One of John Carpenter’s more endearing traits is his aversion to self-effacing clowning. This is not at all to suggest that Carpenter’s films aren’t funny — rather, it’s that the living genre legend often opts to play familiar B-movie scenarios completely straight, whether it be a terse gangland standoff rendered as a modern-day Western showdown (Assault On Precinct 13, one of the most influential films of the 20th century) or a masked killer, bereft of any overwrought psychological motive, terrorizing the inhabitants of a sleepy all-American suburb (Halloween, of course). While Carpenter has dabbled in satire (They Live) and high-concept fantasy (Big Trouble In Little China) over the course of his now decades-spanning career, the grounded nature of his approach is often its own reward. The Escape From New York director has all but perfected an economical, tough-minded creative ethos that has gone on to influence an entire generation of filmmakers dabbling in sci-fi, horror, and beyond.
Going Meta Before It Was Cool
In the Mouth of Madness, Carpenter’s glorious 1994 cult masterpiece, might be the most conspicuous exception to this rule. The story of an insurance investigator who begins losing his grip on reality while probing the mysterious disappearance of a lucratively popular horror author named Sutter Cane, In the Mouth of Madness is an unabashedly meta exploration of the creative act as a form of hypnosis. It is not only a film whose central plot conceit is unique to the moral panic that defined so much of the decade in which it was released (the idea that exposure to certain “corrupt” media could warp one’s brain and possibly even compel one to commit violent acts, etc.), it’s also a cutting cautionary tale about surrendering to artifice and fantasy, and a clever-but-never-obnoxious social lampoon about what it means to be considered the master of a low trade.
Of course, John Carpenter knows a thing or two about being unfairly labeled as the master of a low trade. Carpenter, who is known for his tell-it-like-it-is demeanor, once quipped: “In England, I’m a horror director. In Germany, I’m a filmmaker. In the U.S., I’m a bum.” Films like the Jeff Bridges-starring Starman and the memorably nasty high school bloodbath Christine might be considered totemic cult items today, but many of Carpenter’s more beloved works were initially decried as trash in their time. As such, Carpenter and screenwriter Michael De Luca (yes, that Michael De Luca) turn In the Mouth of Madness’ most important character, Sutter Cane, into the Ernest Hemingway of airport novels. Clearly, the obvious allusion with Cane is Stephen King (or perhaps, to a lesser extent, Clive Barker), right down to the fact that Mouth of Madness eventually makes a narrative detour to Hobb’s End: a kind of bastardized stand-in for King’s own sleepy, creepy fictional borough, Castle Rock.
Third Film of the Apocalypse Trilogy
In The Mouth Of Madness opens with Sam Neil’s John Trent being admitted to a psychiatric hospital. He appears to have gone stark-raving mad, as evidenced by the demented look in his eyes, and the vaguely occult-looking marks he’s scrawled onto his face. In a gesture that feels borrowed from a tale by H.P. Lovecraft (Carpenter’s reverence for Lovecraft is well-documented at this point), Trent begins to recall the tale of how exactly he went mad. We learn that when Trent worked in insurance, his employer (Charlton Heston) tasked him with looking into the matter of Sutter Cane. For all intents and purposes, Cane appears to have vanished off the face of the earth. After its ghoulish prologue, Mouth of Madness settles into a more deliberately routine rhythm, only to disappear further and further down the proverbial rabbit hole as Trent and a colleague, Cane’s editor (memorably played by Julie Carmen), find themselves lost among the otherworldly horrors of Hobb’s End.
In The Mouth Of Madness is the third and final film in John Carpenter’s “Apocalypse Trilogy,” which also includes The Thing and the criminally underappreciated Prince of Darkness. In all three films, evil manifests as a primarily unseen, invisible force, often contorting familiar things like dogs, books, and human bodies into horrifying and hitherto-unseen new shapes. In The Thing, Kurt Russell and his motley crew of researchers hole up in icy Arctic seclusion, fending off the malevolent energy of a shapeshifting, violently hostile alien parasite. In Prince Of Darkness, a group of college students occupy an incredibly menacing old church, where they proceed to unearth a tube of neon-green liquid that, if mishandled, could unleash the very literal fury of the devil. Both movies are steeped in Lovecraftian imagery and primordial terror, and both amplify the built-in claustrophobia of their settings to phantasmagoric degrees.
In The Mouth Of Madness is a funnier, sillier, more stylistically gonzo effort than its two predecessors in the trilogy, mostly because it purports to stand outside the nuts and bolts of its superficial narrative, to some degree, and actually comment on the art of what it means to scare people for a living. There is something wickedly ingenious about the idea of a popular novel whose contents are so unholy that reading it would cause one to spiral into a kind of monstrous abyss. If that idea alone were all the movie were interested in, In the Mouth of Madness would still rank as one of Carpenter’s more enjoyable late-career works. And yet, as always, the director is keen to dig deeper into the subtextual resonance of his story, turning what might otherwise be a spooky ’90s chiller — the type of thing you might have caught a rerun of on TBS sometime back in the 2000s — into a cheeky, compelling commentary on the horror pantheon itself, and Carpenter’s place in it.
We live in an era where people willingly and enthusiastically sign themselves over to fictional “universes.” Whether it’s Marvel, Star Wars, Game of Thrones, or perhaps something more obscure, we now inhabit an epoch in which individuals willingly give themselves up to elaborate forms of corporate mythology. In some cases, this sort of fanboy devotion can swallow you whole. In the Mouth of Madness is concerned with this very subject. It is no wonder the film was greeted with such indifferent critical notices upon its release: as always, Carpenter was light years ahead of his time. The scariest thing about In the Mouth of Madness is that, in the world Carpenter hath created, Sutter Cane himself isn’t even seen as a mere writer of trash books — when he’s finally revealed, he is tellingly and literally depicted as a prophet.
One month after Seymour Hersh reported that the US blew up the Nord Stream pipelines, US officials find a scapegoat in Ukraine and stenographers in the New York Times.
Nearly six months after the Nord Stream pipelines exploded and one month after Seymour Hersh reported that the Biden administration was responsible, US officials have unveiled their defense. According to the New York Times, anonymous government sources claim that “newly collected intelligence” now “suggests” that the Nord Stream bomber was in fact a “pro-Ukrainian group.”
The only confirmed “intelligence” about this supposed “group” is that US officials have none to offer about them.
“U.S. officials said there was much they did not know about the perpetrators and their affiliations,” The Times reports. The supposed “newly collected” information “does not specify the members of the group, or who directed or paid for the operation.” Despite knowing nothing about them, the Times’ sources nonetheless speculate that “the saboteurs were most likely Ukrainian or Russian nationals, or some combination of the two.” They also leave open “the possibility that the operation might have been conducted off the books by a proxy force with connections to the Ukrainian government or its security services.” (emphasis added)
When no evidence is produced, anything is of course “possible.” But the Times’ sources are oddly certain on one critical matter: “U.S. officials said no American or British nationals were involved.” Also, there is “no evidence President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine or his top lieutenants were involved in the operation, or that the perpetrators were acting at the direction of any Ukrainian government officials.”
Despite failing to obtain any concrete information about the perpetrators, the Times nonetheless declares that the US cover story planted in their pages “amounts to the first significant known lead about who was responsible for the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines.”
It is unclear why the Times has deemed their evidence-free “lead” to be “significant”, and not, by contrast, the Hersh story that came four weeks earlier. Not only does Hersh’s reporting predate the Times’, but his story contained extensive detail about how the US planned and executed the Nord Stream explosions.
