‘Think Tank’ Rizal Society launched
‘Think Tank’ Rizal Society launched
A new group in Canada —the Rizal Society of Ontario — made its entrance into civic life at a modest brunch at the Aristokrat last April 8th .
Host and Communications Director Livvy Camacho announced that Rizal Society has received its letters patent making it a registered non-profit corporation. Livvy traced the RSO to its beginning in February, 2005 at the home of Mogi Mogado, one of the RSO founders and currently Pursuivant of the Order of the Knights of Rizal in Canada. Co-founders Mogado, Guy Camacho and Voltaire de Leon laid out their intents for building an independent Rizalist organization.
Another Rizalist Group?
The launching of the RSO comes at a time when the Philippines-based Order of the Knights of Rizal (OKR) is going through a difficult process of organizational changes. Some community observers thought that the RSO is a splinter group. Chairman Voltaire de Leon cleared the air and pointed out that the RSO complements the OKR, in the same way that Kababaihang Rizalista does. In fact, the 3 founding members remain members of the OKR. However, the Society has unique features:
RSO membership is open to both genders and to Filipino and other communities specially those that share a colonial history. It has only two levels of memberships: Fellows and Members.
One very significant difference is that the RSO attempts to continue, in the light of modern times, the social movement of Rizal and his contemporaries — to achieve national self-sufficiency from neo-colonialism in its various forms.
Livvy pointed out that RSO views prospective projects from its own Rizalist beliefs in the civil society, the importance of history to nation-building, science, self-sufficiency as a basis of sovereignty, raising family by moral example, supremacy of just laws over individuals in society; and, whenever humanly possible, the use of peaceful means to effect progressive social change.
Recovery of the Historic Bells of Balangiga
To illustrate the kind of projects RSO will be engaged in , Board Director Ed Muyot spoke about the RSO Balangiga Bells Project. It supports the campaign a local Eastern Samar organization spearheaded by one of the guests, Mr. Expedito Lim. Lim’s campaign goal is to recover the Bells of Balangiga and return them to Samar where they belong. As Muyot explained, in the Philippine American War, Samar was the site of persistent Filipino guerilla warfare. In 1901, by daring and clandestine infiltration, Filipino guerillas nearly wiped out an American garrison. In retaliation, the U.S. army carried out a scorched-earth campaign that devastated Samar. To humiliate the razed town of Balangiga, U.S. soldiers removed the three bells from the church belfry as war booties. Two of the bells are now in F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming. The third one is in an American base in Korea. In 1997, President Fidel Ramos requested for their return during his U.S. visit but nothing came of it. Of note, some American veterans agreed to return them but the Wyoming state assembly voted otherwise.
One of the guests, activist Pura Velasco, expressed her desire for Filipino kids to learn about the bells.
Re-examination of Rizal
De Leon, like most of the Interim Board Directors a long-time community activist, recalled how he moved from idolizing Rizal to debunking him after reading Renato Constantino’s watershed essay ‘Veneration Without Understanding’. In that essay, Constantino decried the elevation of Jose Rizal to sainthood which prevented generations of Filipinos from appreciating his great contributions to nation-building and knowing his limits as well. Constantino’s essay asserted that Rizal was an American-created national hero, his pacifism utilized by the U.S. to dampen revolutionary fires. To Constantino and his followers, other figures make a more fitting national hero.
But, added De Leon, new revelations by historians and academics about the life and times of Rizal and his generation of patriots convinced him to question Constantino’s premise that Rizal’s stature was mostly the work of U.S. propagandists. Recovering the true Rizal and his cause for the Filipino nation are goals of the Society.
History teacher Sir Joe Luzadas remarked on Constantino’s view of Rizal and asked whether or not Rizal was a reformist or a revolutionary. Debates like this are important, Luzadas said, and congratulated RSO for taking the lead.
(PRESS RELEASE)
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