https://www.globalresearch.ca/germany-eu-have-been-handed-over-declaration-war/5794928
Germany and EU Have Been Handed Over a Declaration of War
The sabotage of the Nord Stream (NS) and Nord Stream 2 (NS2) pipelines in the Baltic Sea has ominously propelled ‘Disaster Capitalism’ to a whole new, toxic level.
This episode of Hybrid Industrial/Commercial War, in the form of a terror attack against energy infrastructure in international waters signals the absolute collapse of international law, drowned by a “our way or the highway”, “rules-based”, order.
The attack on both pipelines consisted of multiple explosive charges detonated in separate branches close to the Danish island of Bornholm, but in international waters.
That was a sophisticated operation, carried out in stealth in the shallow depth of the Danish straits. That would in principle rule out submarines (ships entering the Baltic are limited to a draught of 15 meters). As for prospective “invisible” vessels, these could only loiter around with permission from Copenhagen – as the waters around Borholm are crammed with sensors, reflecting fear of incursion by Russian submarines.
Swedish seismologists registered two underwater explosions on Monday – one of them estimated at 100 kg of TNT. Yet as much as 700 kg may have been used to blow up three separate pipeline nodes. Such amount could not have possibly been delivered in just one trip by underwater drones currently available in neighboring nations.
The pressure on the pipelines dropped exponentially. The pipes are now filled with seawater.
The pipes on both NS and NS2 can be repaired, of course, but hardly before the arrival of General Winter. The question is whether Gazprom – already focused on several hefty Eurasian customers – would bother, especially considering that Gazprom vessels could be exposed to a possible NATO naval attack in the Baltic.
German officials are already spinning that NS and NS2 can “potentially” be out of commission “forever”. The EU economy and EU citizens badly needed that gas supply. Yet the EUrocracy in Brussels – which rules over nation-states – would not follow, because they have been dictated themselves by the Empire of Chaos, Lies and Plunder. A case can be made that this Euro-oligarchy should one day be tried for treason.
As it stands, a strategic irreversibility is already self-evident; the population of several EU nations will pay a tremendous price and suffer serious consequences derived from this attack, short, medium and long term.
Cui bono?
Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson admitted that was “a matter of sabotage”. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen admitted “it was not an accident”. Berlin agrees with the Scandinavians.
Now compare it with former Polish Defense Minister (2005-2007) Radek Sikorski, a Russophobe married to US “analyst” Anne Applebaum, who merrily tweeted “Thank you, USA”.
It gets curiouser and curiouser when we know that simultaneously to the sabotage the Baltic Pipe from Norway to Poland was partially opened, a “new gas supply corridor” servicing “the Danish and Polish markets”: actually a minor affair, considering months ago their sponsors were in trouble finding gas, and now it will be even harder, with much higher costs.
NS2 had already been attacked – in the open – all along its construction. Back in February, Polish ships actively tried to prevent the Fortuna pipe-laying vessel from finishing NS2. The pipes were being laid south of – you guessed it – Bornholm.
NATO for its part has been very active on the underwater drones department. The Americans have access to long distance Norwegian underwater drones which can be modified with other designs. Alternatively, professional navy clearance divers could have been employed in the sabotage – even as tidal currents around Bornholm are a serious matter.
The Big Picture reveals the collective West in absolute panic, with Atlanticist “elites” willing to resort to anything – outrageous lies, assassinations, terrorism, sabotage, all out financial war, support to neo-Nazis – to prevent their descent into a geopolitical and geoeconomic abyss.
Disabling NS and NS2 represents the definitive closure of any possibility of a German-Russia deal on gas supplies, with the added benefit of relegating Germany to the lowly status of absolute US vassal.
So that brings us to the key question of which Western intel apparatus designed the sabotage. Prime candidates are of course CIA and MI6 – with Poland set up as the fall guy and Denmark playing a very dodgy part: it’s impossible that Copenhagen was not at least “briefed” on the intel.
Prescient as ever, as early as in April 2021 Russians were asking questions about the military security of Nord Stream.
The crucial vector is that we may be facing the case of a EU/NATO member involved in an act of sabotage against the number one EU/NATO economy. That’s a casus belli. Outside of the appalling mediocrity and cowardice of the current administration in Berlin, it’s clear that the BND – German intel – as well as the German Navy and informed industrialists sooner or later will do the math.
