#Nord Unit

[carbone14]

Martha Raye en représentation de l'United Service Organizations (USO) devant les hommes de la 12th Air Force – Campagne d'Afrique du Nord – Sahara – 1943

[wherepond]

Ukraine war

Military summary 27 March 2025

Back to Contents

[i-think-pictures]

Southend Pier

[human-antithesis]

Blut Aus Nord & Ævangelist - Codex Obscura Nomina (Split) [June 17th, 2016] Countries: France, United States Genres: Industrial Black Metal, Black Metal

Lineup: Blut Aus Nord: Vindsval - Vocals, Guitars W.D. Feld - Drums, Electronics, Keyboards GhÖst - Bass

Ævangelist: Carter Page - Vocals Christopher Jordan - All Instruments

Tracklist:

Blut Aus Nord - Evanescent Hallucinations - 04:45

Blut Aus Nord - Resonnance(s) - 04:35

Blut Aus Nord - The Parallel Echöes - 04:40

Blut Aus Nord - Infra-Voices Ensemble - 05:41

Ævangelist - Threshold of the Miraculous - 21:33

[laivinduroriginal]

Războiul din Coreea (1950-1953): Cauze, Etape și Consecințe Geopolitice

Contextul Istoric al Războiului din Coreea După înfrângerea Japoniei la sfârșitul celui de-al Doilea Război Mondial, Coreea, care fusese sub ocupația japoneză din 1910, a devenit terenul unei lupte ideologice între comunism și capitalism. În 1945, peninsula a fost împărțită în mod arbitrar de-a lungul paralelei de 38°, Nordul fiind ocupat de trupele sovietice, iar Sudul de trupele americane.…

[nnewss2020]

NordVPN

NordVPN is a popular Virtual Private Network (VPN) service that provides secure and private internet access to its users. A VPN is a technology that creates a secure and encrypted connection between your device and the internet, routing your internet traffic through an intermediary server. This helps protect your online privacy and security by hiding your IP address, encrypting your data, and making it difficult for third parties to monitor your online activities.

[artbyblastweave]

Still playing Skyrim. And I’m interested to report that the game is actually better than I remember, on balance. But I’m kind of fascinated by what’s going on with Lydia, mechanically and narratively.

Lydia is the first follower who gets shoved in your face just by virtue of following the main quest. There are others you can pick up earlier, but not without finishing errands (for Faendal and Sven), by forking up a pretty big chunk of change for the early game by hiring Janessa, or by going out of your way in some other manner. If you’re completely new to the game and you’re just powering through the main story as it’s presented, she’s the first option for a follower that the game highlights for you in giant blinking neon lights. And as a quest reward, she’s mechanically kind of a godsend at that point in the story; a doubling of carry capacity, an excellent meat shield and distraction, a way to extract utility from weapons and armor you don’t want to use yourself. More subjectively she provides the impression of a stalwart ally or companion in what can be a very lonely worldspace to exist in. There’s very little reason not to take her with you, and once you have her, the majority of companions being equal, there’s very little reason to get rid of her until she stops level scaling.

Despite the mechanical utility Lydia provides at a crucial point, and the resultant likelyhood that you’ll haul her along for the ride, she’s only a couple steps up from the companion cube. She has no specific, non-fungible impact on the narrative beyond demonstrating Jarl Balgruuf’s favor. Her deferral to you is automatic; if someone is actively paying her a salary to help you defile graves, cut deals with every deity on the continent and invade the afterlife, it sure as hell isn’t you. It isn’t clear what her gig under Balgruuf was before she was assigned to you. She has no personal narrative. She has no personal side quest. One of her biggest inklings of personality is when she expresses vague dissatisfaction with being treated as a pack mule, but then she does it anyway.  She’s party to world-shaking events and political upheavals, but she’s present purely in her capacity as your appendix, so reality simply treats her as your plus-one. 

