Patrick Lawrence: To Retrieve History
It Is Our 2024 Project.
I am still reading, at this late date, that Russian soldiers kidnapped thousands of Ukrainian children early in Washington’s proxy war in that perversely cursed country and brought them to Russia to teach them to hate Ukraine. You would think The New York Times and other Western media would drop this topic, given evidence of this narrative, when not so stupid it is embarrassing, is flimsy such that it requires quotation marks: It is “evidence,” not more.
The Times’s reliably Russophobic correspondent, Carlotta Gall, is now down to quoting Lyudmyla Denisova, who was fired as the Kyiv regime’s senior human rights official last year because her accounts of Russian soldiers raping infants were so ridiculous as to discredit the Kyiv regime’s propaganda op. Gall’s report also relies on the Reckoning Project—without telling readers what this outfit is. Let me finish the work Gall left undone: The Reckoning Project is funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development and the National Endowment for Democracy. It is, pulling back the curtain, a Central Intelligence Agency front.
I do not customarily link to junk this transparently dishonest, but I do so here so readers can get a taste of how inexcusably The Times and all the pilot fish that follow it have left behind their responsibilities as media in favor of “perception management.” The year now passing marks a new low in this line. (As did the previous year and the year before that, it must be said.)
I do not know with certainty what went on last year in the matter of children removed from battle zones—this for the simple reason it is impossible to know the facts of the case on the basis of what Western media report. Gall, icing on this cake, does not quote a single Russian official and appears to have interviewed none. But, given how open Russian officials have been about this program, I do not see that we can summarily dismiss their many-times-repeated explanation when they say the intent was to keep children—a lot of them living in orphanages or on the street—out of harm’s way. This is not, after all, the Israel Defense Forces.
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A new year is about to begin. What do we see as we peer across the great divide on our calendars into the other side of midnight, Dec. 31, 2023? As the case of Ukrainian children makes plain, the first thing we see is that we cannot see very well, so thoroughly have our media blurred our vision. “The only thing that can save the world,” Allen Ginsberg remarked in 1973, “is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world.” This seems as true and urgent now as it was 50 years ago. Let us, then, look through the blur to see as best we can.
The Kyiv regime and its backers in Washington and the European capitals have lost their war against the Russian Federation, we can now read. But only obliquely, as this truth must be obscured. In the service of this obscuring, the U.S. will continue indefinitely to squander military aid to the extent Congress allows, as more human lives are profligately wasted. In the meantime, we must read again about the children and about how “Putin’s Russia,” or simply “Putin,” failed in its or his objective of taking over the whole of Ukraine. And we must read again and again, of course, that the prominent presence of neo–Nazis in the Ukrainian military and up and down the regime’s ranks is a fiction the Russians conjured to justify their military operation.
All of this amounts to a burying of truths. And the greatest of these interred truths is that the Russian military intervention was provoked—systematically, with intent, over a period of many years. The war began when Russian forces crossed the Russian–Ukrainian border two years ago come February: With this lie, eight years of the Kyiv regime’s shelling of its own people is also buried. Three decades during which Moscow attempted to negotiate a post–Cold War security settlement along its western flank with Europe: Those years are buried. The draft treaties Russia sent Westward in December 2021: You will never hear of them again.
I would say it is the same in the case of Israel except that it is worse. Israel has already lost the war in Gaza—the war that is not, in fact, a war but a murder spree. It will succeed tactically, on the ground, but its strategic defeat is a fait accompli. It is strong language, but I will use it: These months of barbarity, with more to come, mark out Israel as a failed state. It is a chaotic entity that depends on violence toward others for its existence, and the violence depends on an irresponsible sponsor. It is inherently, institutionally discriminatory and adopts the apartheid system from white South Africa.
On the domestic side, Israel is riven with centrifugal divisions that the Gaza crisis has temporarily pushed to the background as the IDF hands out automatic rifles to any (Jewish) Israeli who lines up for one. Its leadership will destroy the judiciary’s independence the first chance it gets, and, as argued previously in this space, when the judiciary goes, failed-state status is typically not far behind.
