In America’s late-imperial phase, conjured realities are preferable to reality. The creak of history’s wheel has become unbearable such that forlorn attempts to silence it are the only remaining resort.
The presidential helicopter with Donald Trump on board leaving the White House earlier this month. (White House /Molly Riley)
By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News
To make the case that those who purport to lead the Western post-democracies lie routinely about what they are doing and why they are doing it will not help you win friends and influence people.
That they are incessantly deceitful has been too obvious to too many people for too long. Never forget your Dale Carnegie and the imperative always to say something interesting.
Lately something interesting in this line has occurred to me.
It came to me last autumn — on Oct. 25 to be precise. I was reading The New York Post, as one must to keep one’s head clear in our complicated world, and came upon an opinion piece headlined “Vlad’s war of words.” It was the subhead that drew me in: “Don’t fall for his lies: Russia isn’t winning.”
How could I not read on? By last Oct. 25 it was sky-is-blue plain that Ukraine’s Nazi-infested military was losing its war with Russia and the Nazi-infested regime in Kiev was caught in a spiral of desperation. “Vlad” was hardly the only one to observe — as he did at the time — that Russia’s path to victory was clear.
Some snippets from the column that appeared under the byline of one Jack Keane:
“They’ve taken no major Ukrainian cities since 2022. They are fighting for fields and small towns at extravagant losses they can’t sustain.
… Putin is only still in the game because of Chinese, North Korean and Iranian support.
… Ukrainian drones have denied the Russians the ability to use tanks and mechanized vehicles at scale.
… Most Russian soldiers die in droves to advance just meters at a time.
… Leaked Russian government documents indicate that [the] country suffered on average 35,000 casualties per month from January–September 2025….”
And after 21 column inches of this material, the inevitable punchline:
“The path forward should include not only economic pressure but also increased military support for Ukraine. Force Putin to stop this war on our terms, not his.”
I will let these passages speak for themselves except to say when a writer insists that the vanquished must dictate the terms of cessation to the victor there would appear to be a troubled relationship with reality.
This piece was not the work of lightweights, light of weight as it may be. Jack Keane is a retired four-star general and now chairs the Institute for the Study of War, a regularly quoted think tank staffed with middling hawks well-connected in the active and retired military — David Petraeus, Stanley McChrystal, et al.
To locate the institute within the Beltway constellation, it was founded by Kimberly Kagan, sister-in-law of noted neocon Robert Kagan. It does not, per usual in these kinds of cases, reveal the sources of its funding.
Why would people so situated within the policy cliques traffic not only in bold-face lies but bold-face lies anyone paying attention knows are bold-face lies and that they, the people who tell the bold-face lies, know paying-attention people know are bold-face lies?
The mind goes back, as it often does these days, to that remark Hannah Arendt made in a conversation with a French free-speech activist not long before her death, in December 1975. “If everybody always lies to you,” she said to Roger Errera, “the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.”
Fifty-one years on, it is time to take Arendt’s thought a step further. In our era of nobody believing anything — nobody who pays attention, I mean, as Arendt also meant — to whom are our liars lying and what is the point of their lies?
And here is what I find interesting. In America’s late-imperial phase, conjured realities are preferable to reality. The creak of history’s wheel, I mean to say, has become unbearable such that forlorn attempts to silence it are the only remaining resort.
In the resulting empire of lies it no longer makes any difference that no one believes anything. It does not matter, in other words, that America makes its way in the world on the basis of endless deceits. The only ones who to have to believe any of the lies are those telling them, and among these people pretending to believe them is sufficient.
Maintaining Meta-Reality
Trump giving Keane the Presidential Medal of Freedom the White House, March 10, 2020. (White House, Andrea Hanks)
I do not mean to lead readers into a thicket of convoluted logic, but we live in a time of densely convoluted logic. When Jack Keane writes an opinion piece of start-to-finish lies, do you think he gives any thought to the readers of The New York Post? Of course not.
