PZ Myers. 2005 Nov 28. Watch your back, historians. <http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/watch_your_back_historians/>. Accessed 2008 Dec 04.

Posted on M00o93H7pQ09L8X1t49cHY01Z5j4TT91fGfr on Monday, November 28, 2005

Watch your back, historians

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.

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.

Posted by PZ Myers on 11/28 at 07:41 AM
Politics • Rethuglicans • 0 Trackbacks • Other weblogs • Permalink
  1. 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.
    #: Posted by just john  on  11/28  at  08:00 AM
  2. 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?
    #: Posted by  on  11/28  at  08:40 AM
  3. Oh, Canada, Cuba, Mexico and China, I expect.
    #: Posted by  on  11/28  at  08:41 AM
  4. All kinds of professions are in danger from theocrats and such. Us philosophers don't want to all be clones of Alvin Plantinga. ;)
    #: Posted by Keith Douglas  on  11/28  at  09:00 AM
  5. 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?
    #: Posted by John Emerson  on  11/28  at  09:31 AM
  6. 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.
    #: Posted by  on  11/28  at  09:41 AM
  7. 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.
    #: Posted by Kristine Harley  on  11/28  at  09:41 AM
  8. 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.
    #: Posted by  on  11/28  at  09:42 AM

  9. 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.
    #: Posted by  on  11/28  at  09:43 AM
  10. 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.
    #: Posted by  on  11/28  at  09:48 AM
  11. 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.
    #: Posted by  on  11/28  at  09:52 AM
  12. 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
    #: Posted by  on  11/28  at  09:55 AM
  13. 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.
    #: Posted by  on  11/28  at  10:01 AM
  14. 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.
    #: Posted by  on  11/28  at  10:02 AM
  15. #50944: ... and some still claim that Hinckley didn't actually kill Reagan.
    #: Posted by just john  on  11/28  at  10:08 AM
  16. 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.
    #: Posted by  on  11/28  at  10:30 AM
  17. 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.
    #: Posted by  on  11/28  at  10:30 AM
  18. 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.)
    #: Posted by  on  11/28  at  10:32 AM
  19. 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.
    #: Posted by Chris Clarke  on  11/28  at  10:43 AM
  20. 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.
    #: Posted by  on  11/28  at  11:16 AM
  21. 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.
    #: Posted by  on  11/28  at  11:36 AM
  22. 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....
    #: Posted by  on  11/28  at  11:47 AM
  23. The conservatives have had their own pseudo-historians for decades and decades. It's old news.
    #: Posted by  on  11/28  at  12:37 PM
  24. 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).
    #: Posted by Kagehi  on  11/28  at  12:49 PM
  25. 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.
    #: Posted by Keith  on  11/28  at  01:32 PM
  26. 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.
    #: Posted by John Emerson  on  11/28  at  04:02 PM
  27. 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??
    #: Posted by  on  11/28  at  05:23 PM
  28. 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.
    #: Posted by [MAC]  on  11/28  at  05:37 PM
  29. 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.
    #: Posted by  on  11/28  at  06:31 PM
  30. Harry Eagar has been making stuff up for years.
    #: Posted by John Emerson  on  11/28  at  09:25 PM
  31. "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.
    #: Posted by  on  11/28  at  11:13 PM
  32. 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.
    #: Posted by  on  11/29  at  04:26 AM
  33. 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.
    #: Posted by  on  11/29  at  07:05 AM
  34. 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?
    #: Posted by  on  11/29  at  09:49 AM
  35. 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?
    #: Posted by  on  11/29  at  11:22 AM
  36. 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.
    #: Posted by John H. Morrison  on  12/03  at  07:33 AM
  37. 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.
    #: Posted by Jedidiah Palosaari  on  12/04  at  04:28 AM