Photograph Source: Bair175 – CC BY-SA 3.0
Years have passed since president Joe Biden allegedly ordered the bombing of the Nordstream 2 pipeline, and the dust has long settled. We can now answer whether the reckless white house gamble to damage Moscow succeeded or not. The answer is definitive: it failed. But did the white house really commit this massive economic, political and climate crime? Well, renowned investigative reporter Seymour Hersh long ago concluded, with lots of insider pizazz, that it did. Much more recently, on September 26, we very nearly got a smoking gun, namely verified reports of the surreptitious presence of U.S. navy warships with their transponders suspiciously OFF, near the crime scene, four or five days before the explosion. These warships operated in the exclusive economic zone of Denmark. The captain of a small Danish port learned of this, but officials silenced him for years. Only recently could he speak out to Danish journalists.
So whom did the explosion harm? Not Russia. Moscow just rerouted its cheap natural gas to the east and has been making money there, hand over fist. Similarly with its sanctioned oil: Moscow sells it to India, which raises the price and sells it to Europe. Russia is now the world’s fourth largest economy measured by purchasing power parity, edging out Japan, and is relatively unscathed by impotent western sanctions. Really, whom did the explosion hurt? Not the U.S., enabled by this convenient catastrophe to sell its outrageously expensive and therefore previously non-competitive liquified natural gas to Europe. But Europe? Ah, that’s another matter. And specifically Germany. Remember Biden threatened on TV to destroy Nordstream 2. His henchwoman Victoria Nuland fulminated thus also. It turns out, these Mafiosi-like threats came to fruition and led to the swift deindustrialization of Europe’s economic powerhouse – Deutschland.
Germany boasted 10,702 corporate insolvencies in the first quarter of 2024, rather an indictment of its Russophobic foreign and economic policy. After all, had Berlin okayed using the one remaining and functioning Nordstream pipeline, cheap Russian gas would have prevented many of those businesses from going bust. But prime minister Olaf “Liver Brain” Scholz cut off his country’s nose to spite its face: No cheap energy from Moscow, even for the flagship German car corporation Volkswagen, currently mulling up to 30,000 job cuts, when it closes several German plants. The company also ended its longstanding job security arrangements with the country’s unions. And what has caused this manufacturing debacle? Abrupt withdrawal from cheap Russian energy. And other sundry imbecilic sanctions. Europe, with the Teutonic nation leading the way, decided to commit economic suicide.
Germany’s economy shrinks steadily, as RT reported October 14: Its growth for 2024 will likely be minus .2 percent, and this is “the new, miserable German normal.” It’s not a blip, not an aberration, but the way things are gonna be for quite some time. As RT observes, gone are the halcyon, pre-Russia sanction days of the mid-2000s with 24 percent cumulative growth. And things aren’t better elsewhere in the European Union. France is on track for 57,000 to 62,000 corporate insolvencies in 2024. Italy is predicted to suffer a 22 percent increase in such bankruptcies this year, while in Spain thousands of businesses shuttered. Meanwhile thousands of U.K. companies went belly up in 2024, and officials estimate 147 percent insolvencies over pre-pandemic levels.
This is not the rosy picture of a thriving region. It has the whiff of the funeral parlor, especially when these lousy bankruptcy stats combine with a long-term, declining birthrate. Europe depended vitally on cheap Russian energy. In truth, Moscow subsidized European industry and protected it from American economic predation – who knew? Evidently not the Europeans, who apparently in their degraded arrogance just took this sweet deal for granted. Now that they’ve spurned it for their so-called principles (what principles? That they should be allowed to expand a murderous military alliance right onto Russia’s doorstep, without a peep of objection from the kremlin? Or that they should aid Ukro-fascist slaughter of ethnic Russians in the Donbass?), they find their companies closing up shop and many relocating, where? Dum, da, dum, dum: to the United States, thanks to the American Inflation Reduction Act, a deliberate affront to its so-called allies in Europe, designed to steal their businesses. Washington’s vassalization project for Europe is complete, and demonstrating Germany’s abject submission, its president recently awarded Joe “Nordstream Bomber” Biden a medal. I mean, is this the height of masochism or what?
Meanwhile, in other dismal EU news, Moldova’s recent referendum was manipulated October 20 so that it can join this gang of suicidal masochists, aka the EU. The election was a disgrace for democracy; according to political scientist and East European expert Ivan Katchanovski on twitter October 21, many pro-Russian citizens in Transdniestria could not vote, while only two polling stations in Moscow opened for the 400,000 Moldovan citizens living in Russia. That meant maybe as few as 10,000 out of 400,000 Moldovans in Russia could vote. This was a decision of the pro-EU Moldovan government, which, by the way, only won an even 50 percent of Moldovans living in country for its EU membership bid…Welp, that’s it for Moldova, in all likelihood the next Ukraine, self-immolating on a western altar of spurious openness to troublemaking groups like NATO and whatever idiotic fad of the day comes along.
One incident involving the presidential election, tweeted out by Peacemaket October 21, was especially egregious. “A Moldovan citizen arrived in Moldova, went to vote in the country’s presidential election and found that the UK had already voted for him. The incident occurred with a man called Alexander Nikolaevich in the town of Tvarditsa in the Taraclia region of the republic. This is known as election fraud.”
So from this you can conclude that the presidential vote, like the EU referendum one, was not exactly on the up and up. But hey, U.S. officials helped actual Nazis to overthrow the Kiev government back in 2014, so they’re old hands when it comes to such funny-business in this corner of Europe. I don’t know if there was any American involvement in this shady Moldovan election, but U.S. preferences there are no secret. And those preferences, of course, come with ideologically doctrinal anti-Russian blinkers. No dissent allowed. As we also see in Georgia, where the overwhelming late October vote to remain, well, Georgian instead of joining the EU’s kamikaze mission for it to open a second front against Russia may yet lead to a western-backed coup against the legally elected government.
Back in Berlin, one can say that overall, American behavior toward its EU ally has been atrocious. Calling for destroying an ally’s critical infrastructure – Nordstream – then actually bombing it, then cravenly lying about it and expecting its victims to swallow these lies, literally rubbing their faces in this humbug – what are the words for such behavior? Treacherous, wicked, arrogant, violent, feckless, stupid? You pick. But however many you pick, don’t forget stupid. Because Washington needs a healthy European ally. Joe Biden may not have thought so, if thought can be attributed to his actions, but without a healthy Europe, who does the U.S. have? Canada, Japan, South Korea, Israel and Australia. That’s about it. Compare it to the number of countries in or clamoring to join BRICS. And make no mistake, Washington has induced decline in Europe. This, after embarking on its disastrous Ukraine proxy adventure, which has left western defense cupboards nearly bare.
When photos first appeared of the effects of the Nordstream explosion in the sea, Polish minister of foreign affairs, Radek Sikorski tweeted: “Thank you, America.” Thank you for nothing is more like it. Thank you for robbing us, he should have said. And when the history of this disgraceful and disgusting episode comes to be written, it will be noted prominently that this was Washington’s first shot at its closest ally’s head and, ultimately, its own.
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Publish date : 2024-10-31 23:02:00
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