Tellingly, the Times distorts the basis for Hersh’s reporting. “In making his case,” the Times claims, Hersh merely “cited” President Biden’s “preinvasion threat to ‘bring an end’ to Nord Stream 2, and similar statements by other senior U.S. officials.” In falsely suggesting that he relied solely on public statements, the Times completely omits that Hersh in fact cited a well-placed source.
By contrast, the Times has no information about its newfound perpetrators or about any other aspect of its “significant” lead.
“U.S. officials declined to disclose the nature of the intelligence, how it was obtained or any details of the strength of the evidence it contains,” The Times states. Accordingly, US officials admit that “that there are no firm conclusions” to be drawn, and that there are “enormous gaps in what U.S. spy agencies and their European partners knew about what transpired.” For that apparent reason, “U.S. officials who have been briefed on the intelligence are divided about how much weight to put on the new information.” The Times, by contrast, apparently feels no such evidentiary burden.
In sum, US officials have “much they did not know about the perpetrators” – i.e. everything; “enormous gaps” in their awareness of how the (unknown) “pro-Ukraine group” purportedly carried out a deep-sea bombing; uncertainty over “how much weight to put on” their “intelligence”; and even “no firm conclusions” to offer. Moreover, all of this supposed US “intelligence” happens to have been “newly collected” — after one of the most accomplished journalists in history published a detailed report on how US intelligence plotted and conducted the bombing.
Given the absence of evidence and curious timing, a reasonable conclusion is not that a Ukrainian “proxy force” was the culprit, but that the US is now using its Ukrainian proxy as a scapegoat.
As the standard bearer of establishment US media, the Times’ “reporting” is perfectly in character. Days after the September 2022 bombing of the Nord Stream gas pipelines, the Times noted that “much of the speculation about responsibility has focused on Russia” – just as US officials would certainly hope. The narrative was echoed by former CIA Director John Brennan, who opined that “Russia certainly is the most likely suspect,” in the Nord Stream attack. Citing anonymous “Western intelligence officials”, CNN claimed that “European security officials observed Russian Navy ships in vicinity of Nord Stream pipeline leaks,” thus casting “further suspicion on Russia,” which is seen by “European and US officials as the only actor in the region believed to have both the capability and motivation to deliberately damage the pipelines.”
With the story that Russia blew up its own pipelines no longer tenable, the Times’ new narrative asks us to believe that some unnamed “pro-Ukraine group”, which “did not appear to be working for military or intelligence services” somehow managed to obtain the unique capability to plant multiple explosives on a heavily sealed pipeline at the bottom of the Baltic Sea.
That narrative is already being laundered through the German media. Hours after the Times story broke, the German outlet Die Zeit came out with a story, sourced to German officials, that claims the bombing operation was carried out by a group of six people, including just “two divers.” These supposed perpetrators, we are told, arrived at the crime scene via a yacht “apparently owned by two Ukrainians” that departed Germany. How a yacht managed to carry the equipment and explosives needed for the operation is left unexplained.
The saboteurs somehow possessed the capability to carry out a deep-sea bombing, but not the awareness to properly clean up their floating crime scene. According to Die Zeit, the boat was “returned to the owner in an uncleaned condition,” which allowed “investigators” to discover “traces of explosives on the table in the cabin.” Should this lean “pro-Ukraine” crack team of naval commandos conduct another act of deep-sea sabotage, they will only need to hire a cleaning professional to get away with it.
As for motivation, we are somehow also asked to forget that Biden administration officials not only expressed the motivation, but the post-facto satisfaction. “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward,” senior US official Victoria Nuland vowed in January 2022. President Biden added the following month that “if Russia invades… there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.” After the Nord Stream pipelines were bombed, Secretary of State Antony Blinken greeted the news as a “tremendous strategic opportunity.” Just days before Hersh’s story was published, Nuland informed Congress that both she and the White House are “very gratified” that Nord Stream is “a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.”
Not only are global audiences asked to ignore the public statements of Biden administration principals, but their blanket refusal to answer any questions. This was put on display in Washington this past weekend, when German Chancellor Olaf Scholz paid Biden a White House visit. Unlike Scholz’s last DC trip, there was no joint news conference. This was understandable: the last time they appeared together, Biden blurted out that he would “bring an end” to Nord Stream, leaving Scholz to stand next to him in awkward silence. This time around, the two briefly sat before a group of reporters who were quickly shooed out of the room, much to Biden’s apparent glee.
Scholz's visit underscored that US media is state media. No joint presser, for obvious reasons: they can't risk a question from a German reporter about Sy Hersh's Nord Stream scoop.
Everyone here got the memo: no US outlet covering Scholz's visit even mentioned Hersh's story. pic.twitter.com/9xeBJMtc38
US media outlets got the memo: in a sit-down interview with Scholz, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria did not find the time to mention Hersh’s reporting. In covering the German Chancellor’s visit, US media outlets like the Times and the Washington Post adopted a similar vow of silence.
Not one question from Fareed Zakaria about Nord Stream as German Cuckmeister Olaf Scholz rambles on about his country's supposed energy independence
Fareed intervenes only to push Scholz to commit more money to Ukraine's military – and therefore less to German social welfare pic.twitter.com/GQJxK27pis
Inadvertently, the Times’ account exposes new holes in the failed attempts to refute Hersh’s story.
Members of the NATO state-funded website Bellingcat, falsely presented to NATO state audiences as an independent investigative outlet, have attempted to cast doubt on Hersh’s claims by arguing that open-source tracking at the time of the bombing fails to detect the vessels he reported on. But as the Times story notes, investigators are seeking information about ships “whose location transponders were not on or were not working when they passed through the area, possibly to cloak their movements.” Hersh has made this same point in interviews, noting that when Biden flew into Poland before his visit to Kiev last month, his “plane switched off its transponder” to avoid detection, as the Associated Press reported. Unfortunately for self-styled digital sherlocks, major international crimes – particularly those involving intelligence agencies – cannot be solved from their laptops.
Hersh was also pilloried for citing a single anonymous source. The Times’ story, by contrast, relies on multiple anonymous sources, who, unlike Hersh, have no tangible information to offer. After ignoring Hersh’s story for a full month, the Times’ news section was forced to acknowledge it for the first time. And the best that its anonymous sources could come up with is not only an evidence-free, caveat-filled narrative, but a story that does not challenge a single aspect of Hersh’s detailed account.
In another contrast, Hersh is one of the most accomplished and impactful journalists in the history of the profession. Two of the journalists on the Times story, Julian E. Barnes and Adam Goldman, have bylined multiple stories that spread demonstrable falsehoods sourced to anonymous US officials.
In the summer of 2020, Barnes and Goldman were among the Times journalists who laundered CIA disinformation that Russia was paying bounties for dead US troops in Afghanistan. When the Biden administration was forced to acknowledge that the allegation was baseless, the Times tried to water down its initial claims in an attempt to save face.
In January, Barnes co-wrote a Times story which claimed, citing unnamed “U.S. officials” more than a dozen times, that “Russian military intelligence officers” were behind “a recent letter bomb campaign in Spain whose most prominent targets were the prime minister, the defense minister and foreign diplomats.” But days later, as the Washington Post reported, Spanish authorities arrested “a 74-year-old Spaniard who opposed his country’s support for Ukraine but appears to have acted alone.” (Moon of Alabama is one the few voices to have called out the Times’ fraudulent reporting).
That same month, Goldman shared a byline, alongside fellow “Russian bounties” stenographer Charlie Savage, on a Times story which argued that Special Counsel John Durham has “failed to find wrongdoing in the origins of the Russia inquiry,” even though Durham’s findings have yet to be released. As I reported for Real Clear Investigations, the Times made its case by omitting countervailing information and distorting the available facts – as is the norm for establishment media coverage of Russiagate.
