Patrick Lawrence: Germany in Crisis Part 2: A Short History of Exploding Gas Pipelines
This is the second of four reports on Germany’s various crises, the history that produced them and how Germans, other than the neoliberal elites who now hold power, think about their way forward. Part 1 of this series is here. POTSDAM—A single,…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Blinded to Syria
I do not know anyone who was not shocked by the lightning speed with which Damascus fell to expensively armed jihadist militias last weekend. I know very few people who do not understand that another domino has just fallen in the…
Patrick Lawrence: What Died 60 Years Ago?
A President and a Nation’s Promise On January 9, 1953, The Washington Post published an editorial we can read all these years later as a murmur amid a long silence. “Choice or Chance” was a blunt worry about what the…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Tampering With History
History tells us where we are in the human story and what we, alive now, must do to advance this story. To tamper with history is among the gravest of sins against the human cause. The first sign of trouble…
The Historic Collapse of Journalism
Accuracy no longer matters. Witnessing no longer matters. Conformity matters, writes Patrick Lawrence. I have never gotten over a story The New York Times ran in its Sunday magazine back in May 2016. Maybe you will remember the occasion. It was a lengthy profile of…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: ‘Primacy or World Order’
Stanley Hoffmann doesn’t mention “multipolarity” in his book—maybe the term wasn’t yet in use—but it is precisely the world he was telling Americans about back in 1978 and that is today coming to pass. In the second half of the…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: America the Innocent
The American press has been in the business of keeping readers ignorant since the Cold War—its most essential responsibility turned upside-down—and in our time it gets worse, not better. Vladimir Putin’s annual state-of-the-nation speech, delivered before the Federal Assembly in Moscow…
Twilight’s last gleaming: Can Americans learn to accept the notion of post-exceptionalism?
Among the fundamental conceits of the exceptionalist creed is that America is above the laws that govern all other nations. A leap of faith is required to end this fallacy, argues Patrick Lawrence At four-thirty in the afternoon on Saturday, 4 April 2009,…
Making history safe again: What Ken Burns gets wrong about Vietnam
Historian Christian Appy: Vietnam was not a “tragic misunderstanding” but a campaign of “imperial aggression” Three questions came to mind when news arrived that “The Vietnam War,” the latest documentary film from Ken Burns (co-directed with Lynn Novick), would air…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: American-Century Flight
“American history is the history of the counterrevolution” — a discussion with author Joel Whitney about his latest book, Flights: Radicals on the Run. I have long nursed a keen interest in the Cold War’s corruptions on the cultural side — who…