Samizdata

President Obama must have heard of my disappointment. He heard how my slothful and procrastinating ways lost me the opportunity to essay a therapeutic fisking, and considerately stepped in to give me another chance. I refer, of course, to this gushy article in the Times by Ben Macintyre. I meant to comment when it appeared on May 28 but I was busy and the moment passed.

I will get to Obama, but Macintyre first. After some mostly unexceptionable stuff about the importance of history in schools, Macintyre wrote:

History follows politics, and the Bush-Blair years were Dark Ages for the subject.

O frail flickering light of knowledge, only kept aflame by the devoted labours of Channel 4 documentary producers! I would say that we were a teensy weeny bit lacking of a sense of proportion here, except that all the history nobs these days say the Dark Ages weren’t. Plagues, Normans etc. can happen to anyone after all.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan showed scant understanding of the history of those regions.

Mr Macintyre wrote a well-received book on the American adventurer who was the inspiration for Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King. So I suppose he cannot really be promoting the currently popular racial theory that Iraqis or Afghans are essentially “unconquerable” or “untameable”. But let us put it this way, he is content to leave most of his readers with that impression. Personally it seemed to me that Afghan women were pretty much conquered and enslaved by the Taliban but I have high hopes that their untameable Afghan nature will be proved by their never again returning to that state.

Both Bush and Blair were technocratic leaders, more concerned with the mechanisms of power than the human context in which it was wielded. Neither possessed a historical hinterland.

Hinterland is one of those irritating words that dates the person writing it, usually to a wet Monday. Actually Bush read so much history that a professor of history at Yale had trouble keeping up with him. Blair, I suspect, is a man more fond of thinking about History than history, but all the same, I expect he reads enough to power his reveries.

Today history is suddenly central to politics again. Gordon Brown repeatedly invokes Adam Smith, an earlier son of Kirkcaldy, in his defence. David Cameron refers to the essential importance of “a shared history” in building a coherent society.

“Central to politics again” my hinterland. More like two routine examples of politicians ticking the boxes marked “famous person with connection to self” and “buzz word.”

And Barack Obama is the historians’ president, the apostle for a distinct view of the world seen though the prism of the past. His election campaign was firmly based on his own history.

A little too much so, some might say. His life prior to the presidency seemed to consist mostly of writing autobiographies.

His historical allusions are occasionally inaccurate,

Yeah.

but his references to Abraham Lincoln’s “Team of Rivals”, to the horrors of Auschwitz, to Churchill, to the Crash of 1929, are not merely political positioning (although they achieve that too), but a subtle recasting of politics that invokes a shared historical memory.

Anyone know what this means? When trying to work out what something means it usually helps to ask “as opposed to what?” but that gives no answer here. How does the new, recast politics invoke a shared historical memory in a way that the old politics did not? And does he mean any historical memory in particular?

Next week Mr Obama comes to Europe to mark the 65th anniversary of the Normandy landings, and to Ohrdruf, a satellite of the Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald that his Uncle Charlie helped to liberate at the end of the war.

The visit is a clever melding of personal and general history, evoking shared aims, spectacular heroism and the defeat of evil.

When Bush came to Europe for the 60th anniversary five years ago, was that a clever melding too?

But more than that, the historian-President will be enlisting the past to a cause, at a time when the power of history to shape our lives has never been greater, or more necessary.

Despite evoking so much gush that you would think Mr Macintyre had struck oil, the historian-President sometimes comes out with rather odd views. It might be more accurate to say that he does not notice when his speechwriters come out with some rather odd views. One example came up in the (generally pretty good) speech he just gave to the Muslim world. He said, “Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance. We see it in the history of Andalusia and Cordoba during the Inquisition.”

Hmmm. I do not claim to know much about Spanish history but I do know that the Reconquista was practically over – and was certainly long over in Cordoba (by more than two centuries, I see from Wikipedia) – by the time the Inquisition came along. To my chagrin, David T of Harry’s Place spotted the same gaffe while I was writing this post, and he seems to know a good deal. There are at least four comments before anyone makes a Monty Python reference.