The Liberal Zionist Dilemma
By Lawrence Davidson | To the Point Analyses | August 19, 2014
Part I – The Liberal Ideal
Liberalism, framed as a socio-political ideal, argues that human beings are good and social progress achievable. It is a “glass half-full” outlook. Within this paradigm all individuals, not just members of a specific religion, race or nationality, should have political and civil rights. Here also neither the state nor the law is an end in itself. They are instruments for the creation and maintainance of a environment meant to promote freedom while minimizing social inequalities. Holding this ideal does not preclude identifying with a particular ethnic or religious group. It does, however, preclude any claim of exclusive rights for such groups to the detriment of others.
Within the Western environment many Jews held to this liberal ideal. They saw it as in their interest to work toward an environment of universally applied political and civil rights while minimizing social inequality. For instance, by the mid-twentieth century in the United States, many Jewish organizations were allied with African Americans in their struggle for civil rights and equality. However, this proved to be a complex alliance and it ultimately broke down. Its demise marked a waning of organized American Jewish liberal activism. What had happened?
Part of the answer became apparent after the Arab-Israeli war of 1967. At that time many civil rights leaders in the U.S. noticed that Israel was not, after all, a very liberal society. It was designed exclusively for one group and discriminated against those who were not members of that group. When this became a subject of concern and debate within the civil rights community, many Jewish organizations broke with the movement and its struggle. How about Jewish liberal individuals? They were now confronted with one of three choices: (1) retain a principled adherence to the liberal ideal and cease their uncritical support of the Zionist state, (2) renounce the liberal ideal and continue their whole-hearted support for illiberal Israel, or (3) become quiet in public while fretting in private about the evolving racist nature of Israel. It seems many of them took the third option.
Part II – An Old Dilemma
Given this history it is simply wrong to think of the present dilemma faced by Jewish liberals over Israeli behavior as something new. So-called liberal Zionists such as Peter Beinart, Amos Oz, Ari Shavit and Jonathan Freedland have certainly known for decades that the notion of civil and political rights for Jews and non-Jews equally was not an aim of the Zionist movement and therefore stood little chance of shaping the behavior of the Israeli state. Yet here we are, following three massive invasions of Gaza and its inhumane blockade, repeated massacres of Palestinian civilians going back at least as far as Israel’s “war of independence,” decades of continuous land theft and illegal settlement, and more than sixty years of an Israeli-inspired police state environment on the West Bank, confronting a suddenly newsworthy liberal Zionist dilemma.
One argument given to explain this belated display of liberal Zionist angst is that only recently have such individuals decided that the two-state solution is in real jeopardy. As this argument goes, as long as a two-state solution was possible, liberal Zionists could hope for the realization of both Jewish and Palestinian political and civil rights within their respective two states. But this explanation is misleading. It is incorrect to think of the two-state solution as only recently at death’s door. In truth, if this solution was ever alive and possible (which is questionable), it was killed off the moment Menachem Begin lied to President Jimmy Carter about the granting of progressive “autonomy” to the Palestinians. That was 1979. That otherwise quite knowledgeable Zionists as those mentioned above did not know this is hard to believe.
So why is this liberal dilemma an issue now? A more accurate answer might lie with changing public opinion. It has only been in the last ten years or so that the Zionist storyline on the Israeli-Palestine conflict has lost its monopoly. In that same time frame the boycott movement has also become a worldwide affair. As Israel’s illiberal character becomes more public, option 3 noted above becomes harder to maintain. As Jonathan Freedman tells us in his New York Review of Books article, “The Liberal Zionists,” these folks are now attacked from all sides. The Zionist movement is, if you will, circling their wagons and no longer finds liberal complaints tolerable, even in private. They want everyone out there saluting the Israeli flag.
The Israeli author and columnist Ari Shavit shows us where these extreme nationalist pressures will likely lead those still trying to square the circle of liberalism and Zionism. In his recent book My Promised Land he writes, “The choice is stark, either reject Zionism [the Zionist State of Israel] because of Lydda [an example of the massacre of civilians by Israeli forces], or accept Zionism [the Zionist state] along with Lydda. … If need be, I will stand by the damned. Because I know that if it wasn’t for them, the state of Israel would not have been born. … They did the dirty, filthy work that enables my people, myself, my daughter and my sons to live.” So much for the liberal ideal.
Part III – Facing Contradiction
In truth the term “liberal Zionist” has never made much sense. The only way to explain its survival is to consider the survival of the Zionist storyline itself – the story of Israel as a democracy upholding the Western model in the Middle East. As long as one believed that this was true, one could dismiss Israeli brutality as just occasional slippage from progressive political and civil principles supposedly underlying the state. Within this context, there could be liberal Zionists privately decrying occasional Israeli bad behavior. But the Zionist storyline was not true. We never were dealing with just occasional slippage but rather with the inherent brutality of a state with policies and practices designed to bring about racist ends (a nation exclusively for one group) – while conjuring up a remarkably durable cover story that it was, after all, a liberal democracy. The Israeli right, as well as the Palestinians, always knew the cover story was a sham. Now, with the recent Gaza slaughter, much of the rest of the world does too. That public unveiling, along with the Zionist demands for uncritical loyalty, leaves the liberals in a wholly untenable situation.
You simply cannot adhere to the principle of universal civil and political rights and, at the same time, support a Zionist state. To do so is to involve oneself in a contradiction. The liberals are being forced to face this fact. And, as this happens, they will have to make a real choice: cease being Zionist or cease adhering to the liberal ideal. I suspect that, along with Ari Shavit, most of them will decide to “stand with the damned.”
Robin Williams, Mental Health, and Social Insanity
By Michael Smith | Legalienate | August 17, 2014
“We are made miserable . . . not just by the strength of our beliefs, but by the weight of hard and all-too real situations, as they bear downward, robbing us of control . . . unhappiness treated by clinicians has much more to do with the sufferer’s situation than with anything about themselves, and for those with few privileges, this unhappiness is pretty well beyond the reach of therapeutic or any other conversation.” – Paul Moloney “The Therapy Industry”
Robin Williams’s body was scarcely cold when liberal commentators began using the tragedy of his death as publicity for suicide hotlines and professional mental health intervention in general. He had long-standing depression, we were told, and his “mental illness” was manifest in his decision to take his own life. Depression sufferers were urged to “be honest” and avail themselves of the services of professional therapists and counselors.