This was far from an isolated attack. On September 22 there was an attempt against Turkish Stream by Kiev saboteurs. The day before, naval drones with English language IDs were found in Crimea, suspected of being part of the plot. Add to it US helicopters overflying the future sabotage nodes weeks ago; a UK “research” vessel loitering in Danish waters since mid-September; and NATO tweeting about the testing of “new unmanned systems at sea” on the same day of the sabotage.
Show me the (gas) money
The Danish Minister of Defense met urgently with NATO’s Secretary General this Wednesday. After all the explosions happened very close to Denmark’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ). That may be qualified as crude kabuki at best; exactly on the same day, the European Commission (EC), NATO’s de facto political office, advanced its trademark obsession: more sanctions against Russia, including the certified-to-fail cap on oil prices.
Meanwhile, EU energy giants are bound to lose big time with the sabotage.
The roll call includes the German Wintershall Dea AG and PEG/ E.ON; the Dutch N.V. Nederlandse Gasunie; and the French ENGIE. Then there are those which financed NS2: Wintershall Dea again as well as Uniper; Austrian OMV; ENGIE again; and British-Dutch Shell. Wintershall Dea and ENGIE are both co-owners and creditors. Their fuming shareholders will want serious answers from a serious investigation.
It gets worse: there are no holds barred anymore on the Pipeline Terror front. Russia will be on red alert not only for Turk Stream but also Power of Siberia. Same for the Chinese and their maze of pipelines arriving in Xinjiang.
Whatever the methodology and the actors who were in the loop, this is payback – in advance – for the inevitable collective West defeat in Ukraine. And a crude warning to the Global South that they will do it again. Yet action always breeds reaction: from now on, “funny things” could also happen to US/UK pipelines in international waters.
The EU oligarchy is reaching an advanced process of disintegration at lightning speed. Their window of opportunity to at least attempt a role as a strategically autonomous geopolitical actor is now closed.
These EUROcrats now face a serious predicament. Once it’s clear who are the perpetrators of the sabotage in the Baltic, and once they understand all the life-changing socio-economic consequences for pan-EU citizens, the kabuki will have to stop. Including the already running, uber-ridiculous subplot that Russia blew up its own pipeline when Gazprom could simply have turned off the valves for good.
And once again, it gets worse: Gazprom is threatening to sue the Ukrainian energy company Naftofgaz for unpaid bills. That would lead to the end of Russian gas transiting Ukraine towards the EU.
As if all of that was not serious enough, Germany is contractually obligated to purchase at least 40 billion cubic meters of Russian gas a year until 2030.
Just say no? They can’t: Gazprom is legally entitled to get paid even without shipping gas. That’s the spirit of a long-term contract. And it’s already happening: because of sanctions, Berlin does not get all the gas it needs but still needs to pay.
All the devils are here
Now it’s painfully clear the imperial velvet gloves are off when it comes to the vassals. EU independence: verboten. Cooperation with China: verboten. Independent trade connectivity with Asia: verboten. The only place for the EU is to be economically subjugated to the US: a tawdry remix of 1945-1955. With a perverse neoliberal twist: we will own your industrial capacity, and you will have nothing.
The sabotage of NS and NS2 is inbuilt in the imperial wet dream of breaking up the Eurasian land mass into a thousand pieces to prevent a trans-Eurasia consolidation between Germany (representing the EU), Russia and China: $50 trillion in GDP, based on purchasing power parity (PPP) compared to the US’s $20 trillion.
We must go back to Mackinder: control of the Eurasian land mass constitutes control of the world. American elites and their Trojan Horses across Europe will do whatever it takes not to give up their control.
“American elites” in this context encompass the deranged, Straussian neo-con-infested “intel community” and the Big Energy, Big Pharma and Big Finance that pays them and who profits not only from the Deep State’s Forever War approach but also wants to make a killing out of the Davos-concocted Great Reset.
The Raging Twenties started with a murder – of Gen Soleimani. Blowing up pipelines is part of the sequel. There will be a highway to hell all the way to 2030. Yet to borrow from Shakespeare, hell is definitely empty, and all the (Atlanticist) devils are here.
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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/09/29/new-zealands-pm-wants-more-online-censorship-for-the-war-in-ukraine/
New Zealand’s PM Wants More Online Censorship For The War In Ukraine
New Zealand’s prime minister Jacinda Ardern continued her crusade for the expansion of internet censorship during a speech at the United Nations General Assembly on Friday, this time using the war in Ukraine.
