Pharyngula::Watch your back, historians

Pharyngula has moved to http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/

Monday, November 28, 2005

Watch your back, historians

PZ Myers • 36 Comments (last page)

I'm sure you've all read about the recent Hersh interview that shows George W. Bush is increasingly distant from reality and is relying on his delusions of future vindication to ignore evidence now…happy fantasy trumps unpleasant truths.

But the issue is, is this president going to be capable of responding to reality? Is he going to be able -- is he going to be capable if he going to get a bad assessment, is he going to accept it as a bad assessment or is he simply going to see it as something else that is just a little bit in the way as he marches on in his crusade that may not be judged for 10 or 20 years.

Juan Cole offers a little advice.

Let me finish with a word to W. As for your legacy two decades from now, George, let me clue you in on something--as a historian. In 20 years no Iraqis will have you on their minds one way or another. Do you think anyone in Egypt or Israel is still grateful to Jimmy Carter for helping bring to an end the cycle of Egyptian-Israeli wars? Jimmy Carter powerfully affected the destinies of all Egyptians and Israelis in that key way. Most people in both countries have probably never heard of him, and certainly no one talks about the first Camp David Accords anymore except as a dry historical subject. The US pro-Israel lobby is so ungrateful that they curse Carter roundly for all the help he gave Israel. Human beings don't have good memories for these things, which is why we have to have professional historians, a handful of people who are obsessed with the subject. And I guarantee you, George, that historians are going to be unkind to you. You went into a major war over a non-existent nuclear weapons program. Presidents' reputations don't survive things like that. Historians are creatures of documents and precision. A wild exaggeration with serious consequences is against everything they stand for as a profession. So forget about history and destiny and the divine will. You are at the helm of the Exxon Valdez and it is headed for the shoals. You can't afford to daydream about future decades.

Hey, I like it, and as far as I'm concerned, Cole has nailed it. But I have two niggling reservations.

George W. Bush won't read it, and if he does, it will make no impression at all. He's not a member of the reality-based contingent, remember.
Just a paranoid thought, as a member of a profession that the Republican party is targeting for undermining…one reply would be to make sure that there are no professional historians in 20 years. At the time I was complaining about Cheri Yecke's inclusion of pseudoscience into the Minnesota science standards, she was also doing her best to mangle history: replacing it with rote memorization and jingo. Yeah, Cole, you too can be replaced with a professional propagandist.

Thinking like a Rethuglican, I fear Cole has just painted a big target on all academic historians in the US. Not that he's to blame—Yecke's example shows that they've had the historians in their sights for some time.

Trackback url: http://pharyngula.org/index/trackback/3450/rX6n8CNv/

Comments:

#50916: just john — 11/28 at 08:00 AM
I'd say that Bush will be remembered in Iraq the same way some Israelis remember .... but that would be veering into Godwin territory.

Me, I'm wondering which nations will be occupying the USA after the war crimes trials.

#50921: — 11/28 at 08:40 AM
You guys are pretty removed from reality to suggest that the President of the United States has no grasp of what's going on.
There's a reason Carter isn't remembered for the peace accords. He stank. I can't believe Juan Cole would compare Carter to Bush. You can't disagree that comparing "day 444 of the hostage crisis" Carter with "Bring 'em on" Bush is like comparing apples and oranges?

#50922: — 11/28 at 08:41 AM
Oh, Canada, Cuba, Mexico and China, I expect.

#50926: Keith Douglas — 11/28 at 09:00 AM
All kinds of professions are in danger from theocrats and such. Us philosophers don't want to all be clones of Alvin Plantinga. ;)

#50932: John Emerson — 11/28 at 09:31 AM
Awhile back someone ran into Hersh somewhere and described him as being in despair. Hersh has a long, good track record and he has the sources that Woodward doesn't, so he knows a lot of stuff that that we don't.

I really hate the jokey, game-playing, anti-intellectual attitude to politics that is prevalent right, left, and center in the US. One assumption jokey people make is that "it's all a game" and that after the game is over we'll just put away the pieces and go on with our lives. That works for stuff like school prayer, artichoke subsidies, and so on, but if the man in charge is incompetent and reckless in military / foreign policy he can do irreparable damage which gravely impacts everyone. That's why Hersh is in despair; he knows that this is serious stuff that really means something.

The Bush team has been playing to the base all along, and those people are nuts. They really believe in the seven-headed beast rising from the sea before the Temple is rebuilt in Jerusalem, etc.

And I believe that ideas from these mentally-deranged fanatics actually enters into policy making. everyone assumes that Bush is saner and smarter than his base, but what evidence is there for that?

#50934: — 11/28 at 09:41 AM
I know I'm not the first to notice this but here's what history will see George Bush as: The president who brought down the curtain on the American Century. The one who ended America as a superpower, both economically and as a source of any political moral authority. It's downhill from here, fellow citizens.

