The rewriting of history has become a trend. But, more than offering a new perspective on facts narrated over centuries and even millennia, those who are engaged in the mission of erasing the past and rewriting it seem to have no limits on their imagination. Evo Morales, the coca grower leader who was president of Bolivia between 2006 and 2019, was prolific in inventions. Morales was so successful at telling fibs that, in Latin America at least, he is perhaps the patron saint of the movement.
Nothing was more symbolic than the fact that Morales instituted a second flag for Bolivia, when in 2009 he promulgated a new Constitution, which even renamed the country. THE wiphala, checkered flag with the colors of the rainbow, is a clear invention based on the chronicles of the conquerors that the Incas would have a pennant that represented their empire. Or rather, a flag that united all native peoples who lived at least from Panama to Argentina.
The forgery is so absurd that it suggests that peoples who fought among themselves, who enslaved the defeated and who left no evidence that they were a kind of pre-Columbian embryo of Unasur lived harmoniously in such a Great Homeland.
In 2019, demoralized and plunged into a crisis of legitimacy, Evo Morales tried to steal the election, let the country burn, resigned pretending to have suffered a coup and waited for the opposition (it should be noted, incompetent and corrupt) to put his feet in his hands to become the victim and recycle his image before the world. It worked.
In Brazil, the PT rewrote the history of former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva with mastery. The leak of communications stolen by hackers from “Аraraquara” – which, by a mysterious magic, changed the view of the press and the Federal Supreme Court about Operation Lava-Jato – made Lula stop being the head of the biggest corruption case in the history of Brazil to become a victim of a flawed judicial system and a hero of democracy.
The passage between the ruin and glory of PTism is already too well known to have to be remembered here. The fact that should be highlighted is that, in order to erase the past, PTism relied on a collective and voluntary amnesia that allowed Lula and his group to return to power for a third presidential term that begins in January.
Down in Egypt, there is a clamor for the return of relics stolen from the country. They want the British Museum to return the Rosetta Stone – the archaeological find dating back to 196 BC that allowed the decoding of the hieroglyphs. The Egyptians claim it was stolen, looted and blah… blah… blah.
They ignore that the Rosetta Stone lay under the sands of the desert for centuries and that only in 1799, through the work and effort of Napoleon Bonaparte’s army, was it found and started to be studied to offer us what we know about it today. In 1801 it passed into British rule, as part of what might be called the spoils of war owed by the French, which they lost.
Egypt has long claimed for its mummies and other antiquities scattered throughout museums in Europe and the United States. More recently, African countries have begun to follow suit. In 2020, in the Black Lives Matter wave, African citizens even vandalized museums with displays of African artifacts, claiming that they would return them to their original owners.
These activists act as if some of the poorest countries, often plunged into sectarian conflicts and governed by dictators and corrupt people, had been able to protect, study and disseminate the cultural and artistic wealth of their societies.
As cold as it may seem: most likely, the artifacts that today tell the past of ancient civilizations and tribal cultures would possibly not exist or would be hidden in private collections.
No one with the slightest bit of honesty would be able to deny the atrocities of colonialism. But the period cannot be limited to historical rewriting that restricts itself to negative points and exacerbates them. In increasingly common cases, it nullifies what objectively could never be denied as a benefit.
They look to the past as if history were a succession of mistakes and violations. Millennia of mistakes and crimes that need to be paid for by those who live today and those who weren’t even born.
The rewriters of history use gall instead of ink. They see the world according to their beliefs, conveniences, ideologies or borderôs. They went (and go) so far beyond reason that the world they are presenting us has nothing to do with the “version of the vanquished”. It’s pure invention.
#Rewriting #history #version #vanquished #pure #invention