[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are it behooves you. This HR Reader is about why, for HRs’-sake, we need to reestablish historical truth. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Traducir/traduire los/les Readers; usar/utiliser deepl.com
–So many cases are ignored by global historiography due to the dominance of a Western perspective. (Sebastian Fonseca) Or if you prefer: Where it all went wrong in history was precisely when historians chose to ignore the different forms of social reality.
1. It is impossible to erase, with one stroke of the pen, the atrocious massacres of thousands of workers in past centuries, as well as in the present one. Capitalism was born dripping blood and mud from every pore. …And it has not lost those ‘good habits’. What prevents us from putting this in the history books and teaching it in the schools?
2. At the cost of painstaking research and the systematic confrontation of the available documentation, new historians can re-establish the historical truth –a truth that does not resemble the frequent caricature that we find in many history textbooks…. Fortunately for the destinies of mankind there are those historians who, at the cost of decades-long research, restore the historical truth and put it in history books. (Politika)
History does not repeat itself by chance or fatalism: it repeats itself because there are those who write it, manipulate it, and impose it (Maria Teresa Felipe Sosa)
3. When power has controlled the narrative, truth has always ceased to be a democratic value and, more often than not, has became a tool of war. Prevention has been invoked while aggression was perpetrated; extermination was called defense; peace was invoked while bombs rained down. And too many historians bought into that discourse, wrapped in strategically complicit silences. The aggressor’s impunity has never been a diplomatic error; it has been a structural privilege, the result of a geopolitical machinery that normalized violence if it served certain strategic interests. In this context, war ceased to be a distant crime and became a shared responsibility, fueled by the hypocrisy of those who proclaimed themselves defenders of human rights (HR). This hypocrisy was guaranteed by incorporating it into a conventional narrative with biased diplomatic and political backing.
4. In conventional history, each act of aggression has been framed as a script repeated ad nauseam, arguing ‘self-defense’. And that narrative, established as dogma, for centuries functioned as a moral shield against an uninformed or simply exhausted public opinion. Therefore, the victims disappeared twice: first under the rubble of war, then from the narrated history.
5. The problem is not only who was right, but who had the right to exercise force without consequences. And, as Hannah Arendt warned, when the exception becomes the norm, the rule of law dies. The problem of war* challenges us all, not out of abstract solidarity, but because it defines the history of the world we inhabit: either a history where power has imposed its law without limits, or a history where international law, human dignity, HR and the value of life must regain their place on the global stage. (M. T. Felipe S.)
*: War involves the death of the majority to defend the life of the minority; revolution involves the death of the minority to defend the life of the majority (the middle classes have nothing to gain from war or revolution). The modern and contemporary era has been a fertile time for both wars and revolutions.
And then, wars also displace people.
Look at migrations in history from another vantage point
—The history of migration is the story of humanity and its progress. It is a story of peaceful cooperation and exchange (but also of violence).
One side of the coin
6. Migration remained and remains the key to the success of our species. Migrants have traded goods and shared ideas, like pollinators of human progress. Moreover, these days, migrants send home over $1 trillion a year in remittances and they often return with new skills and investments. (Ian Goldin)
The other side
7. Forces against Colonialism aimed to put an end to the territorial occupation of a given country by a foreign power. But, at the end, these forces did not end colonialism, they replaced it with a regime of neocolonialism. So now, we live in the ruins of social reformism, of democracy, of the endless violation of international law and a non truly existing end of historical colonialism. On the part of the colonial powers, the repression of the anti-colonial struggle was always violent. Northbound migration was/is but one consequence. In some cases, the violence was so severe that the liberation struggle fully embraced the option of war/revolution. This, because the end of historical colonialism was not a selfless gift from the colonial powers. It was the result of the struggle of colonized peoples who fought against European invaders for centuries.
8. Today, the ruling powers speak more and more of war, supposedly to guarantee peace, with the arrogance of those who know they can destroy the voices that denounce the deception.
9. Since the beginning of the millennium, we have witnessed the intensification of colonialism in multiple forms, for example,: a) the plundering of natural resources, b) unequal treaties and c) the imposition of austerity and debt by financial institutions. We can even say that the current times are times of recolonization facilitated by the global growth of far-right forces. Growing marginalization of United Nations institutions is the result of multilateral organizations being controlled by the major Western powers (IMF, World Bank, and World Trade Organization) and, last but not least, international NGOs and foundations financed by the super-rich in the US, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The voice of most countries in the world lost weight in the UN system, which, in contrast, became increasingly subservient to the geopolitical interests of the US and Western transnationals.** (all the above from Boaventura de Sousa Santos)
**: At 80, the U.N. Does not Need a Celebration –it Needs an Intervention. The commemoration of the 80th anniversary, intended to be celebratory, rather reflects the mirror to an institution on the brink. A lifetime after its founding, the United Nations remains a monument to idealism. But monuments, too, can crumble especially if it is an institution struggling with its own identity. The UN finds itself mired in a profound crisis of credibility, funding and function. It is financially crippled, politically fragmented and struggling to uphold its founding mission in an age of resurgent nationalism. A top-down reform initiative will fail to address the root ailment, which is the anachronic and undemocratic power structures entrenched in the Security Council. True streamlining cannot occur while the veto power remains a tool for geopolitical deadlock, allowing atrocities to persist unchecked. We cannot afford the risk of a prioritizing process that hampers progress and of a confusing administrative reshuffling hampering genuine change. The financial crisis is largely orchestrated by its most powerful and prolific funder: The United States. This places the UN in a terribly unsound monetary state. The UN’s operational viability is held hostage by the domestic political whims of a single member state, fundamentally undermining its neutrality, its efficacy, and the very principle of collective responsibility it is meant to embody. The theme of inclusivity rings hollow when the organization’s architecture perpetuates a post-World War II power dynamic, marginalizing the countries rendered poor. The promise of responsiveness feels empty when the body is often reduced to the stage for performative politics rather than an engine for binding action, developing non-binding resolutions that gather dust as crises gather steam. The question is whether the UN, in its current form, can survive another 80 years without a radical, foundational reckoning. Or will future generations see the UN as a well intentioned monument to an era of cooperation that never truly was? (Rameen Siddiqui, Modern Diplomacy)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
Postscript/Marginalia
–“I didn’t come to defend an ideology, I came to remember a face. That of a people that no one ever looked at. Today, I get the impression that they want us to forget everything. That they teach us to unlearn; to unlearn struggle, brotherhood, dignity… It is not their intelligence that I question. It is their amnesia. A people that does not know how to remember always ends up applauding those who have desecrated them“. (Jean Luc Melenchon)