Equipping Truth With Its ‘Wings of Freedom’

Taken separately, these three developments might appear unrelated but a closer look will reveal there is a pattern behind them.

Hersh’s article and Waters’ statement point to the crumbling of well-entrenched Western narratives. In plainspeak, Hersh has exposed the charges of Russia self-sabotaging the Nord Stream pipelines as highly-questionable and that has come as a major blow to the US narrative. Here are some excerpts from Hersh’s article:

“Last June, the Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning.

Two of the pipelines, which were known collectively as Nord Stream 1, had been providing Germany and much of Western Europe with cheap Russian natural gas for more than a decade. A second pair of pipelines, called Nord Stream 2, had been built but were not yet operational. Now, with Russian troops massing on the Ukrainian border and the bloodiest war in Europe since 1945 looming, President Joseph Biden saw the pipelines as a vehicle for Vladimir Putin to weaponize natural gas for his political and territorial ambitions.

Asked for comment, Adrienne Watson, a White House spokesperson, said in an email, “This is false and complete fiction.” Tammy Thorp, a spokesperson for the Central Intelligence Agency, similarly wrote: “This claim is completely and utterly false.”

Biden’s decision to sabotage the pipelines came after more than nine months of highly secret back and forth debate inside Washington’s national security community about how to best achieve that goal. For much of that time, the issue was not whether to do the mission, but how to get it done with no overt clue as to who was responsible.”

Meanwhile, Waters’ assertion also makes it problematic for the mainstream Western account of the circumstances leading to the war in Ukraine to be considered as the whole truth. It makes you wonder why the editorial credibility of Kremlin-backed RT is always deemed questionable, while other state-sponsored television channels like Qatar-owned Al Jazeera, Chinese-run CCTV, Turkey’s TRT World, Japan’s NHK World, Germany’s Deutsche Welle, Paris-based France 24 and licence fee-funded BBC come in for differing treatment.

Simultaneously, Zelenskyy’s visit to the UK and EU in the middle of a deadly year-long conflict has laid bare the West’s increasingly-overt support to Ukraine in its war against Russia.

In the recent past, the West, aided by a pliable media and clever spin-doctoring by well-paid lobbyists and commentators, has attempted to dominate the narrative around its policy decisions and tried to pass them off as noble, worthy causes. From the invasion of Iraq to the siege of Afghanistan, the examples abound. The uni-dimensional portrayal of one (‘enemy’) nation and its ruler as ‘dictatorial’ and ‘imperialist’ has been attempted to be offset by the positive press accorded to Western countries and their leaders, with ‘allies’ getting the stamp of ‘bravery’.

However, the tide seems to be turning.

Investigative journalism by the likes of Hersh and conscientious utterances by those like Waters — coming as they do from ‘within’ — have dented the reputation of the Occident as a place full of opportunities and freedom and revealed the true motivations behind its actions, historic and contemporary. They mostly concern material aggrandisement and consist of decisions motivated by neo-imperialist ambitions. Assertions to the contrary fall flat and add no sheen to the already-tarnished reputation of Western nations, alliances and cozy clubs.

It’s time to wake up and smell the coffee, world.