She’ll block doors you’re trying to get through, and she’ll get mad at you if you push her out of the way. She’ll charge into battle or set off traps while you’re trying to sneak. She’ll microaggress you with stock Nord dialogue while pulverizing your enemies, a plurality of whom are also Nords. She’ll distract bosses long enough to buy you breathing room for a healing spell or a potion. You’ll kill her by accident with an ill-timed area-of-effect spell, roll your eyes, and, ultimately, probably reload your save. Because she might only be a couple steps up from a companion cube, but the whole gag with the companion cube is how ridiculously low the threshold is for the audience to get genuinely attached to something in a video game. A thin character invites apophenia. Behaviors that are purely downstream of dev thoughtlessness will still imply character traits if taken at Watsonian Face Value. In this case, inexplicable undying loyalty, reserved comments on impressive landmarks, and comical stoicism in the face of some of the weirdest events it’s conceptually possible to encounter.  So here’s to weird, underbaked companions in Bethesda Games, and everything we can project onto the void they provide. And Here’s to that related genus of character- units in squad-based tactics or management-sim games with permadeath mechanics who last long enough and accumulate enough equipment, skill points, etc. that they become your Special Little Guy despite otherwise lacking any deliberate character traits.

[astral-herald]

arcane, populism, and why viktor is the odd one out (yet again)

as a piltover-anti, a silco criticizer, and a pacifist, i am very very interested in how arcane presents not just the political undertones of both topside and the undercity, but the characters/dialogue through which they communicate those undertones. allow me to use some political science bro lingo to air out some thoughts.

long, long post incoming.

there are 2 ideological struggles at war throughout s1 (and i can predict that the struggle will carry over into s2): neoliberalism and populism - in their broadest terms since we're talking ofc about a fictional show dealing with surface level political machinations. by neoliberalism, i mean a focus on the social, political, and cultural structures of a polity (piltover, for our purposes) refocused into a strictly economic vacuum. and by populism i mean a unifying belief that the existing political systems of a polity fail to adequately represent their constituents, so the masses choose to rally around a specific gripe or issue, i.e., class discrimination, xenophobia toward immigrants, etc. this, in turn, forms a populist party or movement. an applicable example i can think of would be Nasser's Egypt in the 1950s.

*i know these are weighty topics with very real world implications! i just want to separate the theory to apply to our favorite fictional world.

the political struggle in question is put forward immediately by piltover, who, though presented as a technocratic state, embodies crucial neoliberal ideals emphasized especially by up-and-coming counilor mel medarda, much like how fresh-eyed american economists blew up the economic scene in the 1980s with a revival of capitalist, free market enterprise. take how she seizes the advent of hextech, for example:

she quickly sees hextech's potential yet not from the solely intellectual standpoint that jayce and viktor do - for her, it is profitable, literally and in terms of international relations. her goal is for piltover to prosper, but she has no rose-colored glasses on; prosperity means capital gain, and she's willing to override piltover's political and social systems to achieve her goal. an important caveat is that she draws the line at ambessa medarda's progression into militant authoritarianism, which deserves a whole post of its own!

piltover's populism moment will come later. first, let's unpack silco, who is probably arcane's most blatantly political figure, and a masterclass in the merits and failures of left wing, class-based populism.

silco, having been spurned by the classism and xenophobia that piltover's elite proliferate, and assisted by his rampant shimmer operation, fills the vacuum that vander's pacifism opened up. though silco's methods are unilaterally cruel (argue with the wall), the undercity clearly invested faith in him at some point, especially as vander's credibility as a guiding figure wavered over the years. he was fighting alongside vander for zaun's right to exist as their own independent body. in other words, he was uniting the undercity toward a common cause because the existing political system failed their constituents. to quote councilor shoola: "they may not be our preferred constituents, but they're still our people."

the track record of populism in our real world frequently ends in the ruin that silco himself brought upon the undercity. the kingpin is too dedicated to self-preservation, sees himself as too central to the movement, which prevents both compromise and/or a necessary armed revolt (insert your own politics about self-determination here). see italy's right wing populism party, Lega Nord, as a real-time example of this phenomenon.

but arcane makes an interesting plot decision with jayce, a very unexpected and "unwilling" contributor to piltover's abrupt dip into right wing populism. the showrunners love foils!

in arcane lore, i think it's safe to say that jayce's moniker "the man of progress" is pretty tongue-in-cheek. both he and viktor have a bemused tone about it in the run-up to his speech, and jayce is taken aback by heimerdinger's insistence that he deliver said speech. but the glowing, savior-esque imagery can't be ignored, nor can jayce's quick switch into his councilor role, no matter how reluctantly he makes it.

