[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are you care about HR. This Reader is about the unwritten facts of history and how they reflect a longstanding HR bias. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Traducir/traduire los/les Readers; usar/utiliser deepl.com
–Historians create history and history is built upon the stands they take in narrating it. (Abu Safiya)
–History is nothing but lies that have been agreed-on. (Napoleon)
Know about history …and its pitfalls
1. History, both the recorded and the real, can indeed, with a significant amount of research efforts, be elucidated. This implies paying attention and discovering complementary antecedents in order to achieve explanations that allow a new understanding and coherent interpretation of facts, actors and historical processes (especially of the ignored behind-the-scene actors or of those not having been allowed to act). This is the challenge that demands the intellectual adventure of critically interrogating history in which historical facts, whether they occurred recently or long ago, turn out to be absolutely contemporary and increasingly direct antecedents for an explanation of our present.
2. Therefore, what happened to the wretched of the earth is not the result of the punishment dispensed by capricious and cruel gods, or of destiny, but of the role imposed by the voracity and will of those who were able to take possession of what belonged to others, whether by influence, by deception or by force of arms. Let us note that empires would not exist without the violation of a respectful coexistence of the rights of others and the construction of lies for local and international use. (J. M. Neira)
History is not determined, and the future is ours to create (Max Lawson)
–We are just learning about how unequal we have been in the historical past –and that tells us something also about our present and perhaps even about our future. (Branko Milanovic)
3. It seems to me that for rich elites, it is always very helpful to see history as inevitably leading to the society we live-in today. That for all its faults, where we are today is the only place we were ever going to be, so we must make the best of it. This historical determinism is much in evidence when it comes to inequality. The widely written-about and, therefore, widely-held-belief that human history shows us that inequality was a necessary condition for the rise of big, modern societies is bogus. This, in turn, is meant to make us believe that inequality, while clearly beyond suboptimal in many ways, is basically the price we pay for urbanized, civilized life.
4. But how valid is this common understanding of human history? Interestingly, it seems there is very little truly historical evidence to support it. There is nothing natural about inequality, nothing given about hierarchy, no necessity to have rich nobles who are feted by the majority of the much poorer population. On a much broader scale, history is not something that simply happens to humanity, it is something that we can (or others have) shape(d) and create(d) in many different ways. This is not to say everything is a blank page. There are, of course, huge forces to be taken-on and to overcome in order to create a more equal world.
5. As Marx famously said, “people make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances already existing, given and transmitted from the past”. All this shows that the future is not determined, and inequality is far from inevitable. (M. Lawson)
The problem has always been that unwritten aspects of history can simply not be read (Leonardo Padura, Personas Decentes)
6. This assault on history has unleashed the fury of dozens of activists who cry out in cyberspace in an attempt to counter (not to allow) the blunt make-up or ‘sweeping of real history under the carpet’ that has never been corrected.
7. Is the rescue of the image and methods used by the many repressors* depicted in conventional history an attempt to exonerate them and give them immunity? Reading about the suffering of the victims when the victimizers disguise themselves as victims of ‘obedience-to-superiors’ exasperates us, especially when they say: “The culprits are others, the times were different, we did what they asked us to do”. The mere thought of it provokes our indignation and our frustrations are relieved by feeding us forgetfulness so that nobody remembers anymore. It is like so many other things lost and erased (some by the passing of time itself, others by calculating and willful political actions –but many directly attributable to our apathy!).
*: Demagogy most often honors demerit. There are even countries that honor criminals with street names and/or monuments or statues. (Politika)
8. But the past never ends. The past is all that has been. So, we seek a new compilation of history that makes the burden of those who were left out escape oblivion. Forgetting is a way of hiding. So many things melt under layers of intentionally programmed oblivion. Rewriting the past, even if it seems to be in vain, is a historical obligation. But, beware, the historical truth has aspects that can even be painful –although liberating especially when it is turned upside down and makes unexpected leaps to one side or the other. History never ends, but as it goes-by, it leaves lessons to be learned. (L. Padura, op cit)
9. Now for a couple of my one-liners
–The history we are taught contains so many what-really-are slogans recorded for the purpose of simplifying it.
–Reading history saddens me; it shows me that we come from disasters and reveals to me that, as a species, we are heading for worse disasters. (L. Padura)
-Even during epochs when the storms of history rage, sooner or later, the banal, the every-day, emerges out of the shadows; the history of humble people cannot be brushed aside forever by the ‘great events’ we read about in our history books. (Milan Kundera, Life is Elsewhere)
–There are those who want to shut out history; with it, its humanizing aspects are lost.
-When the doubts are left behind, the questions about the true meaning of what happened is lost. (Luis Weinstein)
–History in the last 175 years: Capitalism’s playground?
Bottom line
— We must look at history as a discipline that must ultimately uncover the truth and complete (and, if necessary, change) the historical narrative.(Neil Asher)
10. “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” declares a character in a famous novel. The world may seem to be on the cusp of a new era, with its promise of a new global order, but the Global South still has to awaken from the nightmares of conventional history of the last 500 years. It is not coincidental that the birth of Capitalism also saw the beginning of the colonial subjugation of the Global South. Only with the coming of a post-capitalist global order will the nightmare truly end. (Walden Bello, Shalmali Guttal)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com