Days later Williams’s widow informed the world that her husband had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, a degenerative disorder that even people with no prior history of depression can find impossible to face. Parkinson’s is chronic, and its symptoms worsen over time, leading to body tremors, muscle stiffness, and the loss of coordinated movement. No one knows why the disease develops, and it is incurable.
We do not know what went through Williams’s mind, of course, but it is not difficult to entertain the idea that the lifelong actor made an understandable decision to take an early exit from life’s stage rather than suffer the appalling loss of body control that the disease entails for its sufferers. Surely there is something more than “mental illness” involved in the desire to avoid such a fate.
Even if Williams’s well-known depression, which long-predated his Parkinson’s diagnosis, was involved in his decision to end his life, the liberal notion that we can and ought to rely on mental health professionals to guide us to health and sanity is more than a little suspect. There is no evidence that this group suffers lower rates of depression than the rest of the population, nor any that any kind of therapy has a cure for it. In fact, the evidence suggests that the mental health profession plays a crucial role in perpetuating a status quo within which depression is said to be growing by leaps and bounds.
Psychoanalyst Joel Kovel demonstrated in the early 1980s that psychotherapy and counseling had become indispensable parts of the capitalist economy, especially in the United States, where turning socially induced misery into false questions of self-improvement long ago reached the status of a quasi-religious movement. Subsequent to Kovel’s published insights came the “diseasing” and drugging of hyper-active American schoolchildren due to what eventually came to be known as “ADHD.” In more recent years, we have seen how “happiness psychology,” particularly the work of conservative academic and writer Martin Seligman, a former chairman of the American Psychological Association and adviser to the U.S. military, informed the Bush Administration’s torture program at Guantanamo Bay. All of this should make us quite skeptical about claims that therapy and counseling have the answer to our mental woes.
Having said that, the challenge of effectively treating mental disorders is surely formidable. According to surveys and clinical data, rates of depression in the U.S. have increased ten-fold since the 1950s, although it must be admitted that individuals of quite divergent symptoms are routinely classified under this broad umbrella, calling into question the validity of the category itself. However, even if some of the increase is due to an increased tendency to define common dissatisfaction as illness, it seems likely that at least some of the increase is genuine, given soaring inequality and an attendant increase in chronic illness, social isolation and reported loneliness, and suicide, especially during the periods of economic crisis that have become a nearly constant feature of U.S. capitalism in recent years.
Contrary to therapeutic claims that a “positive” attitude is the key to mental health, a growing body of evidence supports the claim that the principal influence on people’s mental health is their circumstances, both past and present. We can now say with some assurance that the larger and more obvious the gaps between rich and poor in developed societies – and the more exploitive the relations required to maintain and expand them – the greater the likelihood of violent conflict, mutual distrust, and degraded health, both mental and physical. Features of a particular location in the social hierarchy such as prestige, conditions of work, material circumstances, and wealth largely determine one’s likelihood of enjoying mental and physical health or illness. And to the extent that one belongs to a stigmatized, exploited group, and especially if one is poor, the more likely one is to experience life’s hardest blows – more often, more painfully, and with fewer joyful experiences to compensate for them.
Conventional counseling and therapy isn’t even focused on this problem, much less is it offering a solution to it. Because of its conviction that attitude is everything, conventional approaches put the onus of responsibility on the poor for their poverty. Thus they are given parenting training and other judgmental interventions when what they really need is decent housing, food, recreation, medical care, and above all, money. The assumption is that the poor deserve to be poor owing to their allegedly deficient character, made manifest in poor impulse control, hypersexuality, and a general lack of integrity. If it weren’t for these defects, the theory goes, the poor would be contented members of the middle class. This is one of the most damaging features of therapy, because it teaches exploited people that they are deficient or substandard instead of abused. Unfortunately, the crude stereotypes blaming the poor for their plight are promoted by a wide spectrum of members of the so-called “helping” profession: community leaders, social work educators, and quite a few academic researchers. If this is “help,” what might hindrance be?
Therapists and counselors with a genuine interest in finding a cure for mental illness would do well to investigate the income inequalities hypothesis of population health. Based on the common sense assumption that high levels of inequality are unhealthy (directly for the poor, indirectly for the rich), the thesis is that for modern industrialized countries, the average health, well-being, and longevity of the population depends not on the level of absolute poverty that exists, but on the spread of wealth, and especially on the gap between rich and poor.
As income differentials widen, the theory goes, people start to feel more competitive, and begin to look on others with increasing suspicion and distrust. Wariness, envy, shame, fear, and anger become more pronounced and take on a self-perpetuating thrust, undermining the basis for affectionate and caring relationships. A life of perpetual insecurity (which former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan declared in Congressional testimony was the principal reason for the 1990s boom years) and perceived threat triggers the release of cortisol and other “stress” hormones into the bloodstream, lowering our capacity to fight infection and ward off heart disease and other degenerative conditions. It should be emphasized that the theory maintains that this harms even the rich, who, amidst increasingly unjust conditions, have less and less opportunity to enjoy their wealth in ease. The public health implications are substantial: an increase of 7% in the share of income going to the bottom half of the population allegedly yields two additional years of life expectancy. [Note: The U.S. has the most unequal distribution of wealth in the developed world. According to the most recent survey by the Federal Reserve, the top decile own 71% of the country’s wealth, while the bottom half claims just one percent.]
One of the more intriguing mental health research findings undermines the “positive attitude” theorists. It shows that moderately depressed people have a more accurate perception of their abilities and their capacity to control events than do “healthy” people. A 2002 study found that mildly depressed women were more likely to live longer than non-depressed or severely depressed women. A longitudinal study of more than 1000 California schoolchildren concluded that optimism was more likely to lead to premature death – possibly because the optimists took more risks. Another study among pre-teenagers found that kids who were more realistic about their standing among their peers were less likely to get depressed than those who had illusions about their popularity. And a 2001 study co-authored by the guru of happiness psychology himself – Martin Seligman – found that among older people pessimists were less likely to fall into depression following a negative life event such as the death of a family member than were optimists.
These findings should provoke a complete reorientation of, not just the helping professions, but the entire society. After all, psychologists have long convinced us that we are all “CEOs” of self, rationally testing our ideas against reality, and that we become disturbed to the extent that we cannot accept the verdict that reality delivers. In short, to the extent that our ideas are unrealistic we are mentally ill, which should mean that President Obama, the Supreme Court, top executives on Wall Street, and virtually the entire Congress are certifiable lunatics.