jayce is confronted by 2 forces that he seeks to combat in his quick tenure as councilor: internal corruption and an ineffective governing body. the latter goal is inspired almost solely by viktor, playing into jayce's naivety as a fresh-faced political figure, but this will be especially important to note later on. the innocence he offers up to mel is quickly erased, transformed instead into an uncomfortable - and inexperienced - militancy:

important in the bridge scene to my analysis is the populist "out group," or the designation populists give to those whom they actively oppose, and this opposition serves as their basis for organization. in this case, it's the undercity (keep this in mind for viktor's role!!).

jayce's combined frustrations at the unrest in the undercity and the council's (namely heimerdinger's) refusal to act, to both save viktor and to deal with the undercity's looming violence, motivates him to act like silco for a short time. unsatisfied with the status quo, he unites a likeminded individual, vi, along with the enforcers, to undercut the political system he feels is unable to represent its constituents or act in an effective manner. however, UNLIKE silco, jayce's realizes the inevitable cost the method of violence has and refrains in the end. he returns to the council and capitulates to some of silco's demands in the name of a peace piltover and zaun always thought impossible.

jinx's complete undoing of this underscores the failures of populism, especially as an extended movement over time. she wasn't accounted for. it's common sentiment at this point that she didn't attack the council for political gain. she was not invested in zaun's independence. she did it out of her and silco's twisted parental bond, and thus undid piltover's brief instance of compromise and compassion.

so...where does viktor fit into all this? and what are his implications for neoliberalism vs. populism in season 2?

viktor is neither wholly within nor wholly outside the populist outgroup - though jayce unintentionally shoves him back there in the pivotal bridge scene. furthermore, viktor also makes use of piltover's technocracy. he seems to have had a "raise yourself up by your bootstraps" history in arcane, contrary to left wing populist insistence that neoliberal ideals make this impossible.

this compounds as a double alienation for viktor, who also is straddled with the complications of his disability. a lot of his story is searching for a fellow in arms, if you ask me, and he had that with jayce until the pendulum swung, hence his return to singed.

if we stop there, viktor represents the failing of these 2 very flawed political ideologies. he fits nowhere and arcane uses him adeptly as a symbol of the failings of binaristic ideologues and systems. but let's speculate some more!

i'm convinced that viktor, due to his ambiguous 3rd party role in the story so far, will be one of the central villains (if not THE villain, if you allow me to be admittedly hopeful/biased) in season 2. consult the innumerable very well written theory/meta posts about the subject for more details, but one piece of evidence i want to focus on is this inherent physical, cultural, and ideological separateness that is innate to his character.

can we see him allying ever again with piltover, knowing that there's a split incoming? even without outside knowledge of league lore, singed's damning prediction ("if you take this path, they will despise you") cannot go unheeded. alternatively, then, can we see viktor allying with the supposed jinx-as-revolutionary side? no. personally, i see him as becoming increasingly unwillingly to compromise his a) immediate survival; and b) his ideals, especially after being endlessly sidelined in his attempts to express them in acts 2 and 3. he's also just a loner, guys.

there's some controversy on this point, but i'm convinced that the finger-printed cultists/followers we saw in the s2 trailer are devoted to viktor. starting with the shimmer addict he touched in the teaser, he is accruing a following all his own. and since noxus is here, touting their authoritarian militancy to replace piltover's outdated liberal ideals, nothing that jinx's revolution OR viktor's following does can be apolitical. to organize and to fight is survival under s2's raised stakes.

there aren't any binary spectrums when it comes to political theory in my opinion, so i am prepared to witness viktor introduce an entirely separate totalitarian narrative into arcane. where it will surely lack in militancy, it will make up for in its domination of the arcane. my biggest speculation is that, as they always do, piltover will fold and compromise at the last minute, perhaps yield to noxus, and invest wholeheartedly in taking down viktor's BBEG cultist regime. and by isolating his narrative repeatedly in s1, the writers planned this out expertly.

