PATRICK LAWRENCE: Defending Humanity
In the face of the dangerous U.S. determination to prolong its global primacy, a reform movement to reconstruct our long-abused global institutions merits serious attention. Anyone taking up the question of our shared humanity in the late summer of 2024 must begin…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: James Baldwin at 100
Things got lost in our remembrances. James Baldwin would have celebrated his 100th birthday on Aug. 2, had he lived so long. He didn’t: He died young. He was but 63 on Dec. 1, 1987, the day he slipped away at…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Grand Delusions
This year’s Munich Security Conference was predictably all about the imaginary danger that Russians intend to proceed westward into Europe as soon as they finish in Ukraine. Let’s listen for a moment to Boris Pistorius, the German defense minister, in…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Gaza & Confronting Power
The American state, broadly defined, is well on its way toward a form of apple-pie absolutism, forcing distorted meanings not merely on three university administrators but on all of us. The events of the past seven days are sobering no…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Bad Faith & Blank Checks
All mainstream journalism is “embedded journalism” now, for the battlefield is everywhere, writes Patrick Lawrence in this excerpt from his new book, Journalists and Their Shadows. Some years ago, as the decline of American media became evident even among those not…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Great Acquiescence — Glory to Ukraine
Americans don’t merely acquiesce to the imperium’s wars, interventions, collective punishments and assorted other deprivations. They actively embrace them. The other day I ventured forth from my remote village to a lively market town called Great Barrington to shop for…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: The War Against Us
The nature of the war against Americans in the past, is the nature of the war now. As some readers may have noticed, Antony Blinken has the State Department festooning its embassies around the world with “BLM” banners and the rainbow flag…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Arc of Decline
U.S. leaders would rather accept ever-more extreme isolation as the price of power than surrender any of it. It is remarkable how quickly the Biden administration is acquiring its stamp — the watermark it will leave on our parchment when…
A Circle in the Darkness: Post-War Europe
Diana Johnstone’s newly-published memoir offers an incisive, gritty, politically alert, and expansive account of post-war Europe, reports Patrick Lawrence in this interview with the author. Diana Johnstone first sojourned in Paris during the early postwar years, as France and the…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: De-Westernizing Ourselves
Embarking on a process of personal, individual “de–Westernization” is absolutely essential if we propose to defend the humanity of humanity. This is an edited version of the second of two lectures the author gave recently on “Defending the Humanity of…