The cover-up by the U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media of Seymour Hersh’s blockbuster self-published February 8th investigative-news report that Joe Biden himself had ordered the destruction of the Nord Stream gas pipelines, wasn’t only the virtually total blackout of it that was engaged in by almost all ‘news’-media in The West — their failing to report that Hersh had issued any such news-report — but was ALSO the denigration of it by the very few that did mention it. Almost only non-mainstream news-media in The West DID report about it, and the four mainstream ones that did were treating it casually and briefly.
“The claim by a discredited journalist that the US secretly blew up the Nord Stream pipeline is proving a gift to Putin”, which headline had nothing to do with his report’s truthfulness but was only a smear against Hersh, like Joseph R. McCarthy had infamously done against American progressives back in the 1950s as being ‘communists’ — as-if an investigative reporter ought to consider politics even before considering truth (if considering truth at all). That outright smear-job against Hersh cited a string of U.S.-UK-Netherlands-Government backed-and-financed sources (such as Eliot Higgins’s BellingCat) in order to charge that “In recent decades, he [Hersh] has come under criticism by those who call it [“it” referring to his articles that were published after the neoconservative New Yorker magazine effectively fired him] poorly-sourced, conspiratorial, and over-reliant on anonymous sources.” The New Yorker editor who virtually fired him as a reporter on controversial issues — after which Hersh was no longer able to get employed again as an investigative reporter on the top international matters — was David Remnick, the anti-Palestinian, anti-Russian, anti-Syrian, pro-U.S.-empire (i.e., neoconservative) liberal Editor-in-Chief of that magazine, who, for example, wrote in his magazine on 26 January 2003 headlining “MAKING A CASE” to invade Iraq (he said his purpose in the article was “furthering, and deepening, his [President George W. Bush’s] case for the use of force in Iraq.”), and citing there no facts, but only opinions, from other Democratic Party neoconservatives, such as Kenneth Pollack of the Democratic Party’s Brookings Institution (and now of the Republican Party’s American Enterprise Institute) to support invading Iraq — all of it on the basis of what were, even at that time, clear-cut lies, demonstrably false assertions of fact, whose falseness was systematically being hidden by the press from the public — but Remnick virtually forced out the world’s leading investigative jounalist. (Subsequently, at a 3 March 2009 “Seymour M. Hersh in conversation with David Remnick - The New Yorker Festival”, Remnick introduced Hersh by saying, “Sy Hersh is, quite simply, THE greatest investigative journalist of his era.” In 2001 Remnick had called him “talent at the highest level”. Even Remnick never said otherwise. People who do say otherwise aren’t even close to that level, and Hersh always has a credible (if not always quite convincing) answer to their objections. The question about Hersh’s Nord-Stream-bombings article isn’t whether it contains every truth, but whether it is entirely true — and the burden of anyone who would allege something in it to be false would be to prove the given allegation in it to be false, which no one has thus far done. And yet: the article is banned from publication or republication by all mainstream news-media in The West.
“Seymour Hersh: The US Destroyed the Nord Stream Pipeline: AN INTERVIEW WITH SEYMOUR HERSH”, and also Hersh separately posted at his blog-site, his self-defense as an investigative journalist, “The Crap on the Wall”.
In the interview, here are excerpts:
SEYMOUR HERSH
Nord Stream 1 has been feeding gas fuel [to Germany] for many years at very low prices. And then both pipelines were blown up, and the question was why, and who did it. On February 7, 2022, in the buildup to the war in Ukraine, the president of the United States, Joe Biden, at a press conference at the White House with German chancellor Olaf Scholz, said that we can stop Nord Stream.
FABIAN SCHEIDLER
The exact wording from Joe Biden was “If Russia invades, there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2, we will bring an end to it.” And when a reporter asked how exactly he intended to do it, given that the project was within the control of Germany, Biden just said, “I promise we will be able to do it.”
SEYMOUR HERSH
His under-secretary of state, Victoria Nuland, who was deeply involved in what they call the Maidan Revolution in 2014, used similar language a couple of weeks earlier.
FABIAN SCHEIDLER
You say that the decision to take out the pipeline was taken even earlier by President Biden. You lay out the story from the beginning, chronologically from December 2021, when the national security advisor Jake Sullivan convened, according to your piece, a meeting of the newly formed task force from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, the State and the Treasury departments. You write, “Sullivan intended for the group to come up with a plan for the destruction of the two Nord Stream pipelines.”
SEYMOUR HERSH
FABIAN SCHEIDLER
What role did Norway play in the operation?
SEYMOUR HERSH
Well, Norway is a great seaman nation, and they have underground energy. They’re also very anxious to increase the amount of natural gas they can sell to Western Europe and Germany. And they have done that, they’ve increased their export. So, for economic reasons, why not join with the United States? They also have a residual dislike of Russia. …
To do this mission, the Norwegians had to find the right place. The divers that were being trained in Panama City could go to three hundred feet underwater without a heavy diving tank, only a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen and helium.
The Norwegians found us a place off Bornholm island in the Baltic that was only 260-feet deep so they could operate. They would have to return slowly. There was a decompression chamber, and we used the Norwegian submarine hunter. Only two divers were used for the four pipelines.
They did it around ten days into June, at the end of the exercise, but at the last minute the White House got nervous. The president said he’s afraid of doing it. He changed his mind and gave them the order that he wanted the right to bomb anytime, to set the bombs off anytime remotely by us. You do it with just a regular sonar, actually a Raytheon build. You fly over and drop a cylinder down. It sends a low-frequency signal — you can describe it as a flute sound tone, you can make different frequencies. But the worry was that one of the bombs, if left in the water too long, would not work, and two did not — they only got three of the four pipelines. So there was a panic inside the group to find the right means, and we actually had to go to other intelligence agencies that I didn’t write about. …
Joe Biden decided not to blow them up. It was in early June, five months into the war, but then, in September, he decided to do it.
I’ll tell you something. The operational people, the people who do kinetic things for the United States, they do what the president says, and they initially thought this was a useful weapon that he could use in negotiations.
And I’ll tell you something else. The people in America and Europe who build pipelines know what happened. I’m telling you something important. The people who own companies that build pipelines know the story. I didn’t get the story from them but I learned quickly they know.
I think that the reason they decided to do it then was that the war wasn’t going well for the West, and they were afraid with winter coming. The Nord Stream 2 has been sanctioned by Germany, and the United States was afraid that Germany would lift the sanctions because of a bad winter. …
FABIAN SCHEIDLER
How do you think this war could end?
SEYMOUR HERSH
It doesn’t matter what I think. What I know is there’s no way this war is going to turn out the way we want, and I don’t know what we’re going to do as we go further down the line. It scares me if the president was willing to do this.
And the people who did this mission believed that the president did realize what he was doing to the people of Germany, that he was punishing them for a war that wasn’t going well. And in the long run, this is going to be very detrimental not only to his reputation as the president but politically too. It’s going to be a stigma for America. …
FABIAN SCHEIDLER
Your story was reported in Western media with some restraint and criticism. Some attacked your reputation or said that you have only one anonymous source, and that’s not reliable.
SEYMOUR HERSH
How could I possibly talk about a source? I’ve written many stories based on unnamed sources. If I named somebody, they’d be fired, or, worse, jailed. The law is so strict. I’ve never had anybody exposed, and of course when I write I say, as I did in this article, it’s a source, period. And over the years, the stories I’ve written have always been accepted. I have used for this story the same caliber of skilled fact-checkers as had worked with me at the New Yorker magazine. Of course, there are many ways to verify obscure information told to me.
And, you know, a personal attack on me doesn’t get to the point. The point is that Biden chose to keep Germany cold this winter. The president of the United States would rather see Germany cold [because of energy shortages] than Germany possibly not supportive in the Ukraine war, and that, to me, is going to be a devastating thing for this White House. For me, and I think also for the people on the mission, it was appalling. ...
I can tell you that the people involved in the operation saw the president as choosing to keep Germany cold for his short-range political goals, and that horrified them. I’m talking about American people that are intensely loyal to the United States. In the CIA, it’s understood that, as I put it in my article, they work for the Crown, they don’t work for the Constitution.
The one virtue of the CIA is that a president, who can’t get his agenda through Congress and nobody listens to him, can take a walk in the backyard of the Rose Garden of the White House with the CIA director and somebody can get hurt eight thousand miles away. That’s always been the selling point of the CIA, which I have problems with. But even that community is appalled. ...
Here is from Hersh’s February 15th article at his blogsite, which is paywalled and this is only the article’s opening, which isn’t paywalled:
“The Crap on the Wall”
15 February 2023
This a brief combat report from the battlefield here and abroad in the aftermath of the release last Wednesday of my story about Joe Biden’s decision to blow up the Nord Stream pipelines.
First, many thanks for your interest in what the pipeline story was all about: a very dangerous Presidential decision. You are careful readers.