But of course it doesn’t mean that. WE who cannot make our peace with a social order dedicated to plunder and destruction are mentally suspect, because responsible adulthood entails setting aside the childish notion that the world can be transformed into something within which a decent person would want to live, in order to concentrate on the supremely important matter of reproducing an increasingly imperiled social order dedicated to getting and spending. This is the reigning definition of sanity in our times. God help anyone who insists that social and political reality, not personal attitudes and reactions, is what needs to be adjusted.
Sources:
Barbara Ehrenreich, “Bright-Sided – How The Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America,” (Metropolitan Books, 2009)
Paul Moloney, “The Therapy Industry – The Irresistible Rise of the Talking Cure, and Why It Doesn’t Work,” (Pluto Press, 2013)
Thomas Piketty, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” (Harvard University Press, 2014)
Attacking journalists makes Israel a plastic democracy
By Alastair Sloan | MEMO | August 18, 2014
I’ve just had the pleasure of spending eight hours in detention at the border between Egypt and Israel, between Tabaa and Israel’s southern-most city, Eilat. My crime at first appeared to be a single male travelling alone into a Middle Eastern country. But once the immigration police realised I was a journalist, I was in for the long haul.
At first – I was asked the standard cavalcade – where was I staying, who with, and what were my plans? But on discovering my profession, brows furrowed faster than a Horah dance at a bar mitzvah.
My stay in a holding area, punctuated by increasingly aggressive interrogations, peaked when the most senior official asked me to write down the names and addresses of all my sources in Israel and Palestine.
Of course they wanted sources in “the Palestinian Territories,” and in a Freudian slip, I blurted out that I certainly wouldn’t be revealing any sources in the “Occupied Territories”. After a brief staring match, the official kept tapping away into her computer.
I didn’t give them the information they were after, not wanting to endanger anyone – which resulted in a further four hour wait, during which not much appeared to be happening. They let me go in time for me to miss my best friend’s engagement party, where I was stopping by before heading up to Ramallah. They knew I was in a rush to make this, and they knew I was best man. I’ll never know if they let me go when they did out of spite, but I suspect they did. Bullies enjoy a pathetic victory.
Thomas Jefferson was unequivocal in his support for the media, summarising that “the basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
Nelson Mandela, no friend to Israel but a hero to civilised nations – described freedom of information as “the lifeblood of democracy”. Curbing journalistic freedoms is not only a red rag to the bull – it’s arrogant and betrays the electorate. Too often we think of democracy as happening at the ballot box – but it is the media that informs the voter before they reach the polling station and in harassing, imprisoning and even killing journalists, Israel makes a mockery of their insistent claim to be “the only democracy in the Middle East”.
What I experienced was a mere bump in the road compared to other journalists’ troubles. Majd Kayyal, a Palestinian journalist, was arrested in April 2014 on his return from Beirut – allegedly for entering an “enemy state” and conspiring with a “foreign agent”. He was held in a windowless room for five days, interrogated by Shin Bet, and denied access to a lawyer. The government prohibited Israeli media outlets from reporting on the matter in real time – a ban which was luckily ignored by many editors. The charges were later dropped – however veteran Israeli journalist Itai Anghel noted that having travelled to several “enemy states”, including Iraq and Afghanistan – he had not once been stopped or detained by the Israeli security services.
But again, what happened to Kayyal is, sadly, mild. Seventy-one journalists were killed in Israel last year. Over 2,000 reported being physically attacked or threatened. Eighty-seven were kidnapped. Over 800 were arrested. Seventy seven had had enough and fled the country and, as of December 2013, there were 178 journalists in Israeli prisons. This doesn’t sound like a free press.
At the end of last year – diplomats, politicians, activists and NGOs concluded that the Palestinian territories were one of the worst places in the world to practice journalism. Not only is violence regularly deployed to repress domestic and foreign reporters, censorship laws are used to deny useful debate and manipulate opinion – often in favour of war.
For example, on July 24 the Israeli Broadcasting Authority prohibited the broadcast of an advert produced by B’Tselem, an Israeli NGO, which listed the names of 150 children killed in Gaza. Likewise, the killings of three Israeli teenagers took place almost immediately after their kidnapping, shortly before Operation Protective Edge began, yet a gagging order on the media prevented publishing the key facts.
Instead, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu orchestrated a phoney manhunt for three weeks in which pro-war fervour was whipped up. He even lied to the children’s parents.
Now, talking to Israelis across the country, it is clear that support for the most recent Gaza onslaught is near unprecedented – based on the distorted image of the events leading up to the war. The range of opinions I heard was extremely narrow, with narratives drawing clearly on simplistic hasbara distributed by the government. To take a country to war, you need the media with you. Netanyahu has become an expert on this.
Similar censorship laws were invoked when Lt Hadar Goldin was apparently briefly captured by Hamas during the most recent conflict, and Israeli artillery shelled his location in an effort to kill him. This infamous “Hannibal Doctrine”, which dictates Israeli soldiers should be killed by friendly fire rather than become prisoners, was considered so unpalatable to the national spirit – that reporting on it was completely banned. In an extraordinary display of arrogance, Israeli military censors even attempted to stop The New York Times from publishing further information on the case.
So far, only Haaretz has run a piece seriously questioning the doctrine. Thankfully, the newspaper ended a 10 year reporting ban of the Doctrine in 2003, when they completed an investigation into the matter. Still, knowledge of the Doctrine was not as apparent as you would hope for from the ordinary Israelis I spoke to this week.
Though part of the Israeli public’s thirst for war can be attributed to a lack of media information, many Israelis are wilfully blind to the misgivings of the Israeli Defence [sic] Force (IDF). In a survey last year, Tel Aviv University found that just over half of Israelis believe that the media should not publish immoral conduct by the IDF. This has created an environment in which self-censorship is the norm. Recent civilian casualties in Gaza, despite numbering over 2,000 have barely been reported. The morning after the offensive began, Israel’s most widely circulated newspaper, Yisrael Hayom, did not contain a single word regarding civilian casualties. Instead, editors splashed an enormous explosion in Gaza City, and an emotive photo of an IDF conscript hugging his girlfriend goodbye. Yisrael Hayom’s slogan is sickeningly unquestioning for a major media outlet: “Remember, we are Israelis.”