The only readers that matter to Jack Keane are his fellow ideologues, no one else. He is merely doing his bit to maintain the meta-reality within which the imperium can continue to conduct its illogical business as if it were the logical thing to do.
I have wondered for several years, since it was clear Russia was on the way to victory in Ukraine, how all the Jack Keanes among us would manage defeat in a war they were simply unprepared ever to lose. Now it is clear: They have retreated into a sort of collective psychosis. And in this state they subsist, all by themselves, on fables.
Dominic Lawson, who descends from a line of prominent, minorly titled Tories, published a piece in the Jack Keane line in The Sunday Times this past weekend. “Recent events have confounded the conventional view that Russia is ‘winning,” Lawson writes. And then comes, among much else, the usual gathering of nonsensical statistics — “… last year Russia is estimated to have taken nearly half a million casualties,” etc.
I like the passive voice, always so comforting because so predictable. Estimated by whom?
And then a crop of bold, casually tossed-off assertions that do not survive even cursory consideration: “The poisoner in the Kremlin has no intention of agreeing to peace terms readily available.” Or this:
“Putin’s aims are revanchist, involving wars of annexation, rather than defence. Though, naturally, as in his preposterous claim to be “de–Nazifying” Ukraine, these are and will be expressed as being “in defence of the motherland.”
I love the “preposterous” and the coy quotation marks in the above passage.
“There is only one way Putin will leave Ukraine” is the head atop this piece. And Lawson’s conclusion, right up in the subhead: “Nothing but defeat will stop it.”
Nothing but defeat. Yes, let Ukraine march on to triumph.
Fable Elevated to Thesis
Council on Foreign Relations headquarters in New York. (Gryffindor, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)
There are reams of this stuff around just now, more all the time, it seems. And it is not enough to tag it clunky propaganda and leave it at that: This meta-reality is congealing before our eyes into a view of the world, a new geopolitical take, that we can accept if we wish, although it does not matter one way or the other if we do or do not.
Foreign Affairs, house organ of the Council on Foreign Relations, published a piece to this effect in its March–April edition under the title, “The Multipolar Delusion.”
In it, C. Raja Mohan, a professor of big think at a privately funded university in the environs of New Delhi, makes the case that the world as more or less universally understood since Germans dismantled the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the Cold War drew to a close was a phantom, a collective misapprehension:
“The Trump administration has embarked on a forceful reassertion of American power by imposing onerous tariffs, intervening in other countries, and brokering peace negotiations and commercial dealmaking across the world. China and Russia have resisted Washington on select issues, but they have been unable to mount a comprehensive challenge to the United States’ effort to restructure global rules….
The reality is that the world is still unipolar. The illusions of multipolarity have not created a more balanced international arrangement. Instead, they have done the opposite: they have empowered the United States to shed previous constraints and project its power even more aggressively. No other power or bloc has been able to mount a credible challenge or work collectively to counter U.S. power. But unlike in the prior period of unipolarity that emerged at the end of the Cold War, the United States is now exercising unilateral power shorn of responsibilities.”
Mohan’s point about the extravagant irresponsibility of the Trump regime can hardly land more squarely. But his argument is otherwise an ahistorical mess.
Mohan ignores the late-imperial desperation that has unmistakably come to drive the policy cliques in Washington beginning in 2001, I would say, and culminating in the Trump regime’s incoherence. He seems not able to understand the long durée of our moment — the gradual process by which one world order will replace another.
The Mohan piece is worth reading. It is fable elevated to thesis. Simplicius makes a similar point, absent my term, in a well-done analysis of Mohan published over the weekend in his Substack newsletter under the headline “Multipolarity a ‘Delusion’ in Face of Trump’s New Imperialism?”
Simplicius’ answer, and mine: The delusion lies with those, Mohan exemplary of them, who take the doings of the Trump regime as anything more than an edifice built on lies and illusions. It represents an inherently unstable interim, not an era.
