More than once did Rizal express separatist sentiments and scenarios, yet he declined to lend the Katipunan his leadership when the party of nationalist republicans came to him for help. What was his baggage?

Like Mohandas Karamehand Gandhi who was horrified by violent incidents in the independence struggle (e.g., the Chauri Chaura tragedy), Rizal was haunted by the specter of a racial war. Unlike the Mahatma who commanded the reconquest of India via the soul-force of transcendental love, the boycott of foreign goods and the return of the spinning-wheel of self-reliance, Rizal did not empower the people with the mantra of civil disobedience or of the formation of peasant and workers' unions.

It took a Bonifacio and the original Manila KKK to galvanize the anak ng bayan into cooperativism and an energetic program of nation-building.

The KKK Kartilya, a decalogue of decent living and blueprint for a better society, endured, although it was a grossly violated by an ambitious clique of provincial elitists led by a Bonapartist pretender who deprived the movement of its founder.

In spite of the ilustrados' vacillation, the Revolutionaries defeated Spanish colonialism and re-established a tradition of self-determination.

Our recorded strivings for self-esteem and self-sufficiency began with Lapu-Lapu, "the first Filipino to lead resistance to the white man's rule." [Arturo M. Tolentino. Voice Of Dissent. Quezon City: Phoenix Publishing House, Inc., 1990, p. 1] It was a nativist retort to a sudden and unprovoked outlandish intrusion.

As the alien influence spread across our islands, it also brought with it universal principles of human freedom. These ideals, which brought to life the European and Latin American revolutions, similarly stirred the Filipino cause.

Both the reformist autonomists and the republican separatists were exposed to the values of the British, American and French revolutions. What would they have discovered in the tracts of the social contract theorists?

Read, did they, of Thomas Hobbes' "De Cive," especially Chapter XII: Of the internal causes, tending to the dissolution of any Government? Or of "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte" by Karl Marx?

How about John Locke's "Two Treatises of Government," particularly Chapter XIX (Of the Dissolution of Government) of the Second Treatise? Wherein the political philosopher clarified that "revolutions happen not upon every little mismanagement in public affairs. Great mistakes in the ruling part, many wrong and inconvenient laws, and all the slips of human frailty, will be born by the people without mutiny or murmur. But if a long train of abuses, prevarications and artifices, all tending the same way, make the design visible to the people, and they cannot but feel what they lie under, and see whither they are going; it is not to be wondered, that they should then rouse themselves, and endeavor to put the rule into such hands which may secure to them the ends for which government was at first erected." [Sec. 225]

Did any of them check the "Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From "The Papers of Thomas Jefferson?" Whence this maxim: "It is not by the consolidation, or concentration of powers, but by their distribution, that good government is effected."

We know that Rizal translated into Tagalog the French Declaration on the Rights of Man and that Bonifacio avidly examined the lessons of the French Revolution. In the same vein, the success of the KKK movement and the progress of the Philippine independence campaign were impressed on contemporary observers.

At the Baku Congress of the Peoples of the East, an American delegate, John Reed, cited our instance of resistance to recolo-nization. "Take, for example, the peoples of the Philippines. In 1898, the Filipinos rebelled against the cruel colonial government of Spain, and the Americans helped them. But after the Spaniards had been driven out the Americans did not want to go away.

"Then the Filipinos rose against the Americans, and this time the 'liberators' started to kill them, their wives and children: they tortured them and eventually conquered them. They seized their land and forced them to work and make profits for American capitalists.

"The Americans have promised the Filipinos independence. Soon an independent Filipino republic will be proclaimed. But this does not mean that the American capitalists will leave or that the Filipinos will not continue to work to make profits for them. The American capitalists have given the Filipino leaders a share of their profits - they have given them government jobs, land and money - they have created a Filipino capitalist class which also lives on the profits created by the workers - and in whose interest it is to keep the Filipinos in slavery."

The Katipuneros and their movement may have seemed to recede in the background during the American Occupation. But the revolutionary impulse and the democratic outlook resurfaced against the Japanese Occupation. In the postwar era, nearly all Philippine presidents have invoked the continuation of the 1896 Revolution. Every moral crusader, policymaker and aspiring power-wielder has called for wars against poverty, corruption, terrorism and despotism.