Understanding history for what it is
1. As individuals, we do not really create the historical times in which we live-in. But what we have to do is to understand the problems posed and shaped by each historical time so as to try to come up with the most forward-thinking interpretation of them that eventually leads us to fair and just solutions applicable to our time.
2. Making sense of current and recent history is a subjective, value-driven activity; we do make historical errors of interpretation, i.e., judging what is true or false in history is a value-laden process. Myths have had and have the bad habit to conquer and dominate. There thus always is a historical relativity in the judgments people (and historians) make. The powerful can always boost their honor for posterity by buying themselves a good pair of historians and making them deliver; it is just a matter of a good pay-off. In this same vein, I like the quote: History negotiates its terms and collects its dues, i.e., a ‘history enlisted by commerce’. (Arundhati Roy) Historians, then, are the only individuals that can (and have) modify(ied) the past. (Albino Gomez) Most probably, from the claim holders perspective, worse things than have been chronicled have happened…and keep happening.
3. Not even the educated public is prepared to face and correctly interpret history; I am convinced that, throughout history, the lack of universal progress in development-for-all is a fact, as much as people want to tell me that history is a progressive upward spiral. (P. Weiss)
4. Picture the history of the world as the history of a ten-thousand-year war of brains and of interests between the rich and the poor. Each side has forever tried to take-in the other side –and it has been this way since the beginning of time. The poor have won a few battles but, of course, the rich have won the war for ten thousand years: The inalienable fact is that, in order to make poverty history, the history-of-poverty-making needs to be understood. (T. Lines)
5. History already has a sufficient number of pages to teach us two things: never do the powerful elect the best among us, and policies are too often set up by bad politicians who now, with hindsight, can be held responsible for historical inertia. (Camilo Jose Cela) Too many politicians apply the word ‘history’ to any banality that suits their needs.
6. For instance, the price poor countries pay to sustain the rich countries is a historical fact. After all, colonies do not cease to be colonies because they are independent. (Disraeli) In his Candide , Voltaire already had a black slave who had a leg amputated to prevent him from escaping say: “This is the price for the sugar that you eat in Europe”.
7. What we have to ask ourselves is: Is all history like this? Like the one we learn at school? Like the one historians write, i.e., a more or less idyllic, rationalized and ‘coherent’ fabrication of the hard and crude historical reality representing a mix of multiple interests? The latter has been the forever-history, the never-ending-history we have been taught. When historical (sociological, psychological and cultural) explanations are exhausted, there still is a vast grey area to get to the root of the perversity of human beings.
8. The history we are taught is made up of symbols giving them an aura of reality. But symbols do not always have to be seen as a sign of human irrationality*; they just show time-bound predominant elite-sanctioned beliefs, customs and discriminations that end up being chronicled by history. As a result, history rarely chronicles the setbacks of the largest part of its protagonists.
*: Climate change illustrates a case of irrational exuberance, of forgotten history and of widespread greed.
9. A certain continuity in history is undeniable; One cannot act ignoring it. For sure, more ‘modern’ visions cannot be adopted disregarding history. (M. Ovalle)
10. Some say history is a prophet looking backwards, i.e., based on what was and what was not, history announces what will be. (E. Galeano) Otherwise, it is said philosophers interpret history. After all, it is argued, philosophers are nothing but belated notaries that notarize what is happening in main street. (Albino Gomez)
11. So, as you see, history is not lineal. It is made up of ruptures provoked by the accumulation of energies, of ideas and of projects that, at a given moment, cause a break, and thus the new erupts with enough strength to attain hegemony over all the old forces; thus another time is set up and a new history begins. (Leonardo Boff) Revolution, although a violent break, is the most dramatic compromise with history.
12. Nothing is black or white in history; not even the glamorous chronicles of battles won or revolutions or a just cause succeeding; even there, we can detect those grey areas that cloud everything.
13. A final thought here is that, these days, we do not say or do anything that does not have numbers attached (statistics); judgment comes from the latter. More numbers, more graphs, more histograms with a % on the top and history thrusts forward defying anyone who contradicts (so often biased) statistics. But is this what we really want?
History and Human Rights
Isn’t it true that we often love and pay respect to our dead more than to those that are due respect and are alive? Take human rights pioneers, are they not too often ignored and ‘nobodied’. (Alfredo Bryce Echenique)
14. For work in human rights (HR), being conscious of one’s responsibility in history means we cannot turn our backs to the compromises of history. From this perspective, what leaves me with a bad aftertaste is realizing that, as a group of HR activists, we still are in the periphery of history.
15. Today, we have to serve not those who purport they are making history, but those who suffer from the way it is made. We thus have to refuse lying about what we know to be true and in so doing resist oppression. (Albert Camus)
16. Historically, when HR have gained meaning beyond the level of rhetoric, it has always been as a result of political contestation, often long and bitter.
HR principles are thus intimately bound to values of solidarity and to historical struggles for the empowerment of the disadvantaged. (Debora Tajer)
17. A former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights described HR as “the closest thing we have to a shared-values-system for the world” (M. Robinson 2007). From such a historical perspective then, it is the mobilization of claim holders for the legal recognition of HR that will offer the most plausible route to (by nonviolent means) achieving the transformation of national and international institutions and practices that deny opportunities for good health and for a long life to literally billions of people. (Ted Schrecker)
18. The rich are always one step ahead of activists, you would say, right? Well, not anymore if we succeed in explaining key historic facts from a HR
perspective*; for this, for every step they take, we will take two. We are not the owners of history. But it is time we were. (Z. Acevedo Diaz)
*: Herein the thrust of this Reader.
19. In HR work, we are all bound by the unfair rules of history; the prevailing social order can only be subverted through international work. Motivation for change comes from the effervescence of the masses. (R. Luxemburg)
20. All this having been said, I contend that, in the era of HR, ingenuity will never again be an ingredient of history.
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
cschuftan@phmovement.org