The United States Blew Up Nord Stream 1 & 2 Pipelines
The “indispensable” friend of Europe committed one of the worst terrorist acts against its “friends” likely ever witnessed in the history of war. This crime, which was the carefully orchestrated destruction of Nord Stream 1 & 2, occurred during the first year of the conflict in Ukraine.
It was blatantly clear that the crime was committed by the United States from the start.
Radoslaw Sikorski, a European Parliament member and a former Polish foreign minister, took no hesitation in thanking the U.S. for damaging the Nord Stream pipeline.
“A small thing, but so much joy,” he said on Twitter, posting a photo of the accident site to accompany the tweet and assigning it the hashtag #Nordstream.
“Thank you, USA,” he said in the following tweet, with the same picture.
And to blow the evidence out of the water- no pun intended- two of America’s most prominent neocons, Biden and Victoria Nuland, made brazen public statements prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine that Nord Stream 2 would no longer exist under the condition that Russian troops crossed the Ukrainian border with intent of a special military operation. The recent exposé published by the legendary Seymour Hersch singled out many of the specifics in the planning and the important role Norway played in this singular act of terrorism.
Western Media Deliberately Lying About Ukrainian Peace Efforts
Despite the sanctions, despite the multibillion-dollar terrorism, there was a good-faith effort on both the Russian and Ukrainian sides to try to bring the war to a quick halt, in bargaining sessions brokered by both Turkey and Israel as early as March 2022. Negotiations were enthusiastically embraced and began in Ankara. Although, the western liberal media would continue to omit this fact.
However, as the negotiations were beginning, Boris Johnson, then British PM, made a visit to Kiev. Mysteriously, the next thing you heard was that peace driven negotiations had broken down.
Several months later during an interview on YouTube, then Israeli PM Bennett said the breakdown happened because the West wanted to bring down Putin. Coincidence or not, one of the Ukrainian negotiators who strongly supported a peaceful negotiation agreement was outright assassinated. Did you hear about this assassination on any Western media outlets? Of course not! It was swept under the rug, along with all the other suppressed information the neocons don’t want the general public to hear.
China Denounces American Involvement In Ukraine As Domineering And Hegemonic
It should be clear why I labeled the Chinese scholar’s view of the Russian Ukraine war as childish propaganda. His contention that the war would harm China has also proved to be, like everything else, upside down thinking. Putin’s actions in Ukraine were bookended by two meetings with Xi Jinping. The first was a one-on-one meeting in Beijing just before the Olympics in February 2022, while the second was at the gathering of SCO in Samarkand, just before Russia announced a mobilization of hundreds of thousands of additional troops.
In other words, Xi has been completely in the loop. Is he upset? Recently, the Chinese- in response to the Ukraine war- issued a 10-point plan for how the world should be governed. The report ends with the following statement:
“China opposes all forms of hegemonism and power politics, and it rejects interference in other countries’ internal affairs. The U.S. must critically examine what it has done, let go of its arrogance and prejudice, and quit its hegemonic, domineering and bullying practices.”
To me it sounds like China is pretty happy about how things are going in Ukraine. That is not the kind of statement you make unless you are willing to hold yourself up as an alternative to the United States.
Now let’s turn to the comments from the former head of NATO and military scholar. His longer opinion piece makes three points. First, it’s silly to assume that extended NATO boundaries caused the war or that war could have been avoided if NATO had not expanded to Russian borders. The second is that while no one has a crystal ball regarding the war’s eventual outcome, odds favor Ukraine. And finally in no uncertain terms should the U.S. continue to categorically support Ukraine, as in his words:
“The Ukrainians are fighting for our values… against an evil and relentless foe.”
NATO’s Involvement In Ukraine As Perilous As Cuban Missile Crisis
As to the first point, the acknowledged dean of post-WWII foreign policy, George Keenan, called the expansion of NATO to Russian borders “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.”
According to the Brookings Institute: “Kennan, the architect of America’s post-World War II strategy of containment of the Soviet Union, believed, as did most other Russia experts in the United States, that expanding NATO would damage beyond repair U.S. efforts to transform Russia from enemy to partner.”
Many of these experts drew parallels to the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, when Russian missiles in Cuba came extraordinarily close to creating a nuclear exchange between Russia and the U.S. President Kennedy had to rule against the unanimous recommendation of the Joint Chiefs to initiate a first strike. Perhaps this ex-military commentator thought Kennedy was wrong. I think he should keep that kind of thinking to himself.