With Trump’s “massive armada” gathered in the Mediterranean, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf in apparent preparation for another attack on Iran, Vice President J.D. Vance has been speaking around the country to warn that Iran presents a direct threat to U.S. national security.
Going one better, Steve Witkoff, the New York landlord serving as Trump’s envoy, asserted over the weekend that the Islamic Republic is “probably a week away” from having what it needs to build a nuclear bomb.
This stuff is so unrooted in reality not even the Israeli press has taken Witkoff seriously. But reality, or being taken seriously, are, once again, of no importance to this regime.
Witkoff and Vance can lie, nobody will believe them, and they will know that nobody believes them, but it will not matter. They alone will believe themselves, or pretend to believe themselves, and the meta-reality of our time will continue to elaborate.
My mind goes to the historians as I consider this phenomenon. Will the fables by which so many events unfold in the third decade of the 21st century survive their scrutiny? Will the empire of lies go into the texts of the future as if it were real?
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 restored after years of being permanently censored.
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geopolitics or cowardice: India’s Prime Minister Modi visits Israel (February 25-26) for bilateral talks with PM Netanyahu: ‘We decided to give time-tested India-Israel ties the status of special strategic partnership….’, PM Narendra Modi said – hxxps://www.thenationalnews.com/news/mena/2026/02/25/modi-arrives-in-israel-as-netanyahu-seeks-new-axis-of-allies/
Propaganda is so terribly difficult apparently because it appears to be effective even when it’s too absurd to accept. *This is perfectly awful –that it works even when it ought not to.* Of course, if you’ve been paying attention,”BigLie News” [h.t., Karl Sanchez] is immediately understood as lies. But contrariwise, those who’ve been glued to corporate media are captured in a framing that is congruent even though utterly filthy. What a problem! Desperate to point to an exit, the only suggestion I have is a greater emphasis on timelines. And there’s a terrific example in Joe Lauria’s article in the current issue.
A look into the bank accounts of those being involved, keeping up their narrative at whatever it takes, will make it all look quite more logical.
There are very specific individuals, in front of the scenes and even more so those behind pulling the puppet strings, enriching themselves on a daily basis and huge scale, at the cost of the majority of the people and the planet.
Liars of empire know one thing for certain. Their words, unreal as they are, will reverberate around the globe and be quoted as proofs to sustain actions. They set in motion wheels within wheels, highly engineered, precision guided ones that move with quicksilver speed to unmake the worlds of their chosen enemies. It is the military faction, regardless of whether they believe the lies, that takes them as unquestioned orders. How many top brass have questioned whether there is a UN Security Council resolution and an authorization by Congress to attack Iran before acceding to such an order? In short, the “maximum lethality” of the US military depends upon an architecture of lies.
Interesting article. Because it’s from Consortium News which is prohibited on Facebook, I had to copy and paste it in order to share it (which I’ve done) rather than provide a link. My observations: I wonder which is worse, the constant and predictable lies, or the delusions of those who accept them unquestionably although they have all the grounds necessary to see through them. And more, to question their premises as hyperbolically shouted “accusations” of things that are not inappropriate make them seem terrible. It is a bipartisan phenomenon, if it can be said that the AIPAC owned uniparty really differs inter se, other than in deceptively superficial ways. Trump makes that obvious although it’s just a true when a smooth and subtle figurehead is busy polarizing us (think Obama). To some, everything Trump says is gospel (literally) while to others, it is absolutely perfidious blasphemy and in the case of Obama or the Clintons or Biden, etc., the same is true although the audience differs. And the masters at AIPAC snicker and dole out the cash, an investment as United States taxpayers repay AIPAC’s investment more than a hundred fold. The question then is not “are the vast majority of us that stupid” but, “will we continue to be so”.