The US officials behind the Times’ latest Nord Stream tale presumably believe that they have offered the best counter to Hersh that they could. That it is devoid of concrete information, and written by Times staffers with a track record of parroting US intelligence-furnished propaganda, ultimately has the opposite effect.
The Times’ narrative can only be seen as further confirmation that Hersh found the Nord Stream bomber in Washington. That explains why anonymous US officials are now using proxies in establishment media to scapegoat their proxy in Ukraine.
“Autocrats only understand one word: no, no, no. No you will not take my country, no you will not take my freedom, no you will not take my future… A dictator bent on rebuilding an empire will never be able to ease the people’s love of liberty. Brutality will never grind down the will of the free.”—President Biden
Oh, the hypocrisy.
To hear President Biden talk about the Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, you might imagine that Putin is the only dictator bent on expanding his military empire through the use of occupation, aggression and oppression.
Yet the United States is no better, having spent much of the past half-century policing the globe, occupying other countries, and waging endless wars.
What most Americans fail to recognize is that these ongoing wars have little to do with keeping the country safe and everything to do with propping up a military industrial complex that has its sights set on world domination.
War has become a huge money-making venture, and the U.S. government, with its vast military empire, is one of its best buyers and sellers.
American troops are stationed in Somalia, Iraq and Syria. In Germany, South Korea and Japan. In Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Oman. In Niger, Chad and Mali. In Turkey, the Philippines, and northern Australia.
Incredibly, America’s military forces aren’t being deployed abroad to protect our freedoms here at home. Rather, they’re being used to guard oil fields, build foreign infrastructure and protect the financial interests of the corporate elite. In fact, the United States military spends about $81 billion a year just to protect oil supplies around the world.
After 20 years of propping up Afghanistan to the tune of trillions of dollars and thousands of lives lost, the U.S. military may have finally been forced out, but those troops represent just a fraction of our military presence worldwide.
In an ongoing effort to police the globe, American military servicepeople continue to be deployed to far-flung places in the Middle East and elsewhere.
This is how the military industrial complex, aided and abetted by the likes of Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and others, continues to get rich at taxpayer expense.
Yet while the rationale may keep changing for why American military forces are policing the globe, these wars abroad aren’t making America—or the rest of the world—any safer, are certainly not making America great again, and are undeniably digging the U.S. deeper into debt.
War spending is bankrupting America.
Although the U.S. constitutes only 5% of the world’s population, America boasts almost 50% of the world’s total military expenditure, spending more on the military than the next 19 biggest spending nations combined.
The American military-industrial complex has erected an empire unsurpassed in history in its breadth and scope, one dedicated to conducting perpetual warfare throughout the earth.
Having been co-opted by greedy defense contractors, corrupt politicians and incompetent government officials, America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $32 million per hour.
Talk about fiscally irresponsible: the U.S. government is spending money it doesn’t have on a military empire it can’t afford.
Unfortunately, even if we were to put an end to all of the government’s military meddling and bring all of the troops home today, it would take decades to pay down the price of these wars and get the government’s creditors off our backs.
As investigative journalist Uri Friedman puts it, for more than 15 years now, the United States has been fighting terrorism with a credit card, “essentially bankrolling the wars with debt, in the form of purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds by U.S.-based entities like pension funds and state and local governments, and by countries like China and Japan.”
Unfortunately, the outlook isn’t much better for the spending that can be tracked.
A government audit found that defense contractor Boeing has been massively overcharging taxpayers for mundane parts, resulting in tens of millions of dollars in overspending. As the report noted, the American taxpayer paid:
$71 for a metal pin that should cost just 4 cents; $644.75 for a small gear smaller than a dime that sells for $12.51: more than a 5,100 percent increase in price. $1,678.61 for another tiny part, also smaller than a dime, that could have been bought within DoD for $7.71: a 21,000 percent increase. $71.01 for a straight, thin metal pin that DoD had on hand, unused by the tens of thousands, for 4 cents: an increase of over 177,000 percent.
That price gouging has become an accepted form of corruption within the American military empire is a sad statement on how little control “we the people” have over our runaway government.
Mind you, this isn’t just corrupt behavior. It’s deadly, downright immoral behavior.
Americans have thus far allowed themselves to be spoon-fed a steady diet of pro-war propaganda that keeps them content to wave flags with patriotic fervor and less inclined to look too closely at the mounting body counts, the ruined lives, the ravaged countries, the blowback arising from ill-advised targeted-drone killings and bombing campaigns in foreign lands, or the transformation of our own homeland into a warzone.
That needs to change.
The U.S. government is not making the world any safer. It’s making the world more dangerous. It is estimated that the U.S. military drops a bomb somewhere in the world every 12 minutes. Since 9/11, the United States government has directly contributed to the deaths of around 500,000 human beings. Every one of those deaths was paid for with taxpayer funds.
The U.S. military’s ongoing drone strikes will, I fear, spur yet more blowback against the American people.
The war hawks’ militarization of America—bringing home the spoils of war (the military tanks, grenade launchers, Kevlar helmets, assault rifles, gas masks, ammunition, battering rams, night vision binoculars, etc.) and handing them over to local police, thereby turning America into a battlefield—is also blowback.
James Madison was right: “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” As Madison explained, “Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes… known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.”
We are seeing this play out before our eyes.
The government is destabilizing the economy, destroying the national infrastructure through neglect and a lack of resources, and turning taxpayer dollars into blood money with its endless wars, drone strikes and mounting death tolls.
Clearly, our national priorities are in desperate need of an overhauling.
At the height of its power, even the mighty Roman Empire could not stare down a collapsing economy and a burgeoning military. Prolonged periods of war and false economic prosperity largely led to its demise. As historian Chalmers Johnson predicts:
The fate of previous democratic empires suggests that such a conflict is unsustainable and will be resolved in one of two ways. Rome attempted to keep its empire and lost its democracy. Britain chose to remain democratic and in the process let go its empire. Intentionally or not, the people of the United States already are well embarked upon the course of non-democratic empire.
This is the “unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex” that President Dwight Eisenhower warned us more than 50 years ago not to let endanger our liberties or democratic processes.
Eisenhower, who served as Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II, was alarmed by the rise of the profit-driven war machine that emerged following the war—one that, in order to perpetuate itself, would have to keep waging war.
As long as America’s politicians continue to involve us in wars that bankrupt the nation, jeopardize our servicemen and women, increase the chances of terrorism and blowback domestically, and push the nation that much closer to eventual collapse, “we the people” will find ourselves in a perpetual state of tyranny.
The destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline was a gangster act that reveals the cancer at the heart of the “rules-based order”. How can there be peace and security when the world’s most powerful nation can destroy the critical infrastructure of other countries without deliberation or judicial proceedings? If Hersh’s report can be trusted—and I think it can—then we must assume that senior-level advisors in the Biden administration as well as the president himself deliberately perpetrated an act of industrial terrorism against a long-term friend and ally, Germany. What Biden’s involvement in the act implies, is that the United States now claims the right to arbitrarily decide which countries may engage in commerce with which others. And, if for some reason, the buying and selling of energy supplies conflicts with Washington’s broader geopolitical objectives, then the US believes it has the right to obliterate the infrastructure that makes such trade possible. Isn’t this the rationale that was used to justify the blowing up of Nord Stream?
