What is history, but a fable agreed upon? (Peter Hoeg)
Until the lions write their story, tales of the hunt will always glorify the hunter(Rene Loewenson)
Take Africa: history was written and falsified by colonial ideology.
1. As a consequence, for the present,we live with no real sense of the true before, with conventional history replacing causality with simultaneity, history with news, memory with silence about human rights (HR). That is how in conventional history atrocities end up being blamed on the victims, while aggressors are decorated for bravery in the struggle against supposed emancipation. Why are thieves portrayed as judges and major political decision makers (without a single moral bone in their bodies) get away in history with disastrous decisions resulting in the most appalling HR consequences? Excesses are made to coexist with unreported dire need and want; destruction is always justified with the imperative of building –no mention of what. Economic interests are the fundament of everything. Public opinion is treated as indistinguishable from the private opinion of those with the power to chronicle and publicize it. Historians have changed the names of things so that these things can eventually skip what they really were. Inequality has been renamed merit; destitution renamed austerity; hypocrisy renamed HR; all-out civil war, humanitarian intervention; mitigated civil war, democracy. War itself has come to be called peace, so that it could go on forever. Praise of someone’s virtues or moral qualities simply ceased to rest on criteria of personal worth rather being achieved at the expense of somebody else’s vilification and degradation or by negating their qualities and virtues. (Santos)
2. Capitalism, based as it is on an unequal exchange between supposedly equal human beings, is disguised painting an idealized reality so that its very name has fallen into disrepute. Colonialism, which was based on discrimination against human beings who were nothing but equal in a true way, ended up being accepted as something natural. The purported victims of racism and xenophobia have been invariably labeled trouble-makers before they were victims. As to patriarchy, which has been based on the domination of women and the stigmatization of non-heterosexual orientations, it has been accepted as something as natural as some moral preference endorsed by almost everyone. Limits have thus been imposed on women, homosexuals and transsexuals in case they did not know how to stay within their limits. General laws have been so selectively reported-on that have allowed them to violate impunity, under such pretenses as protecting law-abidingness. (Santos)
3. Considering all this, the affected, the non-reported-on and those whose HR have been violated, settled mostly for resignation. Those who would not give up emigrated. Too often in history, things seemed about to explode, but they never really exploded because, when they did, they were not chronicled or were reported-on in a drawn-out and piecemeal fashion. But the result was that those who suffered from the explosions were either dead or poor and were picked up by history as underdeveloped or old or backward or ignorant or lazy or useless or mad –in any event, expendable. But they were the vast majority (!) even if an insidious optical illusion made them invisible. People were ‘socio-degraded’ to become expendable populations, such as immigrants or young people from peripheral areas. (Santos)
4. It was generally accepted that the common good had to be based on the opulent wellbeing of a few and the destitute ill-being of the many. But there were those who would not accept such normalcy and therefore rebelled. The non-conformists were divided though. Their myopia caused them to be divided in that which was supposed to unite them and united in that which was supposed to divide them. That is why events were chronicled the way they did. (Boaventura de Sousa Santos)
Conventional history is made up of fallacies, sophisms (apparently clever but flawed arguments) and forgetfulness (not so innocent omissions)(Ernesto Sábato)
In a way, history portrays the lives of human beings who suffer the consequences precisely of the inaccuracies of a history that is actually imposed on them. (Albino Gomez)
5. Only some historians tell us that changes in the world have been always caused by greed or by fear. Yet it is evident that we have gone through (too) long periods of greed. It is greed that has been a factor in forgetting values like solidarity, justice and HR. Now,for instance and for the first time in a long time, it is security not the economy that is at the center of conventional historians’ debates. Does that mean that we are going from a cycle of greed to a cycle of fear? Is that progress? History should want to give us a different reading: civilization has advanced not by confrontation, but by cooperation; not by war, but by peace; not by aggression but by tolerance; not by selfishness but by solidarity … and not by military security, but by human security and human rights.(Roberto Savio)
6. Has the trajectory of conventional history –one claiming to chronicle for us a professional yet Western view of fairness and justice– been truly denouncing multi-dimensional crimes against humanity exposing the succession of competing imperial perpetrators? Too many historians ‘medicate’ us and manage to maintain a clear conscience amidst the crime scene that past (and present) history have been.* Is there such an awareness in them, a hidden culpability? …perhaps one that ebbs and flows depending on the ceaseless convenient forgetfulness of such historians. It is clear from history that empires have risen and fallen –and we remain confident that those who work for true global cooperation, HR and peace will outlast the empirewith all its contradictions and denials. (J. Luchte)
*: Fast forward to modern history. I ask: Are silicon-based IT technologies fast-tracking socioeconomic gaps that conventional historians may fail to point out? (S. Harrison)
7. As regards Northamerican history, its global role and mission to spread American values around the world, was divinely sanctified and historically preordained, thanks to the genius of its founding fathers. Jefferson’s ‘empire of liberty’, Roosevelt’s ‘arsenal of democracy’, and Reagan’s ‘shining city upon a hill’ are variants on the same theme of American pre-eminence, a country that sought to colonize the planet with its ideas. The problem, globally, is that American exceptionalism has increasingly come to have negative connotations. (N. Bryant)
8. The truth is that, normally, we learn about history’s storylines in isolation. We might have a strong sense of the history of scientific breakthroughs or the progression of Western philosophical thought or the succession of French rulers, but we are not as clear on how each of these storylines relate to each other, to the have-nots, to the wretched of the earthand to HR. (T. Urban)
I hope social movements will be the ones to offer political responses to change the course and the contents of history
Their challenge is to be with one foot rooted in an accurate account of history (the real true before) and both eyes looking to the future.
9. History is not a science; it is the art of showing a clean face and hiding the dirty and smelly behind of things. (LeopoldoMarechal) So, bottom line about history, we need to awaken the ‘investigative reporter’ in us all to constantly go after the human story behind conventional history. After all, journalism is the rough draft of history –and we want to be counted in shaping it. Those whose interests we claim to serve also expect it from us.
10. Making history was never easy, and the current challenge is but one opportunity to make a tectonic shift in what is actually an unfathomable distortion.
11. I am of the opinion we shall overcome, because we have truth on our side. Truth, for too long trampled by history, will prevail.(W.L. Cullen)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
schuftan@gmail.com