I’m an old hand at dropping bombshell stories that are based on the disclosures of sources I do not, and cannot, name. There is a pattern to the response by the mainstream media. It dates back to my breakthrough story: the My Lai massacre revelation. That story was published in five installments, over five weeks in 1969, by the underground media group Dispatch News. I had tried to get the two most important magazines in America, Life and Look, to publish the story, with no success. Editors at both publications had earlier invited me to do some freelance writing for them, but they wanted nothing to do with a story about a massacre committed by American soldiers.
It was a frightening time for me, in terms of my faith in the profession I had chosen. I was allowed to read and copy by hand much of the Army’s original charge sheet accusing a sad sack 2nd Lieutenant named William L. Calley Jr. of the premeditated murder of 109 “Oriental” human beings. I also had tracked Calley, the Army’s only suspect, and interviewed him at a base in Georgia—he was tucked away—and gotten his assertion that he was merely doing what he was ordered to do. Given all this, I was more than a little rattled—make that terrified—by the failure of senior editors at prominent magazines to jump at a story that would get international attention, especially when those editors professed to deplore the war and want it to end. …
“MEDIA IGNORE SEYMOUR HERSH BOMBSHELL REPORT OF US DESTROYING NORD STREAM II”, and he opened:
in-depth report claiming that the Biden administration deliberately blew up the Nord Stream II gas pipeline without Germany’s consent or even knowledge – an operation which began planning long before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Based on interviews with national security insiders, Hersh – the journalist who broke the stories of the My Lai Massacre, the CIA spying program and the Abu Ghraib torture scandal – claims that in June, U.S. Navy divers traveled to the Baltic Sea and attached C4 explosive charges to the pipeline. By September, President Biden himself ordered its destruction. According to Hersh, all understood the stakes and the gravity of what they were doing, acknowledging that, if caught, it would be seen as a flagrant “act of war” against their allies.
Despite this, corporate media have overwhelmingly ignored the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter’s bombshell. A MintPress News study analyzed the 20 most influential publications in the United States, according to analytics company Similar Web, and found only four mentions of the report between them.
The entirety of the corporate media’s attention given to the story consisted of:
“The claim by a discredited journalist that the US secretly blew up the Nord Stream pipeline is proving a gift to Putin”.]
The 20 outlets studied are, in alphabetical order:
Searches for “Seymour Hersh” and “Nord Stream” were carried out on the websites of each outlet, and were then checked against precise Google searches and results from the Dow Jones Factiva news database.
Therefore, if Biden did indeed order this attack, it is barely possible to think of a more consequential piece of news. Indeed, according to Hersh, all those involved – from Biden, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken to National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan – understood that what they were doing was “an act of war.”
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Preview YouTube video Seymour M. Hersh in conversation with David Remnick - The New Yorker Festival
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AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.
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Banning Seymour Hersh’s “Offensive” Ideas
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the establishment media is an enabler of endless wars and illegitimate oligarchic power
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UNZ REVIEW
EDITOR'S NOTE:It's obvious by now that SyHersh's bombshell revelations about Nord Stream are being deliberately ignored, derided, and boycotted by the corporate media. Most of the time, as befits their mediocrity and disgusting cravenness, underhandedly. YouTube's ludicrous and transparently hypocritical maneuver to reduce the reach of the Democracy Now! interview with Hersh (they're doing that for our benefit (!) they claim) apparently proved the last straw for social critic Ron Unz, who filed a strong, timely and characteristically articulate denunciation of this latest dirty trick by the empire's stenographers to silence a prominent witness to its numerous crimes. Please read this exposé closely and do what you can to assure it maximum visibility. —PG
Banning Seymour Hersh's "Offensive" Ideas Subverting America's Democracy---Now! RON UNZ • FEBRUARY 17, 2023 •
In an unprecedented step, Youtube has severely restricted as “inappropriate or offensive” Seymour Hersh’s blockbuster Nord Stream Pipelines interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!
Reporter Seymour Hersh on "How America Took Out the Nord Stream Pipeline": Exclusive TV Interview
UPDATE: We have blurred some imagery about 30 seconds into the video in response to a content warning from YouTube that severely limited the reach of this interview. What you see now is an edited version. For the uncensored version of this interview that aired on our show, visit democracynow.org.
Hersh won his Pulitzer Prize more than a half-century ago in 1970 as the fiercely independent reporter who uncovered America’s My Lai Massacre in the Vietnam War. During his following decades at the New York Times and the New Yorker he broke some of the biggest stories in journalistic history, including the domestic spying activities of the CIA, the Abu Ghraib prison abuses of the Iraq War, and the killing of Osama bin Laden, while being honored with two National Magazine Awards, five George Polk Awards, and numerous other accolades.
Hersh’s long career arguably ranks him as the most renowned living American journalist, and indeed Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University described him as such in a recent interview.
Then late last week, Hersh dropped a bombshell as big as anything in his career, revealing on his Substack platform the exact details of how the Biden Administration had secretly destroyed the Nord Stream pipelines, an attack on $30 billion of vital European energy infrastructure that constituted an act of war against Germany, one of our closest NATO allies.
How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline
The New York Times called it a “mystery,” but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret—until now Seymour Hersh • Substack • February 8, 2023 • 5,200 Words
As I discussed in my own column, despite Hersh’s stellar career and the massive implications of his remarkable story, almost all our mainstream media outlets boycotted it, ensuring that it received minimal attention.
Seymour Hersh: Standing Tall in a Sea of Lies
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • February 13, 2023 • 2,000 Words
Hersh said he wanted his story to stand on its own, and was only willing to do a very limited number of interviews, with the first of these being with a small radio podcaster:
Radio War Nerd 3.64K subscribers Seymour Hersh on US Bombing Nord Stream Pipelines — Radio War Nerd EP #366 He soon followed this up with a half-hour appearance on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now!, a leading left-liberal news program broadcast on more than 1,400 radio and television stations worldwide, many of them PBS and NPR affiliates.
During that interview, Hersh responded to criticisms and explained that Ukraine’s war with Russia was going far worse than reported by the American media. According to Hersh and some of his government sources, the American attack on the pipelines may have been a disastrous mistake that could result in the collapse of NATO once most Europeans became aware of what had happened.
Democracy Now! has 1.3 million subscribers on its large Youtube channel, and immediately released Hersh’s important interview on that platform. Within hours the segment was approaching 250,000 views on its way to a likely total of many millions, becoming one of the channel’s most popular videos. I naturally linked it in several comments on our website.
But the same day it was released, Youtube suddenly censored Hersh’s Democracy Now! appearance, claiming that it represented “a violation of community standards” and was “offensive”:
"This video is age-restricted and only available on YouTube. Learn more Watch on YouTube"
As a result, Hersh’s Democracy Now! segment can no longer be viewed anywhere except on the Youtube site itself, and then only after clicking through two layers of warnings. The obvious intent was to drastically reduce Hersh’s potential audience and this will surely succeed. I assume that these restrictions have been combined with the most severe sort of shadow-banning. So a segment that would have probably been seen by many millions will only get a small fraction of that total.
Such Youtube censorship of a top mainstream journalist on a leading mainstream channel seems completely unprecedented, a massive escalation of the previous measures directed against the political fringe. The move was probably driven by concerns of how Youtube had earlier allowed the views of other important public figures to circumvent the blockade of media gatekeepers:
Prof. John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, one of our most distinguished political scientists, had spent many years making exactly these same points and blaming America and NATO for the simmering Ukraine crisis, but his warnings had been totally ignored by our political leadership and media. His hour-long lecture explaining these unpleasant realities had quietly sat on Youtube for six years, attracting relatively little attention, but then suddenly exploded in popularity…as the conflict unfolded
Mearsheimer’s lengthy explanation of the origins of the Ukraine war has now accumulated 28 million views, quite possibly more than any academic lecture in the history of the Internet.
The University of Chicago
Why is Ukraine the West's Fault? Featuring John Mearsheimer
Economist and Foreign Affairs, and selected to participate in prestigious public forums such as Canada’s Munk debate and Europe’s Holberg Debate. As a result, probably tens of millions worldwide became exposed to a perspective previously excluded from the Western mainstream media.
In another example, Jeffrey Sachs has expressed very similar concerns about the Ukraine war and over the last few months a couple of his interviews on Democracy Now! have accumulated well over 4 million views, while a different interview with geopolitical scholar Alfred McCoy had reached nearly 2 million more:
Democracy Now!
Democracy Now! Jeffrey Sachs: A Negotiated End to Fighting in Ukraine Is the Only Real Way to End the Bloodshed
Democracy Now! When Sachs suggested on Bloomberg TV that the American government had probably been responsible for the pipeline attacks, he was quickly yanked off the air, but his clip went super-viral on Twitter, accumulating several million views:
Professor Jeffrey Sachs [Columbia] on Bloomberg causing chaos saying US was most likely involved in Nordstream leaks according to data & other experts 😂😂😂 “even reporters tell me …. privately of course …” and that we are on a pretty dangerous path to a nuclear conflict pic.twitter.com/U6FsC2tdp6
Meanwhile, the clips of President Biden and other top American national security officials promising to eliminate the Nord Stream pipelines and then crowing about the mysterious explosions that destroyed them have also became ubiquitious on the Internet:
BIDEN admits US behind sabotage of Nordstream 1 and 2.
