Historians = God
This seems to get our priorities wrong. We don’t know what the judgement of “History” will be, What is important, if anything, is how we see Bush’s Presidency now.
The assumption seems to be that “History” is an impartial, unbending, unequivocal final judgement. It has quasi-religious undertones. If you substitute “History” and put the word “God” in its place, the statement sounds ridiculous. In this context, history has become a secular “day of judgement”. This isn’t correct at all. “History” in this case just means a body of work by academic historians. Even in Birmingham’s history department, where I am studying at the moment, there is a whole range of nationalities, classes, political views. historica approaches and methods. Extend that to history departments all over the world and you have lots of different historians from a myriad of different backgrounds. The only thing they have in common is that they study the past; the views and approaches they bring to that vary from historian to historian.
In the future, as now, those historians who defend Bush, and those who attack his record, will do so on the basis of their ideological views and assumptions. Neo-con, Republican, “right-wing” historians (such as Roberts) will defend Bush’s record. Tim Montgomerie at Conservative Home has been putting together reasons to defend Bush’s presidency. True, it is a bit like saying that ‘the Titanic might have sunk, but my, weren’t the curtains excellent?’. But any historian concentrating on, say, US aid to Africa, or development history in general, may be more sympathetic to Bush than historians concentrating on Bush’s military and domestic record.
By the same token, leftist historians are likely to see Bush as a disaster. It all depends what priorities historians have. Even King John, commonly thought to have been one of England’s worst kings, received some sympathy with historians in the early twentieth century. John left many government records, and historians, who like having lots of records, praised his efficient royal goverment. The fact he seems to have murdered his nephew and was a military disaster was neither here nor there.
Even so, we cannot look to the future, where historians, with the benefit of hindsight, will “pronounce” and give their unwavering verdict. These will change over time - the repuation of most English monarchs has altered, and keeps altering, throughout history. We cannot and should not try and second-guess them. For now, all that matters is that Bush has helped leave the world in a giant train wreck, and now it falls to others to get us out of this mess.
Cory