Sy Hersh has done the world a service by exposing the perpetrators of the Nord Stream sabotage. His expose not only identifies the people involved but also infers that they should be held accountable for their actions. But while we don’t expect any thorough investigation in the near future, we do think the magnitude of the attack has been a “wake up” call for people who cling to the belief that the Unipolar model can produce morally-acceptable outcomes. What the incident shows is that unilateral action inevitably leads to criminal violence against the weak and defenseless. Biden’s covert operation hurt every man, woman and child in Europe. It’s a real tragedy. Here’s a quote from a recent interview with Hersh:
“I think this story has the same potential for destroying the ability of our president to rally the American people behind the war because it shows something that is so dark and so Unamerican. You know, this isn’t us. We’re not talking about us. This is a bunch of intelligence officers and CIA people….” Seymour Hersh 2:29 min
#SeymourHersh, whom the war media now wants to smear for exposing #Biden's act of environmental and energy security #Terrorism, represents the best of journalism in the #USA, having exposed US crimes like the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and the torture at Abu Ghraib prison. pic.twitter.com/YwjS3dPZWB
He’s right, isn’t he? The Biden administration has vastly miscalculated the impact these revelations will have on the public. The reputational damage alone is going to be immense, but they will also be used as the prism through which many critics see the war. In fact, there are signs that that may already be happening. On Sunday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov confirmed that the real objective of Washington’s war was not simply to “weaken” Russia and eventually splinter it into smaller pieces, but to force a split between Germany and Russia. Here’s what he said on Saturday:
According to Lavrov, the US decided that Russia and Germany cooperated “too well” over the past 20-30 years, establishing a powerful alliance based on Russian resources and German technology.
“That began to threaten the monopoly position of many American corporations. Therefore, it was necessary to somehow ruin it, and do it literally,” the minister said.
“There is an aspect here that’s related to the fact that friendship between countries, national reconciliation between them, as it happened between Russians and Germans, has become an eye sore for those who don’t want anyone to appear somewhere on this planet, who will compete with the main hegemon, which the US has declared itself to be,” Lavrov added.” (Lavrov says US officials essentially acknowledge Nord Stream blasts were US handiwork”, Tass)
Lavrov’s comments reinforce our own view that the conflict was concocted by Washington’s foreign policy experts who realized that German-Russo economic integration posed a serious threat to America’s dominant role in the global order. That is why Nord Stream became the primary target of US aggression, because the pipeline was the vital artery that connected the two continents and drew them closer together into an economic commons that would eventually become the world’s biggest free trade zone. This is what Washington feared most, and that is why Biden and Co. took such desperate steps to prevent the strengthening of economic relations between Germany and Russia. In short, Nord Stream had to be destroyed because Nord Stream marked the end of the unipolar world order.
Instead, of expanding on this belabored theory, let’s take a minute and see if we can figure out something about Hersh’s shadowy “source” of information. Allow me to frame it in the form of a question:
Why did Sy Hersh’s source provide him with detailed, top-secret information about the Biden administration’s sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline?
a. The source is a Kremlin stooge who wanted to subvert the war-effort and inflict serious damage on the United States
b. The source is an America-hating “Commie” who loathes democracy and freedom
c. The source is an adrenaline junkie who enjoys putting himself, his family, his career and his freedom at risk.
d. The source is a concerned American who thought that revealing information about the destruction of Nord Stream would prevent the neocons from leading the country into a catastrophic war with Russia
If you chose “d” then pat yourself on the back, because that is the right answer. No one in their-right-mind would take the risks that Hersh’s source took unless he felt the country was in grave danger. And, keep in mind, we might not even know what that what that danger is yet, since we don’t know what future escalations the neocons are planning. For example, it could be that US plans are already underway to deliver F-16s and long-range missile systems that will be used to strike deeper into Russian territory. It could be that the neocons want to detonate a nuclear device in Ukraine as part of a “false flag” operation. Or it could be that Biden plans to organize a ‘coalition of the willing’ (Uk, Poland, Romania) that will fight alongside US Special Forces in combat operations in east Ukraine. Any of these developments represent a serious escalation in the hostilities which would increase the probability of a direct clash with nuclear-armed Russia. In Joe Biden’s own words, “That’s what you call World War 3.”
He’s right, it would be WW3, which might explain why Hersh’s source summoned the courage to provide the author with the damning information about Nord Stream. He might have believed that the world was on the fasttrack to nuclear annihilation, so he risked his own life for ours. “No greater love hath any man…”.
And the source is not the only person who put himself at risk. Hersh could face charges as well. In fact, I would argue, that if Hersh was not as widely-respected as he is, he would probably be sharing a cell with Julian Assange right now. After all, what is the difference between what Assange did and what Hersh did?
Not much, except for the fact that Hersh’s stellar reputation makes him “untouchable. (We hope.)
In any event, if the motive behind the article was to prevent nuclear Armageddon, then we are very grateful for their bravery and selflessness.
Even so, there might have been other motives driving the article which are worth our consideration. Let’s imagine, for a minute, that Hersh’s source has information concerning the neocons plans for the near future. In other words, it is quite possible that the sabotage of Nord Stream alone was not the main impetus for Hersh’s report, but some other sinister plan on the horizon, that is, a military escalation that could trigger a catastrophe of unprecedented severity.
As we said earlier, such a plan might involve F-16s and long-range missile systems, or a nuclear “false flag” operation, or it could be that Biden will organize a ‘coalition of the willing’ that will fight alongside US Special Forces in combat operations in east Ukraine. US combat troops in Ukraine would make a direct clash with Russia effectively unavoidable. It would put the US on-track for another World War, which is what the neocons want. Unfortunately, I suspect that this is the most probable near-term scenario; the forming of a US-backed coalition organized to directly engage Russia in Ukraine. Here’s a “Statement from Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on President Biden’s Travel to Poland:
From February 20th – 22nd, President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. will travel to Poland. He will meet with President Andrzej Duda of Poland to discuss our bilateral cooperation as well as our collective efforts to support Ukraine and bolster NATO’s deterrence. He will also meet with the leaders of the Bucharest Nine (B9), a group of our eastern flank NATO Allies, to reaffirm the United States’ unwavering support for the security of the Alliance. In addition, President Biden will deliver remarks ahead of the one year anniversary of Russia’s brutal and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, addressing how the United States has rallied the world to support the people of Ukraine as they defend their freedom and democracy, and how we will continue to stand with the people of Ukraine for as long as it takes.” (The White House, Washington DC)
As it says in the official statement, Biden will not merely talk to the Polish president about “collective efforts to support Ukraine”, but will also discuss US-Polish “bilateral cooperation as well”. But what type of bilateral cooperation does Biden want besides more weapons? Combat troops? Is that what Biden is looking for; coalition boots-on-the-ground to make up for Ukraine’s heavy casualties? Here’s an article from a website called Notes From Poland that announces a sharp uptick in Polish recruitment goals. Not surprisingly, the article does not explain the reason why Poland intends to more-than-double the size of its army within a year’s time.
Up to 200,000 people can be called up for military exercises in Poland next year, including some who have never put their name forward for service but are deemed to have “useful skills”…. The exercises can last up to 90 days, and failure to attend is punishable by jail or a fine….
The pool of people who can be called up are those aged 55 and under who have been through so-called military qualification, which is compulsory for all men turning 19 and during which the candidate’s health category and fitness for military service are determined….
Poland will increase defence spending to 3% of GDP next year, one of the highest levels in NATO, to protect itself from “voracious imperial Russia”.
Its new Homeland Defence Act will also more than double the number of troops serving in the armed forces https://t.co/KlEA1cHOo — Notes from Poland (@notesfrompoland) March 19, 2022
Until 2009, Poland had compulsory military service for men, but that was scrapped in favour of a fully professional army. However, in recent years the growing threat of Russia has pushed the government to seek to increase the size and strength of the armed forces.
