Rizal, Bonifacio and the âmasaâ myth
JOSE RIZALâS death anniversary today and Ceres Doyoâs reference in a recent column to a book titled âThe Masses are Messiahâ present a good opportunity to discuss the mythicizing in our country of the concept of the âmasses.â
It was the historian Teodoro Agoncillo who popularized the myth of the masses with his biography of Andres Bonifacio, âRevolt of the Masses.â Agoncillo claimed that the Katipunan revolutionaries were the massesâ representatives: âdespairing spirits, the oppressed, the downtrodden,â from the âlowest stratum of society.â Other writers would expand Agoncilloâs thesis by contrasting the âeliteâ Rizal against the âproletarianâ 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 didnât 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).