"No, because they are not true heroes,” intones Domingo de Guzman in a 120-page book entitled, “The Evil That Men Do,” launched last Saturday, June 19. The author asks all Filipinos to scrutinize how Philippine national hero Jose Rizal and first president of the Philippine Republic Emilio Aguinaldo acted towards the end of the Spanish era in the 19th century, then dare to answer one critical question: did they help or betray the Philippine revolution?

“They are counter-revolutionaries of the most evil sort,” pronounces De Guzman who blames Filipino historians and contemporary writers for a big cover-up job on Rizal and Aguinaldo. The failure to call a spade a spade has resulted in the improper reading of Philippine history; this lack of courage has served to hide many more skeletons in the closet and “created a culture of corruption in the Philippines,” he concludes. De Guzman’s initial diatribe  is a short-version of a 500-page book which he plans to expand into a four-volume work on the characters that actively participated in the revolutionary struggles during the Spanish, American, and Japanese colonial periods.

The most damning crime of Philippine historians, says De Guzman, is “the endless whitewashing of Rizal and Aguinaldo’s criminalities.” A true reading of their lives will lead to the inevitable conclusion that they evaded and sold out the Philippine revolution. Had Rizal embraced the revolution with complete affirmation, the pact between Spain and America would not have happened and the deaths of two million Filipinos in the ensuing Philippine-American war would not have transpired, says De Guzman. Had Aguinaldo known the real meaning of a true revolutionary, he would not have committed his grievous mistakes.

Andres Bonifacio, the founder of the Katipunan, was the opposite of Rizal and Aguinaldo in this regard.  Bonifacio initiated the signal event from which we today derive the sense of our nationhood. De Guzman elevates the moral, social, historical, and philosophical value of the revolution that Bonifacio launched in his time. Alas, the true hero was also assassinated by Aguinaldo’s followers, says De Guzman, one of the few and brave historians who has openly attacked Aguinaldo.

Other historians (including National Artist Nick Joaquin) have denigrated Bonifacio for not winning any battles – compared to Aguinaldo’s 29 little victories – but De Guzman demurs: “Bonifacio started the mother of all battles, without which there would have been no battles to be won or lost”.

“If we are impervious to the philosophical angle of the revolution as the revolution of the souls of the people, making them actively capable of absolute sacrifices of dying for the homeland, then, like the rest of other historians, a curious comparison of Bonifacio and Aguinaldo will always be like counting trees for the forest,” argues De Guzman.

Banish bad historians

“We are uniquely corrupt because of the long history of collaboration and betrayal with the ruling class during three periods in our history (Spanish, American, and Japanese colonizations).  This has resulted in the tragic upholding of counter-revolutionaries as heroes. This kind of historical anomaly never happened in other colonized countries (in South America),” shouts an angry De Guzman whose book reverberates with disgust, bitterness, and fulminating rage. Historians of the Philippine revolution have been blinded by class interest, he concludes.

“Like Rizal, other members of the colonial middle class in the Philippines failed to convince their compatriots to join in the revolt against the colonial rulers. In other colonized countries, the ilustrados were the revolutionaries,” he explains. “All of them (the Philippine colonial middle class and the heroes that they venerate and have imposed on all Filipinos up to the modern era), are traitors without a single exemption.”

“The ruling class projects the fake heroes as greater than the true (and assassinated) heroes in order to validate their own existence,” De Guzman says. The author’s historical insights include an accurate reading of historical characters along the fault created by class lines.

Promising to reveal many “treasonous intellectuals” for collaborating with wrongly venerated heroes, De Guzman says, “No matter how assiduously the ruling class, the state, the media, and the treasonous intellectuals have worked towards projecting criminals (or known heroes with vulgar crimes) as heroes; no matter how they have systematically perverted and distorted Philippine history, they will not succeed.” Banishing them into oblivion is the only antidote to decades of historical misinformation that they have perpetrated.

In his reading of history, De Guzman points to the same available documents used by other Philippine historians as the source of his enlightenment, “They (other writers) were more brainwashed than I was,” he says, adding he, too, needed a formidable intellectual and political will to be able to renounce Rizal and Aguinaldo after years of studying the 1896 revolution against Spain, the epicenter of our coming together as a nation.

Since the historical anomaly has not yet been corrected, and the true story not yet popularized, in that sense, the 19th century Katipunan Revolution is “still being fought today,” says De Guzman. The mistake will continue to make Filipinos more corrupt. Contemporary Philippine history must also be reviewed with the same rigor, if De Guzman’s strong polemic is stretched.

De Guzman’s take on history, although full of sociological and philosophical flavors, including a heckling of historians and contemporary rivals that borders on intellectual righteousness, is perfect for modern Filipino readers who are no longer afraid to lose fake heroes; who are no longer intimidated by those who perpetrate historical lies.

Dr. Ed Clemente, owner of the Capitol Medical Center and the book’s publisher, has praised De Guzman’s “combative and obnoxious style of writing” because they are needed to separate the heroes from the anti-heroes of the anti-Spanish revolution. “He talks sense. His book is like a breath of fresh air. It is different from the usually stale, sterile, and academic writings done by historians,” says Clemente.

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 in philosophy: “Praxis and Philosophy” (1990); “The Pre-Socratics: Philosophy, Science, and Metaphysics Before Socrates” (1996); and “The Power to Die, the Ontological Difference and the Logic of Absolute Violence” (2007).