In 2017, a new Territorial Defence Force was established. This year’s Homeland Defence Act foresees a doubling in the size of the armed forces, from the current 143,500 troops…” (“Up to 200,000 Poles to be called up for military training next year“, Notes From Poland)
Are we expected to dismiss this sudden expansion of the Polish military as a mere coincidence or is it more likely that a deal has already been made with Washington regarding future troop deployments to Ukraine?
According to the White House statement, Biden will “also meet with the leaders of the Bucharest Nine (B9)” which is a group of nine NATO countries in Eastern Europe that became part of the US-led military alliance after the end of the Cold War…and includes Romania, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and the three Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. All nine countries were once closely associated with the now dissolved Soviet Union, but later chose the path of democracy. Romania, Poland, Hungary, and Bulgaria are former signatories of the now dissolved Warsaw Pact military alliance led by the Soviet Union…Check it out:
All members of the B9 are part of the … NATO (and all) have been critical of President Vladimir Putin’s aggression against Ukraine since 2014… Last year NATO adopted its new Strategic Concept, in which all Allies agreed that ,,the Russian Federation is the most significant and direct threat to Allies security and to peace and stability in the Euro–Atlantic area”. Now, on the road to the Vilnius Summit we should make sure that the Alliance is fully prepared to face this threat.” (“Who are the Bucharest Nine, countries on NATO’s eastern flank?”, Indian Express)
An army of Russophobes; is that what they want to create?
It sure looks like it.
Maybe, we’re making a ‘mountain out of a molehill’; that’s certainly a possibility. But now that the Russian army is advancing on all fronts along the Line of Contact, we think that the desperate neocons are bound to do something colossal. In fact, we are sure of it. Check out this clip from an article at Larry Johnson’s web site, “The Son of a New American Revolution”:
Now for the bad news. The Biden Administration and our European allies either are preparing for a major military action in the Ukraine war or they know something bad is going to happen soon, probably in Belarus, because warnings were just issued for foreign citizens to bug out of Belarus and Russia:
The French Foreign Ministry urged its citizens to leave Belarus without delay.
Canada urges its citizens to leave Belarus immediately because of the risk of arbitrary application of local laws and hostilities in Ukraine — Canadian Foreign Ministry.
The U.S. on Monday issued a top-level advisory telling American citizens to leave Russia immediately and cease travel to the country as Russia’s war against neighboring Ukraine continues, citing risks of harassment and wrongful detention for Americans specifically.
“Do not travel to Russia due to the unpredictable consequences of the unprovoked full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russian military forces, the potential for harassment and the singling out of U.S. citizens for detention by Russian government security officials, the arbitrary enforcement of local law, limited flights into and out of Russia, the Embassy’s limited ability to assist U.S. citizens in Russia, and the possibility of terrorism,” reads the alert.
I do not believe in coincidence. This is a coordinated action and signals the situation in Russia and Belarus is going to turn dangerous in the near future. Maybe it has something to do with the United States training Islamic radicals to carry out terrorist attacks in Russia and Belarus.” (“Sy Hersh Speaks and NATO Warns of Escalation in the War in Ukraine?“, Son of a New American Revolution)
Something is afoot although we cannot be certain whether it will materialize or not. But—keep in mind—there would be no need for terrorist attacks, false flags or additional combat troops if the official narrative was actually true and the Ukrainian army was winning the war. But that is not what’s happening. The Ukrainian Armed Forces are losing and losing badly. In fact, they don’t even have sufficient ammunition stockpiles to sustain long-term fighting. Here’s the story from Reuters:
“NATO is expected to ask its members to raise its ammunition stockpiles which have been badly depleted by the war in Ukraine... the pace of deliveries to Ukraine, where Kyiv’s troops are firing up to 10,000 artillery shells daily, has drained Western inventories and exposed holes in the efficiency, speed and manpower of supply chains.
“If Europe were to fight Russia, some countries would run out of ammunition in days,” a European diplomat told Reuters… the stockpiles are running even lower due to the conflict in Ukraine…. The war also cast a spotlight on the lack of industrial capacity necessary to ramp up production quickly, after decades of dwindling government orders saw many production lines vanish….
How do you take a country to war with Russia without enough ammo to fight the enemy?
The incompetence is mind-boggling, and it’s not a short-term problem either. Western nations no longer have the industrial base to provide the necessary supplies and equipment for “large-scale, high-intensity warfare.” Building up capacity will take years. In the meantime, the war will be settled by well-equiped Russian combat troops who will continue to grind away at the demoralized Ukrainians who increasingly find themselves outmanned and outgunned at every turn. This is from an article at the UK Telegraph:
“With Russia back on the offensive after significant Ukrainian combat successes around Kharkiv and Kherson in the second half of 2022, the past few weeks have been the bloodiest so far of an already bloody war, with both sides taking extraordinarily heavy casualties. Expect it to get worse.
Ukrainian defence minister Oleksii Reznikov says Russia has mobilised “much more” than 300,000 troops, perhaps up to half a million, and these are pouring into Ukraine in preparation for what is expected to be a major offensive in the coming days and weeks. Although Kyiv has also been building up its forces and supplying them with modern equipment donated by the West, Putin has a much greater advantage in troop numbers than he did when he invaded a year ago. Despite repeated optimistic reports of Russia running low on artillery shells – a battle winner in this conflict – Putin’s war stocks are vast, and his factories have been working around the clock to churn out even more.
Under pressure towards the end of last year, Russia withdrew its forces to positions of strength, trading ground for time as it massed resources for a planned hammer blow while grinding down the Ukrainians in the east, softening them up for the assault to come..
Until now, the narrative in the West has been that Ukraine is comfortably winning this war…The reality is more complex….: the truth is that recent promises of new combat equipment for Ukraine – especially longer range missiles, tanks and other armoured vehicles – are unlikely to be fulfilled in time to have an impact in this battle if Putin launches his offensive on the timetable Kyiv predicts….
We must therefore be prepared for significant Russian gains in the coming weeks. We need to be realistic about how bad things could be – otherwise the shock risks dislodging Western resolve. The opposite occurred last summer and autumn, as flagging support in parts of Europe and the US was galvanised by Ukrainian success.” (“Vladimir Putin is about to make shock gains“, UK Telegraph)
And this is from the New York Times:
Exhausted Ukrainian troops complain they are already outnumbered and outgunned, even before Russia has committed the bulk of its roughly 200,000 newly mobilized soldiers. And doctors at hospitals speak of mounting losses as they struggle to care for fighters with gruesome injuries. … The first stages of the Russian offensive have already begun. Ukrainian troops say that Bakhmut, an eastern Ukrainian city that Russian forces have been trying to seize since the summer, is likely to fall soon. Elsewhere, Russian forces are advancing in small groups and probing the front lines looking for Ukrainian weaknesses.
The efforts are already straining Ukraine’s military, which is worn out by nearly 12 months of heavy fighting. … Losses among Ukrainian forces have been severe. Troops in a volunteer contingent called the Carpathian Sich, positioned near Nevske, said that some 30 fighters from their group had died in recent weeks, and soldiers said, only partly in jest, that just about everyone has a concussion.
At one frontline hospital in the Donbas, the morgue was packed with the bodies of Ukrainian soldiers in white plastic bags. In another hospital, stretchers with wounded troops covered in gold foil thermal blankets crowded the corridors, and a steady stream of ambulances arrived from the front nearly all day long.” (“Outnumbered and Worn Out, Ukrainians in East Brace for Russian Assault”, New York Times) Note: Lifted from Moon of Alabama
And one more excerpt from the Paper of Record:
The problem is that Ukraine is losing the war. Not, as far as we can tell, because its soldiers are fighting poorly or its people have lost heart, but because the war has settled into a World War I-style battle of attrition, complete with carefully dug trenches and relatively stable fronts.
