21 Comments

Yes. This would be deemed heresy in almost all circles just now? We’re in an era that feels like the Red Scare of the 50’s, except that the proponents used to be the hippies.

Who has shared this opinion publically? I assume the Euros are obliged to accept without complaint, since they agreed to pipeline against US advice? What about trump?

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Sep 30, 2022·edited Sep 30, 2022

At least back in the Cold War, spooks and State Department officials knew to shut the hell up and not to act super smug and coy on national tv after they pulled one of these ops. These days they are practically bragging about it instead of trying to obfuscate.

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I suppose it’s because they have no opposition. Traditional republicans and Dems, progressives and Rinos - I think their all enjoying this bout of nationalism I mean selflessness. And I don’t get the sense that many of the Maga crowd give much of a damn either way, just as well since trump seems unlikely to care unless the rust belt starts to?

Us crazies on substack are what’s left, the hippies of the 21st century.

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Its because the Jewish neocons are arrogant narcissists who can't resist humiliating their enemies. They are dancing us all to nuclear obliteration. That's preferable to living in their Empire of Lies.

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And -- Russia’s invasion of Nazi-governed Ukraine was entirely NOT provoked....

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Cool story from Wm. Safire but it sounds like a modern scenario, a la Stuxnet, whereas miscellaneous Russians claim (easily found on Wikipedia) their OG pipes were not software-controlled back in 1982.

l do like the 40th anniversary angle of it -- but this Fleet Street suggestion that Putin bombed it is fairly ridiculous, Kuwaiti-incubator-to-floor-pipeline stuff. Impossible to credit anything reported now, you'd have to be already computer-chipped yourself.

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It is certainly possible that this was US sabotage. But you purposely ignore that Russia has an economic interest here. They stopped supplies a few months ago on the flimsiest grounds and are arguably in breach of contract. The explosions create a force majeure that prevents any such lawsuits. You also fail to mention that the pipelines are not owned by Russia. They are owned by Swiss companies.

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😂

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😂

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"Nord Stream AG, based in Zug, Switzerland, is an international consortium of five major companies established in 2005 for the planning, construction and subsequent operation of two 1,224-kilometre natural gas pipelines through the Baltic Sea.

The five shareholders of the Nord Stream consortium are Gazprom international projects LLC (PJSC Gazprom subsidiary), Wintershall Dea AG (formerly Wintershall Holding GmbH), PEG Infrastruktur AG (E.ON), N.V. Nederlandse Gasunie and ENGIE. Gazprom international projects LLC holds a 51 percent stake in the pipeline project."

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The Russians had tried to shut off the pipelines before, to get sanctions lifted by claiming an important component was being held up in Montreal over them. That the pipelines returned right as rain after three days seems to suggest they were making it up. The sabotage of the pipelines might have been a last-ditch effort to get people to lift sanctions.

In addition, most remember when someone bombed the pipelines from Russia into Georgia in 2006, cutting off gas to Georgia, just after they started trying to seek NATO membership.

Furthermore, the explosions occurred very close to the SwePol power line between Sweden and Poland. Another was closer to a different gas pipeline from Denmark. If they were using pipeline pigs to move the explosives in, they might have been trying to literally weaponize the gas pipelines to attack European infrastructure. Even if they weren't, taking out two birds with one stone is good.

Finally, Russia is the perfector of the Falsehood Firehose - trying to drown the truth in a flurry of conflicting lies and explanations which do nothing but obscure what really happened. When the news broke, suddenly there were stories claiming the US, Germany, NATO, Poland, or Ukraine were responsible for the explosion, mostly from Russian sources and useful idiots. Every time this happens, you can be sure that Russia is behind it.

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William Safire was clinically insane. He was the one who deemed Bush The Elder's sensible speech in Kiev in 1991 "Chicken Kiev." The cruel name stuck and did indeed damage Bush politically (perhaps something that Dubya noticed?). In terms of adolescent jeering, Trump has nothing on Safire.

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Wish I had seen this before I taught a class on evaluating sources today. You have random YouTube videos that are less crazy than the vast majority of news clips that cover this event. I love the historical context.

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Thank you very much. It is never explained WHY such pathological hate of capitalist Russia and total support of Nazi-dominated Ukraine government !!

Stand with Russia – it fights for all of us against bipartisan fascist US/UK clique.

https://thedreizinreport.com/2022/10/09/war-crimes-2/

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Is the underlying assumption that Russia shouldn't experience any serious consequences for its unprovoked attack on a neighboring sovereign country and the slaughter of tens of thousands of its civilians?

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The underlying assumption is that Russia should not experience any more serious consequences than the US doing the same in Iraq: slaughtering tens up thousands of civilians resulting, in the end, with up to 1 million dead people and a destroyed country, for NO reason.

The other underlying assumption is that you have to pick your battles: nobody in his right mind should be at risk of nuclear annihilation for a conflict that has nothing to do with us and on top of that, has cost Europe the staggering sum of 500 billion Euros so far, because of the “sanctions”.

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Both countries should be held accountable for their war crimes. That being said, whataboutism is so tiresome.

This has "nothing to do with us," just as Hitler's Nazism had "nothing to do with us."

It would behoove us all to learn, and learn from, history.

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If we learn from history, we learn that no single country has invaded and killed more people in the last 30 years than the US. And if we have to intervene, each time there is a war, feel free to sign up, but it's not up to you to play Russian nuclear roulette with the rest of us or our families which is exactly what is going on right now.

You really still believe this is about "helping Ukraine"?

The US is and has been selling for $150 billion of weapons to the Saudis in the last few years, profiting from and enabling their atrocities in Yemen which still make Putin's aggression in Ukraine look like a walk in the park. There are 0 sanctions on Saudi oil, quite the opposite. On top, the Ukraine proxy-war is pushed by exactly the same neocons&media that pushed the Iraq war with exactly the same arguments, Sadam Hussein was also "Hitler" and "if we don't stop him now...". Bla bla bla.

That's history and present all in one for you. You can't use "whataboutism" on the one hand and then preaching to "learn from history" on the other.

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Let's try it this way: Is the underlying assumption that Ukraine (specifically the neo-Nazi elements of the Ukraine military) shouldn't experience any serious consequences for their ethnic cleansing of Russian-speaking separatists [who ONLY want their independence from Kiev] and the slaughter of tens of thousands (14,000+ to be more precise) of ethnically-Russian citizens [since 2014]?

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