The complicity of the Israeli media – largely a phoney industry with a sense of social responsibility akin to Blackwater or G4S, fills responsible hacks with professional disgust. One in 10 members of the Knesset is a former journalist. The leader of the country’s second most popular party is Yair Lapid and the leader of the Labour Party is Shelly Yachimovich, both came from Channel 2, Israel’s largest TV station. Of course many highly capable leaders have come from journalistic backgrounds, but the mass migration to the other side of the fence suggests the industry has a fundamental misunderstanding of what journalism is about: holding power to account.
Moreover – the continuing brutality of the Israeli regime against Palestinian and foreign journalists is profoundly troubling. I was lucky – my punishment was eight hours in detention and an unplanned overnight stay in Eilat (incidentally – a depressing sinkhole of tourist tack thronging with recently released IDF conscripts, celebrating their mass slaughter in Gaza).
But for many journalists, the price they pay for reporting on Israel’s crimes is beating, arrest, imprisonment, kidnapping or death. For Israel to be anything more than a plastic democracy its leaders need to rethink press freedoms. And if Israelis want to understand why the world is constantly so critical of them, they need to understand that they live in a media bubble in which only a certain reality about the Occupied Territories is presented. The full picture might not be nice, but is extremely important.
West has more influence than Kiev on oligarchs’ armies in Ukraine – Lavrov
RT | August 18, 2014
Moscow believes the West has more influence on various paramilitary forces in Ukraine – sponsored by local oligarchs – than Kiev does, Russian FM Lavrov said citing the latest bickering between Right Sector and the Interior Ministry.
“The authorities in Kiev are not in control of the numerous paramilitary forces, including Right Sector, which, we estimate, comprises a large portion of the National Guard. The demarche of Right Sector towards the Ukrainian Interior Minister speaks for itself,” Sergey Lavrov said, adding that existence of armed groups sponsored by Ukrainian oligarchs, such as the Azov and Dnepr battalions, poses a great security threat.
“We work with our Western partners in Europe and the United States who can really influence those paramilitary units that don’t answer to the central government in Kiev. We know the West has such influence,” he added.
Lavrov was referring to the weekend ultimatum of the far-right group, which threatened to pull out its troops from eastern Ukraine and march on Kiev unless President Petro Poroshenko fires several police officials, including a deputy interior minister. The group later reduced its demands, saying that the release of its activists previously arrested by the police was sufficient.
The comments from the top Russian diplomat came as he reported on the progress achieved during the Sunday meeting with his counterparts from Ukraine, Germany and France. The roundtable produced no concrete agreements, but the parties involved said some progress was made on the issues of humanitarian aid and border control.
Speaking to journalists on Monday, Lavrov said Moscow would welcome the observer mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) deploying drones to control the Russian-Ukrainian border from the Ukrainian side.
Lavrov said Russia is working with the OSCE on giving more transparency in the border region, which is important, considering how often Kiev voices false reports on alleged violation of the border from the Russian side. He cited the latest claim by Kiev on Friday, when the Ukrainian military said it had destroyed a column of Russian armor after an incursion into Ukraine.
“What really happened was a Ukrainian column moved in the Lugansk Region, obviously to intercept the route of a potential humanitarian aid delivery. That column was destroyed by the militia,” he said. “If such episodes are presented as glorious successes of the Ukrainian army, then please don’t accuse us of anything.”
Russia has sent a convoy of humanitarian aid meant for war-torn eastern Ukraine. The trucks have not been allowed entry by the Ukrainian side, which voiced suspicions about the nature of the cargo and demanded that the delivery be conducted by the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Lavrov noted that the media hype over the mission, which was apparent in the West in its early days, evaporated as soon as it became clear that the column actually carries humanitarian aid and is not some kind of a trick used by Russia to invade Ukraine, as Kiev initially claimed.
The minister also criticized Kiev’s request for NATO’s aid against the militia in eastern Ukraine, saying that it “goes against all the agreements we had reached on stopping the hostilities and initiating negotiations.”
“As long as the authorities in Kiev bet on the use of force and consider a military victory over their own people a necessary condition for keeping themselves in power, I don’t think any good will come from what we are trying to achieve,” he said.
Dangerous Western lies provoke wars
By Paul Craig Roberts | Press TV | August 18, 2014
The Western media have proved for all to see that the Western media comprises either a collection of ignorant and incompetent fools or a brothel that sells war for money.
The Western media fell in step with Washington and blamed the downed Malaysian airliner on Russia. No evidence was provided. In its place the media used constant repetition. Washington withheld the evidence that proved that Kiev was responsible. The media’s purpose was not to tell the truth, but to demonize Russia.
Now we have the media story of the armored Russian column that allegedly crossed into Ukraine and was destroyed by Ukraine’s rag-tag forces that ISIS would eliminate in a few minutes. British reporters fabricated this story or were handed it by a CIA operative working to build a war narrative. The disreputable BBC hyped the story without investigating.
The German media, including Die Welt, blared the story throughout Germany without concern at the absence of any evidence. Reuters news agency, also with no investigation, spread the story. Readers tell me that CNN has been broadcasting the fake story 24/7. Although I cannot stand to watch it, I suspect Fox “news” has also been riding this lame horse hard. Readers tell me that my former newspaper, The Wall Street Journal, which has fallen so low as to be unreadable, also spread the false story. I hope they are wrong. One hates to see the complete despoliation of one’s former habitat.
The media story is preposterous for a number of reasons that should be obvious to a normal person.
The first reason is that the Russian government has made it completely clear that its purpose is to de-escalate the situation. When other former Russian territories that are part of present day Ukraine followed Crimea, voted their independence and requested reunification with Russia, President Putin refused.
To underline his de-escalation, President Putin asked the Russian Duma to rescind his authority to intervene militarily in Ukraine in behalf of the former Russian provinces. As the Russian government, unlike Washington or EU governments, stresses legality and the rule of law, Russian military forces would not be sent into Ukraine prior to the Duma renewing Putin’s authority so to do.
The second reason the story is obviously false is that if the Russian government decides to invade Ukraine, Russia would not send in one small armored group unprotected by air cover or other forces. If Russia invades Ukraine, it will be with a force capable of rolling up the rag-tag Ukrainian forces, most of which are semi-private militias organized by nazis. The “war” would last a few hours, after which Ukraine would be in Russia’s hands where it resided for hundreds of years prior to the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Washington’s successful efforts in 1991 to take advantage of Russian weakness to break apart the constituent provinces of Russia herself.
