[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are you care about HR. This Reader is about how life for the have-nots in times gone by was more complicated and dreadful than what our history books tell us. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Traducir/traduire los/les Readers; usar/utiliser deepl.com.
1. As it is taught today, history is centered on the country or continent where its historians come from. Nationalisms have been dangerously held over in conventional history. (John Scales Avery) We simply have to ask: When are historians projecting their own ideals upon an idealized past? (Adam Gopnik)
2. Life is more complicated than the history we are being taught*; details can be and are very important …not only for historians, but particularly for claim holders. Highlighting the memory of social groups victims of human rights violations is necessary to foster a solidarity and a social identity with them in the struggle of today’s claim holders. (Edgardo Lander)
*: Life, always (or almost always), implies hope, however remote and unfounded it may be. Peace, tranquility, spiritual harmony? Perhaps it is asking too much for those people rendered poor who have been at the mercy of the erratic wills of history to enjoy these. (Leonardo Padura, The Transparency of Time).
3. Believing (or pretending) that one lives outside of where history has taken/brought us is absurd. To think that we can forget history and the abuses of human rights (HR) committed to past generations is naïf and tantamount to accepting that it is not part of a reality that shapes us today. (L. Padura) Today’s claim holders will simply not be helped if they ignore the past!
Under its showy façade, Western civilization’s history hides a picture of hyenas and jackals (E. Che Guevara).
4. What has been understood about what the ‘the West’ has meant has changed over time. First it pertained to Christianity, then to colonialism, then to capitalism and to imperialism and then to neoliberalism –all these having been part of the faces of ‘the West’. In modern times, the latter understanding brought about liberal(?) democracy, as well as only purported decolonization**, forgetting self-determination, human rights (HR) and rules-based-international-relations (always making it clear that the rules were established by and for the West and only complied-with when they served its interests). It all led and ended up in the globalization we live under today.
**: In the 1960s, after decolonization, President Sékou Touré of Guinee told President Charles de Gaulle: “We prefer poverty in freedom to wealth in slavery”. [Colonizers were at the same time telling the colonized that decolonization must still involve ‘interdependence’–clearly an asymmetric one; not one between equals(!). …wither the history of true national sovereignty].
There is not a single museum on the history of colonialism in the whole world
5. Colonialism has not really been repaired, no historical justice has been done, no reparations, not even any recognition of the colonial legacy. Development aid policy, too, often remains mired in a neocolonial attitude that treats people like children in need of education instead of seeing them as victims and descendants of a crime against humanity. Take Africa: The penetration of colonialism in its countries was so profound there that no cooperation or development work has been able to change anything. (Tsafrir Cohen)
Scanning the past: To this day, conventional history has not helped us to grasp the role power played in shaping how historical events truly unfolded (Roberto Savio)
6. Yes, mystifying history hides the fate of those that succumbed to HR violations and the fate of those who died for the HR cause.*** (Samir Gendesha)
***: Take the chronicling of wars in conventional history: No one dies for the fatherland, but dies for the industrialists (Anatole France). So, stop talking about defense enterprises when we truly refer to a bunch of merchants of war. (Alberto Portugheis)
7. Moreover, historically, in the past, peasant people did not show much enthusiasm for the emancipating ideas of their condition, perhaps too accustomed to the servile and submissive obedience to the power of their rulers and masters. On the other hand, for those who owned land or businesses, any peasant emancipation was seen as economically harmful, because it tied them to a less profitable system: Do you remember having read this in your school history books?****
****: Fundamentalisms, the arrogant lust for power and the infinite strategies used by some to deceive, to exploit, to govern and to screw others; these have been omnipresent attitudes since the times of the caves and are also seldom delved-into in history books. (L. Padura)
Scanning the future: Are the days of Western-led globalization coming to an end?
8. The history of empires shows that contraction (shrinking influence) goes hand in hand with decline, and that decline is irreversible and involves many HR violations and much human suffering. The literature on the decline and on end of empires shows that, except for exceptional cases in which empires are destroyed by external forces (such as the Aztec and Inca empires with the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors), internal factors generally dominate. It is posited that the war in Ukraine is the great accelerator of the contraction of the West.***** (Boaventura de Sousa Santos)
*****: When civilizations cease to sustain themselves, no military legions can prevent their total disintegration. (Joseph Brodsky).
An afterthought
9. Ever thought about this? Maps are powerful. People have used them to make sense of the world. But maps do not always tell the same/true story. He who has the power to compile the history about us and our communities determines who gets to draw the maps and who to write our history. How can people reclaim power over their own maps and histories? (Bob Alotta, Mozilla)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
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