Hegel somewhere remarked that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He forgotto add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. (Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852)
All human relations require a history; we lack a truly joint, fair and truly shared history (Isabel Allende)
1.Conventional history misses the true horror experienced by the world at large, the one that has lived at the gunpoint of the imperial powers.We miss the violence, the impoverishment, the corruption and the destruction inflicted by the European (and North American) Empire. We miss the evidence of ‘ordinary’ people struggling against the Empire –and ways they will continue to do so. It would seem that the one recurring legacy of such violence is more violence. Time after time, even when wars end, the violence never really stops. Again and again, it is those secondary beneficiaries of the Empire –those in Western countries who (have) benefit(ed) from the violence and the plunder of the elites– and who are too afraid to challenge, let alone confront, these elites, that make it all possible. We may be victims of the endless elite propaganda (distributed, among other, via conventional history. It keeps us ignorant and submissive, at a time when it is ingood part our fear that stops us seeking the truth. What I contend is that the knowledge of what has happened and is happening is there for anyone who seeks it –if a different historical context reflective-of and pondering human rights (HR) is provided.
1a. Ever noticed? We are almost unable to find any monument, memorial or even artwork of repentance for the on-and-on massacres, rapes, genocides and plundering committed by European (and North American) powers over the past several hundred years against the peoples of Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean, the Americas, Australia, Oceania and Asia –which, let it be said, paid for Europe’s cathedrals, churches, palaces and schools, hospitals and opera houses. Of course, there are statues for some of the most racist and genocidal figures in history… They try to remind us about the ‘gains’ from their imperial slaughter and plunder without a sign of self-consciousness or regret.*(R. J. Burrowes, A. Vltchek)
*: Estimates regarded as conservative, tell us that 55 million lives have been lost since World War II alone as a result of Western colonialism, neo-colonialism, direct invasions, sponsored coups and other acts of international terror. This figure does not include those lives lost to famines, mismanagement and outright misery triggered and maintained by Western imperialism.
2. Conventional history does also not always foretell new horizons; this persuades me that too often it accommodates reality to mere form and formality. This is why we should never fall into the trap of thinking that everything is eventually forgotten. How many episodes of history have we read that sounded veridical only to end up being a complete sham: not by chance, but as a convenient rendition of ‘facts’ that hides any guilt towards Franz Fannon’s ‘wretched of the earth’. When I read history, I have to have the capacity to accept what I read, not leaving out aspects of the dignity of all protagonists especially that of the oppressed.(PabloSimonetti)
3. Conventional history has become a true burden to bear –a collection of often deceiving telltales. For the reasons I have criticized in this Reader, it tends not to move in the direction I would like it to. Significant and selected social and political events are not propelled forward into the future, but are rather left to pile up in an eternal present. Does this mean that conventional history commemorates the wrong insurgents and heroes so audaciously that it thinks it can stop time by leaving out brooding social struggles?
4. No history is mute. No matter how much conventional historians have owned it and have been one-sided about it, human history refuses to shut its mouth. Despite deceit and ignorance, the-time-that-was continues to tick inside the-time-that-is. (EduardoGaleano)
5. Despite the attempts of conventional history to neutralize their significance and their power, the myriad social uprisings throughout history, the world over, have heralded a (re)surgence of the liberating force of the masses.
6. This just shows the insanity of the elites who control the Empire. Any society or ideology that dares to put people first is demonized and ridiculed; it is ideologically attacked. If it refuses to succumb, it gets attacked militarily, it gets bombed, and eventually, it ends up being thoroughly destroyed. Where are the chronicles of the sins of pagans, Muslims, Hindus and of Christianity which have wanted converts, an chronicles about Christianity’s long history of collaboration with royalty, aristocracy, slavery, banks and business interests? We are not told about the victims of imperial violence: those who have been exploited, brutalized, raped, tortured, mutilated and killed so that we can consume more at less cost. Elites do not sponsor the exposure of their brutality in history. It is ultimately the capitalist ethic that values profit over people and uses military violence to impose the ‘free market’. Am I exaggerating? Look at the history of the world through the eyes of those who have been denied a voice in White, Western, Christian history books.(R. J. Burrowes, A. Vltchek)
In world history, we can find but a litany of lost paradises (L. Villalonga)
-History has basically cemented aristocracies. (W. Pareto)
-Ultimately, we know: Laws, and the rules established by any given society, are the product of power plays and only sometimes of true compromises among the members of that society.