The third reason that the story is obviously false is that not a single Western news organization hyping the story has presented a shred of evidence in its behalf.
What we witness in this fabricated story is the total lack of integrity in the entirety of the Western media.
A story totally devoid of any evidence to support it has been broadcast world wide. The White House has issued a statement saying that it cannot confirm the story, but nevertheless the White House continues to issue accusations against Russia for which the White House can supply no evidence. Consequently, Western repetition of bald-faced lies has become truth for huge numbers of peoples. As I have emphasized in my columns, these Western lies are dangerous, because they provoke war.
The same group in Washington and the same Western “media” are telling the same kind of lies that were used to justify Washington’s wars in Iraq (weapons of mass destruction), Afghanistan (Taliban = al-Qaeda), Syria (use of chemical weapons), Libya (an assortment of ridiculous charges), and the ongoing US military murders in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.
The city upon the hill, the light unto the world, the home of the exceptional, indispensable people is the home of Satan’s lies where truth is prohibited and war is the end game.
Israeli analyst explains that the “special relationship” benefits Israel, NOT the US
By Alison Weir | August 17, 2014
While Israel partisans in the US and some others (often former Israel partisans) sometimes claim that the US-Israel “special relationship” is driven by the US, Israeli writers are more honest. Most recently, retired Israeli diplomat Alon Pinkas writes on Ynet* (emphasis added):
Apart from Israel’s ability to defend itself, there never was – and probably will never be – a more important strategic asset to the country than its relationship with the United States. Since its founding – and especially since the end of the 60s and the start of the 70s – these ties have provided Israel a superpower to lean on, a supporting pillar of military deterrence, and a force-multiplier in the international arena.
The United States has not only vetoed more than 50 anti-Israel resolutions at the United Nation’s Security Council, it has also provided military aid totaling more than $140 billion, as well as access to American weapon systems and advanced ammunition. But the US has also garnered a reputation as an almost-automatic defender of Israel – its layer of protection from international isolation.
The relationship between the two countries has often been defined as “special”, “extraordinary”, and an “unshakeable alliance.” Since the 80s, Israel has often pushed to define itself as a “strategic asset” for the United States and, though Americans have never used the phrase themselves, they have not denied it.**
But on this matter there is some confusion in Israel borne of an exaggerated sense of self-importance. The strategic asset in this equation is the US for Israel, not the other way around.
____________________
* Ynetnews, according to its website, “is part of the prominent Yedioth Media Group, which publishes Yedioth Ahronoth – Israel’s most widely-read daily newspaper – as well as several popular magazines and dozens of local publications.”
** Actually many American experts have denied that Israel is a strategic asset – see, for example, The National Summit to Reassess the US-Israel Special Relationship.
New Orleans Cop Turns off Body Cam before Shooting Man
By Carlos Miller | PINAC | August 15, 2014
A New Orleans police officer turned off her body cam before opening fire on a man who had escaped from her a week earlier.
Lisa Lewis shot the man in the forehead during a traffic stop, then shot at him again as he ran away, according to the lawyer of the man who remains hospitalized. He was wanted on warrants.
Not only did she turn off the camera, the department tried its best to downplay Monday’s incident, which they initially reported to the media as posted below:
According to a preliminary report from the New Orleans Police Department, an officer was in the area and heard gunshots and then had an altercation with a person and suffered a minor injury to the officer’s right hand.
The officer was taken to Tulane Hospital, police said.
No further information about the incident was made available in the preliminary report.
When the media found out about it anyway, New Orleans Police Superintendent Ronal Serpas shrugged it off as a blunder.
NOPD Superintendent Ronal Serpas said his public information officer was supposed to issue a news release on Monday, but failed to do so — an action Serpas took responsibility for.
Serpas said NOPD Officer Lisa Lewis was conducting a traffic stop was injured and shot 26-year-old Armand Bennett.
Bennett was booked on five outstanding warrants, which included possession of a weapon, resisting an officer (Gretna), resisting an officer (New Orleans), possession of marijuana and criminal damage to property.
Bennett was listed in stable condition at a local hospital.
The department issued cameras to officers in January with Serpas proclaiming “this is the future of policing in America.”
Which is pretty much like the past in that they still control the message.
No Russian troops crossed into Ukraine – FSB
RT | August 15, 2014
Russia’s Defense Ministry has denied Kiev’s report that it “destroyed the Russian military column” which allegedly crossed into Ukraine, saying that no such column ever existed.
Earlier on Friday Russia’s Security Service (FSB) also denied the reports. Border guards have been deployed to provide security near the frontier, but they operate only on the Russian side, the FSB said.
The mobile military teams “operate strictly within the territory of the Russian Federation,” a spokesperson for the FSB Border Guard Service in Rostov region told RT on Friday.
Russia has stepped up security measures on its border with Ukraine as local residents are under constant threat because of “regular cross-border shelling” and an increased number of “mass border crossings” by the Ukrainian military, he explained. For that reason, FSB mobile border guards’ teams have been created.
“When residents report about cross-border shooting and fighting in the frontier zone, these teams are immediately deployed to such areas to provide the safety of the Russian state border and Russian citizens, and also to prevent armed people from crossing into the territory of the Russian Federation,” Sinitsyn said.
Earlier, several foreign news agencies caused quite a stir, reporting that a convoy of Russian military vehicles had crossed into Ukraine overnight.
The reports triggered criticism from NATO and some European states.
NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen referred to the alleged incident as to “a Russian incursion” that they “saw.”
“Last night we saw a Russian incursion, a crossing of the Ukrainian border,” he said Friday, adding that “it is a clear demonstration of continued Russian involvement in the destabilization of eastern Ukraine.”
British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said he was “very alarmed by the reports.”
“Of course the humanitarian convoy itself is a separate issue, but if there any Russian military personnel or vehicles in eastern Ukraine they need to be withdrawn immediately or the consequences could be very serious,” he told reporters in Brussels, where European Union foreign ministers had gathered for an emergency meeting to discuss crises in Ukraine and Iraq.
In an article published by The Guardian, reporter Shaun Walker said he “saw a column of 23 armored personnel carriers, supported by fuel trucks and other logistics vehicles with official Russian military plates, traveling [toward] the border near the Russian town of Donetsk.” Late on Thursday the convoy “crossed into Ukrainian territory,” he said. However, no photographic or video evidence of the incident was presented either in his article or in his Twitter feed. The photograph published with the text was taken on Russian territory.