Biden: "If Russia invades...then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2."
Reporter: "But how will you do that, it's in germany's control?"
According to @SecBlinken, the Nord Stream pipeline bombing "offers tremendous strategic opportunity for the years to come." Too bad that this tremendous opportunity for DC bureaucrats will come at the expense of everyone else, especially this coming winter. pic.twitter.com/T2eacQUuBF
Hersh’s work and record were widely promoted on Twitter:
#SeymourHersh, whom the war media now wants to smear for exposing #Biden's act of environmental and energy security #Terrorism, represents the best of journalism in the #USA, having exposed US crimes like the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and the torture at Abu Ghraib prison. pic.twitter.com/YwjS3dPZWB
Tucker Carlson had covered the pipeline attacks from the very beginning and immediately discussed Hersh’s remarkable reporting:
Similarly, Max Blumenthal and Aron Mate did the same on the Grayzone:
But the audiences of both these shows are already overwhelmingly hostile to the Biden Administration, so these segments would be far less threatening than Hersh’s own lengthy interview with Amy Goodman on a program often watched by Biden supporters. Other than that practical consideration, I see no reason why Hersh’s interview would have been censored.
The problem faced by our political establishment is that their current position on the Ukraine war has drawn increasing opposition from individuals with the highest public stature and credibility, not only top journalists and academics like Hersh, Mearsheimer, and Sachs, but also top national security experts such as Col. Douglas Macgregor and Ray McGovern. Our failed current Ukraine war policy against Russia has only been maintained by one of the tightest information blockades in modern American history, with 99% of the mainstream media and a large majority of the alternative media tolerating no dissenting voices. But the disastrous potential flaws in our strategy become immediately become apparent once they are mentioned and a critical mass of leading figures has now begun to do so, with their views increasingly reaching the public. So a regime of unprecedented censorship may now be imposed to prevent the American people from hearing both sides of the story. Hence a factual interview of one of our most renowned journalists by a leading media outlet has been stamped “offensive” and heavily suppressed.
Such restrictions are hardly unknown to me. Just days after I published my first April 2020 article pointing to strong perhaps even overwhelming evidence that the global Covid epidemic was result of a botched American biowarfare attack against China (and Iran), our entire website was banned by Facebook with all our pages deranked by Google.
Covid/Biowarfare Series Ron Unz • The Unz Review • April 2020-December 2021 • 60,000 Words
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Ron Unz is the founding editor of the Unz Review, a refuge for people who believe in truth and free speech.
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How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline
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Seymour Hersh SEYMOURHERSH.SUBSTACK.COM WITH SPECIAL ADDENDA
Originally run on Feb 8, 2023
The visible signature of the Nord Stream 2 underwater explosion, as captured by a NATO observation aircraft (TGP Screengrab/Democracy Now!)
The U.S. Navy’s Diving and Salvage Center can be found in a location as obscure as its name—down what was once a country lane in rural Panama City, a now-booming resort city in the southwestern panhandle of Florida, 70 miles south of the Alabama border. The center’s complex is as nondescript as its location—a drab concrete post-World War II structure that has the look of a vocational high school on the west side of Chicago. A coin-operated laundromat and a dance school are across what is now a four-lane road.
The center has been training highly skilled deep-water divers for decades who, once assigned to American military units worldwide, are capable of technical diving to do the good—using C4 explosives to clear harbors and beaches of debris and unexploded ordinance—as well as the bad, like blowing up foreign oil rigs, fouling intake valves for undersea power plants, destroying locks on crucial shipping canals. The Panama City center, which boasts the second largest indoor pool in America, was the perfect place to recruit the best, and most taciturn, graduates of the diving school who successfully did last summer what they had been authorized to do 260 feet under the surface of the Baltic Sea.
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.
There was a vital bureaucratic reason for relying on the graduates of the center’s hardcore diving school in Panama City. The divers were Navy only, and not members of America’s Special Operations Command, whose covert operations must be reported to Congress and briefed in advance to the Senate and House leadership—the so-called Gang of Eight. The Biden Administration was doing everything possible to avoid leaks as the planning took place late in 2021 and into the first months of 2022.
President Biden and his foreign policy team—National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, and Victoria Nuland, the Undersecretary of State for Policy—had been vocal and consistent in their hostility to the two pipelines, which ran side by side for 750 miles under the Baltic Sea from two different ports in northeastern Russia near the Estonian border, passing close to the Danish island of Bornholm before ending in northern Germany.
The direct route, which bypassed any need to transit Ukraine, had been a boon for the German economy, which enjoyed an abundance of cheap Russian natural gas—enough to run its factories and heat its homes while enabling German distributors to sell excess gas, at a profit, throughout Western Europe. Action that could be traced to the administration would violate US promises to minimize direct conflict with Russia. Secrecy was essential.
From its earliest days, Nord Stream 1 was seen by Washington and its anti-Russian NATO partners as a threat to western dominance. The holding company behind it, Nord Stream AG, was incorporated in Switzerland in 2005 in partnership with Gazprom, a publicly traded Russian company producing enormous profits for shareholders which is dominated by oligarchs known to be in the thrall of Putin. Gazprom controlled 51 percent of the company, with four European energy firms—one in France, one in the Netherlands and two in Germany—sharing the remaining 49 percent of stock, and having the right to control downstream sales of the inexpensive natural gas to local distributors in Germany and Western Europe. Gazprom’s profits were shared with the Russian government, and state gas and oil revenues were estimated in some years to amount to as much as 45 percent of Russia’s annual budget.
America’s political fears were real: Putin would now have an additional and much-needed major source of income, and Germany and the rest of Western Europe would become addicted to low-cost natural gas supplied by Russia—while diminishing European reliance on America. In fact, that’s exactly what happened. Many Germans saw Nord Stream 1 as part of the deliverance of former Chancellor Willy Brandt’s famed Ostpolitik theory, which would enable postwar Germany to rehabilitate itself and other European nations destroyed in World War II by, among other initiatives, utilizing cheap Russian gas to fuel a prosperous Western European market and trading economy.
Nord Stream 1 was dangerous enough, in the view of NATO and Washington, but Nord Stream 2, whose construction was completed in September of 2021, would, if approved by German regulators, double the amount of cheap gas that would be available to Germany and Western Europe. The second pipeline also would provide enough gas for more than 50 percent of Germany’s annual consumption. Tensions were constantly escalating between Russia and NATO, backed by the aggressive foreign policy of the Biden Administration.
Opposition to Nord Stream 2 flared on the eve of the Biden inauguration in January 2021, when Senate Republicans, led by Ted Cruz of Texas, repeatedly raised the political threat of cheap Russian natural gas during the confirmation hearing of Blinken as Secretary of State. By then a unified Senate had successfully passed a law that, as Cruz told Blinken, “halted [the pipeline] in its tracks.” There would be enormous political and economic pressure from the German government, then headed by Angela Merkel, to get the second pipeline online.
Would Biden stand up to the Germans? Blinken said yes, but added that he had not discussed the specifics of the incoming President’s views. “I know his strong conviction that this is a bad idea, the Nord Stream 2,” he said. “I know that he would have us use every persuasive tool that we have to convince our friends and partners, including Germany, not to move forward with it.”
A few months later, as the construction of the second pipeline neared completion, Biden blinked. That May, in a stunning turnaround, the administration waived sanctions against Nord Stream AG, with a State Department official conceding that trying to stop the pipeline through sanctions and diplomacy had “always been a long shot.” Behind the scenes, administration officials reportedly urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, by then facing a threat of Russian invasion, not to criticize the move.
There were immediate consequences. Senate Republicans, led by Cruz, announced an immediate blockade of all of Biden’s foreign policy nominees and delayed passage of the annual defense bill for months, deep into the fall. Politico later depicted Biden’s turnabout on the second Russian pipeline as “the one decision, arguably more than the chaotic military withdrawal from Afghanistan, that has imperiled Biden’s agenda.”
The administration was floundering, despite getting a reprieve on the crisis in mid-November, when Germany’s energy regulators suspended approval of the second Nord Stream pipeline. Natural gas prices surged 8% within days, amid growing fears in Germany and Europe that the pipeline suspension and the growing possibility of a war between Russia and Ukraine would lead to a very much unwanted cold winter. It was not clear to Washington just where Olaf Scholz, Germany’s newly appointed chancellor, stood. Months earlier, after the fall of Afghanistan, Scholtz had publicly endorsed French President Emmanuel Macron’s call for a more autonomous European foreign policy in a speech in Prague—clearly suggesting less reliance on Washington and its mercurial actions.
