Cooking on gas

[Edited "Credibility gap" section in hope of improving clarity, 27 Jan 2023] 

They wouldn’t spend all this time lying to us if our opinions didn’t matter. – Robert Barnes.

Never let a good crisis go to waste. – Winston Churchill

Introduction

Germany knows who sabotaged Nord Stream 1 and 2 but will not disclose this information, citing national-security interests. So reports Alexander Mercouris of The Duran in response to a question from his partner Alex Christoforou at The Duran earlier this week. 

I’ve failed to find a press report confirming this news, but trust both Christoforou and Mercouris enough to take it as true. By way of supporting evidence, it follows an announcement from the Swedish government that its own findings are too sensitive to be shared with the world, and further that no joint investigation into the event will take place. It looks like the entire geopolitically critical affair is going to be quietly dropped. 

Were Russia guilty, would that news be too sensitive to share?

The West has unobtrusively let it be believed Russia blew up its primary bargaining chip with the EU, albeit without giving any substance to that argument; Russia could have simply turned off the gas supply at source. In fact, the “Russia did it” narrative is a very difficult, perhaps impossible, sell. For example, Anthony Blinken has in a matter of days switched from asserting the attack was “in no one’s interest” to it being a “tremendous strategic opportunity for the years to come”. Opportunity for whom?

What does this nakedly suspicious handling of the sabotage event imply? What are the implications of the horrifyingly low-quality leadership on display across The West as its peoples are lulled towards a precipitous economic downward spiral, and perhaps ruin? 

Credibility gap

Cui-bono logic tells us clearly the US was responsible for the attack. The US has been implacably against any geopolitical/economic partnership between Germany and Russia for decades, and was particularly troubled by the advent of both Nord Stream 1 and 2. Biden stated publicly in February 2022, with Germany’s Chancellor Scholz standing quietly at his side, the US would end Nord Stream 2 should Russia invade Ukraine. As if to confirm this, Blinken reasons this “tremendous opportunity” as a plus precisely because it ends Germany’s dependence on Russian gas. 

Obviously, Germany’s dependence has yet to miraculously resolve itself; Germany has nothing like sufficient internal gas reserves under its own soil. On whom will Germany now depend? Well, a cursory analysis suggests the US will make up the shortfall, albeit at eye-watering prices; liquid natural gas (LNG) is far more expensive than pipeline gas. However, Turkey’s recent deal with Russia to become the EU’s gas hub could well turn Turkey into Europe’s lone gas middleman, seeing as Turkey would be able to compete on price against US LNG. That said, Germany’s industrial competitiveness globally is over without cheap Russian gas, whether it is replaced by US LNG or Turkey-distributed pipeline gas. This of course means the EU’s strength as a bloc is also on a downward spiral. And the last thing Germany should want is to be at Turkey’s beck and call.

And yet despite knowing that it has been economically emasculated by its ‘loyal friend and ally’, Germany is meekly accepting its fate as US lapdog. What Germany’s people would think of all this might well diverge from what its political overlords are prepared to swallow, but active divergence will depend on whether ordinary Germans are given clear information on the matter, actually proceed to act decisively on that information and oust said overlords.

So the EU’s doe-eyed loyalty to US diktat now looks certain to reduce it to an economic backwater. If this transpires, the globalists’ dreams of a one-world technotopia will have revealed themselves as hot air. (The UK is in equally perilous shape.)

Unless, of course, this is all part of the theorised globalist plan to use the BRICS’ imminent ascendancy over The West as a mechanism for installing the UN, with its Agenda 2030, as the cohering entity binding all nations on earth to the BRICS’ “fair world order”; the BRICS block repeatedly swears fealty to this UN agenda.

