[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are you care about HR. This Reader is about tearing down lies and rejecting false narratives as needed to increase consciousness about how human rights have been trampled. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text].
1. Much of what has been called ‘our shared history’ is, in reality, a string of events and narrations that relate primarily to certain segments of society and not to other. With time, this history has been imposed on us as if it were the history of all of us. This belief of an imagined common/shared past is strong and efficient –and it is claimed it unifies us all. But, mind you, it is an abstraction in which almost all of us take a passive role not aware we are being organized, i.e., guiding us in our day-to-day, in our planning of a collective future, in conditioning the struggle of our white and blue-collar workers and their expectations of how to overcome patent injustices and human rights (HR) violations. Given their bastard origin, ‘our shared history’ represents a biased history of society and an alteration of the moral order and the ‘logic’ of the world especially in the way collective struggles have been evaluated and recounted so as to discredit them in the eyes of history. (Alvaro Garcia Linera)
Take, for example:
Tearing down lies and euphemisms
2. The actual numbers of native inhabitants in the Americas prior to 1492 has been hotly debated in recent years, ranging from 40 to 150 million, but there is consensus that the massive extermination brought about by culture contact even during the first 50 years following Columbus’s voyages decimated as much as 90 per cent of the population, largely due to small pox and other diseases, beyond the mere reach of massacres, enslavement and brutality. The impact of the revisionist analysis of the Conquest has gone much further than this. Note the increasing denied calls for reparations to the descendants of African-Americans, as well as demands by the Government of Haiti for reparations from the French Government for nearly 75 years of historical debt payments to France, payments forced upon the nascent liberated country to reimburse French masters for the loss of their property (i.e., slaves).
3. More importantly, there has been an increasing consciousness on the part of the new generations in many countries of the Americas and the Caribbean about the false history and myths inculcated into our societies by the dominant class, spurred in great part by the work of writers and historians who revendicate the terrible losses and brutality imposed by European (and later US) colonial efforts. The tendency of rejecting the false narratives is a very positive one, a necessary process by colonized/wronged peoples so as to recover their own history. The tearing down of monuments represents only the most visible recent aspect of this phenomenon –the process of tearing down the lies and euphemisms we have been fed being a much larger, longer process. (Frederick Spielberg)
4. So, you see? The depiction of the world by conventional history* must on-and-on explain and justify itself in historical terms. But how does it do it? It does it by discarding all that, at one given moment, seems to deserve the adjectives of ‘irrelevant’ and/or ‘non-contributory’, e.g., indigenous and peasant cultures and cosmologies, democratic liberalism, socialism, class struggle**, national liberation movements, liberation theology, those who were tortured or forced into exile… (Antonio Gramsci, Guillermo Castro) The inconvenient facts to the prevalent ideological system are discarded quickly as if they do not exist; they are simply eliminated since it is much simpler ignoring everything that is inconvenient than to let others hear or read about them. (Noam Chomsky)
*: The compulsion of conventional history to endow states and leaders with respectable motives for their actions is far from confined to past historians. It extends across the spectrum of contemporary history. (Andrew Cockburn) But, throughout history, citizens have not been fooled; they have been first surprised, then shocked, then intimidated, and finally dominated by authoritarian leaders and movements only to, then, figure it all out. (Thom Hartmann)
**: The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles. (Communist Manifesto) So, it is in the underbelly and on the annals of history that all ideologies are proven –one way or the other… (Edmundo Moure)
And then, there are the recounts of wars…
“If you want peace, prepare for war”
5. This perverse maxim –that takes people from victory-over-your-adversary to the extermination-of-your-enemy– has been followed point-by-point by the male absolute power brokers that, for centuries, have had the reigns of our common destiny in their hands. (Federico Mayor Zaragoza)
6. Add to this the fact that, throughout history, war has been like a vacuum cleaner that sucks tax dollars out of citizens pockets funneling the money directly into the pockets of the robber barons who own the weapons factories.*** (Oliver Markus Malloy) …and where and how do we find this reflected in conventional history?
***: These days, the amount of money spent on the military-industrial complex in one year is more than enough to end hunger in Africa. Every problem on earth today has more than one solution. However, priorities are determined by politics. …So, is history picking this up?
7. History further shows that whenever protracted conflicts end, bereaved families are invariably left with questions: Besides asking Who shot my father? Why did my brother die?, they also rightfully ask Why did it all start? and Who was to blame? (Anne Cadwallader) …and that is a beginning to set the historical record straight.
8. Last but not least, some people bring up this or that historical event as a justification from what they have read. But this is irrelevant. There are no two equal cases in history and, as soon as one makes historical comparisons, immediately one begins to argue if these two are similar or dissimilar and how similar to what happened once upon a time forgetting to talk about what is central, namely what is happening here and now (Yuval Harari) –and most importantly anteceded by what exactly …not its bastard historical origin.
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
All Readers are available at www.claudioschuftan.com
Postscript/Marginalia
-I consider myself a historian more than a statesman. As a historian I must be conscious of the fact that each civilization that existed ended in collapse. History is a chronicle of failed attempts, of aspirations that never materialized and of wishes that never came to be what we expected them to be. Therefore, as a historian, I have to live with a sense of the inevitability (?) of tragedy. (Henry Kissinger)