Throughout all of this, Russian troops had been steadily and ominously building up on the borders of Ukraine, and by the end of December more than 100,000 soldiers were in position to strike from Belarus and Crimea. Alarm was growing in Washington, including an assessment from Blinken that those troop numbers could be “doubled in short order.”
The administration’s attention once again was focused on Nord Stream. As long as Europe remained dependent on the pipelines for cheap natural gas, Washington was afraid that countries like Germany would be reluctant to supply Ukraine with the money and weapons it needed to defeat Russia.
It was at this unsettled moment that Biden authorized Jake Sullivan to bring together an interagency group to come up with a plan.
All options were to be on the table. But only one would emerge.
PLANNING
In December of 2021, two months before the first Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, Jake Sullivan convened a meeting of a newly formed task force—men and women from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and the State and Treasury Departments—and asked for recommendations about how to respond to Putin’s impending invasion.
It would be the first of a series of top-secret meetings, in a secure room on a top floor of the Old Executive Office Building, adjacent to the White House, that was also the home of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB). There was the usual back and forth chatter that eventually led to a crucial preliminary question: Would the recommendation forwarded by the group to the President be reversible—such as another layer of sanctions and currency restrictions—or irreversible—that is, kinetic actions, which could not be undone?
What became clear to participants, according to the source with direct knowledge of the process, is that Sullivan intended for the group to come up with a plan for the destruction of the two Nord Stream pipelines—and that he was delivering on the desires of the President.
THE PLAYERS Left to right: Victoria Nuland, Antony Blinken, and Jake Sullivan. (TGP screengrabs)
Over the next several meetings, the participants debated options for an attack. The Navy proposed using a newly commissioned submarine to assault the pipeline directly. The Air Force discussed dropping bombs with delayed fuses that could be set off remotely. The CIA argued that whatever was done, it would have to be covert. Everyone involved understood the stakes. “This is not kiddie stuff,” the source said. If the attack were traceable to the United States, “It’s an act of war.”
At the time, the CIA was directed by William Burns, a mild-mannered former ambassador to Russia who had served as deputy secretary of state in the Obama Administration. Burns quickly authorized an Agency working group whose ad hoc members included—by chance—someone who was familiar with the capabilities of the Navy’s deep-sea divers in Panama City. Over the next few weeks, members of the CIA’s working group began to craft a plan for a covert operation that would use deep-sea divers to trigger an explosion along the pipeline.
Something like this had been done before. In 1971, the American intelligence community learned from still undisclosed sources that two important units of the Russian Navy were communicating via an undersea cable buried in the Sea of Okhotsk, on Russia’s Far East Coast. The cable linked a regional Navy command to the mainland headquarters at Vladivostok.
A hand-picked team of Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency operatives was assembled somewhere in the Washington area, under deep cover, and worked out a plan, using Navy divers, modified submarines and a deep-submarine rescue vehicle, that succeeded, after much trial and error, in locating the Russian cable. The divers planted a sophisticated listening device on the cable that successfully intercepted the Russian traffic and recorded it on a taping system.
The NSA learned that senior Russian navy officers, convinced of the security of their communication link, chatted away with their peers without encryption. The recording device and its tape had to be replaced monthly and the project rolled on merrily for a decade until it was compromised by a forty-four-year-old civilian NSA technician named Ronald Pelton who was fluent in Russian. Pelton was betrayed by a Russian defector in 1985 and sentenced to prison. He was paid just $5,000 by the Russians for his revelations about the operation, along with $35,000 for other Russian operational data he provided that was never made public.
That underwater success, codenamed Ivy Bells, was innovative and risky, and produced invaluable intelligence about the Russian Navy's intentions and planning.
Still, the interagency group was initially skeptical of the CIA’s enthusiasm for a covert deep-sea attack. There were too many unanswered questions. The waters of the Baltic Sea were heavily patrolled by the Russian navy, and there were no oil rigs that could be used as cover for a diving operation. Would the divers have to go to Estonia, right across the border from Russia’s natural gas loading docks, to train for the mission? “It would be a goat fuck,” the Agency was told.
Throughout “all of this scheming,” the source said, “some working guys in the CIA and the State Department were saying, ‘Don’t do this. It’s stupid and will be a political nightmare if it comes out.’”
Nevertheless, in early 2022, the CIA working group reported back to Sullivan’s interagency group: “We have a way to blow up the pipelines.”
What came next was stunning. On February 7, less than three weeks before the seemingly inevitable Russian invasion of Ukraine, Biden met in his White House office with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who, after some wobbling, was now firmly on the American team. At the press briefing that followed, Biden defiantly said, “If Russia invades . . . there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”
Twenty days earlier, Undersecretary Nuland had delivered essentially the same message at a State Department briefing, with little press coverage. “I want to be very clear to you today,” she said in response to a question. “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”
Several of those involved in planning the pipeline mission were dismayed by what they viewed as indirect references to the attack.
“It was like putting an atomic bomb on the ground in Tokyo and telling the Japanese that we are going to detonate it,” the source said. “The plan was for the options to be executed post invasion and not advertised publicly. Biden simply didn’t get it or ignored it.”
Biden’s and Nuland’s indiscretion, if that is what it was, might have frustrated some of the planners. But it also created an opportunity. According to the source, some of the senior officials of the CIA determined that blowing up the pipeline “no longer could be considered a covert option because the President just announced that we knew how to do it.”
The plan to blow up Nord Stream 1 and 2 was suddenly downgraded from a covert operation requiring that Congress be informed to one that was deemed as a highly classified intelligence operation with U.S. military support. Under the law, the source explained, “There was no longer a legal requirement to report the operation to Congress. All they had to do now is just do it—but it still had to be secret. The Russians have superlative surveillance of the Baltic Sea.”
The Agency working group members had no direct contact with the White House, and were eager to find out if the President meant what he’d said—that is, if the mission was now a go. The source recalled, “Bill Burns comes back and says, ‘Do it.’”
“The Norwegian navy was quick to find the right spot, in the shallow water a few miles off Denmark’s Bornholm Island . . .” (TGP screengrab)
THE OPERATION
Norway was the perfect place to base the mission.
In the past few years of East-West crisis, the U.S. military has vastly expanded its presence inside Norway, whose western border runs 1,400 miles along the north Atlantic Ocean and merges above the Arctic Circle with Russia. The Pentagon has created high-paying jobs and contracts, amid some local controversy, by investing hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade and expand American Navy and Air Force facilities in Norway. The new works included, most importantly, an advanced synthetic aperture radar far up north that was capable of penetrating deep into Russia and came online just as the American intelligence community lost access to a series of long-range listening sites inside China.
In return, the Norwegian government angered liberals and some moderates in its parliament last November by passing the Supplementary Defense Cooperation Agreement (SDCA). Under the new deal, the U.S. legal system would have jurisdiction in certain “agreed areas” in the North over American soldiers accused of crimes off base, as well as over those Norwegian citizens accused or suspected of interfering with the work at the base.
Norway was one of the original signatories of the NATO Treaty in 1949, in the early days of the Cold War. Today, the supreme commander of NATO is Jens Stoltenberg, a committed anti-communist, who served as Norway’s prime minister for eight years before moving to his high NATO post, with American backing, in 2014. He was a hardliner on all things Putin and Russia who had cooperated with the American intelligence community since the Vietnam War. He has been trusted completely since. “He is the glove that fits the American hand,” the source said.
Back in Washington, planners knew they had to go to Norway. “They hated the Russians, and the Norwegian navy was full of superb sailors and divers who had generations of experience in highly profitable deep-sea oil and gas exploration,” the source said. They also could be trusted to keep the mission secret. (The Norwegians may have had other interests as well. The destruction of Nord Stream—if the Americans could pull it off—would allow Norway to sell vastly more of its own natural gas to Europe.)
Sometime in March, a few members of the team flew to Norway to meet with the Norwegian Secret Service and Navy. One of the key questions was where exactly in the Baltic Sea was the best place to plant the explosives. Nord Stream 1 and 2, each with two sets of pipelines, were separated much of the way by little more than a mile as they made their run to the port of Greifswald in the far northeast of Germany.
The Norwegian navy was quick to find the right spot, in the shallow waters of the Baltic sea a few miles off Denmark’s Bornholm Island. The pipelines ran more than a mile apart along a seafloor that was only 260 feet deep. That would be well within the range of the divers, who, operating from a Norwegian Alta class mine hunter, would dive with a mixture of oxygen, nitrogen and helium streaming from their tanks, and plant shaped C4 charges on the four pipelines with concrete protective covers. It would be tedious, time consuming and dangerous work, but the waters off Bornholm had another advantage: there were no major tidal currents, which would have made the task of diving much more difficult.
(Image: S. Hersh)
After a bit of research, the Americans were all in.
