The silent and cold who will write presidential history

Soon after he assumed office for the second time, Barack Obama, the US president, summoned a number of leading scholars who in the US are referred to as “presidential historians” to the White House and wined and dined them. From there, however, according to one report of this august gathering, these eminences "saw that the type of discussion he wanted would be different from their talks with previous Oval Office occupants."

The memory of oppressed people is one thing that cannot be taken away. - Howard Zinn

The US president has made a habit of meeting with his future American historians. "At three private annual gatherings during his first years in office, he asked pointed questions: How did Ronald Reagan engineer his 1984 re-election despite a poor economy? Where did the Tea Party fit in the tradition of American protest movements? Theodore Roosevelt bypassed Congress to launch progressive programs; could Mr. Obama do the same?"

The point of such presidential largesse was of course not lost on his future historians: "The president was coolly eyeing American history in order to carve his own grand place in it, the guests said in interviews later. 'It was almost as if he was writing his own history book about himself,' said David M. Kennedy, a professor at Stanford University.”

The postmodern emperor writes his own history 

The ancient and medieval worlds are of course replete with monarchs and emperors having their court jesters-come-historians assure him that he was indeed God’s gift to humanity. So this much of the story in Obama’s contemporary rendition of those bygone dark ages is not surprising. He is done politicking and before he leaves office, starts his lucrative speaking tours and oversees the establishment of his presidential library, he wants to make sure he has a lovely portrait in the halls of the White House and some nice niche in the pantheon of American presidential history.

The question of “history” (and all that that hefty word can mean) accompanied Obama when he assumed office. It looms now as he gets ready to leave. Just about a week before he delivered his penultimate State of the Union address on 20 January, the New York magazine repeated that gesture by asking 53 historians to do the same and reflect on how history will remember president Obama.

"It’s a fool’s errand you’re involved in," one such historian responded, "We live in a fog, and historians decades from now will tell their society what was happening in 2014. But we don’t know the future. No one in 1952, for example, could have predicted the reputation of Truman a half-century or so later."

Most of these historians thought (in different ways) that being the first black president would matter in one way or anther when this still amorphous “history” turns its attention to him. Others thought his presidency was more a continuation of his predecessors rather than a transformation.

It was not just the physical location of these historians (whether at a White House dinner table or around a question posed by an American periodical) that seemed somewhat parochial: their colectedvantage point was domestic to American history. When these historians did turn their attention to such global issues as Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, etc., they mostly saw the matter from the angle they consider "American foreign policies". In the US, this seems a perfectly legitimate and straightforward perspective for president Obama or other Americans to wonder how will he be remembered.

Who gets to write history? 

But is American history is just American history? Is the writing of the history of a US president only the task of American presidential historians? I was two years old when US president Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered a military coup that toppled a democratically elected prime minister in Iran and re-installed a runaway tyrant to power. The incident changed the course of history of an entire nation, my life included. Do I and my generation of Iranians have a say in President Eisenhower’s history? What about the Vietnamese about Presidents Kennedy and Nixon? What about Afghans and Iraqis about the presidents Bush, or Palestinians about every US president since 1948?

In this day and age, with the chief executive officer and Commander-in-Chief of the most deadly military machinery on planet earth, is an American president only an American president? Can a man sit in a house in Washington DC and command the unfathomable power to send deadly force—ranging from conventional army to death squads to snipers to drones—around the globe with the push of one proverbial bottom or the stroke of a presidential pen, and then imagine his history written only by those he can invite for dinner?

The answer is of course an unqualified no. These "presidential historians", all without exception American, are not the only ones who will write that history, with the memories and souvenirs of their White House dinner sitting at their writing desk. There is a different constellation of memories that is also at work in writing such presidential histories. "The memory of oppressed people," as the late American historian Howard Zinn put it, "is one thing that cannot be taken away." He then added: "and for such people, with such memories, revolt is always an inch below the surface." But "such people, with such memories" also have a say about "the presidential history" of US presidents.

The history of president Obama (and his immediate predecessors) will also be written by the dead bodies of Afghan, Iraqi, and Palestinian children, and by other dead children in Somalia and Yemen, and wherever else a bomb or a bullet with the stamp "made in the US" marks its point of departure.

From behind their cold graves, these children are the silent historians of President Obama and all the other US presidents before him. What US historians call President Obama’s “foreign policies” is domestic to the graves marking a landscape from Gaza to Baghdad to Kandahar.

As Israeli warlords were dropping bombs on defenceless Palestinian children, slaughtering them even when they were playing soccer, what did President Obama do? He replenished those bombs apace so Israel would not run out. Does he not think those dead children have a say about his “history”? Just because they are dead, it does not mean they cannot speak, sing, read, or write. They may not speak or write their stories and President Obama’s history in English or in Hebrew, the two languages that he and his closest confidantes and allies can read. But they do write. They may write only in Arabic, or Dari or Pashtu or Somali, or Urdu. But they do write.

The real historians

It is foolhardy for Obama to think that by inviting a handful of “presidential historians” to the White House and wining and dining them he can assure a dignified place for himself in history. The mild liberal criticism he might get from American historians pales in comparison to the much harsher judgment of the real historians of his presidency: the silent graves of innocent Afghan, Pakistani, Iraqi and Palestinian children. On those page his fate would be not that different from such murderous dictators as Saddam Hussein or Bashar al-Assad, the murderous Islamic State, al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

The silenced voices of innocent children murdered by his drones are much more accurate “presidential historians” of who Obama was and what he did, than those compromised scholars who attend dinners with him at the White House. You cannot play an emperor around the globe and then summon a handful of American presidential historians to your table and ensure your place in history. No sir! The writing of that history has long been wrested from those pens and laptops and made global by virtue of your own global and planetary military might, your own drones, your own “kill list” and by virtue of that satellite settler colony you keep arming to murder more Palestinians and steal more of Palestine.

Here are only four of your future historians, Mr President: Ismail Mahmoud Bakr (9), Ahed Atef Bakr (10), Zakariya Ahed Bakr (10), Mohammad Ramiz Bakr (11). Four historians just from one Palestinian family who were playing soccer on a Gaza beach when Israeli naval boats with perfect accuracy cold-bloodedly murdered them. Don’t you think they and their kindred souls from one end of the Arab and Muslim world to another have something to say about your “history” sir?

So next time you invite American presidential historians to the White House, quietly whisper into an ear or two nearby if they can read Arabic, Dari, Pashto, Somali or Urdu?

Those dead and silenced Palestinian, Afghan, or Iraqi children for whom you never uttered even a word of sympathy: they too are your historians, and they alas are beyond the reach of any White House guest list, sir. The sighs of their young mothers, the mourning of their bereaved fathers, young brides whose husbands are buried with their living dreams, they too have a way of writing your history, sir. The interrupted lullabies of mothers for infants murdered in Shujaiyya in Gaza, juvenile joys buried in Kandahar... dead poets from Baghdad will have a lot to say about you and your predecessors, Mr. President.