#50935: Kristine Harley — 11/28 at 09:41 AM
I think that it is a dead-on assessment of reality to say that the current "Bring it on" President of the United States is removed from reality.

He listened to Wolfowitz when Wolfowitz stated that the average Iraq was secular, and that Iraq was ripe for invasion. WRONG! (BTW, why do neo-cons like secular Arabs, but hate secular Americans?)

He listened to Chalabi when Chalabi assured him that US soldiers would be greeted with flowers and candy in the streets of Iraq. WRONG!

Bush thinks that ID should be taught alongside evolution "so everyone can know what the controversy is about." WRONG!

Bush stated that there were more existing stem cell lines than there really are available for research, so embryonic stem cell research is unnecessary. WRONG!

Bush stated that nobody could have forseen the failure of the levees in New Orleans. WRONG! He told Brownie that he was doing a "heckuva job." WRONG!

Bush, like Carter, will win the Nobel Prize. WRONG!

None of the hostages died in Iran.

#50936: — 11/28 at 09:42 AM
There's only one judgement Dubya cares about (OK, apart from his mother's), and that's the one he'll receive when he ascends to sit at the right hand of the Father. He's doing God's work, after all.

#50937: — 11/28 at 09:43 AM

Just a paranoid thought, as a member of a profession that the Republican party is targeting for undermining…one reply would be to make sure that there are no professional historians in 20 years.

They don't actually have to eliminate professional historians, they just have to produce their own historians and call them professional, and pretend they are every bit as respectable as real historians. They could call it Intelligent Revisionism, or some such. Teach both sides.

Recently Cheney has accused his critics of revisionism for claiming that the White House manufactured or slanted intelligence leading up to the Iraq war. Since he did his work ahead of time, I suppose his was previsionism.

#50939: — 11/28 at 09:48 AM
From the interview:

Other people think he's absolutely committed, as I say, to the idea of democracy. He's been sold on this notion.

This has all you bats in a flutter? Man, I thought it was something really bad.

#50940: — 11/28 at 09:52 AM
The key issue here is: what are our real motives for the start of the war in Iraq and having started it, what is our acceptable endstate?

And the answer is: very few of us know. The answers one hears are:

* To control the oil.
* The neocon Project for a New American Century thing.
* A more benign version of that, the kind that Tom Friedman envisions, a way to plant democracy in the Middle East.
* It really is about WMD.
* War profiteering for Cheney frat brothers.
* Revenge for Bush, Jr. since Saddam tried to kill dad.
* That Bush sees democracizing Iraq as his legacy.
* Or he's motivated by Biblical hokey pokey re: Israel, etc.
* Out of the goodness of our hearts to free the Iraqis.
* Etc.

Many believe that we can not just take what the admin says at face value, so the question becomes: by what method can we know the "real" reason(s) for our actions in Iraq? I have struggled with this for a few years now. I find it hard to read this administration since there are so many wild cards (how "at the wheel" is Bush, really? How crazy is he? How much influence does Richard Perle, Wolfowicz, etc. wield? What whole other can o' worms do we not know about?).

And so the country exists in this strange state where we have taken and continue to take this major consequential action and yet it is difficult or impossible to understand the motivations behind it.

#50941: — 11/28 at 09:55 AM
This seems like an appropriate place to post the following quotation, which I stumbled across in my thanksgiving reading:

[O]nce the running of the state involves a permanent and massive shortage of historical knowledge, that state can no longer be run strategically. -- Guy Debord

#50944: — 11/28 at 10:01 AM
I agree, I don't think conservatives will need to go after historians. They'll just make their own pseudo-historians, and proceed to make shit up. 6-8 years from now, after Bush is long gone, there will still be Bush apologists who get up in public and say that Iraq had WMD's all along, that Saddam did 9/11, that Bush was a great diplomat who liberated the middle east, and that Iraq is now a much better place to live than ever. When confronted by the abundant evidence that this is all false, they will simply claim that historians can't be trusted since they're all liberals, and reduce the whole issue, as usual, to a partisan 'he-said, she-said' game. The fact that real historians all say one thing and that everyone saying the other thing will all pretty much be GOP flunkies will not bother them at all.

#50945: — 11/28 at 10:02 AM
President Bush's M.O. hasn't changed since his days as a frat boy at Yale, which is to never admit when he's screwed up. If that's caused him to enter a state of denial about Iraq, that's just a symptom.

#50947: just john — 11/28 at 10:08 AM
#50944: ... and some still claim that Hinckley didn't actually kill Reagan.

#50950: — 11/28 at 10:30 AM
Jimmy Carter will always be remembered as a very decent, deeply idealist, good and pure human being and a most disastrous president. He adopted the argument that the USA was "evil" and abandoned "unsavory" American allies abroad. Nicaragua is still poorer than under Tachito Somoza, and Iran has been for the last twenty years a clerical regime of the darkest variety.