At this point, the Navy’s obscure deep-diving group in Panama City once again came into play. The deep-sea schools at Panama City, whose trainees participated in Ivy Bells, are seen as an unwanted backwater by the elite graduates of the Naval Academy in Annapolis, who typically seek the glory of being assigned as a Seal, fighter pilot, or submariner. If one must become a “Black Shoe”—that is, a member of the less desirable surface ship command—there is always at least duty on a destroyer, cruiser or amphibious ship. The least glamorous of all is mine warfare. Its divers never appear in Hollywood movies, or on the cover of popular magazines.
“The best divers with deep diving qualifications are a tight community, and only the very best are recruited for the operation and told to be prepared to be summoned to the CIA in Washington,” the source said.
The Norwegians and Americans had a location and the operatives, but there was another concern: any unusual underwater activity in the waters off Bornholm might draw the attention of the Swedish or Danish navies, which could report it.
Denmark had also been one of the original NATO signatories and was known in the intelligence community for its special ties to the United Kingdom. Sweden had applied for membership into NATO, and had demonstrated its great skill in managing its underwater sound and magnetic sensor systems that successfully tracked Russian submarines that would occasionally show up in remote waters of the Swedish archipelago and be forced to the surface.
The Norwegians joined the Americans in insisting that some senior officials in Denmark and Sweden had to be briefed in general terms about possible diving activity in the area. In that way, someone higher up could intervene and keep a report out of the chain of command, thus insulating the pipeline operation. “What they were told and what they knew were purposely different,” the source told me. (The Norwegian embassy, asked to comment on this story, but did not respond.)
The Norwegians were key to solving other hurdles. The Russian navy was known to possess surveillance technology capable of spotting, and triggering, underwater mines. The American explosive devices needed to be camouflaged in a way that would make them appear to the Russian system as part of the natural background—something that required adapting to the specific salinity of the water. The Norwegians had a fix.
The Norwegians also had a solution to the crucial question of when the operation should take place. Every June, for the past 21 years, the American Sixth Fleet, whose flagship is based in Gaeta, Italy, south of Rome, has sponsored a major NATO exercise in the Baltic Sea involving scores of allied ships throughout the region. The current exercise, held in June, would be known as Baltic Operations 22, or BALTOPS 22. The Norwegians proposed this would be the ideal cover to plant the mines.
The Americans provided one vital element: they convinced the Sixth Fleet planners to add a research and development exercise to the program. The exercise, as made public by the Navy, involved the Sixth Fleet in collaboration with the Navy’s “research and warfare centers.” The at-sea event would be held off the coast of Bornholm Island and involve NATO teams of divers planting mines, with competing teams using the latest underwater technology to find and destroy them.
It was both a useful exercise and ingenious cover. The Panama City boys would do their thing and the C4 explosives would be in place by the end of BALTOPS22, with a 48-hour timer attached. All of the Americans and Norwegians would be long gone by the first explosion.
The days were counting down. “The clock was ticking, and we were nearing mission accomplished,” the source said.
And then: Washington had second thoughts. The bombs would still be planted during BALTOPS, but the White House worried that a two-day window for their detonation would be too close to the end of the exercise, and it would be obvious that America had been involved.
Instead, the White House had a new request: “Can the guys in the field come up with some way to blow the pipelines later on command?”
Some members of the planning team were angered and frustrated by the President’s seeming indecision. The Panama City divers had repeatedly practiced planting the C4 on pipelines, as they would during BALTOPS, but now the team in Norway had to come up with a way to give Biden what he wanted—the ability to issue a successful execution order at a time of his choosing.
Being tasked with an arbitrary, last-minute change was something the CIA was accustomed to managing. But it also renewed the concerns some shared over the necessity, and legality, of the entire operation.
The President’s secret orders also evoked the CIA’s dilemma in the Vietnam War days, when President Johnson, confronted by growing anti-Vietnam War sentiment, ordered the Agency to violate its charter—which specifically barred it from operating inside America—by spying on antiwar leaders to determine whether they were being controlled by Communist Russia.
The agency ultimately acquiesced, and throughout the 1970s it became clear just how far it had been willing to go. There were subsequent newspaper revelations in the aftermath of the Watergate scandals about the Agency’s spying on American citizens, its involvement in the assassination of foreign leaders and its undermining of the socialist government of Salvador Allende.
Those revelations led to a dramatic series of hearings in the mid-1970s in the Senate, led by Frank Church of Idaho, that made it clear that Richard Helms, the Agency director at the time, accepted that he had an obligation to do what the President wanted, even if it meant violating the law.
In unpublished, closed-door testimony, Helms ruefully explained that “you almost have an Immaculate Conception when you do something” under secret orders from a President. “Whether it’s right that you should have it, or wrong that you shall have it, [the CIA] works under different rules and ground rules than any other part of the government.” He was essentially telling the Senators that he, as head of the CIA, understood that he had been working for the Crown, and not the Constitution.
The Americans at work in Norway operated under the same dynamic, and dutifully began working on the new problem—how to remotely detonate the C4 explosives on Biden’s order. It was a much more demanding assignment than those in Washington understood. There was no way for the team in Norway to know when the President might push the button. Would it be in a few weeks, in many months or in half a year or longer?
The C4 attached to the pipelines would be triggered by a sonar buoy dropped by a plane on short notice, but the procedure involved the most advanced signal processing technology. Once in place, the delayed timing devices attached to any of the four pipelines could be accidentally triggered by the complex mix of ocean background noises throughout the heavily trafficked Baltic Sea—from near and distant ships, underwater drilling, seismic events, waves and even sea creatures. To avoid this, the sonar buoy, once in place, would emit a sequence of unique low frequency tonal sounds—much like those emitted by a flute or a piano—that would be recognized by the timing device and, after a pre-set hours of delay, trigger the explosives. (“You want a signal that is robust enough so that no other signal could accidentally send a pulse that detonated the explosives,” I was told by Dr. Theodore Postol, professor emeritus of science, technology and national security policy at MIT. Postol, who has served as the science adviser to the Pentagon’s Chief of Naval Operations, said the issue facing the group in Norway because of Biden’s delay was one of chance: “The longer the explosives are in the water the greater risk there would be of a random signal that would launch the bombs.”)
On September 26, 2022, a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane made a seemingly routine flight and dropped a sonar buoy. The signal spread underwater, initially to Nord Stream 2 and then on to Nord Stream 1. A few hours later, the high-powered C4 explosives were triggered and three of the four pipelines were put out of commission. Within a few minutes, pools of methane gas that remained in the shuttered pipelines could be seen spreading on the water’s surface and the world learned that something irreversible had taken place.
FALLOUT
In the immediate aftermath of the pipeline bombing, the American media treated it like an unsolved mystery. Russia was repeatedly cited as a likely culprit, spurred on by calculated leaks from the White House—but without ever establishing a clear motive for such an act of self-sabotage, beyond simple retribution. A few months later, when it emerged that Russian authorities had been quietly getting estimates for the cost to repair the pipelines, the New York Times described the news as “complicating theories about who was behind” the attack. No major American newspaper dug into the earlier threats to the pipelines made by Biden and Undersecretary of State Nuland.
While it was never clear why Russia would seek to destroy its own lucrative pipeline, a more telling rationale for the President’s action came from Secretary of State Blinken.
Asked at a press conference last September about the consequences of the worsening energy crisis in Western Europe, Blinken described the moment as a potentially good one:
“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, but meanwhile we’re determined to do everything we possibly can to make sure the consequences of all of this are not borne by citizens in our countries or, for that matter, around the world.”
More recently, Victoria Nuland expressed satisfaction at the demise of the newest of the pipelines. Testifying at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in late January she told Senator Ted Cruz, “Like you, 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.”
The source had a much more streetwise view of Biden’s decision to sabotage more than 1500 miles of Gazprom pipeline as winter approached. “Well,” he said, speaking of the President, “I gotta admit the guy has a pair of balls. He said he was going to do it, and he did.”
Asked why he thought the Russians failed to respond, he said cynically, “Maybe they want the capability to do the same things the U.S. did.
“It was a beautiful cover story,” he went on. “Behind it was a covert operation that placed experts in the field and equipment that operated on a covert signal.
ABOVE: On Democracy Now!—Reporter Seymour Hersh on "How America Took Out the Nord Stream Pipeline": Exclusive TV Interview (This video is being sabotaged by YouTube, hence we are using a Rumble.com version). When the Nord Stream pipelines carrying natural gas from Russia to Germany were damaged last September, U.S. officials were quick to suggest Russia had bombed its own pipelines. But according to a new report by the legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, it was the U.S. Navy that carried out the sabotage, with help from Norway. Citing a source "with direct knowledge of the operational planning," Hersh writes on his Substack blog that planning for the mission began in December of 2021. The White House and the Norwegian government have since denied the claims. Hersh joins us for an in-depth interview to discuss his report and says the U.S. decision to bomb the pipelines was meant to lock allies into support for Ukraine at a time when some were wavering.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Seymour M. Hersh’s fearless reporting has earned him fame, front-page bylines, a staggering collection of awards, and no small amount of controversy. His story is one of fierce independence. Faced with pressure from corporate interests, the various muscular arms of government, and occasionally from outright criminals, Hersh has been relentless in his pursuit of truth and his belief in challenging the official narrative. He has navigated through cover-ups, deceit, and outright crimes against humanity in the morass of war, espionage, and politics. He has been a staff writer for The New Yorker and The New York Times and established himself at the forefront of investigative journalism in 1970 when he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize (as a freelancer) for his exposé of the massacre in the Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai. Since then he has received the George Polk Award five times, the National Magazine Award for Public Interest twice, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the George Orwell Award, and dozens of other accolades. He lives in Washington, D.C.