The Telegraph also reported that “at least 23” Russian vehicles had crossed into Ukraine. The report is accompanied by a video also filmed on Russian territory.
Is Democrats For Public Education Just a Toothless, Cynical Sound Byte?
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Bruce A. Dixon | August 13, 2014
Last month at a teachers union meeting the Democratic National Committee’s Donna Brazile announced the formation of Democrats For Public Education. Supposedly DFPE will fight against the policies of elite Democrats and Republicans who want to privatize public education. As the daughter of a longshoreman from a family of teachers and a product of public schools Brazile declared herself unafraid to call out those of her own party who are demonizing teachers and privatizing public education, though as a top Democrat she did not use the p-word.
But Donna Brazile didn’t call out anybody, not then and not in the month since. Because if she did name names, number one would have to be her president, Barack Obama, and number two would be his Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.
Cabinet appointments are not accidents. Presidents pick appointees with proven commitment and track records of accomplishing the very policies a president wants imposed, and President Obama was deeply in the pocket of the charter school sugar daddies.
As Chicago Public Schools CEO Arne Duncan ravaged, savaged and privatized. He fired thousands of mostly black teachers with little or no due process, and handed big chunks of public resources over to the operators of private charter schools. This record and his personal friendship with the president got Duncan appointed Secretary of Education.
Over the last six years, President Obama, Secretary Duncan and their Department of Education have let representatives of the private charter schools, testing companies, and consultants from the Walton Family, Eli Broad, Bill & Melinda Gates and other foundations ideologically committed to running schools like businesses and education like a market write the federal guidelines school districts must follow to receive federal funds – something they call the Race To The Top program. The same consultants have also been allowed to deeply embed themselves embed themselves in the supposedly impartial private institutions officially recognized by the Department of Education which evaluate schools, school districts.
By now the processes of privatization have an institutional momentum backed up by billions of public and private dollars. You can’t fight that juggernaut if you cannot name its name and the names of the politicians it buys and rents. But Democrats don’t publicly criticize each other much, black Democrats even less, and a prominent black Democrat contradicting the black president is unthinkable, it’s just not in their DNA.
So why does DFPE exist? It can raise money, but nothing compared to the vast sums its opponents can. Apart from possible interference in next year’s Chicago mayoral contest, its only conceivable purpose is an utterly cynical one. DFPE will house surrogates for Hillary Clinton’s 2018 campaign who will give the credulous faithful an excuse to believe that Hillary, unlike Barack, is not on the side of the privatizers and charter school sugar daddies, the same way Obama had unofficial spokespeople everywhere assuring us that he was pro net neutrality, against the Patriot Act, the Iraq war, torture, wanted to renegotiate NAFTA, and whatever else some of us wanted to hear. Democrats For Public Education is just that, the cynical sound byte that some self-deceiving Democrats need to hear.
Teachers unions after all, don’t just provide big checks to Democratic presidential candidates, its rank and file activists are the foot soldiers, the door to door and phone canvassers, the flesh and blood of a nationwide street operation which a successful Democratic presidential candidate needs to mobilize the Democratic base. You want to make that happen you’ve got to tell those foot soldiers what they want to hear, whether your candidate means it or not. That’s called a campaign field operation.
Ron Paul: US ‘hiding truth’ on downed Malaysian Flight MH17
By Robert Bridge | RT | August 10, 2014
Former Congressman Ron Paul said the US knows ‘more than it is telling’ about the Malaysian aircraft that crashed in eastern Ukraine last month, killing 298 people on board and seriously damaging US-Russian relations in the process.
In an effort to inject some balance of opinion, not to mention pure sanity, into the ongoing debate over what happened to Malaysian Flight MH17, Ron Paul is convinced the US government is withholding information on the catastrophe.
“The US government has grown strangely quiet on the accusation that it was Russia or her allies that brought down the Malaysian airliner with a Buk anti-aircraft missile,” Paul said on his news website on Thursday.
Paul’s comments are in sharp contrast to the echo chamber of one-sided opinion inside Western mainstream media, which has almost unanimously blamed anti-Kiev militia for bringing down the commercial airline. Incredibly, in many cases Washington had nothing to show as evidence to incriminate Russian rebels aside from references to social media.
“We’ve seen that there were heavy weapons moved from Russia to Ukraine, that they have moved into the hands of separatist leaders,” said White House spokesman Josh Earnest. “And according to social media reports, those weapons include the SA-11 [Buk missile] system.”
In another instance, State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf told reporters “the Russians intend to deliver heavier and more powerful rocket launchers to the separatist forces in Ukraine, and have evidence that Russia is firing artillery from within Russia to attack Ukrainian military positions.” When veteran AP reporter Matthew Lee asked for proof, he was to be disappointed.
“I can’t get into the sources and methods behind it,” Harf responded. “I can’t tell you what the information is based on.” Lee said the allegations made by the State Department on Ukraine have fallen far short of “definitive proof.”
Just days after US intelligence officials admitted they had no conclusive evidence to prove Russia was behind the downing of the airliner, Kiev published satellite images as ‘proof’ it didn’t deploy anti-aircraft batteries around the MH17 crash site. However, these images have altered time-stamps and are from the days after the MH17 tragedy, the Russian Defense Ministry revealed, fully discrediting the Ukrainian claims.
In yet another yet-to-be explained event, Russian military detected a Ukrainian SU-25 fighter jet approaching the MH17 Boeing on the day of the catastrophe. No acceptable explanation has ever been given by Kiev as to why this fighter aircraft was so close to the doomed passenger jet moments before it was brought down.
“[We] would like to get an explanation as to why the military jet was flying along a civil aviation corridor at almost the same time and at the same level as a passenger plane,” Russian Lieutenant-General Andrey Kartopolov demanded days after the crash.
Paul has slammed the United States government for its failure to provide a single grain of evidence to solve the mystery of the Malaysian airliner despite its arsenal of surveillance technologies at its disposal.
“It’s hard to believe that the US, with all of its spy satellites available for monitoring everything in Ukraine, that precise proof of who did what and when is not available,” the two-time presidential candidate said.
“Too bad we can’t count on our government to just tell us the truth and show us the evidence,” Paul added. “I’m convinced that it knows a lot more than it’s telling us.”
