Across the globe left-wing forces over-influenced by conspiracy analysis methods have created propaganda smokescreens about the sabotage of the Nordstream Russian Gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea. The left-wing 21st century conspiracists use research methods which are not based on painstaking hard-grind work. Journalists such as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein brought the world’s attention to the 1972 Watergate with evidence based research. Today’s conspiracists begin with their own fantasy theories – and never mind the facts which get in the way. They create a circus 🤡 – it is the method of the bumbling Irish police who attempted to frame Joanne Hayes in the infamous “Kerry Babies” case.
Christian Zeller is an activist in the European Network for Solidarity with Ukraine (ENSU). https://ukraine-solidarity.eu/
Germany’s Sozialistische Zeitung gets it wrong on energy and geopolitics
Angela Klein’s commentary “Blowing up NordStream 2. An act of Ukrainian warfare” is bizarre. A long-time SoZ editor, Klein takes the revelation story as a confirmed finding and inserts it in her own account of the war in such a way that she even insinuates that the Ukrainian defence is waging an economic war against the German population.
On 6 June, the Washington Post again triggered all kinds of speculation with the publication of an exposé story on the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines. The journalists “revealed” without providing substantial evidence that a Ukrainian commando destroyed the pipelines on 26 September 2022. Since then, this speculation has been doing the rounds. A few months ago, Seymour Hersh “revealed” that the US had blown up the pipelines. Significantly, the same circles that followed Hersh’s US hypothesis are now following the Ukraine hypothesis….
Left-evasionist and tankie political activists everywhere are promoting a Seymour Hersh post claiming that the USA ruling class blew up the Nordstream 2 pipeline which is designed to allow Russia to supply Germany with Natural Gas, by-passing Ukraine.
In Ireland, Paul Murphy TD (People Before Profit [PBP], Dublin South-West) highlighted this story on the grounds that Seymour Hersh is “one of the world’s best journalists”. In December 2022 a pro-PBP publication, the Irish Marxist Review (a well-produced and often interesting journal published by the Socialist Workers’ Network) carried a Maurice Coakley article which stated “the US Navy were the only force likely to have carried out the attacks on the gas pipeline”. (Maurice Coakley’s article is here : https://irishmarxistreview.net/index.php/imr/article/view/479/464)
Seymour Hersh, decades ago, was a credible journalist. Today he is a conspiracy nut. One correspondent on Paul Murphy’s facebook page, James Doyle, observes “This is all nonsense. For example, Why would the US use a Norwegian aircraft rather than a fake fishing boat in a supposedly covert operation. For those who refer to Hersh as a “respected journalist”, you should know that he thinks the Osama Bin Laden operation was fake and Assad never used chemical weapons in Syria. A good journalist in his day, but sadly has gone off the rails into a rabbit warren of attention seeking conspiracy theories.”
Is this dispute important? It is. In the activist Revolutionary Marxist tradition, theory is needed as a guide to action.
John Meehan February 16 2023
“Left” organisations and personalities retail Hersh’s Nord Stream story uncritically, because it is what they want to hear. Dogma beats inquiry. Innuendo and false claims beat solidarity with the victims of Russia’s scorched-earth war on populations, in Syria in 2014 and 2017, and Ukraine in 2022-23.
Re-forming critical public spaces means challenging the “great men” of the “left” when they offer blinkered, one-sided and untruthful explanations for the dangerous, uncertain realities we face.
Simon Pirani, The Nord Stream Pipeline Explosions – Challenging False Narratives.
The claim that the Nord Stream gas pipeline was blown up by U.S. special forces, made last week by the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, is being used to reinforce false narratives about Russia’s culpability for the war in Ukraine.
On 26 September last year, explosions damaged three of Nord Stream’s four pipelines, which run under the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany, and sent a large cloud of methane into the atmosphere. Russia has blamed the United States; western media suspected Russia itself of sabotage.
Tomás Ó Flatharta 