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ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS
THE THIRTEEN COMMANDMENTS OF PROPAGANDA: ITS CONSTRUCTION, DISSEMINATION, AND INTERNALIZATION
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DEFEAT CAPITALISM AND ITS DEADLY SPAWN, IMPERIALISM ecological murder •
Bruce Lerro
Orientation
Definition of propaganda and the purpose of this article
Are the chances better that you’d read this article if I called it The Ten Commandments of Propaganda? The author of the book The Ten Commandments of Propaganda thinks so because you have deep collective associations with the Ten Commandments because of the centuries of propaganda by the Catholic and Protestant Churches. Because this article is rhetoric and not propaganda, I will take my chances, identifying thirteen commandments of propaganda.
In my last article, Speaking with Forked Tongues, I defined propaganda as the deliberate, systematic and often covert attempt by institutional elites to control perceptions, cognitions, emotions and behavior while censoring, hiding, restricting distorting and exaggerating the claims of their opposition. Propaganda can be found in economics textbooks, political campaigns, religious recruiting, news reporting, advertising campaigns, movies, sports and even educational textbooks.
A little less than two years ago I wrote an article called Jacques Ellul: Controversies in Propaganda. The purpose of this article is to explicate the theory of propaganda of Brian Anse Patrick in The Ten Commandments of Propaganda. Secondly and briefly, it will be to compare his theory to that of Ellul.
Most Provocative Points of Ellul’s Propaganda Theory
Unlike other theorists, Ellul argued that propaganda served boththe upper classes and the lower classes for different reasons.
Unlike other theorists, he understood propaganda as inevitable in modern societies. There is no getting around this.
Unlike most other theorists, he saw masses of people as complicit in their own subordination. He saw them neither as victims of circumstance nor as heroic masses.
He distinguished between hard and fast political propagandaand soft and slow sociological He called political propaganda “agitation”. Education is not outside propaganda. It is part of sociological propaganda.
He identified two techniques of propagandizing the masses. The first kind is mithridatizationwhich acts like a sedative and sensibilization which is about riling people up.
Unlike most other theorists of propaganda, Ellul followed Joseph Goebbels and said that the best propaganda is based on facts.It becomes propaganda with the interpretation of facts. Propaganda based on lies is a sign of weakness.
Most propaganda theorists thought the working class was most impacted by propaganda. Ellul argued that it is the upper-middle classes that create the propaganda and are most likely to believe it.
Ellul distinguished horizontal propaganda,which was made inside the group, from vertical propaganda, which uses centralized power. An example of horizontal propaganda was the re-educational groups of Yankee soldiers organized by the Chinese communists during Yankee imprisonment.
For Ellul, propaganda does not come from the ruling class, but from the upper-middle class.
Industrialist capitalist “democracies” need propagandabecause they depend on public opinion, which is disorganized. It requires propaganda to compete with socialist societies.
Unlike other theorists, Ellul makes a distinction between ideology and myth and argues that myth is more powerful.
His concept of crystallization claims that the individual has latent drives and stereotypes which are vague (based on the work of Karen Horney), and they then become the foundation of propaganda.
Unlike other schools of propaganda, Ellul argues that quantitative study of propaganda isn’t effective. One cannot tell how many people are reached and how effective white vs black propaganda is. At what point do you say it failed? At what point does the payoff justify the cost?
According to Ellul, psychological propaganda in foreign countries does not work. Propagandists are too ignorant of the attitudes, centers of interest, presuppositions and suspicions of the foreign population.
Thirteen Commandments of Propaganda
CONTROL THE INFORMATION FLOW BY BECOMING A SOURCE OR DISTRIBUTOR OF INFORMATION
This includes creating news events, press releases, town hall meetings, scientific reports, op-ed pieces, direct mail appeals, talk show appearances, books, think tanks and commissions. It means creating novelties and hiring screen writers for movies. Many ideas are testing out the public by creating focus groups to see how people respond. This was shown in Parts I and II of Adam Curtis documentary The Century of the Self. Another technique was in the creating of Gallup polls which surveyed the opinions of Mordor’s citizens about sociological and political hot topics to see what floats and what doesn’t.
USE BLACK AND WHITE ABSOLUTES
This was included in my previous article Speaking in Tongues in that it used loaded language, specifically virtue and vice words. Propaganda does not seem to work well when there seem to exist only many shades of gray. It is successful when it paints in broad, bold brushstrokes complicated social reality into a melodramatic, dichotomous struggle between good guys and bad guys. Nazi’s terms such as Jewish “bacillus” (parasites) to define the Jews helped the extermination process. Once the Jews were officially defined as the “parasitic nation of Judea” it became easier to do horrible things to them. The same is true with what was done to Saddam Hussein and Gaddafi. Conspiracy theories are perfect frameworks for black and white thinking.
Expect that as Mordor revs up its propaganda machine against China, Chinese images will appear, just like the image at the beginning of this article. Here the Chinese are wallowing in opium dens making them seem like a decadent culture. What is absent from the propaganda poster is the story of how the British brought opium to China to begin with.
CRAFTING THE MESSAGE SO IT RESONATES WITH WHAT IS ALREADY IN PEOPLE’S HEADS IN TERMS OF THEIR VALUES AND BELIEFS
One of the two most common misunderstandings about propaganda is that propagandists want to introduce something new. Propagandists cannot afford to risk time, effort and resources on messages that might not fly. They need to work with the beliefs and commitments that people already have and just interpret the meaning differently. All a propagandist has to do to create negative propaganda is use propaganda which violates these values in order to drum up hostility among the natives against their supposed enemy. In psychological warfare, predictably, the CIA trots out its tired old list of atrocity stories of the enemy – eating babies, various betrayals to family and any of the violations of evolutionary psychology to work people up into supporting the latest war.
Neither is it true that propaganda is filled with lies. It is true that black propaganda does this, but the use of black propaganda is a sign that propaganda’s messages come out of weakness rather than strength. Following Goebbels, Patrick says propaganda must be factual. It in the interpretation of the facts that propaganda makes its move. In addition to facts, there must be something inexorable about the interpretation as if it could not be any other way. It also must seem necessary, as if any other interpretation would lead to a disaster. Finally, the message must seem to have legitimacy, with the weight of the authorities and the ages behind it.
ADDRESS PSYCHOLOGICAL, SPIRITUAL AND SOCIAL NEEDS OF THE POPULATION
Over two thousand years ago Patrick points out, Aristotle identified what made people happy. He included security, the independent enjoyment of goods, health, wealth, friendship, good children, good birth and pleasant old age. Patrick says these are the same values American politicians draw from. The differences between people in different cultures is the order of these values, not the values themselves. In addition, what is important to people will draw their attention. Lastly, the biological need for food, sex and economic survival is sure to draw people out.
Today Patrick says modern mass society the media person is a strange hybrid of neurotic insecurity and solipsistic egomania. A mass individual is socialized to think himself unique and inviolable in his opinion and in his voting. Propaganda must appeal to this.
Propaganda must appeal to the individual’s identity, his ego, his power and his efficacy. The person must feel like he belongs somewhere, that he is wanted and useful. Lastly, propaganda must give the individual a sense of understanding the world, where it is going along with addressing the political anxiety that develops because of an absence of reassurance about direction. It also helps for the propaganda to have the appearance of hidden underground knowledge that is revealed only to superior beings.
