USA Meme
Europe is facing its worst energy crisis in generations, with numerous factories shutting down and severe hardship expected during the approaching winter. Heavily industrialized Germany has been especially hard hit, with more than half of all small- and mid-sized businesses fearful that they might be forced to close, an economic catastrophe of Great Depression proportions. The only near-term hope of salvation had been an end to the self-destructive energy sanctions these countries had imposed upon Russia, which would have allowed plentiful and cheap Russian natural gas to resume flowing through the Russian-owned Nord Stream pipelines.

Although the European governments remained firmly opposed to that solution, many ordinary Europeans felt differently, and in recent days large public demonstrations in Germany and the Czech Republic had demanded that the sanctions be lifted. There was widespread speculation that such popular protests would eventually carry the day, if not immediately then once winter hardship became too severe. The outcome would be a negotiated end to the Ukraine war along the general lines suggested by Russia, resulting in a strategic defeat for America and NATO.


Then on September 26th, this geopolitical landscape was upended as a series of large explosions severely damaged the huge Russian pipelines, putting them out of commission indefinitely, probably even permanently. With the pipelines no longer operational, Europe would have to make due with the limited supply of American gas that can be shipped by tanker, at a cost many times greater. The massive explosive attacks on the undersea pipelines — rather euphemistically characterized as "sabotage" in the media headlines — had occurred near the coastal waters of Denmark and Sweden, in an area of the Baltic heavily monitored and patrolled by NATO warships.
Map of Nord Stream sabotage attack
Given these simple, undeniable facts, the likely suspects were rather obvious, but they still remained almost completely unmentionable in the Western media coverage. Instead, the Washington Post, hometown newspaper of the American government, ran an article with the headline "European leaders blame Russian 'sabotage' after Nord Stream explosions," quoting a long list of anonymous government sources making that nonsensical claim, which was widely echoed across most Western media outlets. Our political elites apparently assumed that their tight media control will ensure that their ignorant citizenry could be made to believe — or at least pretend to believe — almost anything, even that the Russians had destroyed their own pipelines.

But public media statements do not necessarily reflect private beliefs. Prominent Neocon journalist Anne Applebaum had spent years on the Editorial Board of the Washington Post and her husband is Radek Sikorski, Poland's former Foreign and Defense Minister and someone with the strongest possible ties to America's political and national security establishment. Twitter allows individuals to casually blurt out statements that they may later regret, and the day after the pipeline explosions he issued a series of Tweets celebrating the attacks, including one showing a photo of the resulting destruction with the telling caption "Thank You, USA." That last Tweet soon went super-viral with some 13,500 Retweets and 44,200 Likes, leading him to quickly delete it.
Sikorski Twitter Profile
Someone else on Twitter shrewdly described that desperate backpedaling:


Given the near-unanimous media drumbeat that the Russians had destroyed their own multi-billion-dollar pipelines, presumably because of their evil insanity, it's quite possible that a majority, perhaps even a large majority of our citizens will blandly accept that story, just as they have so many other, equally ridiculous concoctions of the past. But I would think that nearly all our elites who are paying any attention to the issue strongly suspect or even flatly assume that elements of the American government played a central role in the attacks, though almost none of them would publicly admit such a thing.

One of the tiny handful of brave exceptions to this enforced silence and perhaps the only such individual with a large media platform was Tucker Carlson, and a couple of days after the attack, he broadcast a segment on the topic to his audience of millions. He noted that although it might seem unimaginable that the American government would commit such an act of international terrorism as illegally destroying pipelines so important to Europe's industrial economy, perhaps that might be what actually happened.


Among other things, he showed clips of both President Joe Biden and Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland explicitly threatening to eliminate the Nord Stream pipelines if a Russia-Ukraine broke out.



And immediately following the attacks, Secretary of State Antony Blinken mentioned that the bombing would greatly benefit American interests, offering our country "tremendous strategic opportunity for the years to come."


Despite his past public statements, I tend to doubt that Biden himself had played any role in the decision-making process, or that he was even personally informed of the planned attack. He is merely a figurehead, an elderly non-entity who generally says whatever he is told to say, but he has also become notorious for making public statements that his horrified subordinates must immediately "clarify" and that would have been an obvious risk in this situation. So to the extent that our President is even aware that Europe's largest energy pipelines were attacked and severely damaged, it's quite possible that he is in that small minority of high-ranking individuals who has no idea of who may have been responsible or even blames it on the Russians, because his handlers have told him so.