Although no sufficient evidence has been presented to prove that the anti-Kiev militia was responsible for the downing of the international flight, such an inconvenient oversight has not stopped the United States and Europe from slapping economic sanctions and travel bans against Russia.
Moscow hit back, saying it would place a ban on agricultural imports from the United States and the European Union. Russia’s tit-for-tat ban will certainly be felt, as food and agricultural imports from the US amounted to $1.3 billion last year, according to the US Department of Agriculture. In 2013, meanwhile, the EU’s agricultural exports to Russia totaled 11.8 billion euros ($15.8 billion).
After the crash, Ron Paul was one of a few voices calling for calm as US officials were pointing fingers without a shred of evidence to support their claims. Paul has not been afraid to say the painfully obvious things the US media, for any number of reasons, cannot find the courage to articulate.
“They will not report that the crisis in Ukraine started late last year, when EU and US-supported protesters plotted the overthrow of the elected Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych,” Paul said. “Without US-sponsored ‘regime change,’ it is unlikely that hundreds would have been killed in the unrest that followed. Nor would the Malaysian Airlines crash have happened.”
Paul also found it outrageous that Western media, parroting the government line, has reported that the Malaysian flight must have been downed by “Russian-backed separatists,” because the BUK missile that reportedly brought down the aircraft was Russian made.
“They will not report that the Ukrainian government also uses the exact same Russian-made weapons,” he emphasized.
Was Putin Targeted for Mid-Air Assassination?
By Robert Parry | Consortium News | August 8, 2014
U.S. intelligence analysts are weighing the possibility that the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was a botched attempt by extremists in the Ukrainian government to assassinate Russian President Vladimir Putin whose aircraft was returning from South America the same day, according to a source briefed on the U.S. investigation.
If true, the direction of the investigation into the July 17 crash has veered dramatically from initial U.S. government allegations that eastern Ukrainian rebels, using a Russian-supplied anti-aircraft battery, were responsible for bringing down the plane killing 298 people onboard.
The Obama administration used those claims to whip up an anti-Russian hysteria that prompted European countries to ratchet up economic sanctions against Moscow, starting what now looks like an incipient trade war.
But the U.S. analysts dismissed those original suspicions because they could find no evidence that such a missile battery had been supplied by the Russians or was in the possession of the rebels, prompting a shift in thinking toward a scenario in which Ukrainian hardliners working with elements of the air force may have tried to ambush Putin’s plane but instead hit the Malaysian airliner, said the source speaking on condition of anonymity.
Putin flies in a plane with similar red, white and blue markings as the Malaysian airliner and was known to be on his way home after a six-day visit to South America. But his plane took a different route and landed safely in Moscow.
After the crash, as U.S. intelligence analysts pored over phone intercepts and other intelligence data, they began to suspect that the motive for the shoot-down was the desire among some Ukrainian extremists to eliminate Putin whom they had been privately vowing to kill – words initially viewed as empty bluster but which were looked at differently in hindsight – the source said.
If some Ukrainian authorities were hoping to ambush Putin’s plane, they also would have had only a matter of minutes to detect the aircraft’s presence and make a decision to fire, so it could be plausible that the attackers made a hasty decision to hit Putin’s plane before they realized that they had made a tragic mistake.
Blaming Russia
After the crash, the Ukrainian government quickly assembled some pieces of information from “social media” to pin the blame on the eastern Ukrainian rebels and the Russian government for what would have been a reckless decision to supply such powerful weapons to a poorly trained force.
The rebels denied having a Buk anti-aircraft battery capable of reaching an aircraft flying at 33,000 feet and the Russians denied having supplied one, but those denials were brushed aside by the mainstream U.S. news media and were rejected as well by senior U.S. officials. Only three days after the crash, Secretary of State John Kerry made the rounds of five Sunday talk shows to embrace the Ukrainian government’s assertions although the official investigation into the crash had just begun.
The following Tuesday senior U.S. intelligence officials briefed mainstream reporters from several news outlets offering qualified support to the claims by Kiev and Kerry, but some journalists noted the lack of any real evidence and the briefing’s curious reliance on “social media” rather than aerial reconnaissance, phone intercepts or other official sources. The absence of this corroborating evidence suggested that the case against the rebels and Russia was weaker than the Obama administration was letting on.
Yet, because of the high-level endorsements of Russia’s presumed guilt, the U.S. intelligence analysts are moving cautiously in developing their alternative scenario, said the source, who added that another line of inquiry still being pursued is that the Ukrainian military brought down the passenger plane simply to create a provocation that could be turned against the rebels and Russia.
But the assassination motive would seem to make more sense given the intense hatred expressed by Ukrainian leaders toward Putin and how Ukrainian extremists would view the murder of Putin as a giant feather in their cap.
Still, the idea of assassinating the Russian president by shooting down his plane – even if the attack were carried out by hardliners without the approval of top officials – could have provoked a major international crisis. Nuclear-armed Russia would have almost surely retaliated against Ukraine, possibly with a full-scale invasion which could have escalated into a dangerous military confrontation with the United States.
This possibility of a cascading crisis beyond the control of rational policymakers has always been a risk since the U.S.-backed overthrow of elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych on Feb. 22, a putsch spearheaded by neo-Nazi militias though also supported by more moderate political figures. The U.S. State Department quickly embraced the coup regime as “legitimate,” but ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine, which had been Yanukovych’s political base, resisted the new order.
Crimea, another stronghold of ethnic Russians, voted overwhelmingly to secede from Ukraine and rejoin Russia, a move endorsed by Putin and backed by Russian troops who were stationed in Crimea, the site of the Russian naval base at Sebastopol. The annexation of Crimea was heartily denounced by President Barack Obama and U.S. allies in Europe, who began applying sanctions on Russia.
Meanwhile, the new Ukrainian government, which gave the neo-Nazis several ministries in appreciation for their key role in the coup, began calling the ethnic Russian resistance “terrorists.” New National Guard units, formed from neo-Nazi militias, were dispatched to intimidate ethnic Russians in the southern city of Odessa, where scores were killed when a pro-Kiev mob set a trade union building ablaze.
A Worsening Crisis
As the crisis worsened, several eastern cities in the Donbass region also voted to secede and an armed resistance emerged against the Kiev regime, which responded by vowing to crush the rebellion with an “anti-terrorist operation” that has included artillery and aerial bombardments against towns and cities held by the rebels.