CENSORING STORIES OR CONTRARY INFORMATION
Even if you control the content and sources of information, even if you hammer your message into dualistic opposites and even if you appeal to the beliefs and values of the audience, the message of propaganda will be weakened if the beliefs, values, movements, parties and programs of its opposition are allowed to be aired publicly. Propaganda must actively suppress its opposition. Patrick’s most blatant example of this is Britain’s cutting the transatlantic cable from Germany during the World War I. A weaker version of this is to make sure that stories that run against propaganda never get to the public through the press. For over two decades an organization called Project Censoredcomes out with a book which, among other things, contains 25 of the top censored stories every year. In the 2022 edition, here are some of the stories:
Prescription Drug Costs Set to Become a Leading Cause of Death for Elderly Americans
Journalists investigating the Financial Crimes Threatened by Elites
Historic Wave of Wildcat Strikes for Worker Rights
Google’s Union-Busting Methods Revealed
Police Use of Dogs as Instruments of Violence Targets People of Color
Corporate Media Sideline Health Experts during Pandemic
US Factory Farming a Breeding Ground for Next Pandemic
New Wave of Independent News Sources Demonized by Google-Owned You Tube
Conservative Christian Groups Spend Globally to Promote Anti-LGBTQ Campaigns
USE OF GROUP PRESSURE TO HORIZONTALLY SHAPE BELIEFS AND BEHAVIORS
Many, many people imagine propaganda works like the spokes of a wheel. In the center is the propagandist sending out information to separate the spokes. The relationship between the spokes has nothing to do with propaganda. But Patrick rightly claims horizontal propaganda (relationships between groups) is perhaps the most effective way yet of sustaining a propaganda message. It extends, supplements and complements centralized, authoritative bureaucratic propaganda. In the case of the Milgram experiment, the “teachers” obeyed the authorities not just because the authorities seemed legitimate, but because other members of the group were also shocking people. Maoist Chinese communists relied on hammering their propaganda in a centralized way. But they also wisely held writing contests for groups in which the winner of the essay would be the one that most successfully denounced US imperialism. These essays were then discussed in a groupsetting where the content of the essays reinforced the propaganda of the communists. In a text I used to use in teaching my Brainwashing, Propaganda and Rhetoric class, the author pointed out that when Yankee soldiers were asked why they stuck out horrendous situations, it wasn’t because of obedience to their officers and the propaganda of patriotism. It was because they didn’t want to let their comrades down.
In cults, the central propaganda comes from the cult leader. But the cult leader by themselves is not strong enough to break the bond between the recruit and their family and friends. However, the propaganda is sustained by fellow cult members, especially when they are living together. The pressure of horizontal propaganda has often been strong enough to break the loyalty of the recruit to their own family. This is why families hire cult counselors to intervene to get their children out of the cult.
A less heavy-headed approach can be seen in AA groups. The centralized propaganda of Alcoholics Anonymous are the twelve steps. But when a person declares that they are ready to graduate from AA, even the best sponsor will not be as successful in pressuring the person leaving to stay as much as having to face the group at one of their meetings. Similar processes are in place in the horizontal sustaining of propaganda in DARE and in Amway groups.
When propagandists bombard a mass population, they never know how it will be perceived. There will always be people who are apathetic, recalcitrant or openly rebellious and are invisible to the vertical propagandists. However, once propaganda becomes horizontalized, groups have a far better record of winning the recruit to their side and for marginalizing or driving out deviants.
COGNITIVELY PENETRATE AND STICK
How does the propagandist get attention in an age of attention deficit? How do they sustain the attention once it has been noticed? Two means of being noticed are novelty and humor. In the case of humor, from what I am told, there are an extraordinary number commercials during the Superbowl which are dominated by humor. A person is more likely to remember a brand when a commercial made them laugh.
In order to sustain a person’s attention, the propagandist has to compete with many other propagandists from the fields of advertising, politics, economics and sports. An essential strategy is to burrow a hole into the consciousness by repeating the message. In addition, these messages must be simple and easy to understand, filled with slogans and with accompanying images. Popular music is a great example. I still remember the lyrics of rock and roll songs from 50 years ago because the verses were repeated, the music was simple (think of Motown) and there were the accompanying images of the musicians. For two thousand years the discipline of rhetoric has studied the ways in which people can have their minds and actions changed. Rhetorical devices – metaphors, acronyms, alliteration, and rhyme – make language memorable, dramatic and visual.
PERSONALIZE EVENTS
Many years ago, I worked as a counselor for an organization called Men Overcoming Violence. It was a 40-week program for men who were violent with their partners. Our job was to teach them better communication skills. Periodically we would hire outside speakers to give talks for the public that was related to our work. One time we had two presenters, each taking the opposite stance about the extent that violence was inevitable in men. The first presenter approached the problem statistically. He presented research from Darwinian evolutionary psychology. He also presented cross-cultural research claiming that men were nine times more likely to be violent than women. The second presenter took the case study approach. They brought up a man who had successfully graduated from our program. He told the audience the story of how he was once violent with his wife, but thanks to our program he had changed. Then he called on the man’s wife who testified about how much he had changed. There was not a dry eye in the house. After the two talks we asked the audience via secret ballot whether they thought men could ever be no more violent than woman. Guess who won? The personal story won out over the statistics.
When we hear of mass shootings in the news are we presented with statistics on how many the police have killed in the course of the year? No. We are presented with the personal stories of either the victim or the slayer. Patrick points out that when a lawyer defends a multiple slayer to the jury, he is likely to lead with “my client made a mistake”. Everyone makes mistakes, right? It could have been you. Switching to cinema, whatever the movie you’re watching, you can be sure part of the trailer line will be “one man’s quest…to overcome adversity”. Heroes and villains – not sociology – dominate the popular imagination. What propagandists fear most is masses of people responding against the propagandists in a collective manner. In making the problem personal and psychological, collective responses are less likely.
BUREAUCRATIZE EVENTS
The flip side of personalizing events is to bureaucratize them, that is to convey the message that there is nothing that can be done to combat the propaganda. It removes the question of responsibility. To speak in a bureaucratic passive voice depersonalizes decisions which are ugly, stupid and arbitrary. Political scientist Edelman says the main function of modern mass political language is to sharpen the pointless to show some interest and blunt the too sharply pointed.
Military censors or media relations personnel avoid news images that show the caskets for the people on their side of the conflict, especially in quantity. In the first World War, despite nearly a million United Kingdom military dead, no British newspaper reputedly even showed a photography of a dead British soldier. Seeing actual bodies shocks and reduces morale. (148)
In the political context, with competition for scarce funds, prestige and continued political support make records creation a self-serving activity. The capitalist state fudges rate of unemployment, the gross national product, the rate of inflation and the number of Covid cases to reassure the public that it has everything under control.
With bureaucratic propaganda the public gets what Goffman called the “front” part of the organization and never the back side. Unlike traditional propaganda, bureaucratic propaganda does not try to reinforce deeply held beliefs, but instead the legitimacy of an existing organization through painting a contrived, managed and decontextualized picture. The appeal of bureaucratic propaganda is not to economic, political or advertising forces, but to the scientific validity, rationality and objectivity of an organization which will hopefully not be investigated. Officials are encouraged along with their subordinates to use two or more sets of records. One for the inspection of other officials and organizations and one for the privacy of insiders only.
At the same time, bureaucratic propaganda can be used for political purposes while hiding under the cloak of dispensing information.
In its nearly half century of official existence, the US Information Agency employed several thousand persons, mainly for “informing people” in foreign countries (especially the Soviet bloc) via news, education and entertainment broadcasts. (175)
Op-ed pieces are another way of introducing scientific sub-propaganda to an unaware public. Gallup polls supposedly do a “need assessment” for social services or political programs and lo and behind, the bureaucratic organization is found to support public needs. On the other hand, if a research proposal contradicts the purpose of the bureaucratic organization it is not favorably reviewed or funded.
DEMONSTRATE GOOD ETHICS
Patrick points out that in Aristotle’s rhetorical triangle, ethos was the most important element in persuasion. Though propaganda is different than rhetoric in many ways, including that it is impersonal, mass produced and standardized, it is still worth keeping in mind. One of the myths of propaganda is that it does not try to be moral. On the contrary, there is a need for conspicuous displays of ethics and morals in propaganda. One instance of political propaganda is Kipling’s justification for British colonialism as “The White Man’s Burden”.
Bernays cast a long shadow in the ethically-challenged field of mass propaganda.
Patrick points out that a triumph of British and American propaganda during the 20thcentury was the successful attachment during both World Wars to the label of propaganda solely to Germans. For many, propaganda is associated forever with Joseph Goebbels. When one says propaganda people quickly think of jackboots and swastikas, but these are a direct result of Anglo-American propaganda. Later on, the same thing was done to the Soviet Union and Japan.
The truth was that it was British and Americans who were best at propaganda. It was Bernays who first called propaganda by its real name. He then wisely switched it to “public relations” when he realized propaganda had some nasty political implications which would expose what he was actually doing. Americans disguised their propaganda efforts under euphemistic organizations such as the Committee of Public Information in World War I. In World War II there was The Office of Wartime Information.
Good ethics in propaganda means keeping control at all times and showing poise in difficult circumstances. Losing control in public with displays of anger show there might be conflicts between elites or a lack of confidence in propaganda. Secondly, propagandists want to appear as moderates, not as “extremists”. Third, propagandists must be dressed in a respectable manner, be in good shape physically and attractive. Further, other signs of good ethics is that people are open and capable of handling disagreement. Being closed and defensive draws suspicion. Lastly, propagandists should have ethical codes of conduct, mission and vision statements which elevate propagandistic activities to the level of the broader social services.
