No Man’s Land by Gaither Stewart

Image by Bo Nielsen via Flickr

by Gaither Stewart
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Rome, Italy
January 4, 2019

Get out your atlas. You will likely need it when you read farther here about the intriguing but little known story in a lesser known part of Alpine Europe: Italy’s northern territory of Alto Adige, better known as South Tyrol. I used an atlas for geographical details about the borderlands with which this article deals and where I have spent long periods. For it’s the details—often geographical—that will confound you every time. Such details make you aware that military planners of national strategy never spend enough time with their atlases. Over much of my lifetime I have passed through these border territories countless times, from north to south, south to north and yet I still discover new things about them.

Daniel Ellsberg: The Doomsday Machine, Parts 1-13

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Dandelion Salad

The Real News Network

“In this series, Daniel Ellsberg and Paul Jay explore Ellsberg’s latest book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. In the introduction to the book, Ellsberg writes:

“No policies in human history have more deserved to be recognized as immoral or insane. The story of how this calamitous predicament came about and how and why it has persisted over a half a century is a chronicle of human madness. Whether Americans, Russians, and other humans can rise to the challenge of reversing these policies and eliminating the danger of near-term extinction caused by their own inventions and proclivities remains to be seen. I choose to join with others in acting as if that is still possible.””

Pope Francis and Beijing: The Geopolitics of the Vatican by Caleb Maupin

Image by Devendra Makkar via Flickr

by Caleb Maupin
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Caleb Maupin (website)
Caleb Maupin (Facebook Page)
New Eastern Outlook, Sept. 18, 2018
September 27, 2018

The Roman Catholic Church and the Peoples Republic of China are set to sign an agreement, which would formally end the hostilities between these two entities. The Chinese government will formally acknowledge the Pope as the leader of the Catholic Church in China. In exchange, the Pope will reinstate ex-communicated Bishops selected by the Communist Party to lead Catholics on the Chinese mainland. In this context, it is worth reviewing the shifts and evolutions of Catholicism in global politics.

Another of the Many Charming Examples of Cold War Anti-Communism by William Blum

Image by J Duval via Flickr

by William Blum
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Killing Hope
April 19, 2018

Unpersons

One reason it’s so easy to get an American administration, the mainstream media, and the American people to jump on an anti-Russian bandwagon is of course the legacy of the Soviet Union. To all the real crimes and shortcomings of that period the US regularly added many fictitious claims to agitate the American public against Moscow. That has not come to a halt. During a debate in the 2016 Republican presidential primary, candidate Ben Carson (now the head of the US Housing and Urban Development agency) allowed the following to pass his lips: “Joseph Stalin said if you want to bring America down, you have to undermine three things: Our spiritual life, our patriotism, and our morality.” This is a variation on many Stalinist “quotes” over the years designed to deprecate both the Soviet leader and any American who can be made to sound like him. The quote was quite false, but the debate moderators and the other candidates didn’t raise any question about its accuracy. Of course not.

Facebook Scandal Blows Away “Russiagate” by Finian Cunningham

Image by CleveredFool.com via Flickr

by Finian Cunningham
Writer, Dandelion Salad
East Africa
Crossposted from Strategic Culture Foundation
March 24, 2018

Now, at last, a real “election influence” scandal – and, laughably, it’s got nothing to do with Russia. The protagonists are none other than the “all-American” US social media giant Facebook and a British data consultancy firm with the academic-sounding name Cambridge Analytica.

John Pilger: The Contamination of the Corporation Runs Right Through Our Lives

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Dandelion Salad

with John Pilger

Melbourne Press Club on Mar 1, 2018

“John Pilger has always been hopelessly romantic about journalism, he told a 2 March Press Club lunch, and the day he got a cadetship on the Daily Telegraph was one of the happiest of his life.

John Pilger: There Is No Evidence! It’s A Propaganda Campaign! + Stephen Cohen: Corbyn Calls for Evidence

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with John Pilger

RT on Mar 18, 2018

Russia-UK relations plunge amid row over the poisoning of a former spy. Award-winning journalist John Pilger joins RT to discuss this issue.

Now Here’s Some Real Interference In Election Campaigns by William Blum

Image by Babak Fakhamzadeh via Flickr

by William Blum
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Killing Hope
March 15, 2018

Shakespeare said it best, much ado about nothing.