Such wars tend to be won — as indeed World War I was — by the side with the demographic and industrial resources to hold out longest. Russia has more than three times Ukraine’s population, an intact economy and superior military technology. At the same time, Russia has its own problems; until recently, a shortage of soldiers and the vulnerability of its arms depots to missile strikes have slowed its westward progress. Both sides have incentives to come to the negotiating table.” (“Russia and Ukraine Have Incentives to Negotiate. The U.S. Has Other Plans”, New York Times)
Get the picture? The war will undoubtedly drag on for some time, but the outcome is now certain. And as the noose tightens in the east and the prospects for success grow more remote, we think the neocons are bound to do something even more desperate, foolhardy and violent. We expect the next move will be an attempt to build a coalition of the willing (UK, Romania, Poland and US) that will push the reluctant NATO allies to the breaking point by pitting a makeshift US-led Army against Russia Forces on Ukraine’s killing fields. With every reckless action, Uncle Sam increases the probability of a critical split within NATO that will end Washington’s stranglehold on Europe and lay the groundwork for a new order.
The Biden Administration is finally reacting to the scandals that have arisen from the computer of the president’s son, Hunter Biden. This loser, whose only known activities are those of a junkie and a pimp, managed to become the director of a large gas company; a job he knows nothing about. A man of straw, he signed all sorts of big contracts, in different countries, where he travelled -without right- in official US planes. His father is now launching an operation to cover up his affairs, which has led him to clean up the Ukrainian government.
As time goes on, American voters are turning away from President Joe Biden. Many of those who say they voted for him tell pollsters they regret it. Some say that if they had known about the Hunter Biden affair beforehand, they would never have trusted his father as president.
During the presidential election campaign, the Republican Party filed a lawsuit with the Federal Election Commission because the social networks Twitter and Facebook censored thousands of accounts that relayed the New York Post’s revelations about Hunter Biden’s computer [1]. The seizure was dismissed, but the Twitter Files, revealed by Elon Musk, attest in detail that the FBI and an intelligence agency (probably the CIA) had intervened with Twitter and Facebook to censor this information.
I was astonished that in the United States, the son of a vice-president, then president, could travel in official planes to the four corners of the world, giving the impression of being an official personality when he was only a junkie [2]. This abuse was, in my opinion, a sign of the decadence of the US Empire.
However, the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives intends to carry out various investigations, notably on Joe Biden’s involvement in his son’s dirty dealings. If these investigations were to succeed, they could call into question the independence of the President of the United States and therefore lead to his impeachment.
It should be remembered that when Joe Biden was Barack Obama’s vice-president, 7 million dollars in bribes were paid to the Attorney General of Ukraine to keep his nose out of Burisma’s affairs. Later, this same prosecutor, who had become too greedy, was ousted by the Verkhovna Rada (Parliament) under pressure from the United States, the European Union, the IMF and the World Bank, which wanted to save the owner of Burisma and former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko at a lower price.
In a puritanical country like the United States, public opinion first focused on Hunter Biden’s frequent use of prostitutes and his drug use before it became clear that his financial affairs were much more important.
Now the Hunter Biden affair, which had been covered up by very senior members of the intelligence community, for whom the whole saga was “Russian disinformation” [3], is likely to turn the tables. It is no longer appropriate to deny the facts, so much so that Harvard University has just announced that it is closing its Technology and Social Change Project, a structure that had been constantly assimilating the existence of Hunter Biden’s laptop to Fake news [4].
Until now, the citizens who cared about this affair were only “conspiracy theorists”, “extreme right-wing” followers of President Trump and readers of the gutter press. On the contrary, almost the entire ruling class had “discerned” that it was just a popular rumor, Fake News. On the one hand, there were the readers of the New York Post, which had revealed the affair [5], on the other hand, those of the New York Times, which kept on denying it.
Among the many financial affairs of the president’s son, two stand out. The first concerns a Chinese spy. It could reveal influence peddling in the service of a foreign power. While the second concerns his activities in Ukraine and particularly his appointment and that of his friend Devon Archer (former roommate of Christopher Heinz, John Kerry’s son-in-law, during their university period) to the board of directors of the oil company Burisma. This is the group that President Vladimir Putin denounced as “a bunch of drug addicts and neo-Nazis” [6] when he called on his armies to end the civil war in Ukraine under UN Security Council Resolution 2202.
This week two seemingly unrelated events have shaken things up. They were probably imagined by or with David Brock, the undisputed agitprop specialist on whom President Biden relied in 2016 against President Trump. Ill, he had disappeared, he is now back [7]
Hunter Biden has hired one of the most famous American lawyers, Abbe Lowell. He has requested a criminal investigation and sent letters to all the people who played a role in the disclosure of the contents of his client’s laptop, including former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former Donald Trump advisor Steve Bannon. He accused them of violating the privacy of his client, urged them to retract the conclusions they drew from the contents of the computer, and thus bury the case. At the same time, a delegation from the Departments of Defense and State, as well as USAID, went to Ukraine to advise the Zelensky government to clean up some of the mess [8]. Officially, it was only to ensure that the money offered at the expense of the US taxpayers was not misappropriated by corrupt officials. Unofficially, it was only a matter of eliminating the annoying pawns without touching the others. In two days, fourteen personalities resigned in a chain. Five regional governors (Valentin Reznichenko (Dnipropetrovsk), Oleksander Starukh (Zaporizhia), Dmytro Zhivytsky Surya), Yaroslav Yanshayevich (Kherson) and Oleksiy Kulba (Kiev)), four deputy ministers (including Viacheslav Shapovalov (Defense) and Vasyl Lozynsky (Infrastructure)) and two heads of a government agency left their posts, in addition to the deputy head of the presidential administration (Kyrylo Tymoshenko) and the deputy prosecutor general (Oleksiy Symonenko).
The Western media reported faithfully on this major sweep. But the most important thing happened on the 3rd day and very few people talked about it. SBU troops searched the home of oligarch Ihor Kolomoysky, sponsor of both President Volodymyr Zelensky and the “integral nationalists”, but above all owner of… Burisma Holding, which he had bought from Mykola Zlochevskyi, in 2011, i.e. before Hunter Biden entered it. Of course the Anticorruption Action Center’s article on this change of ownership has long since been removed from its site [9].
Technically, Ihor Kolomoysky is not being prosecuted for the assassinations he ordered, but for rigging a gas lot auction involving two deputy energy ministers for nearly a million dollars.
Arresting mafia boss Ihor Kolomoysky removes the traces of many problems. He is the key witness to link President Volodymyr Zelensky with the “integral nationalists”, i.e. between a defender of democracy and anti-democrats, and between a Jewish personality and mass murderers of Jews. For the “President’s Men”, Kolomoysky is the main Ukrainian personality who can be held accountable for the corruption of Hunter Biden and, eventually, Joe Biden.
It will be remembered that in 2019 the US Secretary of Energy Rick Perry reportedly informed Rudy Giuliani about President Zelensky’s confidences during his inauguration ceremony about Hunter Biden [10]. President Donald Trump then asked the Ukrainians for information about their investigations. But the affair was leaked, President Trump was accused of acting out of revenge, and a new impeachment procedure was launched against him.
The Hunter Biden affair has many facets. One thing is to erase his role in Burisma, another is to erase his role in the activities of US military laboratories in Ukraine. These activities were carried out through Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners (RSTP), one of his companies that he created with Christopher Heinz, son-in-law of the special presidential envoy for the climate John Kerry, who joined him on the board of Burisma [11].
The Hersh report is a devastating revelation of U.S. and NATO international terrorism as well as Western media complicity. It exposes the lawlessness of U.S. government, the total disregard by Washington for its so-called European allies, the supine nature of European governments, Germany in particular, and the real geopolitical reasons behind the war in Ukraine, and subsequently the shocking servility of Western media in refusing to cover what is an astounding act of criminality.