Not the vast majority, but those who study such things have overwhelming evidence that a majority of people (how big? don’t know) are of below average intelligence. Biggest problem is they don’t know, don’t want to know & will fight to the death any effort to make them know.
RACE
For those still living in oblivion, Race and Ethnic Studies is an interdisciplinary field analyzing the social construction of race, racism, and ethnicity, alongside their impact on power structures, culture, and history.
Like all else in the human endeavour of gaining enlightenment, one must always be consciously alert to the fact that there is a tendency for innate, individual subjective biases playing a defining role in analyses of objective facts.
1.) Doesn’t universal Homo sapiens qualify all of humanity as of one and the same RACE
For those living in oblivion, Race and Ethnic Studies is an interdisciplinary field analyzing the social construction of race, racism, and ethnicity, alongside their impact on power structures, culture, and history.
Like all else in the human endeavour of gaining enlightenment, one must always be consciously alert to the fact that there is a tendency for innate, individual subjective biases playing a defining role in analyses of objective facts.
1.) Doesn’t universal Homo sapiens qualify all of humanity as of one and the same “ethnicity”?
Yes, because all living humans are biologically categorized as the same species, Homo sapiens, with 99.9% identical DNA, they constitute a single, universal, and genetically indistinguishable group. Genetics confirms there is no biological basis for dividing humans into subspecies or distinct races, as “genetic variation is more common within groups than between them”.
All humans are classified as a single species, Homo sapiens, and are genetically 99.9% identical, meaning there is no biological basis for dividing humanity into distinct subspecies or races. While we are one biological family, ethnicity refers to shared cultural, social, or ancestral traits, not to the species-level genetic similarity.
National Institutes of Health (.gov)
2.) Doesn’t universal Homo sapiens qualify all of humanity as of one and the same “ancestry”?
Yes, the classification of all living humans as Homo sapiens confirms that all humanity shares the same, relatively recent African ancestry, originating approximately 200,000 to 300,000 years ago. Humans are 99.9% genetically identical, making us a single, closely related species. (National Institutes of Health (.gov) +2)
By changing one word in the above questions, it immediately becomes apparent that the very notion of ‘racial differentiation’ is nothing more than a figment of constructs of the mind (or mental constructs). They are abstract, non-physical frameworks, ideas, and belief systems created by the mind to interpret, categorize, and give meaning to experiences. (Psychological definition)
In other words, ancestry and ethnicity are 99.9% of identical origins. They are in fact more than simply synonyms; more than just words.
“Taxonomically” all of humanity has 99.9% identical DNA – Homo-sapiens. We are, therefore, all one and the same species, when referencing organizing, naming, or classifying organisms or concepts based on shared characteristics, evolutionary relationships, or structural similarities. It indicates that a description is made from the standpoint of scientific classification (e.g., domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species). (Merriam-Webster + 4); despite the manifest overt racism of the U.S. President.
Manifest overt racism refers to open, observable, and unapologetic acts of racial discrimination, hatred, or prejudice that are intended to harm or exclude individuals based on their race. It is characterized by its, direct, obvious nature, often rooted in white supremacy, which seeks to reinforce racial hierarchies.
What I took away from learning, in a “white racist high school”, just the other day, a couple of years back, in 1960!
Note:
With thanks to the collated, confirmatory factual data sources (“hard data”) of AI Overview, referring to verified, objective information used to validate, prove, or disprove a hypothesis, assumption, or claim. They are considered “hard data” or official statistics that are reliable, comparable, and generally independent of the way they were measured. In this case, measured experientially!
hxxps://www.counterpunch.org/2026/02/26/we-are-still-discovering-the-tracks-of-the-underground-railroad/
Nobody talks about Ukraine anymore. The yellow and blue flags are all gone. There are still articles now and then that talk about how wonderful it is that a Ukrainian missile hit a Russian target and how bad it is that hordes of Russian missiles and drones are dismantling Ukrainian infrastructure (without hitting populated areas). One could go on. As Patrick points out there is currently a spate of articles and opinions as in the WSJ to the effect that don’t believe your lying eyes because Ukraine is doing great all they need is more money more weapons and more armies. As in Afghanistan or Iraq just one more surge will do it and Russia will fold. The essential message is to keep the war going at all costs. But nobody in America is all that interested.
I really thought this was going to be about Trump’s State of The Union. There can be nobody in the room who believes Iran is building nuclear weapons to hit the US, or any of the laughable word for word Iraq WMD copy and past, yet both parties stand in applause. Total pantomime, they are all complicit going through the motions of obvious lies, completely in the face of public sentiment. The only thing they DO believe is the necessity of the ritual lying and that everyone must participate, even if not they or the public believes what is being said.
The column was written before the speech was delivered.
Imperial America’s thirst for world conquest and control of any country not succumbing to our dictates and unable of defending themselves against our military war machine may be targeted at any point in time as nobody wants to unite to halt the death, destruction, misery and suffering the U.S. has inflicted on so many nations around the globe, ever since the defeat of Germany and Japan. The late historian, William Blum, chronicled all the nations we attacked, occupy, assassinations, imprisonment or exile of democratically-elected heads of state who didn’t do it “our way!”
BTW, the prostituted big corporate media “news” announcers use the term, “capture” of President Maduro of Venezuela, rather than the correct term or word which is “kidnap.” The “K” word is reality, the “C” word is fantasy for the gullible, non-thinking people.
The Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China are the only two countries who can stand up to us, militarily, and I wish they would. The American/Zionist war machine needs to be stopped, one way or another.
Couldn’t agree more after reading Noam Chomsky and Nathan Robinson’s “The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Polic Endangers the World.”
I’ve seen this kind of history throughout my life. Some notable examples;
The myth that the nation mourned for weeks after 9/11. All I remember is people going about their day, eating hot dogs and laughing, just as Bush commanded.
Another, similar to the above, is the reported overwhelming distress of the pandemic. The future reader of history will think it was as bad as the Black Death. I remember that Quick Trip remained full of customers every single day, getting egg roles and going places in cars that drove on highways full of speedsters. By the way, I heard no one talking about the plaque of deaths caused by auto use.
Yes, when I read history it is diffucult to know what to believe based on my experience on how current history is written with so much hyperbole. Best I can do is be aware and trust my instincts.
Is anyone shocked to learn that a Rupert Murdoch tabloid (aka The New York Post) is telling lies? Or, maybe I have the advantage in that I hold the belief that they are all lying? I do not try to spot the liars. I keep it simple and just go by my experience and know that they are all lying. Thus, I would never give any money to the NYP, nor do I let the NYP have access to my brain to insert its lies. Given that I think they are all liars, I use my default policy for Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid. This is because I think the rest of the media of “the Free World” are liars with the same lack of credibility as a Rupert Murdoch tabloid.
Turn them all off!
As always, Patrick, you expose the realities. What is missing: the fact that this is not new. This, I believe is an important aspect of what we are witnessing. Perhaps I am mistaken. However, without being able to provide hard evidence, it is my experience that the American public has been lied to by every administration. And these fabrications and interpretations based on them pervade our schools, text books, colleges, universities and thus the public consciousness. The current insistence by some journalists that ‘context’ is essential in order to have a full understanding of both the Ukraine war and the ongoing genocide of Palestinians, is reflective of this historic practice of deceiving the public.
It is good, always, to ‘hear’ your voice.
Exactly the point I wanted to make. “This is not new” ; it has a long pedigree, a nurtured culture of lies and propaganda. The indo-zio-con cabal had been at it for well over half a century now, at least. “Fable elevated to thesis” has been home turf of this cabal for many decades now. Raja Mohan doesn’t lead writes in the Foreign Affaires by accident ! What has long been wishful thinking of exploiting elites have now been upscaled as conjured reality and institutionally propagated internationally in the form of syndicated news. The obvious answer to this is, of course : long live multipolarity !
In the 1960’s, most of an entire generation figured out that they were being fed a pack of lies. That it is all lies. All of it. Stacked high on top of each other. America pretends to be a land for freedom and justice, and yet a look at how it actually operates shows a crooked system that is manipulated for the benefits of the Elites. That most of what you are taught growing up, taught in schools, taught by your family, that its all a big pack of lies.
If you start pulling the strings on one lie, beginning with the one that is most obvious to you and that you see first, you find that its not just one lie, but a big whole pack of lies and that the whole thing is build on giant lies. For a very long time America has been a land of the Elites where the whole system is run by the Elites and for the benefit of the Elites. Since America does not openly say this, it becomes obvious that the whole thing is a pack of lies that only serves the Elites.
The system does not care about you. The system does not educate you for your own benefit. The system maintains schools to warehouse young people so their parents can be wage slaves. The system actually hates educated people, because they are a threat. The land of Christians who worship Jesus Christ goes around the world killing and torturing. If you speak up against the system, perhaps believing the lie that you are in a democracy, you are tracked and targeted. The rich always get richer. This paragraph on scratches the surface. It is all a big lie. All of it. All the way down the foundation that says you have rights that can not be taken away from you. Its all a lie. All of it.
Those who call America a Christian land are themselves false Christians, loudly proclaiming their ‘faith’ in order to discredit true Christianity.
This claim of Iran being “one week away” from having the material it needs to build a nuclear bomb may not be as exaggerated as implied. MIT professor Ted Postol has posited that enriching uranium from 60% (the level Iran is purported to have now) to around 90% (the level needed for a nuclear bomb) is not that difficult & would not take much time (more than a week probably). But that doesn’t include the building of an actual bomb to house the material nor the amount of time to fit the bomb to a delivery system. Scott Ritter has said Iran made a mistake in upping its enrichment to 60% since that does narrow the timeline considerably to build a bomb if it wanted to (which Iran insists it doesn’t) thus heightening the perceived risk that the US admin can gin-up as Iran producing a nuclear bomb in fairly short order (conflating the amount of enriched material needed with an actual usable weapon). Recognizing that all this propaganda about an Iranian nuclear bomb is fodder for the American public since the real game afoot is regime change or destruction.
Like the unconstitutional attack on Venezuela, it’s all about fossil fuels.
Humans live by fables! Have always done. It is just that ‘once upon a time’ our fables rubbed up against enough Reality to be useful. And that usefulness confused us into thinking (that source of fables) that our fables had, in the magic of our powers, become the new reality. Now, devoid of almost any even gentle rubbing against the Real, and necessarily actively rejecting the possibility, the fullest expression of ‘life in fable’ is the guiding principle. This is the true longue durée: power and domination through fable as reality. The source of guiding Reality must lie outside of our thoughts of it, or we will always come to believe lies as truth (or as Lawrence suggests, this has the circularity of believing a form of nothing). Today is an especially dangerous manifestation of this particular ‘beyond human powers’ Reality. I don’t see even the most honest and thoughtful putting our fables to sufficient test, but rather still pitting fable against fable.
In the 1960’s, people found the solution of a Counter-Culture. They tossed out what they saw as a toxic mainstream American Culture, or Fable, and created a Fable of their own. This gave them sure footing from which to challenge the mainstream fable. This was the footing from which they challenged a racist mainstream American fable with the Civil Rights movement and the Freedom Riders. This was the footing from which they challenged the violent and hateful American War Fable with a peace movement. It is very hard to contest a fable when you are a character inside the fable. But when you create your own Fable outside of the toxic Fable, you can find sure footing to stand your ground and hold on to your morals.
You do not have to believe their Fable. The human mind and soul are much more powerful than that, once they are set free from their mental slavery.