The vacuum left by an almost entirely dishonest or timorous media has been filled by a handful of courageous independent bloggers, with Moon of Alabama and John Helmer probably providing some of the best early analysis of what had probably happened: The particular details of the attacks have relatively little importance and the early speculation has gone in several directions. The theory advanced by Helmer, a longtime American correspondent based in Moscow, is that the actual operation was carried out by Polish forces with America's intelligence and technical support. This seems quite plausible since Poland has been fiercely hostile to Russia and the Russian pipelines, which would annually cost the country many hundreds of millions of dollars in lost future pipeline transit fees. The Poles had made every possible effort to block the Nord Stream project and Poland's nearby coast would provide an ideal staging ground for the attack. Moreover, by an astonishing coincidence, the attack occurred exactly as Poland had opened a much smaller pipeline, allowing it to supply its own energy needs from Norway, completely independent of Nord Stream.

But whether or not the operation was carried out by Polish proxies or even Ukrainians, those local allies are totally dependent upon our goodwill for their survival, and it is inconceivable that they would have taken this momentous step without the approval and supervision of powerful elements of the American national security establishment, so debating who actually planted the explosives is merely a red herring.

Despite the lack of any hard evidence, the likelihood that America played a central role in the attacks seems a near-certainty. Means, motive, and opportunity all point so strongly in a single direction that I doubt that there are too many rational, intelligent individuals who sincerely believe otherwise, although for obvious reasons they may mouth deceptive evasions or choose to keep silent. Yet virtually no one in the major media is willing to recognize this obvious reality.

And this disingenuous reaction has even extended to large segments of the supposedly fearless alternative media. Although these enormously important attacks reached the front pages of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, not a word about them appeared in Counterpunch, the Nation, or the New Republic, and barely any mention at Antiwar.com, presumably for fear that their pieces would necessarily have to mention the prime suspect. Various Internet pundits have promoted the most absurd alternate possibilities in order to avoid fingering the American government. This widespread "See No Evil" response is illustrated by a popular Internet meme:

USA Meme
Let us step back and place this incident in its proper historical context, recognizing the astonishing recklessness. We are not currently at war with Russia let alone Germany, and a $20 billion energy project important to both those countries has been wrecked, with a potentially devastating impact upon the European economy. Not only is this probably the greatest peacetime military attack upon civilian infrastructure in world history, but if we exclude the 9/11 attacks — officially ascribed to a non-state terrorist organization — nothing even remotely comparable comes to mind.

Consider the obvious possibility of retaliation. Russia possesses a very powerful and sophisticated military with excellent special forces, and the West's own energy infrastructure is woefully vulnerable and unprotected. Moreover, our heavily financialized economy might collapse like a house of cards if it were struck a tiny blow in the right location, with Tucker Carlson noting that if Russia merely cut the transatlantic fiber-optic cables connecting financial markets in the US and Europe, Wall Street would suffer gigantic losses.

But I think the greatest risk our country faces is an automatic consequence of our attacks on Europe's critical energy infrastructure even absent any significant Russian reprisals.

If Germany and the rest of Europe undergo an economic collapse, the American economy can hardly avoid severe damage as well, but I think the more important impact will be upon the longer-term geopolitical alignment of that continent. Europeans will suffer greatly this winter and despite the solid wall of media propaganda, more and more of them may begin to recognize the architect of their distress.

For nearly three generations, our NATO allies have constituted a crucial element of America's global military and economic power, and if they see their repayment as being a treacherous, criminal attack with devastating consequences, they may eventually decide to shift their allegiance in a different direction. The hashtag #Kriegserklaerung---"declaration of war" — was recently trending for several days on Twitter, with numerous Germans saying that America had declared war against their country. Overwhelming control over electronic and social media represents a powerful brain-washing tool, but at some point its effectiveness may be overwhelmed by miserable reality. The old Soviet Union never inflicted such deliberate suffering upon its Warsaw Pact vassals and that alliance collapsed in 1989, so if some of the more dismal economic predictions for Europe are realized, I wonder if NATO will long survive.

From a broader perspective, industrialized Germany and resource-rich Russia are natural trading partners, and as Mike Whitney so presciently argued back in February, much of America's recent European strategy has been aimed at blocking their growing economic ties. Our destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines may have temporarily prevented any immediate German defection, but the bitterness we will have earned may be even more significant in the future. If Germany shifted its political ties eastward, America's power in Europe would be shattered, and German voters do have a say in such matters, especially if they begin to suffer Depression-like conditions in the next few months.

