[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are you care about HR. This Reader is about how powerful forces in the world have influenced what mankind’s history we are taught and what human rights aspects have been conveniently left out. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Note: You can easily translate the Readers to many languages, Use the app deepl.com and it is done instantaneously. It takes seconds to download the app into your computer or phone and translations are of high quality.
–To misrepresent history is the recourse of those who do not have valid arguments. (Louis Casado)
1. Powerful forces in the world have sought and seek to make history go away and to replace it with something that denies the very existence of history, instead looking only to the here and now at the time without asking who really did what to whom and why. Human rights (HR) cannot ignore this historical background that (has) basically depoliticizes(d) violence and (has) treats(ed) it as merely chronicling events. (adapted from Mahmood Mamdani)
2. It is the falsifying and alienating facts and myths we get from conventional history that have highlighted the inflated greatness of what, in reality, have been oppressors. National heroes, that in reality have been class oppressors, have been deified. (Luis Weinstein) [Statues in the US have been torn down, you know…]
3. Moreover, there have always been regular armed forces and policemen that have been willing to abuse, loot, violate HR and invade free nations. (L. Casado)
4. Most people do not think much of historical truth be told.* So, should not we, the ‘non-most people’, attempt to change history since conventional history ‘sold us’ its wrong protagonists? …and in so doing, amend history books that have taught us an often wrong version of events? (John Le Carre, Smiley’s People) I think it is healthy and called-for to unplug the pipes of our collective memory and finally make peace with all that conventional history left out or left behind –the truth about people’s abused rights included. (Maria Dueñas)
*: The first victim in any war is truth. Do lies kill? Yes, they do and some live by lies. (False information from intelligence services do unleash wars: remember weapons of mass destruction?). We cannot further ignore that Capitalism has carried in itself the seeds of war as clouds carry the powerful energy of a storm. (Jean Jaures)
Long bottom line
5. The tides of history make it look as if the fate of the world shifts in unison. Tides are predictable. They are unstoppable. They are acts of nature. Human affairs though, while inextricably tied to planetary forces, are also shaped by the actions protagonists took/take and/or do/did not take. When looking back at the past, it is tempting to see paths as preordained –narratives conventional history has neatly tucked into the contextual confines that purportedly make these contexts ‘easier for us to understand’. (Dan Rather and Elliot Kirschner)
6. Only in fantasyland do the good guys always win. Take the movies we watch: we learn how criminals operate, how cops catch them, how wars were fought and won, how history was allegedly made… (John Grisham, A Painted House)
7. Clearly, the dominant classes prefer a history of the winners as told by one of them. This is why the Left must promote the history from the perspective of the losers as told by one of them. (Boaventura de Sousa Santos)
8. For all the above reasons, we are obliged to reposition collective intentionality in the picture of human history. Whenever conventional historians cherry-pick facts in human history, they inevitably end up reproducing the old myths we all grew up with.** Ultimately, a society that accepts the true history of its origins as the official history and teaches it in schools and thereby infiltrates the public consciousness will necessarily be a society radically different from the society in which we live. (Giulio Ongaro)
**: The ‘perpetualization’ of historic mythology demands, above all, a permanent enemy. (John Pilger) …and who is that? The billions of claim holders?
9. Basically, all political struggles entail a struggle between remembering (memory) and forgetting (oblivion): What really happened in old and modern history? How come it happened? Why did it happen? What happened that made us arrive at where we are today? (Emir Sader)
But it is not only where we are today in history; what about looking to the future?
-It seems we are running faster-and-faster to the abyss.
10. Capitalism has achieved something that seemed impossible, namely, that opposing Capitalism can be as capitalist as staunchly defending it. History teaches us that no economic system has been eternal, no matter how long it lasted. We should thus conclude that Capitalism will also, some day, fall as much as slavery and feudalism did. But, nevertheless, there are some uncomfortable questions to ask: Will it fall when it is too late? …when it will be impossible to rebuild the world’s economy and save the planet? Will its collapse lead to an unstoppable decline of humanity? And, if humanity survives, will we then get a social order better or worse than Capitalism? Will there be a second chance for socialism? …and in that hypothetic case, will socialism have learned from its mistakes? (Federico Mare)
11. History has set some states up to succeed, and others to fail. So, we cannot fail to recognize that circumstances today were often created in the past. On the same principle, beware that that what looks like justice (or justified) to people alive today may harm their grandchildren! Does history thus dictate what people do? History may create the constraints and boundaries within which people make choices, but it is them who still make choices. (Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
All Readers are available at www.claudioschuftan.com