That’s the “Russian interference” in the 2016 American election.

A group of Russians operating from a building in St. Petersburg, we are told in a February 16 US government indictment,1 sent out tweets, Facebook and YouTube postings, etc. to gain support for Trump and hurt Clinton even though most of these messages did not even mention Trump or Clinton; and many were sent out before Trump was even a candidate.

Ukraine on Fire

Image by Sasha Maksymenko via Flickr

Dandelion Salad

Warning

This video may contain images depicting the reality and horror of war/violence and should only be viewed by a mature audience.

Robin Westenra Feb 2018

Oliver Stone – Ukraine on Fire. Full Documentary. The Real Story (Original English version).

Cold War 2.0 Just As Stupid As Cold War 1.0 by William Blum

Image by fliegender via Flickr

by William Blum
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Killing Hope
December 5, 2017

Cold War Number One: 70 years of daily national stupidity

Cold War Number Two: Still in its youth, but just as stupid

“He said he absolutely did not meddle in our election. He did not do what they are saying he did.” – President Trump re Vladimir Putin after their meeting in Vietnam.

Global Rollback: After Communism by Michael Parenti + Reflection on the Overthrow of Communism

Image by Jurriaan Persyn via Flickr

by Michael Parenti
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Originally published at Third World Traveler
CovertAction Quarterly, Spring 2002
Previously posted Sept. 26, 2011
November 9, 2017

Lately we have been hearing a great deal about “blowback.” But the real menace we face today is global rollback. The goal of conservative rulers around the world, led by those who occupy the seats of power in Washington, is the systematic rollback of democratic gains, public services, and common living standards around the world.

Crossover As Transformation — My Testimony by Gaither Stewart

Image by Charles Hutchins via Flickr

by Gaither Stewart
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Rome, Italy
October 31, 2017

I woke up in the early 1970s. Since such an awakening happened in my life, I believe something similar happens also in the life of others. Though I didn’t realize it I had stood for sometime at a crossroads. I had to take the left. This sounds reductive but in retrospect it feels that my transformation happened more or less like that. Before, I was one person. Afterwards—the interval might have been months long, maybe a couple years—I was another. No need to over-dramatize and claim that the event happened as if it arrived like a thunder bolt. In any case, over a period of time, in the same way revolution happens, I revolted against my own self of the time; against my old life. And I became another. Today, as a result, part of my personal philosophy of life is that people can and do change. Fundamentally.

Cold War Then. Cold War Now. by William Blum

Image by J Duval via Flickr

by William Blum
Writer, Dandelion Salad
www.killinghope.org
September 26, 2017

Cold War then. Cold War now.

The anti-Russian/anti-Soviet bias in the American media appears to have no limit. You would think that they would have enough self-awareness and enough journalistic integrity -– just enough -– to be concerned about their image. But it keeps on coming, piled higher and deeper.

The Deep History of US, Britain’s Never-Ending Cold War On Russia by Finian Cunningham

Image by Raymund Flandez via Flickr

by Finian Cunningham
Writer, Dandelion Salad
East Africa
Crossposted from Strategic Culture Foundation, May 4, 2017
May 6, 2017

After decades of delaying, the United Nations finally released archives from the Second World War-era war crimes commission investigating the Nazi Holocaust. The source of those archives on Nazi war crimes were Western governments, including those in exile at the time of the war, such as the Belgian, Polish and Czechoslovakian. The time period covered is 1943-1949. Washington and London had long sought to halt the release. Why?

The Great American Perpetual Motion War Machine by Greg Maybury

Image by Robert F. W. Whitlock via Flickr

by Greg Maybury
Guest Writer, Dandelion Salad
Pox Amerikana, Jan. 16, 2017
February 13, 2017

Brief: The so-called ‘military-industrial complex’ ushered in by the passing of the 1947 National Security Act is a luxury America and the world can no longer afford. The unprecedented threat posed by the over-privileged belligerents infecting U.S. military doctrine with their unbridled hegemonic ambition is redolent of that of the British Empire in the years leading up to the Great War in 1914. With Donald Trump advocating massive upgrades of the U.S. nuclear arsenal and full-spectrum dominance likely to remain integral to American foreign and national security policy making, along with musing on how we arrived at this point, we ponder the here and now, and an unthinkable, yet, still avoidable future.