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…
IMPEACHMENT: Innuendo and Evidence
Consortium News‘ Patrick Lawrence will be daily covering the U.S. House inquiry into the impeachment of President Joe Biden. This is his first report. Ten months after Republicans regained control of the House of Representatives and eight months after the…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Question About Biden
In the wake of Zelensky’s wildly provocative statements, it is time to question whether the U.S. president has a personal interest in prolonging the war in Ukraine. A friend and colleague wrote in an unusually sage commentary a couple of years ago that Ukraine would prove…
Patrick Lawrence: Russian (Melo)drama
After a few hours of high drama in southwestern Russia last Saturday, featuring a paramilitary leader, 4,000 to 6,000 followers, and a small column of trucks and other military vehicles driving north toward Moscow, let us keep our heads when…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Deaf, but Not Blind to US Decline
In Fiona Hill’s recent speech it’s possible to detect the very faint signals of Washington’s policy elite responding to the immense global power shift that is underway. I count the advance among non–Western nations toward what we now call a new…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Totalized Censorship
Content warning, canceling, de-platforming, denying access: The fate of Sy Hersh’s Democracy Now! interview on YouTube is the latest indication of how much rougher press suppression is in this new media era. When I awoke Sunday morning to the news that YouTube…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Press Reckoning on Russiagate
Jeff Gerth’s investigation for The Columbia Journalism Review exposes the dark heart of the news media’s coverage of alleged Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections. In the autumn of 1973, Jack Anderson, the wonderful iconoclast of the Washington press corps, published…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: A War of Rhetoric & Reality
Washington put us all on notice when Zelensky got to town: It has no intention of seeking a diplomatic solution to the Ukraine crisis and every intention of recommitting indefinitely to its ideological war. Passing through Austin, Texas, the other night, we had…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Germany & the Lies of Empire
With Angela Merkel’s revelations of Berlin’s duplicity in its dealings with Moscow, Cold War II just got colder. “Germany is Hamlet,” Gordon Craig once wrote. The great historian of that nation (1913–2005) was noted for pithy summations of this kind,…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Russia’s Turn From the West
Sergei Lavrov’s recent comments are a case of the subtext being vastly larger than the text. Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s steady, able, intellectually quick foreign minister, last week held one of those wide-ranging press conferences he and his boss favor. Lavrov’s…