If this nefarious plan is real and afoot, The West’s demise must be exploited to secure The West’s willing embrace of what it has for decades been conditioned to hate: Russian and Chinese power. To succeed, the plan’s conspirators must be in sufficient control of an astounding number of variables, including: the powerful Western MSM that is currently engaged, with all its hundreds of thousands of employees, in virulent opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; the entire internet through ABC-Google and its censorship activities; current and future anti-globalist populist leaders, such as Bolsonaro, Gabbard, Trump; all The West’s current political parties; street-level political sentiment in the US as Ukraine’s chances of victory visibly diminish; etc. And all of these exceedingly complex domains of control must jointly steer The West into an engineered cultural denouement of apocalyptic proportions, one that would destroy its self image, and with it, potentially, respect for all institutional authority. 

Would the peoples of The West trust their respective globalist cohorts after impoverishment at their hands, when those cohorts proffer the UN and the BRICS as The West’s bright new saviour? Will there be any existing homegrown and trusted authority left standing to spotlight as having been right all along about the ‘pandemic’, the ‘vaccines’, the Russia-Ukraine-NATO war, digital IDs, digital currencies, The West’s financial future, etc.? I imagine an institutional wasteland, trust as dust blowing away over the horizon, impossible to retrieve, impossible to reconstruct.

Or – this assuming this plan is indeed afoot and proceeding as hoped – will the shock be so great that the then broken peoples of The West, lost between worlds with no viable alternative in sight, will only be able to weakly accept the “fair world order” presented to them?

In truth I do not know. Theorised plans of this enormity seem highly improbable to me, but things have become so bizarre I simply cannot rule it out. My own sense was of a push towards global totalitarianism on the back of a managed ‘pandemic’, which afforded a narrative simple and coherent enough to sustain, with measures economically destructive enough to initiate a manageable financial crash across a nominally ‘unified’ world. That seems to have failed, or to have been an erroneous assessment on my part.

A more complicated narrative has an even lower chance of success, in my view. Russia’s war against Ukraine muddies the narrative waters considerably, delivers too much hardship in defence of too tenuous a vision – ‘Ukraine, the underdog bastion of Freedom!’ – and risks hobbling the very financial infrastructure the globalists will need to erect their technotopia, even if their CBDC system is up and running in the next few months.

So, if Russia has indeed pitted itself against what Putin calls “neoliberal totalitarianism”, and in so doing set in motion a sequence of events that is critically demoting The West’s, and in particular the US’, standing in the eyes of the rest of the world, and if this sequence of events is organic (not planned), then we are looking at the fall of one civilisation to the benefit of two or more others. In this case, how The West responds to this is up to The West, and not a coterie of sinister plotters who have been in control all along.

Either way, we in The West are facing what I’m calling a credibility gap. If this whole affair is indeed about to burst, if indeed our leaders and all our institutions are about to be exposed as rank failures when Russia secures unconditional surrender in Ukraine in coming months, as the UK and EU sink into severe recession or even depression with no obvious way out, how will any existing power structure maintain control with their credibility in irredeemable tatters?

At stake

Putin’s recent answer in Astana to a journalist’s probing questions as to the future of the Ukrainian state was revealingly open ended. Russia had had no plans to end Ukraine as a state, but now, well, Ukraine did attack Crimea’s water supply and the Kerch bridge to the Russian mainland. Things have changed. His answer did not make any definitive statement or announce any change in policy, but it did not rule out Ukraine’s imminent demise as a state at Russia’s hands. 

The West’s ability to militarily support Ukraine is quickly drying up. Russian mobilisation is almost complete, its defensive lines are solidifying and holding well, repelling Ukrainian attacks at great cost in hardware and human life to Ukraine. Russia has spent the last eight days destroying about a third of Ukraine’s power infrastructure. Financial crisis looms in that sorry country. For all these reasons, both troop and civilian morale in Ukraine is apparently declining.

In the US, the ruling party looks sets to incur something of a wipeout in the upcoming mid-term elections. The UK just witnessed the sacking of its new Chancellor of the Exchequer, a mere six weeks in the post. Prime Minister Truss’ position looks lost to fate, and she has been in her post for the same short period of time. Macron has no parliamentary majority. Scholz’s party (SPD) is haemorrhaging support. Europe is facing economic meltdown, as is the UK, despite what temporary upward blips in currently volatile markets might suggest.

