[Applause] [Music] he who does not know where he came from will not reach his destination this is an often quoted line from rizal which isn't by resale at all and if we are to really look for something that he said about history the nicest thing he wrote is con el recuerdo del pasado entro en el por venir in english it's i enter the future with a memory of the past this is a quote that we should remember in the days when social media the internet and google has flooded us with so much information that we cannot possibly humanly digest all of it so we have to learn to move into the future carrying a memory of the past because it is that that will help us in looking at and evaluating what we now call fake news fake news is not new we've had it a long time but in the past fake news was easily or regularly corrected by research or by institutions like the press or the academe what we are seeing today is an assault on truth fake news or fake history has to be seen always in terms of its intention is it made for fun is it made because of ignorance or is it deliberate misinformation if you google jose result today and check the images part you will get a whole range of results picture results mug shot and it usually comes from a photograph his favorite photograph taken in 1890 however there is a photograph of result in masonic garb and because it came from the u.s library of congress people believe it to be true but all you have to do is to look at the photograph of this man in masonic attire and compare it with result to see that these are two different people so something is wrong somewhere many years ago i received a query asking me to confirm whether this long lost photograph of result was actually results and when i looked at it it was actually the head of mani pacquiao photoshopped on abraham lincoln's body this was a made-up picture that made the rounds and it was made for fun but some people want to believe what they want to believe want to see what they want to see and actually believe that this photoshop picture of pacquiao is actually resolved [Music] when i was a boy i learned that rizal had lost one of his slippers while he was playing near a river [Music] and when he went home barefoot of course his parents asked him what happened to your slippers and risale is supposed to have said i lost one slipper and since this is useless to me i threw in the other one because there might be a little boy downstream who will find the pair and it will be useful to him if i'm the little boy downstream and i'm playing and i see one slipper float by i won't pick it up and wait for the next slipper to come right it is a story that is made up because it is meant to teach us a moral story it is meant as a lesson for children to learn so it is not exactly true but its intention is good with result we have a mixture of fact fancy and what caroline how the literary scholar calls necessary fictions in a 1950 public school textbook i saw a story that claimed that result was the inventor of champurrado rizal was eating one morning and he accidentally tipped over a cup of chocolate that spilled over his plate with rice and so one of his sisters said you know you're a clumsy little boy why did you do that and result is supposed to have said no i did that on purpose because if you mix chocolate and rice you get champorado if you actually look at the origin of champorado champurade is not a philippine meal it's actually a mexican meal so we have a meal that sounds the same but it's not like the real mexican champorado and we have our national hero inventing something which he did not so this is the type of thing that we get that we have a result we're supposed to teach us nationalism patriotism and all the good things which we are not of the two quotes that i have found one is the quote about history and the second is the quote about language which we hear every year in august during buanawika and this is the most quoted line from jose sal it says it came from a poem called sa'akhinka babata which was supposedly written when resal was eight years old i found out that unlike most of the things that i know about resal sa'akan kababata does not have or is not supported by an original manuscript it was published posthumously in a book on florente laura by a man named hermine hildo cruz it's in an appendix and it just says this is results first poem it was given to one of his childhood playmates and i checked the name of the childhood playmate it does not match up with any of the documentation that i know of result wrote mostly in spanish and there are only two poems of rissal in tagalog both of them are questionable when you look at in kababata you ask yourself how could an eight-year-old boy in calamba compare tagalog with latin in spanish and greek how can an eight-year-old boy in calamba talk about freedom which he uses twice in the poem the word kalayaan when i checked true results correspondence i found out that the first time rizal had ever heard the word kalayaan freedom was in 1882 he was already 21 years old in a poem that marcelo del pilar was translating results also mentions in his writings that when he was translating william tell from german into tagalog he was stumped by the word fry height which in german means freedom this was 1886 and rizal could not find the tagalog equivalent of fry height and so how can result forget a word that he used twice in an 1869 poem so what we is know result did not write sakin kabata when we talk history when we study about jose rizal and our heroes we are taught to remember to memorize facts to remember who what when where how but more importantly history should teach us that it is more than memorization it is more than data history teaches us to be critical to question even the things that we think to be real and that helps us to separate the truth from the false and fact from opinion we have a photograph of jose results execution in the lunetta on december 30 1896 and it is a photograph where result is standing shortly before he shot that is the only picture we have although over the years some other pictures have come out including one that actually shows the valley of fire and result falling dead because of this people have started to doubt even the authentic picture so what happens here is we don't know what to believe and we end up believing what we want to believe so with result for example we have other things there are urban legends that persist one of them and the most popular is that rizal is supposed to be the father of adolf hitler [Music] in 1913 