[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are you care about HR. This Reader is about how historical myths have obscured a long history of HR violations. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Traducir/traduire los/les Readers; usar/utiliser deepl.com
–George Orwell summed up why narratives about history are crucial: “Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future”.
1. In so many universities, history professors and experts keep reaffirming the accuracy of their knowledge of conventional history and their ability to communicate it as ‘the truth’.* But the clarity they convey is more illusory than real. They do not know what we, by analyzing the course of history and reinterpreting it, can deduce with certainty regarding the human rights (HR) that have been universally violated throughout history. (Franz Kafka)
*: If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking. (George Patton)
History does not tolerate fake make-ups
2. Among those professors (and us), some do not want to see the truth while others de-facto accept a bunch of historical half-truths or lies. Today’s pains are the product of yesterday’s betrayals and the-day-before-yesterday’s crimes. No society can live pretending to believe in lies; our generation lives immersed in these historical lies. (Louis Casado). Long after, historians take the liberty to sift through the facts —the question is which facts and recounted and how… (Joe Lauria)
3. Historical context is also consistently buried by the corporate media making it impossible to understand the true history. The Establishment media actually, in fact, tries to suppress history. (It is like opening a novel in the middle of the book to read a random chapter as though it is the beginning of the story…). Providing true historical context, somehow, is taboo. So, the out-of-true-context reporting sounds like (or is?) propaganda. (J. Lauria)
The tendency towards historical myths is innate (Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence)
4. Certain historical figures disturb us, but attract us, even when sometimes having clearly been eccentrics; but we defend them; we accept their faults as the necessary complement to their merits. The place they occupy in history is debatable. Undoubtedly, they are regarded with disdain by others who rightfully denounce(d) their actions. In principle, these characters may have seemed extravagant, but subsequent trials have come to confirm that they were harmful to history…
5. Fables have been invented about them and then given fanatical credence. It has become a habit to present the great figures of history as models of virtue while covering up their faults. In the course of time, a legend is created with so many details that any prudent historian would have hesitated to relate, but there are so many unwise historians who fail to refute widespread errors and omissions… Other historians belong to a school of those who believe that human nature is, not only as bad as it seems, but much worse. They have an unerring eye for discovering the dastardly motives of apparently wholly innocent acts. (S. Maugham)
A deep engagement with the theory and the history of human rights is more than an intellectual pastime (Matthias Mahlmann)
–Critical historical junctures, like the present one, create openings for new visions emphasizing HR. (César Rodríguez-Garavito)
6. The historical assessment of HR has a profound political significance; it demands that, based on it, we reimagine HR. This can be accomplished, not only by criticizing the shortcomings of their past and ongoing legal and political practice (or non-practice), by exposing their abuse and by identifying their blind spots, but also by reasserting the grounds and principles of their profound appeal.
7. The historical account of HR must be analyzed in its complexity. Key to perceptions of HR are, not only its explicit moral roots, principles and legal codes, but also more importantly social practices –not least the struggles of human beings through the ages for what they thought to be their due.
8. So, begin exploring a neglected part of HR history we must! Our historical moral experience is very important for a history of an idea of HR that aims to avoid ethnocentric blind spots or even racist bias.
9. Human rights building blocks passed through a long, twisted and discontinuous process to become the recently developed explicit idea of HR as an ethical, political and ultimately legal concept. We cannot ignore this. It is thus a mistake to depoliticize the intrinsically political project of HR in history. Political preconditions are needed for the enjoyment of HR and of the principles of egalitarian justice**, as well as for a substantive obligatory solidarity and, last but not least, for respecting the intrinsic worth of human beings.
**: How I wish Martin Luther King was right when he said: “The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice”. …It certainly does not work for reparative justice since justice is often the mask for the injustice of the powers-that-be. (Politika)
10. Human rights would make no sense if all humans were not equally worth the effort of guaranteeing their rights in ethics, in their politics and in laws that guarantee their capabilities to pursue their particular vision of life –all the way to contemporary history. (M. Mahlmann)
11. All the above said, we urgently need to move from a contextual critical thinking, to a historical critical thinking on HR, where it is understood that we must look to the future with a clearer idea of their past evolution. (Primera Piedra Magazine)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
Postscript/Marginalia -I cannot but think about the example of monarchies: Monarchies, based on heredity, are the antithesis of HR culture in which states draw their legitimacy from the will of the people. Monarchies lean towards authoritarianism (only ‘lean’?) by reducing citizens to ‘subjects’ of their monarch (from the Latin sub and jacio, meaning one-who-is-under-the-power-of-another). Hereditary monarchies impede the development of a HR culture. Not only are individual monarchs not voted-in, but the concept of a hereditary monarchy as a political structure has never been put to a popular vote. (Kate Bermingham) [Something brewing in the UK…?].