When some combination of Western and Ukrainian terrorists with obvious state support – we still don’t know who and how precisely – destroyed the Nord Stream I and II Baltic Sea pipelines in September 2022, they caused an ecological catastrophe by releasing an unprecedented amount of the climate killer gas methane into our atmosphere. In other words, they made a hell of a stink. But that immediate impact pales in comparison with the rotten stench generated by the politics of cover-up that have followed the attack.
We have gotten so used to the European and German response that it’s hard to grasp just how perverse it has been. Usually, the victims of a crime do not try to cover it up. And yet, despite being the targets of a perfidious assault on critical energy infrastructure, both the EU as a whole and Berlin in particular have done everything they could to delay investigations and obfuscate and downplay the attack, while avoiding finding or naming all its perpetrators.
Indeed, Sweden and Denmark, both directly affected by the sabotage, simply and quickly abandoned any attempt at investigation. NATO, of course, if it followed its own rules, would have moved heaven and earth to identify and then, in accordance with precedent, bomb the aggressor state behind the attack on its members.
Instead, after an initial phase of blaming Russia that was so absurd it could not last forever even in the West, the strategy for this grand exercise in self-damaging lying has now shifted to deploying a quarter-truth in order to keep telling one big fat lie: In beautiful unison, German prosecutors, the Wall Street Journal, and about every German mainstream media outlet you can think of are desperately trying to impose a silly new narrative: it was the Ukrainians that did it, and – here comes the crucial part – only the Ukrainians. It........