ARTICLES
Patrick Lawrence: Becoming Who We Are
The following is an edited, amended, and condensed version of a speech I delivered in Zurich’s environs earlier this month. The occasion was sponsored by Zeit–Fragen, a twice-monthly journal that also comes out in French and English as Horizons et débats and Current Concerns….
Patrick Lawrence: ‘Automated Murder’: Israel’s ‘AI’ in Gaza
“Technological change, while it helps humanity meet the challenges nature imposes upon us, leads to a paradigm shift: It leaves us less capable, not more, of using our intellectual capacities. It diminishes our minds in the long run. We strive…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Europe’s Identity Crisis
As European leaders continue to import a version of U.S. militarism, rearmament will cost the Continent its postwar social contract. It is many years now since the French, bless them, revolted as Disneyland Paris arose near the previously uninvaded village…
“‘It is.'”
A novelist confronts the siege in Gaza. The Floutist is pleased to publish for the first time, an excerpt from Peter Dimock’s novel in progress. This “fragment,” to use Dimock’s term, is nothing less than a literary meditation on the impunity…
Patrick Lawrence: Imperium: Decline on the Way to Fall
I just read a most remarkable piece in The Seattle Times—remarkable for its bluntly nihilistic candor. The headline atop Ron Judd’s August 2021 essay for The Times’s Pacific NW Magazine gives a good idea of the writer’s point: “The decline of American…
Patrick Lawrence: Late-Imperial Duplicities
As I was saying to Diocletian over Prosecco just last week, it is hard to run an empire these days. You have to lie to people more or less incessantly to keep the troops minding the perimeter in supplies. No…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Authorized Atrocities
Israel’s lawlessness has a history that those in the West share with the apartheid state. It is remarked often enough, including in this space, that Israel’s savagery in its determination to exterminate the Palestinians of Gaza — and we had…
Patrick Lawrence: Old Man Shouting, The American Empire is Doing Great! But It Isn’t
Democratic elites and the reporters who clerk for them were effusively approving of Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech last Thursday evening—not so much for what he said, which came nothing new, as for the demeanor of our enfeebled president. Never…
IMPEACHMENT: A Rapid Succession of Events
Patrick Lawrence on the indictment of key witness Alexander Smirnov; the under-reported testimony of Jason Galanis from a federal prison; and Hunter Biden’s testimony under oath. This is the fourth in Consortium News’ series on the congressional investigation into President Biden’s allegedly corrupt…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Could the Russians Seize Congress?
The Russians have been coming, off and on, for seven-plus decades. While these conjured imaginings may be laughable, the consequences of a culture of Cold War fear are far from funny. The Russians are coming — or coming back, better put. As…