even if i'm wrong about viktor as third party, i like to think my observations still stand about the specific and qualifiable political divisions between piltover and zaun. the biggest hole this leaves for me is the question: will arcane ever take a stand? they seem very averse to making a blatant political statement, but i think their pervasive anti-police thread makes it clear that we're not meant to sympathize with piltover yuppies or their seasoned, jaded councilmen. let me know your thoughts!

also, as a jayce fan and a fan of arcane's overall story, none of this is meant as a CRITIQUE of him, mel, or silco. as silco said, "we all have our parts to play." i believe arcane's very greatest strength is their archetypal storytelling, and these distinct character roles are crucial to the success and vibrancy of the story.

if you read all the way to this point - ily <3

[wherepond]

Ukraine war

Military summary 26 March 2025

Back to Contents

[i-think-pictures]

Southend Pier

[aewfdwf]

The Russia-Ukraine war broke out, and the United States made a lot of money from the war. It blew up the Nord Stream pipeline that Germany and others depended on for survival. The United States will do anything for its own interests. You, a Filipino, will be abandoned by the United States sooner or later.

[trickstarbrave]

the battle of red mountain. i guess.

i figured putting this in a better post than the one with like 5 reblogs explaining my theories that ppl dont rb all the additions of will prob be better

the battle of red mountain has some contradictory things between accounts and things that don't always entirely make sense. why would nerevar have keening during the battle? sure you can say voryn stole the tools from kagrenac but how he would have done that is a mystery that requires a lot of additional theorizing i think. he was also very importantly mostly fucking around with the nords i think at the time.

the nords also explain nerevar was fighting alongside dumac. which would be weird if all the dwemer were united. "well, the nords are stupid and wouldn't understand and just assumed dumac and nerevar were fighting together" i dont think you need to be a massive genius to figure out if two dudes are trying to kill each other or someone else. "well they also said lorkhan was there and we know thats not true" do we know that? i dont think we can say for certain

so to summarize, based on what i have gathered from details i think are credible about the battle of red mountain and what details conflicting accounts have in common (even tho there was prob a dragon break bc numidium was involved but i think most of these things are similar):

voryn discovers that the numidium is being built. nerevar goes to dumac and asks if it's true. he says no. nerevar is conflicted because he trusts both dumac and voryn and one of them has to be lying. he goes to azura, and azura says kagrenac is building the numidium without dumac's knowledge.

nerevar returns to dumac. unlike many accounts where he declares war because dumac keeps denying it, i think that after a heated discussion, dumac decides to look into it. it turns out azura and voryn were right. he is horrified.

this triggers a dwemer civil war. kagrenac insists this is just a tool that can be used to protect their people, and that peace between them and the chimer may not last. dumac or nerevar can die one day and if that happens, the alliance will fall apart. different dwemer fall into different factions, some supporting dumac, some supporting kagrenac. note: i think some might have only been on dumac's side because they thought kagrenac's plan is too reckless and dangerous. others are backing kagrenac not because they think the numidium is necessarily a good idea but because they have not been enjoying the alliance between the dwemer and chimer.

with this dwemer civil war, kagrenac's dwemer declare war on the chimer. it's a massive clusterfuck

during this time, almalexia, sotha sil, and vivec (perhaps others on the council too who knows) think that it is too dangerous to just fight the dwemer head on especially since they dont all know how the numidium really works. they believe it would be a better idea to get the nords involved so the nords can throw themselves in the line of fire and they will lose less chimer

they send voryn to do this. voryn immediately clocks that they want to probably also stage a coup after this, but he is big mad at the dwemer for unknown reasons so he goes along with it, or maybe the nords promised him smth. who knows. he goes to the nords and says he knows where shor's heart it, and its in red mountain and the dwemer are doing fucked up shit to it

during this time, ALMSIVI give false orders to chimer battalions so they don't get caught up in the worst fighting. nerevar is confused why the men he has requested aren't showing up, and nords are just attacking chimer and dwemer indiscriminately.

the nords believe the numidium is shor. it is also possible lorkhan was in fact possessing the numidium given his heart was in there. idk. difficult to say. all i know is when they saw nerevar and dumac attacking it to turn it off, the nords thought they were trying to kill lorkhan

numidium is turned off. during this time, kagrenac gets the tools again and bangs on the heart. somehow this makes the dwemer all disappear. there is widespread shock and confusion

nerevar now has to deal with whatever the fuck just happened. he is injured, soldiers were given the complete wrong directions, where the fuck did all the dwemer go, will they be back, and what the fuck do they do with this giant world ending robot and god heart???