“Whether it’s climate, trade, health crises or seeking peaceful solutions to war and conflict, New Zealand has always been a believer in multilateral tools,” Ardern told the assembly, adding that “without reform, we risk irrelevancy.”
“There is perhaps no greater example of this than Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” Ardern said. “Let us all be clear: Russia’s war is illegal. It is immoral. It is a direct attack on the UN charter, and the international rules-based system and everything that this community should stand for. Putin’s suggestion that it could at any point deploy further weapons that it has at their disposal reveals the false narrative that they have based their invasion on. What country who claims to be a liberator, threatens to annihilate the very civilians they claim to liberate? This war is based on a lie.”
Later in her speech, Ardern returns to the theme that Russia’s war is “based on a lie” to argue for the censorship of online speech which supports the idea that Russia is fighting for legitimate reasons in Ukraine.
Using the 2019 Christchurch terrorist attack as a segue to talk about the perils of online radicalization, Ardern then smoothly transitions to the subject of “mis- and disinformation” on the internet.
“This will also be important in understanding more about mis- and disinformation online: a challenge that we must as leaders address,” Ardern said.
“As leaders, we are rightly concerned that even those most light-touch approaches to disinformation could be misinterpreted as being hostile to the values of free speech we value so highly,” Ardern added, an acknowledgement of the grave human rights concerns inherent in having ‘leaders’ participate in the regulation of public speech. “But while I cannot tell you today what the answer is to this challenge, I can say with complete certainty that we cannot ignore it. To do so poses an equal threat to the norms we all value.”
Then it gets even creepier.
“After all, how do you successfully end a war if people are led to believe the reason for its existence is not only legal but noble?” asks the prime minister. “How do you tackle climate change if people do not believe it exists? How do you ensure the human rights of others are upheld, when they are subjected to hateful and dangerous rhetoric and ideology? The weapons may be different, but the goals of those who perpetuate them is often the same. To cause chaos and reduce the ability of others to defend themselves. To disband communities. To collapse the collective strength of countries who work together. But we have an opportunity here to ensure that these particular weapons of war do not become an established part of warfare.”
Ardern’s remarks are currently getting a lot of criticism in right-wing circles due largely to her suggestion that online discourse about climate change needs to be regulated so that the issue can be properly addressed. And to be sure that is an absolutely insane thing for her to say; I believe climate change is real and anthropogenic and I find the idea of silencing people who disagree with me about that unthinkably nightmarish. This is a line of thinking that can only arise from a profoundly tyrannical mind.
But what isn’t getting enough attention at this time is the fact that Ardern is calling for an increase in the already outrageous amount of online censorship we are seeing with regard to the war in Ukraine. She explicitly said the war is “based on a lie”, and then went on to argue that people need to be stopped from circulating speech which lends credibility to that lie, even if such freakishly authoritarian measures may be “misinterpreted” as being hostile to free speech.
Ardern argues that online speech claiming that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is legal and noble makes it harder to attain peace, but of course she doesn’t really believe that, and neither does anyone else. The idea that free speech about the war could somehow hamper peace negotiations between governments is self-evidently absurd and completely nonsensical.
In reality, this war is just the latest in a string of excuses we’ve been given by the western political/media class to censor the internet, with earlier justifications including Covid-19, election security, domestic extremism, and Russian propaganda again after the 2016 US election. But asserting that it’s important to stop people from thinking wrong thoughts about a war is a major escalation from all those other justifications, because they’re no longer pretending that it’s being done for our own good. Our wrongthink is the justification, in and of itself.
Which is a problem, because this is in fact an extremely dangerous proxy war being waged against Russia by the US and its imperial member states. It was absolutely deliberately provoked, it’s showing no sign of ending anytime soon, and its continual escalation threatens the life of everyone on this planet. The US has lied about every war it has ever been involved in, and if ever there was a war to bring scrutiny and skepticism to, it’s the one that is bringing us closer to a nuclear exchange than at any other time in history.
This notion that it is the job of “leaders” to involve themselves in regulating the ideas and information we’re allowed to share with each other online needs to be stomped out, dissolved in acid, and flushed down the toilet. That’s not their place. They shouldn’t even be looking in that direction, much less talking amongst themselves at the United Nations about how best they can go about doing it. It’s a profoundly dangerous notion that needs to be rejected with unadulterated aggression....