We read about this, some of it, but, once again, only obliquely. And never, but in independent and non–Western media, do we read about the 75 years of abuse, imprisonments, torture, forced removals and all else that preceded and indeed produced the events of October 7. That is all buried now. The 1948 Nakba is very rarely even mentioned now and is never cast as pertinent to the present. History started not quite three months ago.
If ever an emperor had no clothes, it is apartheid Israel as it parades across the West as the innocent victim of “terrorists” who have no cause.
During his controversial presidency of the Islamic Republic, 2005–2013, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a right-wing populist who spoke for Iran’s unmodernized millions, famously asserted that Israel had no place on a map of Middle East nations. I mention this because I do not want to be misunderstood on this following point. Does Israel as currently constituted and as it currently conducts itself have a right to exist? Does it honor the responsibilities that come with nationhood? I do not have answers to questions so complex as these, but it seems to me time, as the killing goes on in Gaza and as Israelis are radicalized rightward, to pose them.
To rotate the gaze briefly, I wonder if there is another nation on earth whose circumstances are so blurred as America’s on the eve of 2024. The judiciary, in plain sight, is even further than Israel’s along on the path to fatal compromise. But we must not mention this. If that preposterous Colorado Supreme Court decision has anything to tell us, it is that those opposed to a presumed presidential candidate are abusing the law—not superior ideas or policies, not the preferences of voters—to keep him out of office. This cannot be mentioned, either—not in the polite company of the liberal authoritarians responsible for these abuses.
Atop all this sits a president whose obvious mental incompetence is spoken of only when the topic cannot be avoided and most of the time apologetically. Joe Biden is just short of his “I am not a crook” moment, and corporate media now take to saying this for him. Since he seems to be incapable of competing for his own reelection, the corporate press and the broadcasters are apparently prepared to campaign for him.
I describe a world we have made of blur, of denial, of erasure. How shall we respond to this circumstance, once we have understood it?
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It has been said many times that those without a past have no future. Or that without a past one is marooned in an eternal present with no prospect other than repetition of the what is, as I call it. There is the famous line from Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, quoted so often it is cliché, but there seems no avoiding it given its merciless pertinence to our condition: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
This is the struggle it is essential to undertake in 2024, given where 2023 drops us off. It is to be waged on two fronts, it seems to me. Straight off the top, there is protecting the present from blur and the burial grounds. Events, for anyone wishing to escape the eternal present just mentioned, must be represented as they are, for what they are, and for what they mean. I suppose I advocate simple vigilance as I propose this, and good enough. Plain, clear language is our best friend in this.
Independent journalists, the best of them, are vigilant in this way. But it takes a collective effort to succeed. There is the not-fooling people and the not-being-fooled. We owe this to ourselves, to others in the world, not least Palestinians, and also to those who will record the events of our time when they become passages in history: We owe it to the future, in other words. It seems to me we are getting there in this cause. If comment threads and altogether the steadily increasing readership of independent publications are any indication, our collective capacity to transcend the Big Blur is growing.
Protecting the present is the way into protecting history. At this point we must think in terms of retrieving history from the slag heap of erasure, of coerced forgetting, of coerced never-knowing. We need our history, all histories, to be told well precisely as Palestinians, to take the largest example, need theirs so urgently now. If guarding the present from distortion and worse is how we begin to retrieve history, retrieving history is how we honor the present and begin to build a different future.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the exquisitely principled German pastor who gave his life to resisting the Reich, wrote, in The Cost of Discipleship, of cheap grace and its opposite, costly grace. “Cheap grace means grace sold in the market like cheapjacks’ wares,” he wrote. “Grace without price; grace without cost! The essence of grace, we suppose, is that the account has been paid in advance; and, because it has been paid, everything can be had for nothing.” As Ray McGovern told me when he introduced me to Bonhoeffer, cheap grace is grace without putting your neck on the line.
Of costly grace, Bonhoeffer said simply, “Costly grace is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it a man will go and sell all that he has. It is the pearl of great price.”
I identify retrieving history as the project to which we dedicate ourselves in 2024. Readers may have other ideas as to how to think of 2024 and what to do in the year to come. However we look forward, Bonhoeffer, Kundera, Ginsberg: Shall we include the thoughts of these three in ours?
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