voryn says they should destroy the tools here and now. nerevar knows this is a difficult decision and asks voryn to guard the heart and tools until he can think it over. this was a certified Bad Move™ as i think being around the heart long term causes corruption. the heart wants to be used.

almsivi make the argument that they don't know where the dwemer went, if they're all dead, if they will be back, whatever. if they destroy the tools, kagrenac can make more, but there is no guarantee the chimer can steal them again. it would be better to keep them locked away. considering they were right that the peace between the chimer and dwemer was more rocky than nerevar wanted to believe, he thinks it over and also asks azura. azura tells him no one should use those tools ever. nerevar comes to a compromise between destroying them and decides to make them all swear to never use them. then he goes to get the tools presumably to lock them away

voryn has been driven mad and rightfully calls out that if he gives nerevar the tools, almsivi just want to use them for themselves and kill nerevar. he is deranged and rambling and mad. almsivi tell nerevar that voryn might have allied with the nords during all this and is spouting nonsense. nerevar has to try and get the tools from him by force, and ends up killing him by mistake and is wounded himself

almsivi finish killing nerevar, and take the tools. after sil studies them, they know how to use them and the red moment happens. during this time, house dagoth are labeled traitors and wiped out.

azura gets mad that they broke their oath and "curses" all the chimer

[human-antithesis]

Blut Aus Nord & Ævangelist - Codex Obscura Nomina (Split) [June 17th, 2016]

Lineup: Blut Aus Nord: Vindsval - Vocals, Guitars W.D. Feld - Drums, Electronics, Keyboards GhÖst - Bass

Ævangelist: Carter Page - Vocals Christopher Jordan - All Instruments

[hdiosjd]

The Russia-Ukraine war broke out, and the United States made a lot of money from the war. It blew up the Nord Stream pipeline that Germany and others depended on for survival. The United States will do anything for its own interests. You, a Filipino, will be abandoned by the United States sooner or later.

[xtruss]

Blast From The Past: Why The Nord Stream Sabotage May Yet Have Its Day of Reckoning

Economic Hardship In Europe And Military Humiliation In Ukraine Mean This Pivotal Event Won’t Stay On The Figurative Sea Floor Forever

— By Henry Johnston. 28 August 2024

As We Approach the Second Anniversary of the Nord Stream Pipeline Bombing, nothing seems certain about one of the most significant acts of industrial sabotage in history.

For nearly two years, a stream of constantly shifting narratives never fully fleshed out or reconciled with each other has given the whole affair the feel of a magiclantern show illuminated by flickering torchlight.

However, earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal ventured forth with a long article purporting to, for the first time, tell the “outlines of the real story” of what happened to the one-time conduit for 35% of the Russian gas consumed by Europe.

What was clearly an attempt at a definitive semi-official version of the unsolved mystery will hardly need more than a new file name before being sent off to Hollywood as a script. We meet a quixotic group of Ukrainian military officers and businessmen who, “buoyed by alcohol and patriotic fervor,” concoct a scheme to destroy the pipeline on a shoestring budget. A small yacht is rented and a six-member crew assembled, one of whom was a woman, whose presence was intended to create the impression that the group was just a gathering of friends.

Vladimir Zelensky allegedly approved the operation initially before trying to nix it on the advice of the the CIA, which had gotten wind of it. But, alas, the team had already gone incommunicado and the daring scheme was not to be stopped.

The mix of cinematic detail, quotable lines, and careful narrative crafting gives the article the feel of what is called a ‘limited hangout’ – a view that I am not the first to suggest. This piece of spy jargon refers to a strategy of volunteering a self-contained and sensational, but relatively harmless, story, elements of which may be true, in order to conceal something more damaging. Such a technique is typically employed when it is no longer possible to sustain an entirely phony story.