DISPENSE SELECTIVE INTERPRETATION OF FACTS
As much as possible propagandists start with facts. What they do then is interpret the facts in a particular way. What the propagandist doesn’t tell you is that there may be four or five other ways of interpreting the facts and connecting the dots that are suppressed. For example, a Freudian propagandist may tell an audience at a psychoanalytic conference that depression is repressed anger. A graduate student may be very impressed. But what the Freudian propagandist will not discuss is that there are cognitive, behavioral, physiological theories of depression as well, and some of the better follow-up results than Freudians.
DISTANCE THE PROPAGANDA FROM ITS SOURCE BY USING FRONT GROUPS LIKE FOUNDATIONS, THINK TANKS, AND RESEARCH PATRONAGE
Propagandists rarely go to the public directly. They mediate their message through intermediate organizations such as universities, foundations, think tanks, policydiscussion group, and other organizations I’ll discuss shortly. This gives the propagandist credibility – or the benefit of the doubt that goes with organizations that appear to be just disinterested third parties.
The only liberal Think Tank is the Ford Foundation. Johnny-come-lately social democratic think tanks are the Economic Policy Institute and the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
The third level down are policy discussion groups from which testimonies, reports, books and editorials flow. The fourth level is the result of these policy discussion groups that go through mass media newscasts along with the Chambers of Commerce.
All these filters peddle the same conservative-liberal propagandistic line. Willingness to toe the line determines which political candidates are chosen from either party.
The Republicans and Democrats reproduce the same frameworks that were built at the university and foundation level. It doesn’t matter whether these candidates understand upper levels or not. In fact, it is more convincing if they don’t understand what they are doing because it appears that they are making up their own minds in what they say.
ACCOMMODATE INFORMATIONAL NEEDS AND HABITS OF PROFESSIONALS
Aiming propaganda at a mass audience is often wastefully ineffective. It is a shotgun approach because the cynical Patrick says the masses are more likely to be apathetic and inattentive to anything other than sex and food. As Jacques Ellul has revealed, it is not the ruling class that creates propaganda. It is the upper-middle classes that are the explainers of capitalism to the rest of the population. That means that propagandists have to create, package and distributute propaganda in ways that suit the informational requirements and professional routines of journalists, editors, script writers, interest groups, voluntary associations, churches, trade associations, blogs, and news media.
For the past 100 years since the development of modern mass media, propagandists have provided pre-written news articles for use of journalists known as “press releases which benefit media organizations because fewer journalists are needed to process stories. (123)
Most quotes from officials found in press releases are simply made up by the propagandists who write the releases. (124)
What Would Jacques Ellul Say?
Personalizing events
One of the things that would have surprised Ellul is the power that personalization has in moving people. France is less individualistic than Mordor’s ideology and people living in Mordor have become more individualistic in the past sixty years since Ellul wrote his book.
Propaganda in black and white
Ellul was more interested in the subtleties of propaganda. While he did make a distinction between propaganda designed to rile people up (which he called sensibilization) and to cool people out (which he called mithridatization), he was more interested in propaganda that pacified people.
Horizontal propaganda
Ellul did have room for horizontal propaganda in his system but he might have been surprised by the extent it has been developed in adding members of cults and AAA to the mix.
Bruce Lerro has taught for 25 years as an adjunct college professor of psychology at Golden Gate University, Dominican University and Diablo Valley College. He has applied a Vygotskian socio-historical perspective to his four books: From Earth-Spirits to Sky-Gods: the Socio-ecological Origins of Monotheism, Individualism and Hyper-Abstract Reasoning Power in Eden: The Emergence of Gender Hierarchies in the Ancient World Co-Authored with Christopher Chase-Dunn Social Change: Globalization from the Stone Age to the Present and Lucifer's Labyrinth: Individualism, Hyper-Abstract Thinking and the Process of Becoming Civilized He is also a representational artist specializing in pen-and-ink drawings. Bruce is a libertarian communist and lives in Olympia WA.
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NOTE: ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS
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Did the US Blow Up Nord Stream If There is No Media to Report It?
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DEFEAT CAPITALISM AND ITS DEADLY SPAWN, IMPERIALISM ecological murder •
Danish Defense shows the gas leaking at Nord Stream 2 seen from the Danish F-16 interceptor on Bornholm, Denmark, on September 27. This was not just an act of treacherous terrorism, but a huge ecological insult in a continent well known for its fanatical adherence to the idea of environmental protection. (Danish Defence/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
“The Norwegian navy was quick to find the right spot, in the shallow water a few miles off Denmark’s Bornholm Island” —Seymour Hersh— Substack
“If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” The idea behind this old thought experiment should not be relegated to the realm of philosophy. Present-day reality can be used in place of hypothetical falling trees. If the United States blows up the Nord Stream pipelines but the media ignores it, did the attack ever happen?
Seymour Hershhas all of the credentials that usually give one gravitas in the world of journalism. As a freelance reporter he exposed the U.S. army’s 1969 massacre of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai and won a Pulitzer Prize for his efforts. He later worked at the New York Times and reported on high-profile stories such as the Watergate revelations, and the CIA coup against the government of Chile. In 2004 Hersh exposed the torture of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison for The New Yorker.
None of these accomplishments helped Hersh when he recently provided evidence of what had long been obvious, that the Biden administration blew up the Nord Stream pipelines on September 26, 2022. In a 5,200 word article published on his Substack entitled How America Took Out the Nord Stream Pipeline, Hersh utilized highly placed sources who presented as one might say the “receipts” of how the deed was done.
The media are behaving in a manner that violates their own ethics and that may in fact be criminal. Lest anyone forget, the post-World War II Nuremberg trials charged the German press with committing “propaganda as an instrument of war.” Now in the nuclear age the media in what is known as the “collective west” are acting in a similar fashion, covering up crimes and repeating lies as truth in the name of making and continuing war.
Joe Biden and his foreign policy team at the State Department, National Security Agency, and the Central Intelligence Agency first discussed the operation one year before carrying it out, and months before Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine began. The fear of deepening integration between Russia and Germany was the cause of alarm. They wanted to end Europe’s resource and financial connections to Russia, and decided that exploding the means of transporting natural gas was a good idea. According to Hersh’s source(s) the plot was carried out with help from Norway, a NATO member nation that made itself the sole source of natural gas in the region by helping in the attack. The current Secretary General of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, was formerly a prime minister of Norway.
The U.S. had the motive, means, and opportunity and spent many months confessing to the plot and then to the crime after it took place. In February 2022 Biden pledged to stop the Nord Stream 2 projectand added for good measure, “I promise you we’ll be able to do it.” After the explosion Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, “It’s a tremendous opportunity to once and for all end the dependence on Russian energy.” Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland smugly saidat a Senate hearing, “Senator Cruz, like you 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.”
Hersh’s article was a sensation online when it was published on February 8, 2023 but it has been ignored by major corporate media ever since. One has to ask if it really happened when the New York Times, Washington Post and television networks ignore what ought to be a huge news story.
It isn’t hard to understand why the same individuals and institutions who act as state mouthpieces would want to sweep Hersh’s reporting under the rug. For months they have acted as scribes instead of as journalists. The days when they would compete to break a scoop that a president wanted covered up are long gone. They now go along with establishment narratives, and promote imperialism as much as the people they are tasked with covering and confronting. Not one person asked about Hersh’s revelations at the daily white house press briefing the day after it was published.
Not only have the media ignored what Hersh reported but Republicans who claim to oppose Biden and the Democrats have also been silent. There are impeachable offenses committed in Hersh’s account but the people who should be asking questions have demurred. Republicans were as eager as Democratsto end Nord Stream’s existence. The word collusion which was bandied about so much in recent years is apropos here and that means the Hersh story is now at the bottom of the sea politically.
Biden is the fox in charge of the hen house, preparing to ask congress for the biggest defense budget in history, in large part to replenish the weapons used in Ukraine. The people who are asked to accept austerity for themselves are largely ignorant of how the conflict started and why their money is used for every purpose except for those that benefit them.
The Nord Stream sabotage is not the only news story that has been deep-sized. The decision to sabotage Nord Stream was very reckless, and a sign that Biden and his team are willing to risk a wider war in order to do what they cannot, weaken Russia or get Vladimir Putin out of office, or destroy Russia economically. At the very moment that people in this country need to know the hard truth, it is being kept from them.
So complete is the indoctrination that Biden’s obvious instability is never discussed, even when the public see it for themselves unfiltered. At the State of the Union address he made this odd remark, “Name me a world leader who'd change places with Xi Jinping! Name me one! Name me one!" The strange outburst was never given the attention that it deserved.
The media are behaving in a manner that violates their own ethics and that may in fact be criminal. Lest anyone forget, the post-World War II Nuremberg trials charged the German press with committing “propaganda as an instrument of war.” Now in the nuclear age the media in what is known as the “collective west” are acting in a similar fashion, covering up crimes and repeating lies as truth in the name of making and continuing war.
The Biden administration did sabotage Nord Stream whether the media say so or not. Their lack of attention doesn’t change facts, but it does disappear them and that is incredibly dangerous to the entire world.
NOTE: ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.