This is an explosive story in more ways than one and indeed in more ways than we can perhaps even calculate at this stage. Only one week after its publication, the fallout and reverberations continue to amplify. Such is the parlous and pathetic state of Western journalism, Hersh was obliged to publish his account on his resources, knowing that mainstream outlets would not touch it. That systematic media censorship and exposure of propaganda functioning is itself a huge scandal that will grow further. This is while the European Union sanctions and bans Russian media, even though Russian media have been vindicated by Hersh’s revelations while Western media is shown to be an utter disgrace.
On September 26, 2022, the Nord Stream pipelines were blown up. European states have since acknowledged that, albeit with muted reports. For its part, Russia has from the outset blamed Western powers for an act of terrorism. Washington initially made the preposterous claims that Russia had carried out the attacks in revenge against Europe. And Western media went along with the ridiculous ride.
There is no disputing that the damage was deliberate sabotage. The 1,222-kilometer undersea civilian infrastructure was the biggest of its kind in the world, involving a consortium of companies from Russia, Germany, France and the Netherlands. It took more than a decade to construct at an estimated cost of over €12 billion. The enormous loss of natural gas volumes from the explosion could also be monetized in billions of euros.
State-Sponsored Terrorism
So, without even attributing specific culpability, this sabotage constitutes an egregious act of state-sponsored terrorism that violates international law on numerous counts. And yet Western media have acted like the proverbial monkeys who see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil.
At the time of the spectacular event, many critical observers immediately suspected foul play. In our Strategic Culture Foundation weekly editorial of September 30, the headline stated: “Blatantly Obvious Who Gains From Nord Stream Sabotage”.
We postulated back then only days after the incident that a plausible cause was “deliberate sabotage” by the United States and its NATO allies.
“If that’s the case, then it is an act of terrorism against civilian infrastructure and a grievous blow to Russia’s national interests. It could be construed as a criminal act of war,” we wrote.
Our editorial cited U.S. President Joe Biden’s own words of warning issued at a White House press conference when he spoke on February 7, 2022. Biden appeared to stray off script and cryptically asserted to reporters that the Nord Stream would be “brought to an end” if Russia were to intervene militarily in Ukraine, as Russia did two weeks later on February 24 (as a result of deadly NATO provocations, we should add).
“His [Biden’s] cryptic assertion, over-riding European governments, suggests that a contingency plan had already been authorized to take out the Nord Stream. And, it seems, the nefarious action duly went ahead this week,” we wrote.
(We modestly take pride in the objective perspicacity of our assessment. And yet this online journal is smeared and banned by the United States and European governments as a Russian propaganda tool.)
Seymour Hersh’s investigative report published last week corroborates what many observers had suspected at an early stage. The irrefutable fact is the Nord Stream gas pipelines were blown up by U.S. military forces. Not only that, but the Americans were aided and abetted by NATO member Norway, and quite possibly by other NATO members including Poland, Denmark and Britain.
This is an earth-shattering scandal. The repercussions are going to keep cascading and cascading. Hersh has followed up with promises of more indicting details in forthcoming articles. Other journalists are now corroborating his details about U.S. navy divers planting explosives under the cover of NATO war games in the Baltic Sea last June. Hersh claims that some of the C4 bombs did not detonate as planned. That means there could still be evidence to be found on the seabed conclusively implicating the United States.
Then there was the earlier report by Swedish divers who had inspected the site in the aftermath of the explosions. Did they try to clean up the crime scene? The Swedish authorities have refused to disclose the contents of their report. They have a case to answer, as do the Danes, the Norwegians, the Brits and most of all the Americans.
Russia has called for a United Nations Security Council meeting to convene next week on the subject, based on the latest investigative report by Seymour Hersh. China has also called for an independent international commission to study the matter.
Questions are also urgently required from the German government on what it knew about the sabotage. As our columnist Martin Jay pointed out this week, Chancellor Olaf Scholz was in the White House on February 7 last year when Biden made his clumsy threat to take out the Nord Stream. The implication is that Scholz knew in advance of the demolition plan.
Western Media’s Damning Silence
We are talking here about multiple malfeasance and cardinal crimes. Terrorism, destruction of sovereign property, aggression and incitement of war, treason and an orchestrated media cover-up involving supposed bastions of Western journalism. The New York Times and Washington Post have so far ignored the Hersh report. Western media have stubbornly refused to investigate this urgent story. How damning is that?
Internationally renowned legal expert Professor Francis Boyle has assessed (in email correspondence with SCF) that a prosecution case can be brought against the United States over the Nord Stream incident under the auspices of the International Criminal Court. The U.S. is not a signatory to the foundational Rome Statute but the incident occurred in territory belonging to European states that are. Whether such a prosecution proceeds and whether the UN Security Council takes action later this week are moot points. But at the very least, the whole scandal is blowing up in the court of international public opinion.
Seymour Hersh (now aged 85) is to be commended for his journalistic service. We may quibble about some details in his report. Has he covered the full picture of all the actors involved? Perhaps not. His report is not a geopolitical analysis and some of his premises suggest he is not critical of the U.S. or NATO involvement in the war in Ukraine. These reservations are relatively minor to his main point of understanding what actually took place.
Those caveats aside, however, one can say that Hersh’s report is a blockbuster. His lifetime work is impeccable. He uncovered the My Lai massacre in Vietnam in 1968 when hundreds of men, women and children were murdered gratuitously by American troops. Hersh also exposed in 2004 the torture practices by the US military in Iraq at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison.
Historic Impact
Hersh’s reporting in the past has had a historic impact. It mobilized public understanding and opinion about the nefarious nature of U.S. wars in Southeast Asia and the Middle East.
As many analysts and our own weekly editorials at SCF have repeatedly pointed out, the war in Ukraine is a bigger geopolitical cause than the absurd narrative put out by Western governments and news media about “defending Ukraine and Western freedom from Russia aggression”. We have consistently analyzed that the expansion of NATO, the weaponization of Ukraine, and the current conflict are all about the American imperialist ambition for hegemonic control. Destroying normal relations between Europe and Russia and most especially destruction of the strategically important energy trade are all part of the objective. Pursuing that objective has created a most dangerous war that could escalate into a nuclear conflagration.
As eminent American commentator Jeffrey Sachs has noted, the criminal conduct of Washington regarding the blowing up of the Nord Stream is totally characteristic of U.S. criminal behavior that has been practiced over many decades since World War Two. The difference now is that this criminality directly impinges on many more people’s lives – from the danger of catastrophic war to the economic misery caused by wanton American aggression.
The Hersh article – despite the Western media shamefully ignoring it thereby exposing their own criminal complicity in U.S. terrorism – has made the world more aware than ever of the rogue state that is the United States and its capitalist, imperialist dynamics.
Inciting war in Europe, antagonizing a nuclear Russia with unprecedented aggression, inflicting mass poverty and hardship on European civilians, and lying about it all the time through its propaganda media. Washington is a war-criminal state par excellence along with its European Quislings.
As Russian President Vladimir Putin remarked several weeks ago, the historic situation is revolutionary.
“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” ~Oscar Wilde
There are now over eight billion people on the planet. We each have a different psychophysiological reaction to any given stimuli, no matter how minute the difference. From forks to forklifts, spoons to spoonerisms, folklore to philosophy. Every single one of us perceives everything differently.
The way I perceive the concept of something as simple as a tree is fundamentally different than the way every single other person perceives the “same” concept. This is due to our historically unique experiences with “trees.”
