Strategic Culture – Sept 29, 2023

The sheer total impunity over the blowing up of the Nord Stream gas pipelines raises an appalling vista of the lawlessness and barbarity in today’s world.

The United States and its NATO accomplices are recklessly and callously pushing a war in Ukraine against Russia which has seen up to half a million Ukrainian soldiers slaughtered and is putting the world at risk of a nuclear conflagration. The criminal insanity stems from the lack of any legal accountability for the United States, which grotesquely declares itself the custodian of “rules-based order”.

One year ago this week, an outrageous crime against international peace was committed and yet the Western governments and media perform like the proverbial monkeys who incredibly refuse to see, hear or speak of any evil.

The profound moral and philosophical challenges are worthy of exploration in an epic novel akin to Dostoevsky’s classic Crime and Punishment.

But this is not fiction. They are cold facts of real life.

By far, the most credible explanation for the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines is provided by the investigative reporting of veteran American journalist Seymour Hersh.

Many other independent observers concur with Hersh’s account that the gas pipelines under the Baltic Sea were blown up by a covert U.S. military operation in collusion with other NATO forces.

According to Hersh, the sabotage was ordered by President Joe Biden and his top White House aides.

The infrastructure intended to pump natural gas from Russia to Germany was owned by those two nations as well as several other European companies. It cost at least $20 billion to construct over a decade. On September 26, 2022, the pipes were rendered inoperable by a series of underwater explosions.

Biden had explicitly threatened in February 2022 to take out the gas pipes during a White House press conference accompanied by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

The motive for the Americans was to cut off Europe and Germany, in particular, from Russian energy fuel which was to be replaced by vastly more expensive U.S. exports of liquefied natural gas. Great for American business, absolutely detrimental for Europe, as the recession-hit European economies now attest.

The motive and means for carrying out the crime have been thoroughly described by Hersh and others.

And yet in an audacious act of collective denialism, the Western governments and media refuse to investigate this monumental crime. Official reports into the incident carried out by Denmark, Germany and Sweden have been suppressed with no conclusions published about the identity of the perpetrator.

Russia has been refused permission by European states to participate in a joint criminal investigation.

This week Moscow once again called on the United Nations Security Council to issue a condemnation of the sabotage and to launch an impartial probe into the extraordinary violation of international law. Previous appeals at the Security Council from Russia have been rebuffed by Western powers.

Laughably, Western media have feigned an agnosticism about the “mysterious explosions”. Such media have credulously indulged in blatant diversionary disinformation, for example, initially claiming that Russia carried out self-sabotage, and then later claiming that the sophisticated and highly complex military operation was the feat of “pro-Ukrainian militants” working off a yacht.

There is a pre-eminent reason for the Western silence. That is, to avoid the proverbial elephant in the room that this was a terrorist crime committed by the United States under the orders of its president.

To acknowledge this fact would of course bring the United States into fatal disrepute. It would be seen more than ever as a rogue terror state that presumes itself to be above the law.

Washington’s imperialist interests of dominating Europe and displacing Russia as an energy supplier are central to the reason for the war in Ukraine. This selfish and criminal agenda becomes evident if the Nord Stream act of terrorism is acknowledged and properly understood. The Western public would be up in arms over the false propaganda about the Ukraine war and the supposed “defense of democracy”.

Not only that but the European and NATO states would be seen as the criminal accomplices and pathetic vassals that they are. The United States sabotages European civilian infrastructure and the economies of its supposed allies – and yet those allies utter not a word of protest. Indeed, they have willingly and meekly participated in their self-harm.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and other European leaders should be prosecuted for complicity in international terrorism and treason against their national interests.

Ironically, this week, Joe Biden while in Arizona dared to tell American voters that they face a stark choice in the presidential elections coming next year. Biden said the choice would be for U.S. citizens to either “support democracy” under his continued leadership or “elect extremism” under Donald Trump or some other Republican candidate.

What could be more extreme than Biden ordering his military agencies to blow up gas pipelines owned by Russia and other European states?

The fact that Biden and the United States have been permitted to get away with the outrage of Nord Stream terrorism is why Washington and its NATO acolytes have continually escalated the proxy war in Ukraine against Russia over the past year.

The astounding impunity afforded to the U.S. and its NATO accomplices over the Nord Stream incident is consistent with the way these same imperialist powers have gotten away with mass murder and waging criminal wars for decades without any prosecutions. The U.S. establishment and its clandestine agencies are a criminal syndicate that also suffers from delusions of virtue.

Impunity breeds more criminality. The United States and its Western partners have rarely, if ever, been held to account for their historic crimes against the rest of the world. When such a transparent, brazen act of terrorism is perpetrated as in the Nord Stream sabotage and it is ignored then the world has shifted to an even more perilous situation where crimes have no punishment and even greater, more nefarious crimes can be engaged in.

The U.S. and its NATO henchmen, in particular Britain, are arming a Nazi regime in Kiev with tanks, cluster bombs, depleted uranium shells and longer-range missiles to strike Russia. The impunity that the Americans and their partners believe that they have acquired is shocking and hideous. There is no restraint.

For years, the NATO axis has been arming and training Nazi battalions in Ukraine to cynically take an imperialist war to Russia’s doorstep. Canada’s scandalous adulation of a Nazi war criminal in its parliament last week is a sign of the depraved times we live in. But we have reached this degeneration because, as the Nord Stream incident illustrates, the Western powers, primarily the executive American power, feel they are not just above the law but entitled to smash the law for whatever objective they deem desirable.

When those who profess to uphold the law, break the law, then there is no law. That is the frighteningly barbaric world we live in today.

Biden warned this week of fascism creeping up on the United States in the form of domestic political rivals. The reality is fascism, imperialist lawlessness and barbarity are already well-ensconced in this White House.

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