Pharyngula::Watch your back, historians

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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.

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Comments:

#51001: John Emerson — 11/28 at 04:02 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.

With that "supposedly" in there, I'll just ignore that part of your argument.

#51007: — 11/28 at 05:23 PM

You are at the helm of the Exxon Valdez and it is headed for the shoals.

Technically, when Exxon Valdez ran aground on Bligh Reef, the third mate was at the helm because the skipper was off the bridge. Is Cole saying Bush is the third mate of the ship of state??

#51011: [MAC] — 11/28 at 05:37 PM

Is Cole saying Bush is the third mate of the ship of state??

There're good reasons why many refer to our administration as the Cheney administration.

#51019: — 11/28 at 06:31 PM
Who's divorced from reality? Who promised us Bush was gonna fire Tommy Franks?

Etc etc.

Sy Hersh has been spun for years by somebody at the CIA, nobody can remember the last time one of his stories panned out.

#51036: John Emerson — 11/28 at 09:25 PM
Harry Eagar has been making stuff up for years.

#51047: — 11/28 at 11:13 PM
"Outsourced to monsters like Somoza and the Shah, torture has been US policy for some decades." I know those fellows are unpopular but regarding the Somoza, I can say firsthand that very little if any actual torturing or repression was done under them (father and son), but they liked to cultivate the Supremo image. Tachito even didn't try to fight the Sandinistas, he was an obedient client and when Carter sent him a cargo airplane he took it obediently with all his personal belongings. Carter didn't have the decency of offering him a save heaven and he was assassinated in Paraguay.

Regarding the Shah, he was an incompetent comic operetta character and the country was administered by the Americans till Carter decided to leave it to Allah's personal representatives - the Ayatollahs. No outsourcing there.

I wonder how Carter would have performed in war as the commander of a nuclear submarine.

Quod natura non sunt turpia

#51059: — 11/29 at 04:26 AM
Oh, I don't think the historians will be all on one side about W at all, especially with a few conservative-funded University chairs around. Nothing very radical will need to be done to find apologists for him.
I've recently been reading a history of the Battle of Passchendaele/3rd Ypres. This battle was dreamt up by Gen. Douglas Haig and pushed through by him despite the fact that it got delayed until autumn (forcing the British to try to advance in the rain and resultant 2 ft deep mud), that the Germans were thoroughly prepared for exactly the offensive he was launching (this was discussed at some length in an editorial in Frankfurter Allgemeine prior to the attack) and that no one in the political establishment believed in it (Lloyd-George had read the aforementioned editorial). The result was 160,000 British casualties in exchange for about 700m of advance and an even more exposed salient at Passchendale than the one at Ypres. The goal of taking that whole ridge and then attacking the Belgian ports was not realized, and the entire gain was wiped out (and then some) by the German counter-offensive the following Spring, partially because the PM refused to send Haig any more men.
Haig, while not exactly stupid, had no imagination at all, no ability to change his plans to meet new conditions (as Hindenburg noted), did not listen to anyone who disagreed with him, and thought he was on a mission from God to grant the British victory at arms, especially vs the French and Americans, whom he despised. Sound familiar?
Churchill compared Haig to "a surgeon from the days before anaesthetic." Yet there have been plenty of military historians who were apologists for Haig. Interestingly, many of them have chosen to blame the French.

#51072: — 11/29 at 07:05 AM
History abrades on all sorts of tender sensibilities at least as much as biology does. It's only fair to mention here that more than one lefty has been an enemy of history, critically conceived, as well. I recall a recent pop revisionist survey of American history that breathlessly repeated the notion that the Iroquois Confederacy significantly influenced the U.S. Constitution. That claim boils down on analysis to nothing more than a very hopeful reading of this statement by Benjamin Franklin in a letter:

"It would be a strange thing . . . if Six Nations of ignorant savages should be capable of forming such a Union and be able to execute it in such a manner that it has subsisted for ages and appears indissoluble, and yet that a like union should be impractical for ten or a dozen English colonies, to whom it is more necessary and must be more advantageous, and who cannot be supposed to want an equal understanding of their interest."

The Founders knew their Montesquieu and Locke very well, and had at least a nodding acquaintance with federal government in the form of ancient Greek federal leagues and the Swiss Confederacy. There is ample evidence of their appeal to and reliance on European precedents of that sort, none whatsoever for use of Iroquois examples. Nor did the Iroquois Confederacy bear much resemblance to what the Founders came up with. And Franklin was emphatically NOT an admirer of the Iroquois, as his sneering reference to them makes clear. One would have to conclude that the Founders were influenced by the Iroquois, but then ungratefully hid that influence. Possible, but why entertain such a hypothesis in the absence of ANY evidence? Only from a well-intended but misconceived desire to do some recompense to American Indians by exaggerating their contributions to the regime that slaughtered, deported, quarantined, and otherwise oppressed them. The Indians are interesting and valuable enough without giving them credit for things they didn't do.

Because real historians, though they have political prejudices and passions, are not mere slaves to those passions, Bush will go down in history as a very bad president, in the eyes of conservative, as well as liberal and radical, historians. History will always be in danger, as it is now, of replacement by indoctrination at the elementary and high school level, both from left- and right-wing enthusiasts; but the discipline will soldier on.

#51090: — 11/29 at 09:49 AM

I've recently been reading a history of the Battle of Passchendaele/3rd Ypres.

Wasn't a young infantryman Adolf Hitler present for that battle?

#51120: — 11/29 at 11:22 AM
Keith wrote: "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?'"

Is it only the actions that you disagree with that are motivated by money, or is it a motivation/temptation for us all?

#51823: John H. Morrison — 12/03 at 07:33 AM
Here's one possible scenerio a century or two in the future:

Possibly as part of the "History and Moral Philosophy" course required of all graduating seniors, students will learn about the great President George Walker Bush. They will learn that Bush brought the US out of permissivism and moral relativism and introduced the new era of moral clarity. He fought the War on Terror, defeating the enemy Osama bin Saddam, who had attacked America on 9/11. The Bush Administration responded with tough moral clarity, standing down the weasly leftists who wanted to investigate 9/11 instead of going on the attack to punish it.

#51904: Jedidiah Palosaari — 12/04 at 04:28 AM
I wholeheartedly agree with the main gist of Juan Cole's statements. However, my personal experience belies a couple minor details. I have studied the Arab world extensively, and presently live in Morocco.

One, those in the Middle East have a very long memory. For them, the Crusades did happen yesterday. Which of us in the West are still complaining about that horendous invasion of our ancestors in 1066?

Secondly, I find a lot of those in both Lebanon and Egypt, and here, still remember Carter. I often get in conversations about politics with people in my country. They warn you not to- but that's really only if you are conservative. If you're a liberal, you pretty much agree with most Arabs, and there's no problem. The conversations always go something along a discussion of our dislike of the current leader. Then we go back, and talk about the previous leaders- Clinton is somewhat liked, but not much, nor Bush I, nor Reagan. But Carter is a very different matter. Especially in Egypt, he is remembered as a man who brought peace- but throughout my travels in the Arab world, he is remembered as a man who loved the Arabs and dealt with Arab and Jew equally and fairly.

I think the memory of Bush will be quite long in the Arab world.

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Monday, November 28, 2005

Watch your back, historians

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