By Finian Cunningham
March 30, 2023:
Information Clearing House
-- "SCF"
- Russia and China are determined to
hold the American perpetrators of the Nord
Stream sabotage to account. Uncle Sam’s days –
indeed decades – of wanton criminality are over.
There’s going to be hell to pay as the
imperialist tyranny in Washington hits a wall of
reality.
Several weeks have gone by with the United
States and its Western lackeys stonewalling at
the United Nations Security Council, squirming
and resisting calls from Moscow and Beijing for
an international criminal investigation into the
sabotage of the Baltic Sea pipelines that were
blown up in September.
A swathe of independent observers, such as
American economics professor Jeffrey Sachs and
former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, have concurred
with the investigative report published on
February 8 by renowned journalist Seymour Hersh
which claims that U.S. President Joe Biden and
his senior White House staff ordered the
Pentagon to take out the natural gas pipeline
that runs along the Baltic Sea bed from Russia
to Germany.
Russia and China are adamant about not
letting this vital subject be ignored. They want
a proper investigation, international
accountability and criminal prosecution. Moscow
and Beijing are right to insist on this.
Washington and its Western allies’ presumption
of impunity has gone on for too many decades.
The buck stops here and both Russia and China
are strong enough to ensure that the United
States cannot threaten, blackmail, or arm-twist
its way out of scrutiny.
The Nord Stream project is a major
international civilian infrastructure, costing
in excess of $20 billion to construct over more
than a decade. At 1,200 kilometres in length
under the Baltic Sea, it is an impressive feat
of engineering, symbolizing the mutual benefits
of good neighborliness and cooperative trading.
For the United States to blow this pipeline
up in order to knock Russia out of the European
energy market so that it could muscle in with
its own more expensive gas supplies is a
shocking act of state terrorism and criminality.
It is also potentially an act of war against
Russia and callous sabotage against supposed
European allies whose citizens are now suffering
economic misery from soaring energy bills.
German workers have this week shut down the
entire economy from industrial protests over
collapsing businesses and unbearable cost of
living.
Of course, the Nord Stream sabotage is an
urgent matter of basic justice, accountability
for an atrocious crime, as well as massive
international financial reparations. It’s almost
hilarious how the self-proclaimed American
protagonist of “rules-based global order” is
desperately procrastinating over a glaring
incident of dereliction and chaos.
But more than the essential obligation of
justice is the legacy of impunity. For the
perpetrators of such a wanton terrorist act not
to be held accountable sets a perilous
precedent. Otherwise, what is stopping the state
terrorists from repeating equally brazen acts of
sabotage and warmongering? The very concept of
international law and the United Nations Charter
is demolished, not simply undermined.
The Nord Stream incident potentially opens an
era of rampant lawlessness and state banditry –
by a nuclear superpower, the United States,
using its Western minions for cover. The Western
news media, in their reluctance to investigate,
are also exposed as nothing more than propaganda
channels in the service of imperial masters.
The present is reminiscent of the 1930s
during a time of fascist expansionism by Nazi
Germany and other imperialist nations, including
the United States, Britain, France, Italy, Spain
and Japan, and others. Nazi Germany was not the
unique culprit during that earlier time of
barbarism, notwithstanding the official Western
revisionism of history to absolve itself.
After the Second World War amid the ashes of
international destruction and up to 85 million
deaths, the United Nations and its Charter were
founded to ostensibly enshrine the stricture
that there would be no repetition of the
1930s-style lawlessness and state terrorism.
That lofty aspiration was always a pathetic
illusion. The decades after WWII saw no halt to
the imperialist warmongering and subterfuges
carried out primarily by the United States and
its Western allies, in particular Britain. What
a mockery that the U.S. and Britain were
afforded permanent member states of the UN
Security Council given that these two rogue
powers have been largely responsible for
countless wars post-1945. The decades-long wars
in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan are but the
most notorious war crimes of the Anglo-American
“special relationship”.
During the Cold War decades, the Soviet Union
provided a limited check on the worst
depredations by Western imperialists. The
People’s Republic of China was not strong enough
to act as a deterrent force.
For about two decades after the Cold War
officially ended in 1991 following the
dissolution of the Soviet Union, the United
States rulers perceived a license for
“full-spectrum dominance”. Washington embarked
on a frenzy of endless wars that up till
recently have prevailed.
The first reality check on the unbridled
violence of the U.S. imperialists and their NATO
henchmen was Russia’s military intervention in
Syria in late 2015 to put an end to the Western
machinations for yet another regime-change
operation. Washington and its accomplices failed
in their nefarious goals in Syria, albeit the
Americans persist in illegally occupying part of
the Arab country and stealing its oil resources.
Ukraine is the full manifestation of the end
to impunity for the United States.
Russia under Vladimir Putin has recovered the
military strength that was lost with the
dissolution of the Soviet Union. In some ways,
present-day Russia is even more formidable owing
to the development of new forms of weapons, such
as hypersonic missiles and S-500 air defenses.
Also, Russia’s economy is on a sounder footing
than the Soviet Union which relied excessively
on militarism. Hence, Moscow has been able to
withstand the economic assault that Washington
and its allies have tried to mount over the
Ukraine conflict.
Just as important, too, China has risen to
economic and military superpower status.
Together, Russia and China now present an
invulnerable countervailing force to the United
States and its Western allies.
For nearly eight decades after World War Two,
the United States was relatively free to run
amok, trashing international law and nations’
sovereignty, racking up death tolls by the
millions, and terrorizing the planet with its
“benign”, narcissistic tyranny.
The conflict in Ukraine, where Russia has
said “enough is enough” to years of U.S.-led
NATO aggression, is demonstrating that the days
of impunity are finally over for the would-be
American hegemon.
Washington has recklessly raised the stakes
to an unsustainable height in Ukraine. It has
bet the house – and farm – on subjugating Russia
for its next insatiable imperial move against
China. But Moscow and Beijing are calling Uncle
Sam’s bluff. The buck stops here.
The edifice of American imperial power has
never been challenged at its foundation. It is
now.
Finian Cunningham
has written extensively on international
affairs, with articles published in several
languages. He is a Master’s graduate in
Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a
scientific editor for the Royal Society of
Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a
career in newspaper journalism. He is also a
musician and songwriter. For nearly 20 years, he
worked as an editor and writer in major news
media organisations, including The Mirror, Irish
Times and Independent.
Views expressed in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
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