(LifeSiteNews) — The role of the mass media is to obscure and distort the obvious. Pattern recognition is usually dismissed with a charge of conspiracy theory, “extremism,” or other slurs. This means that the use of your judgment to assess the evidence is stigmatized. It is ignorance, make belief. Now, to notice the apparent is “Russian Propaganda.”
Another pipeline has been attacked. This time, it is the Russian pipeline which supplies ammonia across Ukraine. Explosions were reported on June 8 near the Togliatti-Odessa pipeline.
Russia quickly condemned
In December last year, Fertilizer Daily reported that the pipeline, which had been dormant since February 2022, could soon reopen. United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Martin Griffiths said an agreement was near, which involved the guarantee of the supply of Ukrainian grain together with the resumption of this vital global supply line for the manufacture of agricultural fertilizer.
‘I think we are close to this agreement. It may happen this week. I believe both sides and the UN are aware of the importance of this pipeline. It’s almost more important than grain exports,’ Martin Griffiths said.
Before the invasion of Ukraine, Russia supplied 23 percent of the world’s ammonia, and was the leading exporter of agricultural fertilizer. Global shortages and price hikes have resulted from the cessation of exports due to sanctions and war. This is the reason the UN’s representative Martin Griffiths described ammonia export as “almost more important” than grain. Ammonia makes fertilizer, which allows the world to feed itself.
Who could be opposed to this pipeline reopening? According to Agence France Presse, the Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Ukraine was “the only country that has never been interested in resuscitating the pipeline.”
So who would blow up this Russian pipeline, supplying Russian products to an eager international market?
Russia. That’s who. Reuters here is doing what much of the Western media do, and is simply repeating Ukrainian claims as news.
So far, Russia has been accused of
- Blowing up the Nordstream pipelines it built
- Blowing up its only bridge to Crimea which it also built
- Bombing its own capital city
- Bombing a nuclear power station it staffs and occupies
- Bombing a dam to flood its own people and destroy the water supply to Crimea
According to the press, it is not clear why Russia has bombed itself again.
The actions of a madman
The war began in 2014, and escalated with the Russian invasion of February 2022. The official reason for the war is that
- Putin is a madman
- Like Hitler
- and must be stopped
We are told that Russia repeatedly attacks its own infrastructure. Putin, being a madman, orders his army to bomb its own installations and fire upon the Russian speaking population.
Damned lies
Immediately prior to this latest act of insane self-harm, we are told that Putin ordered the destruction of a dam under Russian control.
He has been reported as describing the attack on the Nova Kakhovka dam as a “barbaric” crime which was intended to escalate the war with Russia.
The subsequent flooding has displaced Russian speaking populations typically loyal to Putin himself, and the collapse of the dam threatens the water supply to Crimea, which Russia has claimed as its own territory since 2015.
Yet the United States has itself bombed a dam, using a covert military unit acting autonomously.
The New York Times reported on the story, detailing a scandal that was woefully under-reported. Nevertheless, as recently as 2019, this was the kind of investigation we could expect from mainstream journalism.
A psychotic break
The type of reporting mentioned above has vanished, despite there being no end of mysterious events to explore. Why is this the case?
There is an absence of interest in finding out the truth. Smaller outlets remain the only ones willing to do any journalism it seems.
The GrayZone’s Liam Cosgrove asked Pentagon Press Secretary Brig. Ryder what he thought was the likely explanation. I have summarized his points here.
If you look at the context, the dam was in Russian occupied territory, the Ukrainian Ecological League said this could deprive Crimea of water for ten years, and the Washington Post reported Ukrainian plans to blow up the dam. Ukraine had also fired missiles at the dam to test this theory – of flooding the battlefield to hamper the Russians.
The Pentagon Press Secretary did not address any of these points.
The reports about Syria noted above are remarkable examples of investigative journalism, taking months to complete. The information would simply be unavailable if courageous men of principle remained silent. That is what is happening now.
Where are the reports on the Nord Stream pipelines? Where is that on the foiled attack on the Black Sea pipeline between Turkey and Russia? Both pipelines connected NATO members to supplies of strategic importance. The UN representative described the resumption of delivery through the recently sabotaged ammonia pipeline as more important than the grain supply.
Where is the interest in these numerous mysterious explosions?
These attacks on civilian infrastructure form a pattern of reckless destabilization regardless of the cost. They are terrorist attacks, and even when they fail they are dangerously provocative.
Of course, there is no interest in investigating their cause, nor of that of the collapse of the dam in Ukraine, because to do so would complicate the information picture with evidence.
Yet without any investigation whatsoever, the head of NATO has joined leading Western figures such as Antony “Al” Blinken in suggesting that Russia routinely bombs itself.
Jens Stoltenberg led a meeting with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitri Kuleba on June 8 to discuss an explosion he clearly attributes to Russia. Kuleba, who said he arranged the meeting, has already determined who is to blame. As Le Monde reports:
Kuleba reiterated Kiev’s accusation that the ‘crisis’ was ’caused by Russia’s destruction of the Kakhovka dam.’
Antony Blinken’s dislike of certain pipelines
Blinken knows a lot about Russian gas pipelines. He wrote a book about them in 1987, outlining his opposition to the construction of exactly the type of pipeline Nord Stream came to be.
Despite this, following the mysterious detonation of a pipeline he disliked before it even existed, Blinken suggested it may not have been an attack at all – and even if it was, it was in “no one’s interest.”