7. Actually, when we turn our faces towards the have-nots in the past, what we find is what seems to be a single catastrophe that incessantly piles rubble on top of rubble. To think historically with a HR perspective, is to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. (W. Benjamin)
8. Mind you, almost all wars, perhaps all, have been and are trade wars connected with some material interest. They have been and are always disguised as sacred wars, made in the name of God, or civilization or ‘progress’. Since the Neolithic, the conquest of land by force has been the primary objective of sovereigns to amass wealth and extend the territories over which they hold sway. What is never asked is: At what cost to HR?(MalikOzden, CETIM)
9. Otherwise, things actually do change in society and in history, because many people work very hard. They work in their communities, in their work places or wherever they are, but not enough in building the foundations of popular movements –which are the only ones that (historically) bring about needed structural social change. This is the way it has always been in history. (Noam Chomsky)
10. If we follow the progress of inequality throughout history, we find that the establishment of the law of property was a first phase of legitimizing inequality; the instituting of the judiciary to defend property was the second; the third phase was the transformation of legitimate power into arbitrary power.** In that sense, the state of being rich and being poor was legitimized by the first phase; that of being powerful and being weak by the second and, that of being masters and slaves by the third –which is the ultimate degree of inequality. (Jean Jacques Rousseau)
**: Acknowledgement of an absolute right to private property is in contradiction with the inalienable right of those rendered poor to common property given by nature, for example for land. Without land, the peasants are defenseless. The human right to land is an indispensable condition for attaining autonomy. Therefore, our approach must comprise the redistribution of land (agrarian reform) to restore the social function of land (as opposed to the absolute private property of land). We must also encourage the right to the collective use of some lands, guaranteeing the security of its occupation, as well as guaranteeing food sovereignty. (CETIM)
[Note: Today, the classification of the right to property as a HR still raises controversy. It is only recognized in the Universal Declarationof Human Rights. From the point of view of HR thereafter, the right to property must neither be discriminatory nor absolute. (CETIM)].
Even if we all are immersed in history, not all of us have equal power to make history (C.Wright Mills)
Ultimately, man can be destroyed, but never ever be defeated. (Leonardo Padura)
11. Should we give up on the idea that, despite all the terrors from millennia of HR violations, history is redeemable? Centuries of repression and struggle have also had a history of claim holders countering despair, of arriving at the point where they recognize the politics of the power behind the brutality, to then mount credible struggles for HR. As Eduardo Galeano said: “At the end of the day, we are what we do to change who we are”. So, if we ever lose the concept of what Galeano’s (our) generation calls ‘realidad social’, the world is in for real trouble. It is necessary to replay each scene in world’s history, precisely because it has been disguised in ‘venerable’ language.***(G. Grandin)
***: Unfortunately, everything in ‘the new, reinterpreted history’ has reached us way too late. (L. Padura) The book “Global History: A View from the South” is one of the pioneers of global history retold from the perspective of the Third World, arguing that the countries of the South were not latecomers to capitalism, but were integrated into the global economy from the start, but in a position of dependency to the rich, industrialized North. (Samir Amin)
It is not a fad or an obsession to rewrite history (L. Padura)
Do we need to dream to move history where it belongs? (JulioMonsalvo) No!
12. A present day historian with the right focus will have to point to the causes of the centuries-long literal annihilation of vast sectors of humanity, especially first nations. First nations rightfully experience history as an endless repetition of depredation.
13. One way to develop the history rewriting skills could be to re-imagine key events. History students could write essays exploring ‘What would the world be like if the French Revolution had succeeded in the long run?’ or ‘What would have happened if Britain had permanently abolished the monarchy in the 17th Century?’ or ‘What would history have been without slavery?’
14. Additionally, we need to construct an alternative historical account of international law that tells the story of its development from the perspective of non-Europeans, i.e., a history that focuses not on events in Europe, but on the colonial confrontation between non-European and European societies. In a sense, this is to be an example of what might be called ‘history written from the margins’, because conventional history was complicit in the development of colonialism and with the unleashing of the forces of conquest and exploitation over a big part of the globe. The history we get to read tends to legitimize and maintain the North-South economic inequalities that characterize the world of today. In historically justifying colonialism and its offspring neo or post-colonialism, conventional history justifies its racial or social terms thus licensing the gross violence or the benevolent liberal civilizing mission. The historic accounts we get to read do not spare us the self-congratulatory accounts that posit colonialism as a great phase of history and not as a problem –a wonderful example of the workings of power in the politico-historical realm. (M. Kleyna)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
cschuftan@phmoveement.org