When Seymour Hersh released his article titled How America Took Out the Nord Stream Pipeline, it caught many people by surprise. Seymour Hersh was the first one to fully connect the dots, but the first few dots were there for everyone to see.
In 2021, Ukranian energy regulators stated that “[Nord Stream 2] will negatively impact on Ukraine’s national security.” They took part in a coordinated effort to stop the new pipeline from coming out. In February 2022, President Joe Biden said that “We will bring and end to [Nord Stream.”] After being pressed, President Biden replied, “I promise you; we will be able to do it.” (Video below) At a press conference in September 2022, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated, “It’s a tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy and thus to take away from Vladimir Putin the weaponization of energy as a means of advancing his imperial designs. That’s very significant and that offers tremendous strategic opportunity for the years to come.” In January, Victoria Nuland, an American diplomat, testified at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “Like you [Ted Cruz], I am, and I think the Administration is, very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.
In Hersh’s piece he goes into detail describing the financial reasons for the destruction, and how the pipeline threatened the dominance of the US and NATO. He discusses how Germany’s reliance on Russian gas could impact their enthusiasm to send military funding and aid to the Ukraine. He lays out the details of the planning of the operation, including the historical impact of Norway working with American intelligence agencies since the Vietnam war. Hersh describes how the divers were not required to report to the US Congress as they were not members of America’s Special Operations Command because they were in the Navy.
During the era of the Vietnam War, Seymour Hersh showed us the genocide that defined the war in Vietnam and Laos. His piece won a Pulitzer Prize and was instrumental in shifting the general opinion of the war. More recently, Hersh’s reporting once again changed the public view of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan when he reported on Abu Ghraib, a torture camp in Iraq. Seymour Hersh’s journalism is an excellent example of how exposing the lies of the American Empire is crucial to the peace movement.
We need to learn to look beyond the headlines, find out what’s going on, and share it! The people of the Donbass region of Ukraine, Palestine, Yemen, Haiti, and all around the globe need a movement in the imperial core that shares the truth of US imperialism. The Biden administration understands the importance of this, and they have been combating the narrative by briefing influencers on social media on the military operation in the Ukraine. Truth is the first casualty of war.
