necessary radicalism as a project of philosophical critique, analysis, and reconstruction.
Only a philosopher can do it, and not just any kind of philosopher either. And that no doubt is why it took more than a hundred years for this accident to happen, this accident of a project of rescuing the truth of an entire nation’s history.
To be more exact, a hundred and twenty, if we take as starting point Rizal’s and Del Pilar’s and Lopez-Jaena’s and the La Solidaridad assimilationist-counterrevolutionary propaganda lies, and, shall we say, obtusenesses, i.e., stupidities, and Apolinario Mabini’s lies and tergiversations in his Historia Dela Revolucion Filipina, and of course Emilio alyas Ilyong Buktot Aguinaldo’s subscribed and sworn to statements and declarations on one hand and the death bedside oral dictations Ilyong Buktot in his all too long dying exhaled and expectorated into the orifices of his nephew Teodoro Agoncillo and which went straight into the pages of this proud UP Diliman full professor relativist historian’s books of the same kind of bloody stupidities and lies, utterly shameless and malicious, nay malignant, malevolent, on the other hand, and lastly, Epifanio Delos Santos Avenue’s lies.
And, yes, stupidities compounding those participant-eyewitness lies and stupidities. (And yes, that too is the reason why the longest Metro-Manila road was by the same kind of liars and swindlers named after him.) Oh, but I just wanted to say I intend now and then to interpose little cultural-literary-poetic-philosophical critiques and notices here to break the monotony or wipe-off the grime of historiographic documentation and argument.
But to the nuclear bomb now which I intend to detonate in this column. I did not originally mean to call it that, though the name is perfect for the certainly unpacific thing. It was international lawyer-philosopher Romel Regalado Bagares who did, in a Facebook review of the two-volume, 1076-page book (which the interested reader can order from amazon.com, or get hold of at Mount Cloud Bookstore here in Baguio or at Popular Bookstore in Quezon City (Tomas Morato St.) Allow me to just reproduce here the brief terroristic notice together with my, and other FB interlocutors, responses and comments.