[TLDR (too long didn’t read): This Reader focuses on how there is a lesson to be followed to arrive at a new HR-inclusive history. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text].
-We do know that conventional history glorifies and tries to reinvent the past as it tries to convert old defeats into purported victories.
-“A soldier that deserts can be used for another/the next war”. “Poverty, privations and misery are the school of the good soldier”. (Napoleon) Quotes like these illustrate how the under-class is ignored by conventional history records…
History concealing the truth
-Beware: Errors of history are not the same as horrors of history. (Primera Piedra)
-The perennial demands of colonialism were always oriented towards the objectives of domination.
1. Since the beginning, the legitimization of Europe’s maritime expansion rested on the desire and the mission to propagate the Christian faith. The presence of the Catholic Church was both constant and decisive. Under its aegis, the world waiting to be found was divided between Portugal and Spain. The Church also legitimized the submission of ‘the Indians’ when it proclaimed (in the year 1537, through Pope Paul III’s bull Sublimis Deus) that they were human beings with souls and, therefore, endowed with not only the need, but also the capacity to be evangelized.
2. We do not mean to question the good faith of the many thousands of missionaries who participated in the mission to save the Indians in the next world, but we know well that the primary objective of this mission was far more practical and mundane, namely the salvation of Europeans in this world, by way of the economic prosperity that was made possible by the access to the natural riches of the New World –wither human rights (HR).
3. It is very doubtful, to say the least, that this evangelizing mission was in any way beneficial to the Indians, but there is no doubt that the mission of plundering the riches led to the level of development now flaunted by the Eurocentric world of the North Atlantic. As far as the colonizers’ cognitive investment was concerned, the prospect of penetration, plunder, and elimination/assimilation overrode all other considerations. Anything that went against such expectations was to be written off in history as being non-existent (civilization/culture, rights of any kind), irrelevant (‘primitive’ technology), backward or dangerous (cannibalism, superstitions). So was recorded colonial history… (Boaventura de Sousa Santos)
4. The perennial demands of colonialism were always oriented towards writing a Eurocentric ‘colonial history’. Colonial law, tropical medicine, etc. are all the legacy from those days. Today, we know that the colonizers characterized the societies of their colonies as simple societies, societies without their own political structures and institutions, as savage, primitive, backward, lazy, dirty, underdeveloped. Based on this ‘naming’, for centuries, the colonial policies could justify their actions of violating HR with impunity. This characterization of the colonized was the one promoted, not the knowledge of the colonized about themselves. …and conventional history was an accomplice of this… (B. de Sousa Santos)
5. If Africa would not be what it is, Western Europe would not be what it is either. Ah, Europe! That continent that gives lessons of democracy (?) to the whole world having hosted/sustained histories’ worst dictatorships and having been host of all world wars –not to count limited wars, the violation of territorial boundaries* and of HR, military coups, and invented countries installed with bombs and missiles. (Regis Debray)
*: In the 19thcentury the phrase “the big game” was used to describe competition between the British and the Russian empires for power and influence in the world. (Tony Walker)
A footnote in history would be an accurate way to define how the role of the Left has been portrayed since the 19th century…
-Advances and setbacks of peasant and workers movements have been mostly ignored or given shortschriftby most historians –and even by some self-proclaimed HR ‘experts’ around the globe. (Nora Noralla)
6. Therefore, conventional history simply too often ignored recording and conveying the achievements and setbacks of the Left –and this is not the case for other ideologies.** Europe has forever been one of the main sources of conventional history and its political ideology subliminally pervades it. The decades-long anti-colonial struggle, for instance, has been reported from European eyes and Europe’s ideas were injected into millions of people’s heads so that they ended up adopting (succumbing to) its culture. (Esteban Valenti)
**: Mind you, some of them have sprang up like mushrooms just in recent times, denying their past although they have been there for ages; they use diverse names and embrace a rightist political line –despite the fact that their ideology is a weird mesh difficult to untangle).
There is a lesson here for a new history
-There have been tyrants and murderers, and history portrayed them as invincible, but in the end, they always fell; think of it, always. (Mahatma Gandhi) Justice, equity, HR and dignity are bound to advance –if claim holders unite and arise. (Think how many statues have been torn down in the last couple years).
7. Lately, a lot has been talked about the historic injustice of colonialism that impoverished more than half of the world by looting their wealth, to this day creating economic dependence even after the independence of its colonies. Herein lies one of the aims of righting history based on the naked truth –a step towards historical justice. (B. de Sousa Santos)
8. For too many years, the story told of HR has been very shaky at best and remains unreliable and poorly explored. This does affect our worldview. Persuasive stories and unexamined assumptions thus riddle our current worldview. Intellectual honesty forces a correction. We pride ourselves on advancing beyond myth and superstition, but we are deeply immersed in the myth with wrong ideas that spring from a faulty worldview. The problem is that a worldview cannot create ideas outside its assumptions. (adapted from Deepak Chopra)
9. We should certainly pursue bigger truths and a more robust history with better accounts of the reproduction of injustice. (Zinaida Miller)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
All Readers are available at www.claudioschuftan.com
Postscript/Marginalia
-Clio was the Greek muse whose task was to watch over the course of human history. Clio would today assure Western men that their noble compulsion to record what happened in their political structures and events gives them power to have their predominance survive. If nothing else, conventionally recorded history stands as a testament to make us all believe what and who we were/are, what others in the past said they did and what actually happened. (Daily Kos)