Although they keep trying, as masters of hypocrisy, the Democrats have now finally lost their masks as agents of Neoliberalist fascism and Empire. The US population really has no political representation of any kind and increasing numbers are finally realising it.

Throughout history, imperialists have always ‘justified’ their empires by moral-sounding excuses such as that it comes from ‘God’ or from the nation’s being somehow ’superior’ to all others; but it has always been a fraud. The latest excuse is that only ‘our’ nation and its ‘allies’ (vassal nations, colonies) are ‘democratic’ — but how can an imperial nation be a democracy since it dictates to its vassal nations; so, neither the imperial nation nor its colonies can even possibly be a democracy. It cannot. It is merely a ‘democracy’.

There is one imperial nation in the world right now, and this is the U.S.A., which, on 25 July 1945, (its President, Harry Truman) decided to become the world’s first-ever all-encompassing imperial nation, aiming ultimately to control all others. It would defend the rights of existing empires so long as they subordinated themselves to the U.S. And this is what happened, with loads of U.S. coups and military invasions and, now, 900 foreign military bases all around the world (and another 749 inside the U.S. itself).

Today, that empire encompasses not only NATO but also Japan and South Korea. Its coming targets for take-over (“regime-change”) are mainly Russia and China, but others targets are Venezuela, Syria, Iran, and all others that it doesn’t yet control. It’s a hyper-militaristic monster.

The current hot war in the battlefields of Ukraine isn’t between Ukraine and Russia but between the U.S. and Russia and is being waged in the battlefields of Ukraine by Ukrainian soldiers and NATO (mainly U.S.-built) weapons, against Russian soldiers and weapons there. So, it is enormously profitable for the U.S.-and-allied billionaires who control those weapons-manufacturers. And they want it to continue for that reason. Their ‘elected’ stooges who control their Governments carry out their plan and call themselves a ‘democracy’.

The U.S. has increasingly ever since Obama in 2012, been applying sanctions against Russia, and especially after 2021 when Russia responded to America’s take-over of Ukraine on Russia’s border by demanding that no U.S. missiles be placed that close to Moscow, and on 7 January 2022 the U.S. and its NATO heaped contempt upon Russia’s entirely reasonable national-security demand. Then, on 24 February 2022, being left with no other option, Russia invaded Ukraine in order to prevent that outcome, and, immediately the U.S. slapped severe sanctions against Russia, and all of America’s colonies have complied with these sanctions ever since.

The chief source of gas to all EU countries was the by-far cheapest, which was Russian-supplied pipelined natural gas, which became increasingly barred by the EU countries throughout 2022, and was replaced mainly by U.S.-supplied fracked canned and cross-Atlantic-shipped liquefied natural gas (LNG), at prices many times higher than what EU countries had been paying for Russian pipelined natural gas.

This recent history is ‘justified’ by statements that are false and that hide the key truths, so as to fool voters to fear Russia instead of America, as will now be documented: 

A big meme is that Russia endangers “The West,” instead of that “The West” endangers Russia — which is the reality. Here are some examples of this:

https://unipub.lib.uni-corvinus.hu/7831/1/1-s2.0-S0301421522005316-main.pdf

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421522005316#fig6

https://archive.ph/BPpG9

Energy Policy Journal

Volume 173, February 2023, 113312

“What can the EU do to address the high natural gas prices?”

Péter Kotek b, Adrienn Selei a, Borbála Takácsné Tóth a, Balázs Felsmann a

a    Corvinus University of Budapest, Hungary

b    REKK, Hungary

Received 11 April 2022, Revised 27 September 2022, Accepted 20 October 2022, Available online 12 December 2022, Version of Record 12 December 2022.

Fig. 1. International gas price markers. Henry Hub indicates the US gas markets, JKM the Asian gas markets and TTF the European. 

“Platts JKM™ (Japan Korea Marker) LNG Price” — in other words, it is the price of liquified natural gas (LNG) — mainly U.S. fracked, compressed, canned, and shipped, instead of pipelined natural, gas — as opposed to Russia’s pipelined natural gas, which is enormously less expensive and which was the main supply-source there until 2021. In other words, TTF and JKM are the EurAsian portions of the U.S. empire, the parts of EurAsia that have been complying with the imperial regime’s, the U.S. Government’s, sanctions against Russia, and that thus are no longer buying Russia’s gas. So: that’s the cause of soaring gas-costs in the EU (and in “Asia” but ONLY the U.S. vassal-nations there). And here is the graph they presented showing how MUCH those gas-costs have soared:

https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S0301421522005316-gr1.jpg. 

It shows that starting in April 2021, gas-prices in both TTF and JKM soared from about 12 EUR/MWh to 250 EUR/MWh. Meanwhile in U.S., gas prices (the “Henry Hub” price sold in America) remained almost unchanged. The study analyzed why, and concluded that,

"Therefore, it can be concluded that it is not Nord Stream 2 but additional Russian deliveries through any route that would alleviate gas prices in Europe.” 

However: at the end it said:

5. Conclusions and policy implications

The current EU gas price crisis is rooted in strong Asian demand related to the economic recovery from the 2020 COVID crisis. The current situation is somewhat different compared with past Asian gas price spikes since European gas prices are more exposed to global prices with the decline in domestic EU production.

This allows Russia, Europe's largest import supplier, to gain substantial market power by withholding extra spot supplies beyond the quantity of the long-term contracts via the existing Ukrainian route. The escalation of the Russian invasion of Ukraine has accelerated the problems related to the vulnerability of the EU, especially the Eastern Member States more reliant on the Russian gas supply.

In the entire article, the word “sanctions” doesn’t appear even once.

In other words: the study “What can the EU do to address the high natural gas prices?” ‘explained’ the twentyfold recent rise in gas-prices, which it had documented, from 12 EUR/MWh, to 250 EUR/MWh, without even referring to the anti-Russian sanctions, which had actually caused it.

#Russia is using gas as a weapon” to defend itself against U.S. aggression.

On 22 April 2022, the New York Times headlined “Germany’s economy is expected to contract under a Russian gas embargo.”, and reported that, “An embargo on Russian natural gas could cause Germany’s economic output to drop as much as 5 percent this year.” They claimed that this “embargo” came from Russia — not from America by way of its colonies the EU. The meme that Russia not America was the aggressor here has been constant.

In a 4 September 2023 interview with Austria’s Chancellor Karl Nehammer (Austrian People’s Party), he was asked whether Austria can get along without Russian gas, and he said that it could not, but that “Russisches Gas ist per se nicht billiger als jedes andere.” (“Russia’s gas is per se not cheaper than any other.”) However, even if that were true, the U.S.-Government-demanded cutting-off of Russian natural gas into Europe has added such enormous expenses to getting gas into Europe, with all of the huge compression costs, shipping costs, and other added costs (including corruption) to get it delivered, so that European industry (which relies predominantly upon gas not oil for fuel) will inevitably get crushed because of its skyrocketing energy-costs. 

This is the new type of ‘democracy’: fake democracy, by the government officials and press, constantly deceiving the voters, who then vote on the basis of those lies.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR / SOURCE

Eric Zuesse (blogs at https://theduran.com/author/eric-zuesse/)