the question of the two apocalypses part IV: america’s nth death serenade
on last week’s Nord Stream Rashomon at the UN Security Council
When a child is born or a year begins, the number of life-years or year-days on hand seems equivalent to infinity. Somewhere towards the middle-end of a year or of a lifetime, this feeling disappears.
There may also exist a limit to the number of times the US can afford risking the end of this world which it still considers its exclusive realm to command. At some point, for the Zoolander bedazzled patriots of the coastal bistros, this possibility got too real and was lost in the grid.
A week ago, Russia convened a meeting of the UN Security Council to request a UN investigation on the September 26th Nord Stream 2 pipeline explosion. The UN has refused, yielding to Sweden, Denmark, and Germany, countries that are each overseeing separate investigations.
So far, it’s agreed on that the leak was the single greatest release of methane gas into the environment ever recorded, and that it was caused by “powerful explosions due to sabotage.” Aside from this, everyone knows who sabotaged the Nord Stream, but it’s impolite to admit it.
The drama of this fact is itself explosive. The UNSC broadcast now feels like the last and only “reality television.”
Two briefs opened the meeting in support of Russia’s request. They were given by men who made their careers as activist jewels of the US imperial brain trust.
The first was Jeff Sachs, once known as the “Shock Therapist” and “Dr. Shock,” who debuted his world-historical touch by experimenting austerity on national economies. Sachs is regarded as one of the men most responsible for Russia’s corrupt and sick condition since the fall of the Soviet Union, but then he reinvented himself as a sustainable development leftist anti-poverty expert. As Doug Henwood wrote twenty years ago:
[Sachs’ Harvard Institute for International development] eventually collapsed in scandal, when it was revealed that the principals of its Russian project, Andrei Shleifer and Jonathan Hay, along with their wives (who happened to be mutual fund managers), had been buying Russian stocks and dickering for the privilege of getting the country's first mutual fund license, while dispensing advice to the Russian government. (Shleifer was one of the trinity of so-called Harvard Wunderkinder who were to Russia what the Chicago Boys were to Pinochet's Chile; the other two were Lawrence Summers - and Sachs.) The U.S. government sued, and Harvard shuttered the institute. Sachs, who was not involved in the scandal, decamped to Columbia (it's said there was no going-away party from his Harvard colleagues)…Sachs admits to no responsibility for the Russian catastrophe. When I interviewed him in November 2002, I asked him to comment on the (incontrovertible) fact that he's viewed by scores of millions of Russians, as one journalist has put it, as either an emissary of Satan or of the CIA. He answered that he found this question "disgusting," "perverse," and like nothing he's ever been asked before.
Something disgusting and perverse happened again to Jeff Sachs during the pandemic. Maybe he woke up and found himself surrounded by liars, or else he realized the corrupt people in bed with him were becoming too messy with their lying.
When, last year, he was somehow chosen to head the Lancet’s investigation into the Wuhan lab leak theory and discovered that the entire investigative panel was yet another branch of the coverup (it was filled with the lab leakers themselves), he dissolved the panel on “conflicts of interest.”
In his UNSC address last week, one sees that he’s fully turned on the lying face of America, jumped ship as the lie grows too obvious, as if contrite for the special monstrosity he made of Russia, as if regretful for the greater American monstrosity in which he embedded the whole of his career.
Jeffrey Sachs may be late to the game. His career has been one long retardation. One long experiment. In the end, he came to.
The second US defector testimony was given by Raymond McGovern, who spent 27 years inside the CIA, winning an “Intelligence Commendation Medal,” and then turned on the CIA, spending the past 33 years as its critic on the Russian youtube channels.
These are very interesting men, who gave very good speeches, both backing Seymour Hersh’s accusation against the U.S. on the Nord Stream. What I mean to impress on us when I talk about these defectors is that the number of intelligent people willing to partake in whatever America thinks it is doing has fallen severely.
On behalf of America, Yassified Colin Powell was sent to the UN HQ to tell lies, and one can feel his own disbelief at the petty things he has to say on camera. Why does it fall on black men to tell America’s most iconic lies at the UN Security Council, today and twenty years ago? “Russia, yet again, is abusing its position as a permanent member of the Security Council by using this meeting as a platform for disinformation and conspiracy theories…This is not the first time that Russia has used its seat on this Council to amplify conspiracy theories from the internet,” he says, as though one could dismiss America’s best journalist for using the internet.
There are a couple of subtexts that get lost here. The main one is that while America thinks it’s on the Bachelor, the Russian representative was dead serious, extinct serious.
Russia was staging this meeting to make an ultimatum. Either the UN conducts an independent, intergovernmental investigation and the Nord Stream saboteurs are “brought to justice,” or the world will have entered a reality in which the sabotage of transnational “critical infrastructure” is fair game.
As far as we should be concerned, we have entered that reality. Because at this meeting, the UN secretariat general capitulated to the Americans, and declined to hold its own investigation, and nobody was forthcoming to bring America “to justice.” As far as we should be concerned, Russia is on track to retaliate against America by sabotaging its transnational infrastructure.
Yassified Colin Powell was so preoccupied with his task of lying that he did not seem to catch any of this. He called the meeting a “blatant attempt to distract” from the one-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, even as America depends dearly on the issue of Ukraine as its own distraction from the end of the world and the end of America, from the closing-in of inflation and recession.
In this nth apocalypse clusterfuck, we “await” the findings of the Swedish, Danish, and German investigations. We know who is guilty, but we “await” the findings of the investigations, because what we do now is sit back and watch how many yass men will step forward to lie on camera, how they will wear and style their insincerity.
This is no way to go out in style. While Anna and Dasha deny global warming swaglessly, I want to leave America.
必死だな。(w