The memories we form influence our experience of perceiving trees. I may have fallen out of a tree and broken my arm. You may be blind and can only touch or smell a tree. I may have chopped down twenty trees to build a house. You may have crashed into a tree and totaled your car. The point is, every single historical interaction with a tree has formed a unique interpretation of “tree” in our psychophysiology.
The same thing applies to abstract concepts such as love, God, and philosophy. We each have historically unique experiences regarding these abstract concepts as well.
Which brings me to the point of this article: we should own up to the fact that we each have a devastatingly unique perception of all things, including philosophy. And rather than merely piggyback, kowtow, or place all our eggs into a single historical philosophy forsaking our individuality, we should make our individuality foremost and create our own philosophy out of the mulch, fodder, and compost of past philosophies.
We should double down on our uniqueness and fatten our individuality on the food of philosophies past.
Most people settle upon one established philosophy (religion, ideology, worldview), unaware that they have a unique perception of what that philosophy is. It is already the case that we perceive the concept of philosophy in a fundamentally different way than others do even within the same philosophy. Developing our own unique philosophy is simply becoming aware and honoring our unique perception.
It’s a matter of awareness and honor. Becoming aware of our unique perception of all things puts us into an existential pickle: We either admit it and honor it, or we deny it and dishonor it. If you choose the former, read on. If you choose the latter, not even the one-dimensional philosophy you lean on like a cripple can save you from yourself.
Here are five ways to discover yourself through your own philosophy…
1.) Practice self-inflicted philosophy:
“To go wrong in one’s own way is better than to go right in someone else’s.” ~Dostoevsky
What does it mean to inflict yourself with philosophy? It means being ruthless with your perception of reality. No excuses. No mercy. No self-pity. It means forcing your head over the edge of the abyss. No rose-colored glasses. No pie-in-the-sky delusions. No safety nets. Just you and the eternal darkness. Just you and the rawness of nihilism. Just you and the existential angst.
You’re faced with the bleeding-meat realness of reality, a snarling darkness puking up all things. It forces you into a vital confrontation, demanding you think rather than believe. Full-frontal, no punches pulled, it grabs you by the throat and asks you, point blank, “Are you ready to accept that everything you believed was a lie?”
Self-inflicted philosophy forces you to perceive reality with a clean slate. It gets down to brass tacks. It’s philosophy in action. It digs down to the roots of the human condition. It cuts deep into the pulsing blister of the mortal wound. It reveals the lodestone. It’s your ticket to staying ahead of the curve because it exposes how everything is on the curve. No exceptions.
As Marcus Aurelius said, “All that exists is the seed of what will emerge from it. You think the only seeds are the ones that make plants or children? Go deeper.”
2.) See the world from the shoulders of multiple giants:
“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” ~Isaac Newton
Don’t be afraid of becoming an autodidact. Read a lot. Connect the dots. Stay curious. Seek the shoulders of giants. Seek help, expertise, guidance, and wisdom from others. Become a sponge for higher knowledge. Soak it up. Ring it out. Repeat. Learn; unlearn; relearn.
Don’t cling. Never settle. Putting down roots on a giant’s shoulder is a death knell for your uniqueness. Jump! Take a leap of courage out of faith. Stay loose. Stay flexible. Create a scaffolding between giants. Keep your curiosity ahead of your certainty.
Don’t get caught up in the hype. Don’t allow their destiny to prevent your own. Rather, use their destiny to invigorate your own hero’s journey.
What does this mean? It means staying out of your own way. It means allowing for guideposts, other points of view, and a healthy sense of detachment. It means sojourning, not standing, on the shoulders of multiple giants to see further than they did. It means employing self-interrogation strategies as pivot points in order to better navigate the labyrinth of life.
When you sojourn on the shoulders of giants, you are effectively building a bridge to the Overman. You rise above the outdated past to embrace the updated future.
3.) Interrogate the knowledge:
“As anywhere else in the world, the unwritten law defeated the written one.” ~Herman Hesse
The flipside of sojourning on the shoulders of giants is the ability to be circumspect with the knowledge gained. To truly be original one must be able to “entertain a thought without accepting it (Plato).” This means you must take the knowledge gained and interrogate your perception of it lest you become stuck in a belief.
Human ingenuity, like human evolution, is a flowing process of change and mutation. The key to maintaining the process is to allow reimagination despite past imaginings.
The stale and outdated past must give way to a fresh and updated future. Otherwise, there is only stagnation, devaluation, and de-evolution. Therefore, you must have the wherewithal to question everything you’ve learned to the nth degree.
The best way to do this is to honor what validates Universal Law and discard what doesn’t. A deep enough interrogation of the knowledge you gained from sojourning on the shoulders of giants should reveal its validity in relation to the benchmark of health.
When you use health as a benchmark, you realize that health is not a matter of opinion. Rather, it is dictated by an indifferent universe with universal laws that apply to everyone, despite our interests, biases, opinions, or beliefs. And this applies to everyone not only physically, but mentally and spiritually as well.
But health will only get you so far. It can teach you moderation and temperance. But it won’t get you outside the box, the comfort zone, the domesticated bliss, the indoctrination, the cultural conditioning, or the dogmatic mental paradigm. Only audacity and courage can do that.
It doesn’t take courage to blindly follow the dictates of the giants who came before you (manmade laws), but it does take courage to question them (using universal laws). Be audacious. Be courageous. Interrogate your knowledge.
4.) Blend it all together with your unique soul-signature imagination:
“Your time is limited, don’t waste it living someone else’s life.” ~Steve Jobs
If given a choice between the path most travelled and the path least travelled, choose neither. Choose your own path instead.
Don’t fall into the trap of following someone else’s plan. Deconstruct, analyze, and scrutinize their plan, then improvise it. Infuse it with your own essence. Take the knowledge gained from standing on the shoulders of giants and run it through the sieve of your imagination. Customize your life to your own fitting.
Take this piece from this ideology and that piece from that ideology, but then connect it all to your own unique perspective. Be creative. Think outside the box. Push your culturally prescribed comfort zone as far as it will go. It’s all yours for the making.
You are a pivot with a point of view. You are a wave crashing onto the shores of eternity. You are a unique emergence from the universal interdependent spirit molecule. You are the cosmos becoming aware of itself. And you are vital for the progressive evolution of the interconnectedness of all things, whether you realize it or not.
Don’t let anything else lay your uniqueness low, whether spiritually or psychologically. This is your life. This is your story to tell. As Nietzsche said, “The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”
Indeed. No price is too high to pay for the privilege of discovering yourself through your own philosophy. No price is too high to pay for the privilege of self-mastery.
5.) Recycle the mastery:
“To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, remove things every day.” ~Lao Tzu
When it’s all said and done, mastery is just as illusory is it is useful. Don’t allow it to kill your quest for truth. Let the life-death-rebirth process come alive inside you. Resurrect Beginner’s Mind. Keep the flow state flowing. Keep the fountainhead resonating. Keep the Truth Quest always ahead of the “truth.”
As Scott Adams said, “Awareness is about unlearning. It is the recognition that you don’t know as much as you thought you knew.”
For a true seeker there is no settled state, there is no final stage. There is always something more to learn. There is always an answer to question. Mastery is always recyclable. The journey is always the thing, or it is nothing. The sword is always sharpened dullness. The diamond is always pressurized coal. As James Hillman said, “the pearl is also always grit, an irritation as well as a luster.”
Mastery must be discarded on the funeral pyre of muscle memory lest it become the dogma that kills your journey. Feel the mastery, love it, relish being in awe and overwhelmed with gratitude for it. Then let it go. Surrender “mastery” to Cosmos. Practice detachment. When you’re attached to nothing, you’re connected to everything.
After the Crash 