“It is impossible that it is impossible to change our history” (Graffiti in the Darío Salas Highschool, Santiago, Chile).
1. All my life I have been an impertinent person;is this why history interests me? I have for long maintained that traditional historiography, i.e., mainstream history, has not paid attention to human rights (HR) thus generating the wrong impression that, with counted exceptions, common people have overwhelmingly been incapable to ‘make’ history. Such a deficit has distorted people’s image and is an unacceptable interpretation.
To me, the silence of the defeated and the downtrodden is like ‘the holes in the cheese of history’, but the holes are not enough for cheese to stop being cheese* (Roberto Ampuero)
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*: I will not here mention the holes in the cheese of history regarding the history of Asia and Africa, holes that most of you readers never got to study at school, i.e., the ethnocentric aspects of history which would make for a whole new Reader.
Historians not only record the past, but also record that which worries them about the present.
2. History has been a discipline largely indifferent to suffering, injustice and appalling HR violations; it is told primarily by the victors. Is history, therefore, reliable? Does it convey reality? If not, what then is history if it can-be and not-be a true reflection of reality? Does this mean that, in this realm, we have to talk about anti-history when the tale is recounted from the perspective of the defeated and downtrodden? (If so, this new anti-history is not to be considered a subversive version of history!). The past belongs to humanity as a whole: Yes, but have we been made accomplices, victims and/or survivors of how it has been and is being recorded? Are we loosing important collective memory –and thus suffer from selective amnesia– as a result? We can indeed accuse mainstream historians of not recounting history as it really was. In each era, history may have been received as novel and revealing –until somebody unveils its imposture.
3. Which conquerors in the history of the world did not burn the history of the conquered to impose their own version of happenings? They aimed-at becoming, and de-facto became, the medium (artifice) of the actual frequent rewriting of history. Take the evangelization process: Was it only an ideological thrust aimed at hiding the real interests that seduced and inspired the conquistadores and colonists? At the heart of evangelization was the silencing of the historic past of those conquered. It has particularly been wars of conquest that silence those who want a new narrative to prevail over the recounting of facts by mainstream historians.
It is more; there are holes in the conscious part of our collective memory(Johan Galtung)
4. Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist said (and the Chinese before him) that the shadows of history are long and dark; that trying to jump over them does not help; they follow us. We cannot get away with the misdeeds of the past hoping people will forget. At their worst, these misdeeds have been nothing short of HR calamities –not only for the victims, but also for the perpetrators now standing accused. Slavery, for example, was forced labor with chains and whips; genocide is often only whispered by mainstream historians, as is ethnic cleansing. One day, these shadows do to us what we did to them, making our worse fears self-fulfilling… The darkest shadows never really leave the inside of our collective subconscious. The feeling of being on the wrong side of history, not only losing wars or an empire, is now more-and-more coming to many. It is a feeling of having been led to slide downhill;indeed an uneasy feeling. Leaders try to find somebody ‘outside’ to blame, but the shadow follows the victors and the oppressors faithfully. Yes, people are reacting. How? (How does one process dark shadows with dire negative HR impacts in history?) By confronting them! Submitting them to International Truth Commissions (on slavery; on White against Red and White against Black, on Brahmins against Dalits and on Haves againstthe Have-been-deprived).**
**: The refusal to accept setting up such international commissions/tribunals is itself self-incriminating, isn’t it?
5. Explanations must be found, because a strategy without understanding the whys is liable to bring about violence and is empty (like one-time street protests). Make no mistake, there is no way the world forgets the past; it stays in the deep culture, brooding collective nightmares; more so if people are barely surviving and are being politically repressed. In confronting the truth, the 3Cs, Confession-Contrition-Compensation, would help;it would help to heal the tortured, those whose rights have been trampled for generations… It would do wellto both sides, all sides, and the cost is little. No! to distancing ourselves from the misdeeds of the past. Bring them to the open. The track record of the past is too dark to simply gloss over it. People’s movements must take the initiative; bring the ball to their court and play it. Many groups have already started, many more must follow.
Mainstream historians are actually collectors of big-events’-memories (are they therefore ‘memorialists’?)
6. We have said these historians have too often failed to reflect the history of the downtrodden, namely failed to chronicle the fate of the ‘anonymous-or-no-names in history’. Somehow, they vanish in the fog of history as officially recounted. (Eduardo Galeano) Actually, at best, they recount what prompted the bravery of an exceptional hero who rebelled against power and against abject HR violations and launched the building of a better society… and this is often only found in the small print of mainstream history.***
(J.R. Ribeyro)
***: The Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap who defeated the French frowned at the manyglorified headlines glistening under the pens of Western writers such as “The Victor or Mastermind of Dien Bien Phu” or “The most feared enemy of the French and the Americans”. He was not speaking from false modesty. He was convinced that mighty upheavals in world history are born from the interplay between various objective factors in the relations between haves and have-nots; itis the capacity of great leaders of the people to exploit this, given the right circumstances. (A. Ruscio)
7. Until the middle of the 20th century what we had was a positivist history. It was not based on the downtrodden. It was based on kings, generals and important politicians –and that is not what history now ought to be. Now, history is to be more social, for instance, including oral history complemented with other social sources. (V. Navarro-Rosenblatt)
8. Yes, chronicling about the fates and fortunes of the poor sectors in society is too often missed. For instance, the history of the influences of various happenings on food shortages is familiar, but the consequent impacts on the health and survival of the oppressed are much less well told, as are the historical ravages of infectious disease outbreaks and interconnections between food crises, epidemics, social disorder, wars and conflict. The structural causal processes affecting health outcomes seldom reflect the historical facts behind appalling social conditions, the violation of HR, despotic governance, militarism the resulting demographic stresses. Up to three millennia of evidence of impacts on food shortages, famines, starvation and deaths can be found in textbooks, but little is found about their social and political causes. The truth is that historians of the time provided assessment clues of poor quality. Generic words such as ‘plagues’ and ‘poxes’ are evitably obscure. In summary, the broad health-risk categories of under-nutrition and starvation, infectious disease outbreaks, and conflict and their relation to, for instance, warfare, are insufficiently accessible for historical study. One simply has to question the quality of the evidence reported in historical accounts. Bottom line, during much of the 20th century, and before, there was an energetic debate over the inclusion of socio-political consequences on the marginalized in historical analysis:you can only guess which position mainstream historians took. (T. Mc Michael)
9. There is an unexplained mystery in the history of ideas: an idea may be right and true….sometimes for centuries…without impinging on the public debate or collective consciousness. The idea remains unacceptable until that mysterious moment the Greeks call kairos(‘the right time’)comes. I ask: Has kairos arrived?
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
cschuftan@phmovement.org