Late-Imperial Maladies

A re-posting of a tour de force by journalist Patrick Lawrence

I read this powerful piece by journalist and author Patrick Lawrence today and wanted to share it with my readers this Easter weekend. It summarises better than I ever could the terrifying and surreal times we are living through, and why it’s important that we speak out against the madness.

I am sick of reading that the Israelis’ genocidal murder spree in Gaza is justified as a matter of self-defense.

I am sick of reading nothing at all in corporate media, while reading daily in independent media, about the Israelis’ genocidal murder spree in the West Bank.

I am sick of reading nothing in mainstream media about the Zionists’ plan to construct a version of Eretz Israel, Greater Israel, that never existed.

I am sick of reading about Zionist settlers in the Occupied Territories without any mention that they are all criminals.

I am sick of being told that Hamas is “a terrorist organization,” ditto Hezbollah, when these are no more or less than liberation fronts.

I am sick of reading that Hamas tortures hostages and the phony accounts of mistreatment coming from those Hamas has released.

I am sick of seeing no photographs in Western media of the scarred and three-quarters starved Palestinian hostages Israel lets out of its jails in exchange for decently treated Israeli hostages.

I am sick of America’s silence — in government, in the press — as Israeli settlers and occupation forces shoot American citizens of Palestinian background — two of them, in recent days, children and one of whom died.

I am sick of Western media’s silence as the Israeli military targets, hunts down, and murders hundreds of non–Western journalists reporting from Gaza.

I am sick of The New York Times’ incessantly repeated sentence, “The Gaza Health Ministry does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.”

I am sick of reading that the Zionists’ military will investigate its own war crimes and crimes against humanity.

I am sick of people such as Sheryl Sandberg still pretending that The New York Times’ infamous takeout alleging Hamas’s sexual misconduct on Oct. 7, 2023, has not been thoroughly exposed as systematic Israeli propaganda.

I am sick, for that matter, of seeing Jeffrey Gettleman’s byline in the Times, as if this out-and-out punk did not decisively discredit himself as well as his Zionist-supervised newspaper when he reproduced Israel’s fabrications in his “Screams Without Words” “report” in December 2023.

I am sick of hearing that anti–Semitism is rampant in America because it is “anti–Semitic” to object to the criminal conduct of a nation that has earned no right to exist. I am sick, I may as well add, of walking around being told I am an anti–Semite by this preposterous definition.

I am tired of reading that bombing Yemen is a justifiable act when the Houthis and the South Africans, they alone, act according to international law when they attack the Zionist terror state in the courts and on the seas.

I am sick of being told the jihadist murderer who seized control in Damascus last year is acceptable because he wears a suit when he has to and is not Bashar al–Assad.

I am sick of the incessant use of the word “unprovoked” when Western media describe the Russian military intervention in Ukraine.

I am sick of hearing that Moscow’s stated intent to de–Nazify Ukraine has no legitimacy because there are no Nazis in Ukraine.

I am sick of the suggestion that I am to take Volodymyr Zelensky to be anything more than a puppet of Washington and a rampant crook beholden to the Nazis who do not exist in Ukraine.

I am sick of listening to Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, tell me that Russian President Vladimir Putin is nothing more than a tyrant intent on reconstructing the Czarist empire when, statesman to stateswoman, she is unworthy of carrying Putin’s attaché case.

I am sick of listening to American and European officials state with phony gravity that Russia intends to invade the whole of Western Europe.

I am sick of reading that China “claims Taiwan” as if the island is not historically Chinese territory. And I am sick of hearing that China could “invade” Taiwan, its own territory, at any moment.

I am sick of watching ignoramuses (ignorami?) such as Pam Bondi, Kash Patel and Kristi Noem — U.S. attorney general, F.B.I. director and secretary of homeland security — act as if they are serious human beings properly assigned to some of America’s highest offices. This is to leave unmentioned the frightening primitive who employs these people and his crypto-fascist aide de camp.

Alas, readers, there is so much to be sick of in the world at the hands of those who purport to lead the Western half of it. I have not the time and my esteemed editors would not give me the space to offer a complete list.

But we must record our sicknesses, all of them — our maladies, our fatigue, our shared nausea, our unrelenting tsouris as we make our ways through our days. Let us remind each other of them whenever occasions arise, for our sicknesses are the beginning of our objections and our objections, best outcome, the beginning of action.

If I had to describe in a brief phrase the burden of being alive in the third decade of the 21st century I would say it derives from the distance those who run the Western world have taken us from reality.

Think of those items on my (very partial) list of sicknesses. Each one is a painful reminder that we in the West have lost our moorings and, indeed, our humanity and reason — each one an expression of the state of unreality imposed upon us.

This thing we call reality is full of suffering, as the Buddhists will remind us whenever we ask them, and we always speak of it in these terms. “Get real!” we insist to one another, as if this is a bitter undertaking we would rather avoid. But don’t we realize, when reality is taken away from us, how what is ever difficult is equally ever to be celebrated?

Politicians on either side of the international date line, West and East, are no strangers to lying and misrepresentation. There are no angels in high places in the world as we have made it, no philosopher kings (which, I come reluctantly to wonder, may be our best way out of the chaos of our time). But it is only as empires end, if I read history correctly, that societies enter into what Hannah Arendt used to call “an Alice-in–Wonderland atmosphere.”

The worst part of living this distance from reality — or maybe the best part — is the knowledge, even if it is only subliminal, that we cannot go on like this.

The American imperium, which is the author of all our vaporous conceits, cannot go on indefinitely pretending about Israel’s innocence, and who the Russians are, and the evil intent of Chinese, and all the rest.

This is not only impossible to imagine: It is by definition impossible plain and simple. It is impossible according to the laws of history.

I come now to the true burden of all our maladies. Our Sandbergs and Zelenskys and Gettlemans and von der Leyens: These, a few of the clowns populating our time. They are what D.H. Lawrence used to call “T.I.P.s,” temporarily important people. But they serve to remind us that to live again in any kind of better world we must make it ourselves.

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon. Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored.