Your Brain on Centrist Time

Always Too Late, Never Sorry, Never Learning

In Europe, Ukraine is run by a moody, narcissistic, and devious drug addict president, who is overstaying his term limit and has installed the most corrupt and authoritarian regime of all the country’s leaders since independence in 1991 (yes, including the infamous Viktor Yanukovich). And that is a tough field to compete in. The reason Volodymyr Zelensky has been able to outdo all his predecessors in vicious destructiveness is that he has been a sometimes obstreperous yet fundamentally obedient puppet of the West, while the latter has pursued an insane scheme to crush Russia by using up Ukraine. Ukraine has been used up indeed, but Russia, fortunately, has not been crushed but become even stronger.

In Western Asia (still usually misnamed the Middle East), things are even worse, as hard as that may be to imagine. But leave it to Israel to always go an extra mile (and then another one and yet another one) in genuinely satanic evil (to quote the sober and correct assessment of the card-carrying atheist Norman Finkelstein). Gaza, the target of genocide and ethnic cleansing for now almost three years, is being starved systematically by the Jewish-supremacist fascist (aka Zionist) genocidal apartheid colonial-settler death cult masquerading as a state. Israel, too, can only carry out and get away with its many, constant crimes because it enjoys massive support and impunity thanks to the co-genocidal West.

(And let’s not forget that Gaza is not Israel’s only currently ongoing crime: there also is the terror and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, the destruction of Syria, the battering of Lebanon, Iran, and Yemen, and, of course, as always the systematic subversion of the politics and public spheres of every country in the West to shield all these atrocities.)

No, none of the above has yet been acknowledged by the mainstream West. And maybe that will never happen. Or, if so, then in about a 100 to 200 years when even the very last conformist will feel save enough to face reality. But what we have seen recently are (very) partial admissions that stories told only yesterday by the West’s and Israel’s mainstream politicians and media are – shock, shock! – untrue. We are observing multiple, herdlike shifts from the virtually unconditional – and aggressive – asserting of obvious propaganda to a form of opportunistic reputational hedging.

In the case of the Gaza Genocide, Western talking heads such as Omer Bartov, Bob Geldof, Ross Douthat, Piers Morgan, and Matthew Iglesias and mainstream media outlets such as Der Spiegel and the New York Times are realizing that they have been on the side of what the Spanish prime minister has correctly called, the greatest crime (at least as of yet) of our 21^st century. Regarding Ukraine, they are beginning to get cold feet because Russia is winning the war the on the ground and, at the same time, the longstanding authoritarianism of the Zelensky regime has started targeting darling institutions of the West, Kiev’s anti-corruption agencies.

The simultaneity of the shift in these two theaters of Western aggression and disinformation warfare is striking. In addition to those named above, it is also clearly observable in The Washington Post, the Financial Times, the Economist, Deutsche Welle, the Telegraph… And I am sure I am missing quite a few.

You may, of course, disagree with my harsh assessment of the cause of this phenomenon. Is it really all just opportunism, time-serving adaptability? Are they really all just so cynical? Could it not be that some of them have finally understood things they were “merely” too slow to grasp before?

My answer would be: No. And here is why. First, if these were genuine if culpably late insights, then they would not form a campaign-like pattern. So many different individuals and media outlets do not have simultaneous epiphanies except the latter are less than genuine.

Second, conduct a simple test on each such Johnny-come-lately: Are they acknowledging their own guilt (yes, guilt is the word)? Are they writing or talking about how crushed they must be by noticing an almost three-year, ongoing genocide – which was virtually broadcast in real time globally all that time – only now? Do any of them show signs of serious depression, which is the least a halfway normal conscience would induce? Are any of them acknowledging that Zelensky’s authoritarianism goes back to, at the very least, 2021 – that is well before the escalation of the Ukraine War in early 2022? Are they at least asking what contribution we, the West, and they often personally have made to helping the Zelensky regime become this monster? Where are the questions about what could be different now in Gaza if only they and others had spoken up earlier and not, like Piers Morgan for instance, done their utmost to both-side (at best) a genocide?

And third, last but not least: There is a telltale move of abysmal dishonesty. You see it, you know you are dealing with the moral and intellectual gutter. Namely, to pretend that the turn is coming now because reality has turned only now. This is, of course, the exact opposite of asking about one’s own responsibility. It’s a fiendish, if primitively transparent move, to avoid precisely that question. Its essence is the implicit but clear claim “We are not late at all. We are just in time. Because before we deigned to notice, nothing worth noticing was happening.”

Take, for example, a post by Matthew Yglesias, reliable indicator of mediocrity-and-less. Promoting fellow sleepyhead Ross Douthat, Yglesias praised him – and thus, himself and the whole herd, of course – for “changing your mind when the facts change.” Only one problem, the facts have not changed.

Gaza was rightly called the “world’s largest concentration camp ever” by Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling in 2003; it has been under merciless siege and blockade since 2006, interspersed with massacres; in late 2023, the Israeli perpetrators were loud and clear about starting a genocide with the final aim of ethnic cleansing. Since then they have shown us every single day and night they meant every word of it. Nothing “has changed.” Except that the media and propaganda co-perpetrators of this genocide and the many who have been accomplices by cowardly silence are getting cold feet.

Yglesias and his ilk do not interest me. But their effect is toxic. For this lie – resembling that of many Germans, by the way, who also claimed to have only ever learned about their country’s holocaust once it was too late – prevents learning. We must face a lesson from how long it has taken for so many to even acknowledge a small part of the horrible truth. And if we allow them to pretend that there was nothing to acknowledge before they started doing so, then we allow them not only to cynically once again to disregard and insult the victims and to escape the ostracism they really deserve (as a bare minimum). We also allow them to make us all dumber, once again. So that next time many can fall again for Centrist Time Brain Syndrome: Always too late, never sorry, and never even trying to learn to do better.