On Friday, a Ukrainian parliamentary group reported that more than 10,000 people have been killed in Kiev’s offensive since April, a number far higher than earlier estimates.
Angered by the mounting violence, the Russians lodged murder accusations against two Ukrainian officials, Interior Minister Arsen Avakov and Ihor Kolomoisky, a billionaire oligarch who was appointed by the coup regime to be governor of the southeastern Dnipropetrovsk Region.
Kolomoisky, known for his strong-arm business tactics including deploying paid thugs to intimidate rivals, is now using his fortune to finance paramilitary units, such as the Dnipro Battalion which is considered one of the most aggressive and brutal units in the “anti-terrorist operation” in eastern Ukraine.
Since the February coup, Kolomoisky also has engaged in a bitter war of words with Putin whom he publicly mocked as a “schizophrenic shorty.” But Kolomoisky’s fury toward Putin has intensified in the face of the Russian murder charge and other threats to the billionaire’s PrivatBank holdings. In private conversations, Kolomoisky has made angry threats against Putin, the source said.
Other Ukrainian officials have vowed to kill Putin. Ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, a onetime Kolomoisky ally, said in an intercepted phone: “It’s about time we grab our guns and kill, go kill those damn Russians together with their leader.”
Though U.S. intelligence was aware of such threatening anti-Putin rhetoric via American intercepts, the rants were not taken seriously, at least not until after the shoot-down of the Malaysian airliner, the source said. Now, they are reportedly being studied as a possible motive for the July 17 attack.
Another curious development was the sudden resignation on Thursday of Andriy Parubiy as chief of Ukraine’s national security. A longtime neo-Nazi leader, Parubiy had organized and directed the paramilitary forces that spearheaded the putsch on Feb. 22 forcing Yanukovych and his government officials to flee for their lives.
Parubiy refused to explain his reason for quitting but some analysts believe it may have a connection to the Malaysia Airlines shoot-down, the source said. The U.S. intelligence analysts specifically said their evidence does not implicate Ukraine’s current President Petro Poroshenko or Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, but they did not extend that clearance to the more extreme elements of the government, the source said.
Russian Evidence
Based on technical evidence that Moscow has supplied to U.S. and other investigators, it appears that the Ukrainian military had several Russian-made Buk anti-aircraft missiles along the path of the Malaysia Airlines flight as well as two jetfighters in the air in the vicinity of the doomed plane.
Eyewitnesses also reported seeing one or two Ukrainian jetfighters near the airliner right before it was blown out of the sky. Two theories are that the jetfighters were trying to identify the plane or were responsible for finishing it off if the missile failed to do the job.
An independent analysis by an expert on the Buk systems, who has reviewed the Russian evidence, says it shows that one of the Ukrainian anti-aircraft batteries was in position to take down the Malaysian airliner by inflicting damage consistent with the wreckage that has so far been recovered from the plane.
As the pieces of this puzzle fill in, the image that emerges is of a possible Ukrainian ambush of a jetliner heading into Russian airspace that had markings very similar to President Putin’s official plane. As shocking as that picture may be, there is a grim logic to it, given the demonization of Putin who has been likened to Hitler and Stalin by pundits and politicians from Ukraine to the United States.
However, even if the U.S. intelligence analysts do assemble a strong case implicating an extremist faction within the Ukrainian government, there is still the political problem for the Obama administration of dealing with a conclusion so dramatically at odds with the original accusations aimed at the rebels and Russia.
Powerful people are notoriously unwilling to admit mistakes, especially when it could open them to charges that they rushed to judgment and behaved recklessly. There are similarities with the hasty U.S. conclusions a year ago when sarin gas killed hundreds outside Damascus on Aug. 21 – and the finger of blame was pointed immediately at the government of President Bashar al-Assad.
On Aug. 30, Secretary Kerry declared repeatedly that “we know” that the Assad regime was guilty, but some U.S. intelligence analysts were privately expressing their doubts and refused to endorse a “Government Assessment” which presented no verifiable evidence to support the accusations. The four-page white paper also suppressed the dissents of the analysts.
Over the ensuing months as much of Kerry’s case fell apart, some of these analysts came to believe that rebel extremists were likely responsible for the attack as a provocation to draw in the U.S. military into the civil war on their side. But the U.S. government has never retracted its allegations against the Syrian government. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “The Collapsing Syria-Sarin Case.”]
Given how far senior U.S. officials have gone in heaping blame for the Malaysia Airlines shoot-down on the rebels and the Russians, it is hard to envision a walk-back of those accusations regardless of the actual evidence. To compel that would require true courage from U.S. analysts or from international investigators looking into the crash.
It is never easy to contradict important people, especially when they have leveled such serious accusations so confidently. That is one reason why Kerry and the mainstream U.S. news media should have held back on their conclusions until a thorough investigation had been done.
~
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
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New Book
The silver that medicine dropped — four thousand years of clinical use, four decades to erase.
Colloidal Silver — First Edition, 2026, Paperback
Lies are Unbekoming | October 16, 2026
Silver was medicine. Not alternative medicine. Not folk medicine. Medicine. In surgery. In obstetrics. In the burn ward. In water treatment. In the household medicine chest. Every physician before 1938 knew this.
By the 1870s, silver nitrate was standard in surgical wound care across the leading hospitals of Britain, Germany, and the United States. Colloidal silver preparations — Collargol, Argyrol, Protargol — entered European and American practice through the 1890s and early 1900s and became standard antiseptics in military field medicine. By the time Fleming grew his first penicillin mould in 1928, silver was the first-line antimicrobial of the Western pharmacopoeia. The Lancet and the British Medical Journal carried the clinical reports in volume. The practice ran continuously through the Victorian era, the Edwardian era, the First World War, the interwar period. By 1980, almost all of it was gone.
What has not been treated at book length, until now, is how a four-thousand-year clinical record disappeared from mainstream medicine within four decades of the Flexner Report — and what the honest account of silver looks like once that record is reassembled.
Colloidal Silver reconstructs the pre-1938 record from The Lancet, the British Medical Journal, and the primary literature of the era; recovers Robert Becker’s bioelectric framework from the regeneration research the pharmaceutical model buried; and places silver inside a practical terrain-paradigm guide to its current place — in water, on the body, inside the body, and in the chronic conditions where antibiotics have failed. … continue
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