The West’s ability to support Ukraine is at the end of its rope. I have no doubt that Kiev and Moscow know this full well. We may well see one last desperate push into Kherson by Kiev as Zelenskyy’s time runs out.

At stake, as argued above, is the collapse of The West as global hegemon should Russia win. This likely outcome is set to transpire despite the belligerent and bellicose fervour with which The West demonised Russia and promised Ukraine certain victory. All of it to win far, far less than nothing.

Is this what the Davos/WEF crowd wanted? Is this the bloody royal road to the global technotopia of which they dreamed? It doesn’t look like it to me. It looks like a typical hubris-driven comeuppance, at great cost in blood and treasure to Ukraine.

Alexander Mercouris and Alex Christoforou of The Duran suggest that Germany’s and Sweden’s tightlipped handling of the Nord Stream sabotage means the US has given up on its ambitions to deconstruct Russia and China. If true, this leaves the US with the EU and UK as its prize, which it already had anyway, though now a broken EU and UK not really of all that much utility. And with Turkey in control of whatever gas makes it to the EU/UK, how effective would the US’ control be [edit: with reserve currency and petrodollar gone?]? Would some sort of impoverished technocratic-superstate vassal to the US be a fun or satisfying outcome for all future US leaders after all the fine work put into accomplishing so much more?

Mattias Desmet was recently in conversation with Tucker Carlson, a one-hour conversation I highly recommend. He points out – and this is of pivotal importance – that totalitarian elites are first and foremost ideologues. They are not cynical pursuers of total power, spoilt rich overlords with nothing better to do. They passionately believe in some ideology so unshakeably they are prepared to do and risk anything to see it installed. He shares with his host Carlson that Hannah Arendt predicted as far back as 1951 that the ultimate totalitarian system would be technocratic/bureaucratic. The ideology driving dreams of a technotopia (my word) is materialism, or rationalism, the atomist worldview that is modernity’s paradigm. The totalitarian state predicted by Arendt in 1951 is the logical outcome of that paradigm: a perfected global system of perfected humans in perfectly run cities and businesses. 

Only fervent belief in a vision of this kind can drive people to risk everything as ‘incompetently’ as we currently witness happening in The West. The question is, does the rest of the world, and do, in particular, the BRICS nations, share this cultural fervour for technotopia? This question has driven the probing articles I’ve published here since I started addressing the Russia-Ukraine war. I suspect the answer is a soft yes on the part of Russia and China; I’m not sure how deep that sympathy for utopian dreams goes, especially considering Russia’s deep Christian Orthodoxy and China’s Confucian reflexes. But I am simply not sufficiently informed to hazard a guess beyond my intuitive sense that life – which is not mechanical in essence – wins out in the end. Hence, to whatever degree the BRICS bloc and the Global South share in materialist reflexes, and however solemnly their leaders may advocate Agenda 2030, no pure rationalist/materialist impulse can produce a healthy society, just as this applies to The West.

Conclusion

Things are quickly coming to a head. My own read on what is taking place is firming, but events change so incessantly it is impossible to keep up. 

Nevertheless, love, not fear, is always the answer. If Desmet is right that speaking out inhibits the depth of any given mass-formation process, I will continue to speak out in support of love and free will, and in so doing play my small part, come what may.

While materialism dominates, love, as I express it at this blog and elsewhere, will continue to seem like a ninny teenage fantasy of minimal utility. But if we humans do in fact despair when lonely, and if in fact we do hunger for meaningful lives, if we love to love and earnestly want contribute to the health of all those around us, then love is the path we will have to turn to sooner or later. Of this I remain sure, and on this point I will continue to write for as long as my fingers allow!

Let's not let this crisis go to waste.