On the second point, the military thinker has it backwards. The United States along with its European “allies” have hit rock bottom on their inventories of weapons. Even with a $800 billion military budget we are unable to come close to matching Russian production of armaments. A recent issue of the Economist, perhaps the most pro-neocon periodical in the West, features an obituary in every issue. The first time I have ever witnessed this space devoted to something rather than to someone was when the subject of the obituary was Bakhmut, which had been the scene of the most intense fighting in the current Ukrainian war. This logistically critical city had been surrounded by Russians, and the remaining Ukrainians in the city had lost sources of supplies, meaning the city after eight months of fighting was doomed.
Ukraine Doesn’t Have A Chance Of Winning The War And NATO Knows It
Folks, you don’t have to be a super military analyst to realize that Ukraine’s chances of winning are close to zero, while the Russians are likely debating whether they need to take Kiev in the following months in order to ensure Ukraine remains neutral in the war’s aftermath. In other words, the Russians can do pretty much what they want.
Anyone aware of the astonishing loss of life in the Ukraine armed forces has to wonder what in the world happened to America. The America I grew up in never would have allowed a situation like Bakhmut to occur. There have been reports from journalists on both sides that have said the life expectancy of a Ukrainian soldier still fighting in the beaten city is about four hours. The city has come to be known by the chilling sobriquet “meat grinder.” The description of the hundreds of dead Ukrainians whose bodies are beginning to decompose is beyond horrific.
As of the writing of this article, there are other critical cities in Ukraine meeting the same fate. America is currently proving the social psychologists correct when they say the “love of money leads to the objectification of other human beings.”
America has to wake up or it will be left at the altar in the new world order. A final statistic is probably a pretty fair summary of what has happened so far in the war. At the beginning of the war, Ukraine was a country of roughly 37 million. Today estimates range from 18 million to 22 million. Perhaps the only statistic the retired Admiral may have had right is that about 800,000 Russians fled their country on account of the war. One statistic he omits is that over a million Ukrainians left their country and emigrated to Russia.
The OUN And Ukrainian Ethos
Finally, to say Ukraine represents American values is very close to saying that American values are not inconsistent with lionizing Nazis. This part is painful to write, but I think Americans should know what is really happening, because if not, there will be little chance of effecting change.
Here’s a key point to understand. Recall that part of Putin’s reason for invasion was to stop the shelling of the eastern part of the country, which was largely directed at two Russian-speaking republics. As stated above, ceasing this shelling was part of the Minsk agreements, which Ukraine deliberately ignored. By itself this suggests that when talking about Ukraine, we are talking about two very different countries.
Underlining these profound differences is that the languages and religions are also different. In the west, Ukrainian is spoken, a mix of Polish and Russian with Polish a bit more prominent. In the east, Russian is spoken. Despite the greater prominence of Russian in the two parts together, schools are mandated to have classes in Ukrainian and to study history from the perspective of the west.
While both eastern and western Ukraine practice Orthodox Christianity, there are differences in the governance of the churches. The western church recognizes the Ukrainian patriarch as the church’s highest authority. In the east most believe that the patriarch of Moscow is the church’s highest authority. While the church is important for life in both the west and east, this difference also separates the country’s two parts.
With increased Western interest in Ukraine, the differences between east and west have become more obvious, though historically their roots go back about a century. In the late 1920s, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) was formed. The goal of the OUN, which was a collection of military groups, youth groups, and right-wing nationalists, was to create a strong nationalistic Ukraine, a country whose ethos was defined entirely as Ukrainian.
The original enemy was Poland, which at the time controlled a part of what is now western Ukraine. Nationalist organizations by definition are nondemocratic in that they only respect, or more strongly fail to tolerate, any group or individual not considered part of the national ethos. Poles were an obvious target because of territorial disputes, but minorities of all sorts were in most cases considered outcasts. Even before OUN, the country had a strong history of antisemitism, but in the wake of OUN, greater attempts were made to emphasize differences between Jews and Ukrainians. Still, Jews remained a major group within the country as the extreme right-wing OUN’s views were in the minority.
As I understand Jeffersonian democracy, all participants are believed to have been created equal, with all assured of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Equally important, it is perhaps the most important responsibility of the government to ensure that all individuals are guaranteed these rights. Incidentally, this was the position of the brilliant French philosopher Simone Weil. If you are going to govern, you have a sacred responsibility to preserve basic human rights and needs, lest you participate in the destruction of humanity.