The establishment of a full-fledged Russian-German alliance would completely reshape the geopolitics of Eurasia, but I suspect that our ignorant government leaders would dismiss such a possibility as an absurd fantasy given what they imagine is the deep traditional hostility between those two populations. However, as I explained a few years ago, this is completely incorrect, being based upon an extremely skewed misreading of European history:
In my unjustified arrogance, I also sometimes relished a sense of seeing obvious things that magazine or newspaper journalists got so completely wrong, mistakes which often slipped into historical narratives as well. For example, discussions of the titanic 20th century military struggles between Germany and Russia quite often made casual references to the traditional hostility between those two great peoples, who for centuries had stood as bitter rivals, representing the eternal struggle of Slav against Teuton for dominion over Eastern Europe.

Although the bloodstained history of the two world wars made that notion seem obvious, it was factually mistaken. Prior to 1914, those two nationalities had not fought against each other for the previous 150 years, and even the Seven Years' War of the mid-18th century had involved a Russian alliance with Germanic Austria against Germanic Prussia, hardly amounting to a conflict along civilizational lines. Russians and Germans had been staunch allies during the endless Napoleonic wars and closely cooperated during the Metternich and Bismarck eras that followed, while even as late as 1904, Germany had supported Russia in its unsuccessful war against Japan. During the 1920s, Weimar Germany and Soviet Russia had a period of close military cooperation, the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939 marked the beginning of the Second World War, and throughout the long Cold War, the USSR had no more loyal a satellite than East Germany. Perhaps two dozen years of hostility over the last three centuries, with good relations or even outright alliance during most of the remainder, hardly suggested that Russians and Germans were hereditary enemies.

Moreover, during much of that period, Russia's ruling elite had had a considerable Germanic tinge. Russia's legendary Catherine the Great had been a German princess by birth, and over the centuries so many Russian rulers had taken German wives that the later Czars of the Romanov dynasty were usually more German than Russian. Russia itself had a substantial but heavily assimilated German population, which was very well represented in elite political circles, with German names being quite common among government ministers and sometimes found among important military commanders. Even a top leader of the Decembrist revolt of the early 19th century had had German ancestry but was a zealous Russian-nationalist in his ideology.
If the looming economic calamity does eventually shift Germany to a Russian alliance, the American attacks on the Nord Stream pipelines will be remembered as the blow that altered the entire trajectory of global politics.

To this point, most readers will probably be nodding their heads at the factual observations I have made even if they doubt some of the suggested possible consequences. Perhaps America's destruction of Europe's energy pipelines and the resulting economic devastation of Germany will lead to a permanent rupture in the Western alliance, or perhaps not; the future is difficult to predict.

But although there is not a single shred of hard evidence indicating American involvement, the circumstantial case is so overwhelmingly strong that no sensible person can come to any other conclusion. Whether or not we acted through local proxies, our government was clearly responsible for the destruction of Europe's most important energy infrastructure, an act of absolutely colossal criminality and recklessness, which may have enormously negative consequences for our own national interests. Virtually all Western mainstream media outlets and many alternative ones may scrupulously avoid this reality and paid propagandists may energetically dispute it, but it remains the obvious truth.

And here's the rub. This entire scenario seems remarkably similar to another that I have advanced over the last couple of years on an entirely different topic. Beginning in April 2020, I have published a long series of articles arguing that the global Covid epidemic was the result of an American biowarfare attack against China (and Iran).

Just as with President Biden, Donald Trump himself was similarly out of the loop, but the attack was probably orchestrated by top figures in his administration, who immediately tried (somewhat successfully) to blame the Chinese for the viral epidemic that began in their own country. Once again, virtually all of the relevant facts have been ignored by the Western media, but can easily be found and connected together. And once again, the weight of circumstantial evidence seems overwhelming, indeed in many respects far stronger than that for the pipeline attacks.

During the thirty months I have been making this case, the only strong argument ever presented against it was the claim that not even rogue elements of the Trump administration could have been so reckless as to launch a biowarfare attack, an attack whose unintended blowback eventually killed over a million Americans and disrupted the lives of billions worldwide. But our destruction of Europe's most crucial energy infrastructure demonstrates the true depths of the criminal recklessness sometimes found in the American government.

Once individuals have fully absorbed the broader implications of the Nord Stream attacks, including the widespread but ridiculous media claims that the Russians destroyed their own pipelines, they should reassess their assumptions regarding American governmental behavior and also reexamine the circumstances of the Covid outbreak with a fresh eye.