The beginning of the end of the Atlantic Alliance
What did Blinken say in this book? He wrote it at a time when the United States sought to undermine Soviet Russia by starving it of Western trade and technology.
When Russia began to exploit its gas fields, European states such as Germany saw an opportunity for cheap energy. To the US, this was a threat. If Europe began to trade gas, the Western alliance would be split, and its efforts to undermine Russia severely weakened.
As a 2020 Foreign Policy report on Blinken’s book said:
To Europe, tapping those seemed like an obvious way for it to diversify its energy supplies. To Washington, the pipeline was a scheme that would end up funding the Soviet military machine.
When Europe started laying pipe against U.S. objections, Washington the sanctioned European companies involved.
European governments pushed ahead anyway. A foreign-policy disagreement was becoming a commercial crisis. And the alliance that had held the West together since World War II risked fracturing.
It was ‘the beginning of the end of the Atlantic Alliance,’ France’s foreign minister declared. (emphasis added)
Though Blinken did not support the maximum pressure on Russia favored under President Ronald Reagan, his position then reflects the geopolitical reality he now shapes. The “alliance” of the West versus Russia must be paramount.
In Ally Versus Ally, Blinken evinced little sympathy for the Reagan administration’s campaign of maximum pressure against the Soviet Union, though he also thought the Europeans’ hope that ‘expanded economic relations will produce positive change in the Kremlin’s foreign and domestic policies’ was ‘wishful thinking.’
However, he argued, U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union was less important than U.S. policy toward its European allies.
The key geopolitical prize was not changes in Soviet behavior – which were difficult to predict or to shape – but alliance unity.
Blinken appears not to care that the Soviet Union collapsed, nor that the Russians under Putin asked to join NATO and cooperated in the “War on Terror”.
To him, and to the faction which directs U.S. foreign policy, what matters is a united front against Russia. The project to undermine Russia was the business of the National Endowment for Democracy, founded under Reagan to do just that.
The NED has deleted the records of its funding in Ukraine, but the proud admission that it has been “working” there since 1989 remains on their own site. An archived record shows the NED awarded 22 million dollars between 2014 and 2017 in Ukraine.
Yet the involvement of NED prior to 2014 has also been redacted.
In 2012, it issued a statement with Freedom House, a front group founded by NED, to denounce new Russian legislation which restricted the actions of NED in Russia.
This has been removed from the NED site.
NED objected to being labelled “foreign agents” and said it was undemocratic to limit its actions as a “civil society organization,” disbursing funds to other civic minded groups. The term “civil society” appears 14 times in the paper.
The late Parry points out that the “civil society” of the United States is not endangered by the existence of identical laws concerning foreign funded groups.
Russia is condemned for limiting the power of foreign agents of subversion, funded by an organization founded to undermine enemies like Russia.
Again, this is not to say Russia is good, or better, or does not do bad things. This information is helpful to correct the deliberate deficit of information by which our world view is manufactured.
What does this mean? It shows that the mentality of undermining Russia has a forty year pedigree in U.S. politics. It shows that this is the chief aim of European policy, and that the welfare or interests of European nations is insignificant when they conflict with this aim.
In fact, it appears the only reason there is an alliance between the U.S. and Europe is to undermine Russia.
The fact that U.S. foreign policy has seen the collapse and regime change of Russia as its highest mission for four decades explains why the economies of Europe can be devastated by sanctions, its pipelines destroyed, and its industry sent into decline.
It explains why without pause billions of dollars worth of arms has been funneled into one of the most corrupt nations ever to exist, with only a third estimated to have reached the battlefield at all. Europe will pay the price of a massive illegal arms trade for many years.
This point of view also explains why it is insignificant that Europe must bear the brunt of mass migration waves triggered by regime change.
Europe’s role is to help the neoconservatives destroy Russia. That Europe itself is being destroyed in the process is irrelevant.
This is also true for Ukraine.
Project Russia – Project Europe?
What possible reason would the U.S. have to wreck its own allies? Blinken’s neoconservative vision appears to be affirmed by recent analysis.
The following video discussion between Judge Napolitano and former British Ambassador Alastair Crooke discusses the fracturing of the US/European “alliance.”
Mentioning the position of the Austrians, Slovaks, and even that of French President Emmanuel Macron, the exchange builds upon mounting unease in Europe over the long term cost of the neoconservative war on Russia.
This is a picture which has been developing for months. Last November, one European diplomat questioned whether the U.S. can still be called an ally, amid complaints that the US is profiting from the war in Ukraine at the general expense of Europe.
This follows the recent remarks of Lawrence Wilkerson, retired Colonel in the U.S. Army and former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell. He argues the US is using Ukraine to re-establish its own hegemony at the expense of its allies.
Former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell and retired US Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson:
The US is using the proxy war in Ukraine to re-establish hegemony over Europe
The only winners are the military-industrial complex pic.twitter.com/NcbnI17gPu
— Going Underground (@GUnderground_TV) June 3, 2023
In this June 3 video, Wilkerson warns that NATO could fall apart unless Washington ends the war, noting that Germany’s energy costs are “Nine to ten times higher” since “We took out Nord Stream.”
He says that the U.S. presence in Ukraine is largely explained by the “obscene” profits being made by the military industrial complex.
“That’s a sin. It’s a cardinal sin.”
Finally, he notes that the European Union was achieving parity with the USA, both in GDP and population.
“We don’t want them to grow up” he says, in a startling summary of the war aims of the neocons.
The banishment of Europe to Neverland, along with all the other casualties of Forever War, is looking increasingly like a target, and not collateral damage at all.