results friend maximoviola wrote a memoir called miss viajes connell dr rizal for my travels with dr rizal in may of 1887 viola and rizal were in vienna and they stayed in the hotel metropol we actually have a photograph of the receipt of the hotel that gives us the room numbers they stayed in hitler's mother clara polz is supposed to have worked in the hotel metropole in vienna and it is this very faint connection that is the root of the urban legend that rizal is the father of adolf hitler all you have to do is to look up hitler's birthday which is april 20 1889 and you will actually find out that rizal was nowhere near austria or vienna in 1889 he was actually in london in the british library doing his research on the pre-spanish philippines this was also quite funny because when i dug it up i didn't realize that adolf hitler's real name was alloy schickelgruber a name that sounds very funny to us and it gives you the sense of how powerful a name can be because you cannot shout heil shekel gruber doesn't sound very nice but adolf hitler has a very strong ring to it oserisal was in london so he's not adolf hitler's father but this led to another urban legend jose rizal actually moved to paris in 1889 in order to print the successors de las eslas filipinas now at the time that result was in london doing research in the british library chuck the ripper birders occurred and as we know jack the ripper was never caught but he killed with a sharp instrument that suggested that a he had medical training that's result or b he killed with the scalpel that's result again now the important part to remember here is that rizal is in london at the time the murders occur and when he moves to paris the murders stop now if you open the jack the ripper website it has a long list of suspects and you will be surprised to find that jose rizal is one of the suspects in the jack the ripper murders and i remember one of my undergraduate students once told me when i said this in class he said you know sir everyone else has missed out on the biggest clue of all and i said what's the biggest clue and he says jr jack the ripper and jose rizal shared the same initials normally i would laugh but i'd like to think that this is a student who's thinking he's just trying to be funny but in many ways i learned a lot more from my students that they learn from me and i'd like to think that even when they're making fun their mind is working their mind is thinking their mind is thinking critically which is what we are all talking about today jose rizal is one of the people that has inspired many urban legends but there is another jose who we have to remember his name is jose e marco he was a man who peddled historical manuscripts and from 1918 till the day that he died for almost half a century mr marco was able to sell or donate to the national library of the philippines and many scholars things that he had created and two of his greatest creations were the code of kalanchao which is believed to be the earliest pre-spanish law and the other one is a novel called la loba negra supposedly by father burgos jose marco is somebody that historians hate but i long wanted to study him and probably to write a monograph about him because here was a man who was writing history from the top of his head he messed up philippine historiography but this is a man who i don't know what his real motives are but i'd like to think that maybe if we had asked him why he did this aside from making money he would probably say you know before the war you wanted proof of pre-spanish filipino civilization you had none so i created the code of kalanchow for you in the 1950s you wanted a hero who might be better than jose rizal so i gave you father burgos and he created over 50 fake works of burgos so in a sense this is a man who can probably look me in the eye and say you wanted things that you could not find in your history so i created it for you and so if you want to be filipino and you want to be nationalistic then you believe what i'm telling you to believe fake history also gets into the picture because of politics and a good example would be apolinario mabini who is best remembered under the title the sublime paralytic i know what a paralytic is but i don't quite know how it matches with sublime and although i knew this phrase growing up it was only years later when i was attending meetings with a friend at the historical commission and the two senior members of the commission aguilar cruz who was our ambassador to unesco and the historian teodoro agoncillio during a break went out and looked at the statue of mabini in front of the national library and someone said it's the sublime paralytic and the other one said from the sublime to the cephelite and they both started laughing after they laughed i asked them why why did you say this and they sort of whispered conspiratorially and said do you know that mabini's paralysis was caused by syphilis and i kept this in the back of my mind to use at some future time except that in 1980 i found out that mabini's remains were exhumed his his bones were arranged like a jigsaw puzzle and they were studied x-rayed measured and the conclusion by an orthopedic surgeon was that mabini's paralysis was actually caused by polio there was no syphilis involved now i mentioned this one day to national artist f chonil jose who wrote part of his rosales trilogy or his book on generations one of the volumes is called porn and in that volume mabini is referenced and mabini lost the use of his legs because of syphilis and so i told frankie jose you know the syphilis story is not true because we have the the latest medical opinion that says it was polio but i didn't stop there i started to trace where the story came from and i found out that apolinario mabini was emilio aguinaldo's closest advisor he was the person for whom all papers to the president and out would pass so he was powerful and yet he was hated and so people who hated him especially in the malolos congress created the syphilis story in order to discredit him and probably to force him to resign so when you think about it it sounds very contemporary the whole idea of creating fake news so that you can get someone out of the way or tarnish someone's reputation this has happened to none other than the polinario mabini people talk freely throughout the length and wealth of this library republic against public divisions against government institutions against anybody on any subject politics has a way of distorting not only the present but also our history