The worst act of eco-terrorism in recent history has become a surreal exercise in convenient blame-shifting
Once upon a time, long, long ago, scandals had consequences even in the West, at least sometimes. In the ancient US of 1974, Richard ‘Tricky Dick’ Nixon had to go because of Watergate, which, unlike Russiagate, was real, if hardly sensational by our standards today.
Even in the late 1990s, early post-unification Germany, the career of a giant like Helmut ‘chancellor of unification’ Kohl took a lethal hit from a rather boring affair turning on creative accounting in party finances. Indeed, biased media hype and liberal pearl-clutching was the whole brouhaha’s real essence. Without it, Angela Merkel might never have been able to knife her old benefactor Kohl in the back, and Gerhard Schroeder might not have become chancellor.
Now the West has devolved further. Our political elites in the US and EU have learned not to care, and more importantly, they have learned how to make us not care, or at least not enough. The worst political scandal of recent US history is the oddly inexplicable career of Jeffrey Epstein, convicted pedophile criminal and suspected intelligence operative as well as intimate friend of, it seems, most of the American establishment (in a thoroughly ‘bipartisan’ manner with vile favors to all). Its fall-out should already have profoundly changed America’s domestic and foreign policy, especially in the Middle East. And yet, it probably never will.
In NATO-EU Europe, things are at least equally dismal, as is appropriate for what is really just the most masochistic backyard of the American empire. There, the single worst scandal is what has happened to the Nord Stream pipelines at the bottom of the Baltic. Built at a cost of around $20 billion to bring inexpensive gas from Russia to Germany and the EU as a whole, in September 2022, they were mostly destroyed by sabotage.
That was the worst act of eco-terrorism in European history. Especially, with Russia and China now finalizing the building of the Power of Siberia Two pipeline, the destruction of Nord Stream will also be remembered as part of a historic reorientation of Eurasian energy flows that locked in Germany’s – and the EU’s – self-Morgenthauing de-industrialization.
This insane event was then followed by a most bizarre cover-up. Indeed, between the attack and the cover-up, it is impossible to tell which has been the more stunning, jaw-dropping outrage. But then, we don’t have to: the whole thing is one big mess.
A mess that, while buried under a dirty mudslide of Western mainstream media propaganda, has a way of bubbling up to the surface like methane from a bombed gas pipeline. And so the stink never really goes away: The most recent malodorous bubble has popped in Italy, where police arrested a Ukrainian terrorist – that’s the correct term for those committing acts of terrorism – on a family trip.
Sergey K., also a businessman (in – oh, coincidence! – the energy business) as well as a member of Kiev’s military and intelligence services (in reality: international terrorism organizations, as openly if jocularly admitted by one of their leaders), stands plausibly accused of playing a key role in the Nord Stream attack. The versatile Ukrainian will face extradition to Germany. Meanwhile, the German authorities are still searching for several more Ukrainian terrorists who took part in the attack.
The shameful, ludicrous roles that Western media and would-be experts – especially in Germany, the country most damaged by the attack, such as Carlo Masala or Janis Kluge – have played in absurdly trying to blame this devious terrorist strike against all of Germany on Russia is already old hat. Yet it is worth remembering: The fact that it has made no difference to their careers and artificial resonance in mainstream media tells us much about the abyss of deception and self-deception that Western propaganda has become.
Yet even after the initial smearing of Russia was mostly abandoned, this is not a story of the truth finally prevailing. In reality, what we are witnessing is one silly set of lies superseding another. In essence, ever since it became impossible for even the most dishonorable, unpatriotic, and ruthless Western information warriors to pretend that Russia had detonated one of its most valuable assets, we have been stuck in a second, improved – if that is the word – phase of daft stories for dummies: Now every good Western mainstream media consumer is supposed to believe that it was half a dozen Ukrainians, and they alone, who used the equivalent of a bathtub with a sail to sabotage heavily armored pipelines at the bottom of a cold, inhospitable sea.
Russians who know what they are talking about, meanwhile, are pointing at the involvement of highly trained and well-equipped special forces belonging to major NATO players, for instance Britain. As so often recently, the Russian view makes much more sense than the inanities pandered in the West.
Fed with that nonsense, we are also asked to believe that the US had nothing to do with the attack. Never mind the revelations of Seymour Hersh, star US investigative journalist, and the fact that America had a perfect motive, as had Germany’s friendly neighbor Poland (in both cases a combination of clear and brutal financial interests and cold-blooded geopolitics). Even more ridiculous, the current Western mainstream party line is that the nice, decent chaps at the CIA warned those hotheaded Ukrainians against that Baltic plunge. Yes, of course! And Kissinger really tried to have Allende helicoptered out of Chile’s presidential palace just before he blew his brains out before the CIA-sponsored plotters got to him.
In yet another twist for the ultra-gullible, even Ukraine’s authoritarian, clinically mendacious, ultra-corrupt, and mostly stoned leader Vladimir Zelensky is exempted from suspicion. He, so that tale goes, also wasn’t in favor of the explosive diving party; only wicked out-of-control General Valery Zaluzhny was.
By now, a major German newspaper is reporting that the German prosecutors are getting ready to name Zaluzhny as the terror attack’s mastermind. This is – no pun intended – explosive: Currently, Zaluzhny, an old and bitter rival of Zelensky, is an unlikely ambassador to the UK (his English is rotten, his diplomatic skills are non-existent, but then, that’s quite common in Ukraine). More importantly, he is also a likely Zelensky replacement if the West should decide to palace-coup or color-revolution the latter away.
You think all of the above is as crazy as it gets? You are still underestimating the NATO-EU Europeans. Because here is the next level of insanity: Having agreed on a stupid story without rhyme and reason that shifts the whole blame to Ukraine and Ukraine alone, Germany is not even ready to draw any reasonable consequences from its own cover-up tale.
Instead, Berlin has made it clear that recognizing Kiev as being behind the worst attack ever on German vital infrastructure and national interests in peacetime does not mean the government intends to take any action against Ukraine. Sanctions? Retaliation? Perish the thought! On the contrary, sheepish Berlin is promising Kiev ever more billions of Euros (on top of the 44 billion already squandered there), while demonstratively not even bringing up Ukraine’s act of terrorism and de facto war against Germany. That, after all, would be so very, very impolite.
Germany’s leaders are appeasing Ukraine in a ludicrous manner. Beyond that, they are appeasing everyone else who was also involved in this massive, devastating deindustrialization attack on a country already in deep economic trouble – that is, most likely Poland, the US, and Norway, at least. And all of the above is obvious for those with eyes to see. Yet nothing gives in Germany. Or just not yet?