Quod natura non sunt turpia

#50951: — 11/28 at 10:30 AM
Jimmy Carter will always be remembered here as a very decent, deeply idealist, good and pure human being and a most disastrous president. He adopted the argument that the USA was "evil" and abandoned "unsavory" American allies abroad. Nicaragua is still poorer than under Tachito Somoza, and Iran has been for the last twenty years a clerical regime of the darkest variety.

Quod natura non sunt turpia

#50952: — 11/28 at 10:32 AM
Tastant -- My Theory: You know how Tammany Hall had the Tweed Courthouse? The Bush White House has this war. (Also, the Department of Homeland Security.)

#50953: Chris Clarke — 11/28 at 10:43 AM
Jaimito reminds us that the conservative US apologia for torture did not begin with Abu Ghraib. Outsourced to monsters like Somoza and the Shah, torture has been US policy for some decades.

"I do not think we should antagonize the religious when it is not warranted, though I think we should be willing to do so whenever it is.”
-- Glen Davidson

#50955: — 11/28 at 11:16 AM
While conservatives often bemoan the supposed replacement of "objective truth" by relativism, they are quite happy for punditry and opinion to triumph over facts and hard data, when it helps their cause.

Richard Viguerie is one of the founders of the neo-conservative media movement and is no mean intellectual. He was asked about the veracity of the stories being told by the "Swift Boaters of Truth" in the face of eye-witness reports that contradicted their tales. His response was chilling. It wasn't the truth that was important, it was all "a matter of opinion". In other words, if you can get people to believe that you're right, then it doesn't matter what the truth is.

#50959: — 11/28 at 11:36 AM
They always had to subvert historians too, somewhere along the way, because reality-based historians would have recorded and reminded people that there was once an outstandingly fruitful reality-based subject called science. A subject which made progress by rigorously investigating the truth, instead of making up lies which happen to be convenient for a few greed and fear-based people.

#50961: — 11/28 at 11:47 AM
The ShrubCo cabal can demonize as many "non-program" historians as they want. This will work about as well as the Stalinist attempts to rewrite history, and for the same reason: No matter what they *claim*, they don't actually control everybody in the country, let alone the world, and they never will. Humans have learned to adapt to attempts at censorship....

#50976: — 11/28 at 12:37 PM
The conservatives have had their own pseudo-historians for decades and decades. It's old news.

#50978: Kagehi — 11/28 at 12:49 PM
Sorry PZ. But I don't trust Cole as a source. Why? Cole supposedly predicted that Isreal would never make concessions to Palestine, since it doesn't actually want peace. Further, he recently implied that the Lukid is behind a lot of the stuff going on around the world, including influencing US policy, and the decision to invade Iraq. In fact, he even claimed this was a plan by them to also hit Iran, then hand part of the resulting territory over to Egypt, and the rest to Israel. Of course Israel 'did' make concessions, has been trying to make peace, there is no evidence that the groups Cole claims are fronts for the Israeli goverment are connected to them, we have yet to invade Iran (though they seem to want to piss everyone off...) and the major mover and shaker in Israel just abandoned the Lukid to start his own party. I grow less and less impressed with Cole all the time. His views seem to either be borrowed from Chompsky with regard to the ME, or maybe aquired from the universal propoganda of the ME governments, not from any real understanding. Sorry though, I lost the link to the collection of quotes he made on the subject. I believe they where all found in his writting on his website though, just not in which posts.

You know my view on the subject. We are not seeing the truth. Bush is too disconnected from reality to recognizes that we are not seeing it at all, his advisors can't force him to make speeches that include real information and the press refuses to go any place they have convinced themselves is too unsafe to report from, so they have almost no clue what it really going on. The few that have the guts to do so are all independents and because they don't toe the line and report bad things, most of the press refuse to print them. Bush isn't the only side disconnected from reality here. The difference is, he *chose* to be disconnected. Most people don't have a choice about what misinformation they are getting (or at the very least, lack the awareness that contradicting evidence is available and where to find it).

Any priest or shaman must be presumed guilty until proved innocent - Robert A. Heinlein

#50986: Keith — 11/28 at 01:32 PM
Many believe that we can not just take what the admin says at face value, so the question becomes: by what method can we know the "real" reason(s) for our actions in Iraq?

Follow the money. Money never lies, and it holds fingerprints really well. If you wan tto know why we're in Iraq, or why we continue the War on Drugs, or GWOT or why we're the only industrialized nation without universal healthcare, just ask yourself, "Who stands to gain financially from the situation?" Then you will have your answer. In the case of Ira, it's American Oil interests and Private companies who do Government contract work like Haliburton. The good old Military Industrial Complex.

Page 1 of 2 pages 1 2 >

Next entry: Things that go boing in the deep

Previous entry: Zimmer on evolutionary compromises

<< Back to main

Pharyngula has moved to http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/

Monday, November 28, 2005

Watch your back, historians

Info