In particular, they should note the strikingly clear evidence of American foreknowledge of the outbreak, which can be summarized in just a few hundred words:
For example, in 2017 Trump brought in Robert Kadlec, who since the 1990s had been one of America's leading biowarfare advocates. The following year in 2018 a mysterious viral epidemic hit China's poultry industry and in 2019, another mysterious viral epidemic devastated China's pork industry...

From the earliest days of the administration, leading Trump officials had regarded China as America's most formidable geopolitical adversary, and orchestrated a policy of confrontation. Then from January to August 2019, Kadlec's department ran the "Crimson Contagion" simulation exercise, involving the hypothetical outbreak of a dangerous respiratory viral disease in China, which eventually spreads into the United States, with the participants focusing on the necessary measures to control it in this country. As one of America's foremost biowarfare experts, Kadlec had emphasized the unique effectiveness of bioweapons as far back as the late 1990s and we must commend him for his considerable prescience in having organized a major viral epidemic exercise in 2019 that was so remarkably similar to what actually began in the real world just a few months later.

With leading Trump officials greatly enamored of biowarfare, fiercely hostile to China, and running large-scale 2019 simulations on the consequences of a mysterious viral outbreak in that country, it seems entirely unreasonable to completely disregard the possibility that such extremely reckless plans may have been privately discussed and eventually implemented, though probably without presidential authorization.
But with the horrific consequences of our own later governmental inaction being obvious, elements within our intelligence agencies have sought to demonstrate that they were not the ones asleep at the switch. Earlier this month, an ABC News story cited four separate government sources to reveal that as far back as late November, a special medical intelligence unit within our Defense Intelligence Agency had produced a report warning that an out-of-control disease epidemic was occurring in the Wuhan area of China, and widely distributed that document throughout the top ranks of our government, warning that steps should be taken to protect US forces based in Asia. After the story aired, a Pentagon spokesman officially denied the existence of that November report, while various other top level government and intelligence officials refused to comment. But a few days later, Israeli television mentioned that in November American intelligence had indeed shared such a report on the Wuhan disease outbreak with its NATO and Israeli allies, thus seeming to independently confirm the complete accuracy of the original ABC News story and its several government sources.

It therefore appears that elements of the Defense Intelligence Agency were aware of the deadly viral outbreak in Wuhan more than a month before any officials in the Chinese government itself. Unless our intelligence agencies have pioneered the technology of precognition, I think this may have happened for the same reason that arsonists have the earliest knowledge of future fires.

According to these multiply-sourced mainstream media accounts, by "the second week of November" our Defense Intelligence Agency was already preparing a secret report warning of a "cataclysmic" disease outbreak taking place in Wuhan. Yet at that point, probably no more than a couple of dozen individuals had been infected in that city of 11 million, with few of those yet having any serious symptoms. The implications are rather obvious. Furthermore:

As the coronavirus gradually began to spread beyond China's own borders, another development occurred that greatly multiplied my suspicions. Most of these early cases had occurred exactly where one might expect, among the East Asian countries bordering China. But by late February Iran had become the second epicenter of the global outbreak. Even more surprisingly, its political elites had been especially hard-hit, with a full 10% of the entire Iranian parliament soon infected and at least a dozen of its officials and politicians dying of the disease, including some who were quite senior. Indeed, Neocon activists on Twitter began gleefully noting that their hated Iranian enemies were now dropping like flies.

Let us consider the implications of these facts. Across the entire world the only political elites that have yet suffered any significant human losses have been those of Iran, and they died at a very early stage, before significant outbreaks had even occurred almost anywhere else in the world outside China. Thus, we have America assassinating Iran's top military commander on Jan. 2nd and then just a few weeks later large portions of the Iranian ruling elites became infected by a mysterious and deadly new virus, with many of them soon dying as a consequence. Could any rational individual possibly regard this as a mere coincidence?

The Iranians themselves were well aware of these facts, and their top political and military leaders publicly accused America of an illegal biowarfare attack against their own country and China, with their former president even filing an official protest with the United Nations. But although these explosive charges were widely reported in the Iranian press, they were completely ignored by the American media so that almost no Americans ever became aware of them.
For those who prefer to absorb this information in a different format, here are three of my video podcast interviews from earlier this year, which are now approaching 1.3 million total views on Rumble, with the first of them nearly reaching the half-million mark:

Kevin Barrett, FFWN - February 16, 2022 - 15m


Geopolitics & Empire - February 1, 2022 - 75m


Red Ice TV - February 3, 2022 - 130m