i saw a very small article in the chicago tribune that talked about the impeachment of el pidio querino quirino was the first president to undergo an impeachment hearing and in this time kirino was charged with all sorts of things the most serious of which in the public opinion was that he was extravagant and he wasted people's money much of it in the renovation of malacanang and he is supposed to have bought a 5 000 peso bed an amount that seems nothing to us today but was a great deal in those times and we actually have a photograph of kerino bringing the press inside his bedroom to show people the bed that supposedly cost 5 000 pesos to cut the long story short the impeachment did not flourish and kirino was acquitted but in 1953 when he ran for re-election the charges from the impeachment hearing came out again and they created a new bit of news and it was that kirino spent a lot to have a golden orinola or a piss pot under his bed which is quite funny because they had modern plumbing in the toilet why would he need a gold orinola but in that election that golden arenola became a symbol of everything that was corrupt and wrong about the kirin administration and even if it was not true kirino was remembered at that time for a golden orinola that did not exist on social media you will find many memes about juan ponce and riley and how immortal he is on my facebook feed once i saw advertised a one ponce andrea immortality seminar and really has been with us for a long time even when i was a boy he was already part of marcos and martial law and you go back to history and you see that one of the justifications for martial law was that they shot up or they ambushed and relay in wa in september of 1972 when marcos heard about the ambush and really survived he said that this made the proclamation of martial law a necessity as of the 21st of this month i signed proclamation number 1081 placing entire philippines under martial law in ferdinand marcos's diary we actually see marcos writing about the the assassination attempt and this being one of the reasons why he was forced to declare martial law now in 1986 after marcos was exiled to the united states juan ponce enrique is supposed to have said that the assassination attempt was staged the ambush was the states i said but i did not say who is stage it i did not say that i stayed so the correct word was staged yes and it was staged so that they would have an excuse to declare martial law that became part of our history from 86 but many years later when andrea published his memoirs he recounted his 1986 statement and said marcelo's already going on why should i take my ambush to justify myself when it was already on a irreversible day so when you look at it this is one historical figure telling us two different versions of the same event so our question is which side do we want to believe and why marcos is one president who had a fine sense of history or his place in history and i have been working for a number of years on putting together the handwritten diary that he wrote over many years in order for us to understand the events but when i looked at the diary and sometimes i look at his speeches some things don't quite match in 1972 he actually gave a speech to the philippine historical association and some of the members of this association were his professors in the university of the philippines and in this speech he actually declared i will tell you about the particulars of the declaration of martial law in our history books the declaration of martial law is always given as september 21 1972 but everyone knows that the martial decree was actually implemented on the 23rd the document was dated september 21 simply because marcos was superstitious about numbers and he liked things that had a number seven or in multiples of seven so he told the philippine historical association that i actually had two copies of the martial law declaration made and one copy i signed on september 17 but i dated it september 21 so you have a 17 and you have a 21 and he kept this document according to him i kept the document because i was waiting for a sign from god to tell me whether i should proceed or not so in this speech marcos says and it is actually typed out and transcribed and he says that even before the ambush of secretary ponce and riley i had already ordered the enforcement of the proclamation long before that i had decided to proclaim martial law so when you see it we have a historical document we have marcos saying different things marcos because of his sense of history even corrected his birthday he was supposed to have been born on september 11 1917 so in 2017 the 100th anniversary of marcus's death there was a philippine postage stamp that commemorated his 100th birthday but then a document came out from the civil registrar of sarat his birthplace where according to the records he was actually born in 1916 uh and not 1917. and i have asked demarco says to confirm or deny this document and there has been no record but it shows you that if a man is willing to fake or alter even his own birthday maybe he is somebody that we cannot trust and it is a history that he has written that might be more problematic than truth dealing with fake news is like dealing with history you have to look at the past you have to validate it you have to check it and make sure that it is accurate or even if it's accurate to see that our interpretation or our the values that we put into it the colors we put into it are accurate and true fake news becomes history after a while and i'd like to think that fake news should not move into history which becomes permanent today we talk about historical revisionism especially in terms of the marcos period when we talk about resale or mabini or people 100 years ago it does not really change things it's just a matter of giving truth or using truth in order to validate something in the past but what complicates our life today with fake news is that even the term that we use historical revisionism it is historical revisionism to paint the marcos period as the greatest happiest most economically sound part of philippine history and yet they call it historical revisionism historical revisionism should be based on truth historical revisionism means that you correct something that is wrong you correct something that is false and you cannot revise something to make it false and so history and fake news teaches us to always search for truth because it is only in truth that we will find ourselves and we will find our future [Music] you