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https://stephenlendman.org/2022/09/28/a-state-of-undeclared-hegemon-usa-dominated-nato-war-on-russia/
A State of Undeclared Hegemon USA-Dominated NATO War on Russia
Since the dawn of the nuclear age, the risk of war on Russia by the self-declared master of the universe and its NATO vassals was never greater than now.
Things have been incrementally heading in this direction for years, notably since the Obama/Biden regime’s 2014 Kiev coup — replacing democratic government with Nazified tyrannical rule.
Since that time, things have been heading toward direct confrontation between the world’s leading nuclear powers.
A giant step toward what’s unthinkable occurred after Russia began its liberating SMO — an act of self-defense in response to its threatened security by US-dominated NATO regimes.
On September 26, reported damage to Russia’s Nord Stream I and II gas pipelines was the latest shoe to drop.
It occurred while Donbass and Kherson/Zaporozhye Regions were voting overwhelmingly to join Russia — their predominantly Russian-speaking populations wanting freedom from the scourge of Nazified Ukraine control.
Leaks rendering both pipelines inoperable also occurred as militantly-hostile-to-Russia Poland announced the inauguration of a new pipeline to deliver 10 billion cubic meters of gas annually to the country through Norway, Denmark and the Baltic Sea.
Yet while deliveries are expected to begin on October 1, about 80% of the pipeline’s capacity won’t be reached until January.
And 10 billion cubic meters of gas annually will only supply Poland with around half of what’s needed for its enterprises and consumers.
The announced inauguration of the pipeline to Poland at the same time as reported damage to Russia’s Nord Stream I and II were clearly not coincidental.
Most likely caused by one or more Unmanned Underwater Vehicles, laden with powerful explosives, three leaks rendered both pipelines inoperable until repairs are completed.
Damage to both pipelines occurred within hours on the same day beneath the Baltic Sea — its waters controlled by US-dominated NATO at a time when Pentagon warships were in the area where what happened was reported.
Make your own judgment.
On Tuesday, Nord Stream AG, operator of the pipelines, reported the following:
“The significant pressure drop caused by…gas leak(s) on both lines of the gas pipeline registered yesterday leads to a strong assumption of…physical damage” by sabotage.
“(C)auses of (what happened) will be clarified as a result of the investigation.”
Damaged locations of the pipelines were identified.
They’re northeast of Bornholm in Swedish and Danish economic zones.
Resources are being mobilized to assess damage in preparation for repairs to be made.
At this time, it cannot be determined how long it will take.
According to Swedish seismologists, two explosions occurred along routes of the pipelines on Monday, causing sharp drops in pressure needed to transport gas.
On Tuesday, Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said the following:
“Obviously, there is some kind of destruction of the pipeline.”
“(T)his is an issue related to the energy security of the entire continent.”
“This is a completely unprecedented situation that requires urgent investigation.”
“We are extremely concerned about this news.”
Make no mistake.
What happened had Biden regime dirty hands all over it, an act of war on Russia — either directly, what’s most likely, or by one or more of its vassals.
On Tuesday, Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, said the following about damage to Nord Stream I and II:
Former Polish foreign minister, Radek Sikorski, thanked the empire of lies and forever wars for what happened.
His public remark is “an official (admission) of a (state-sponsored) terrorist attack” on Russia.
Even so-called EU foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, admitted the following:
“All available information indicates those leaks (to Nord Stream I and II) are the result of a deliberate act.”
“Any deliberate disruption of European energy infrastructure is utterly unacceptable and will be met with a robust and united response.”
German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel and Spiegel magazine called what happened a “deliberate act of sabotage.”
In early February, reciting pre-scripted lines, Biden said the following:
If Russia acts against (Nazified) Ukraine, “there will be no longer a Nord Stream II. We will bring an end to it.”
“I promise you. We will be able to do that.”
What can be done to one underwater pipeline can be done to others.
The empire of lies and forever wars wants European economies harmed to benefit US enterprises.
Its diabolical scheme includes making the continent dependent on 40% higher cost US LNG over much lower-priced Russian natural gas — as well as being dependent on maximum amounts of US oil and other commodities.
All of the above is ongoing at a time when hegemon USA and its NATO vassals keep pouring more arms and equipment into Nazified Kiev for perpetual war on Russia to the last Ukrainian.
Sabotaging Nord Stream I and II pipelines also occurred days before Donbass and Kherson/Zaporozhye Regions become Russian republics.
Hegemon USA is waging unannounced war on Russia.
By allying with their US master instead of opposing what’s going on in their own self-interest, European regimes are heading their economies for collapse.
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