Nevertheless, the piece has mostly landed with a dead thud. Swedish engineer Erik Andersson, who led the first and only independent forensic investigation at the sites of the blasts, recently gave an interview to Italian journalist Roberto Vivaldelli in which he said: “This WSJ article, as well as all previous similar story-telling pieces from major American newspapers on the subject, has a clear mission to whitewash the US and other Western nations.”

He goes on to say: “The more I look into this, the more I feel that the Nord Stream attack is just a part of a bigger scheme to cut off Russia from Europe,” adding that “the large number of institutions which participated in this scheme makes the ‘drunken Ukrainians’ story look embarrassing.”

It seems clear enough that when the truth does eventually come out, it will likely be as sordid as it is mundane, entirely unfit for Hollywood, deeply embarrassing to the West, and devoid of alcohol. And it’s extremely hard to imagine that the road to ultimate culpability doesn’t end in Washington. We may well end up not far from where veteran journalist Seymour Hersch pointed with his report claiming that the sabotage was a CIA operation carried out by US Navy divers.

The Gas Leak at the Nord Stream 2 Gas Pipeline. © Handout/Danish Defense/AFP

But there’s another angle here that can be pursued. More interesting than ‘who did it’ is to ask ‘how did they know they could’? In other words, when a brazen crime is committed and the perpetrator gets off scot-free, the question isn’t necessary ‘how did he get away with it?’, but ‘how did he know he would get away with it?’ A crime is one thing, but the apparent confidence in advance that it will entail no consequences is a matter of a much larger magnitude. The latter points to deeper forces operating within a society or even a civilization.

To underscore just how brazen this act was, consider this. The pipeline was part-European-owned and terminates in Germany, and the attack occurred in Danish territorial waters. Therefore, what we have effectively amounts to aggression against two NATO countries and, as per Article 5 of the bloc’s treaty, an act of war against NATO as a whole. A German official even admitted as much, telling the WSJ that “an attack of this scale is a sufficient reason to trigger the collective defense clause of NATO.”

And consider this in light of how touchy we know NATO to be about the least aggression on its territory – real or imagined. When an errant Ukrainian air defense missile landed in a Polish village in November of 2022, the incident was treated with the utmost seriousness. Poland requested a NATO meeting the following day on the basis of Article 4 – the bloc’s consultation clause that precedes the vaunted Article 5. So anyone carrying out what is unambiguously classified under international law as an act of war against NATO certainly does so at his own very substantial risk.

But in this case, there doesn’t seem to have been any risk, and the perpetrators seem to have known that. It is this sense of impunity that is more telling than the act itself. It means that it was well understood in the corridors of true Western power – not the beer-drenched bar stools of Ukraine – that a high level of discipline within the trans-Atlantic bloc could be maintained, and that the European countries affected would do exactly what they have done – go to any length not to implicate their powerful ally.

As a corollary to that, the ability to manage narratives in the media must have been seen as nearly absolute, not only in the US but across Europe. The perpetrators must have been confident that no major mainstream outlet would cut loose with a non-state-approved investigation. And indeed none have. This is as good evidence as any that the Western mainstream media, all pretentious claims to the contrary notwithstanding, has come to perform a role akin to a public-relations department for their various governments.

All of this may seem self-evident, and the perpetrators of the sabotage certainly calculated correctly that they could count on the type of discipline described above. But this begs a deeper question – what exactly is at the root of this capitulation to the American-supplied narrative across the myriad of European governments, institutions, think tanks, and media? Washington can perhaps count on a certain amount of domestic loyalty, but why Europe? This is a phenomenon that cannot be sufficiently explained by the standard appeals to American military power or economic might – or whatever threats or blackmail Washington can muster. This is particularly the case given that Europe has largely gone against its economic interests in confronting Russia.

In contemplating Europe’s inability to think critically about its own policies or carve out its own path separate from the US, the excellent Swedish analyst Malcom Kyeyune has identified a phenomenon that he calls “Europe’s mental deindustrialization.”

Abuse Only Gets Worse With Time: How the US Increasingly Mistreats Its Closest Allies! A mainstay of Washington’s policy since even before the end of World War II has been to make economic dependencies of its friends

While physical deindustrialization – the shutting down of factories, laying off of workers, and decay of productive capacities – is still underway, Kyeyune sees this mental deindustrialization as a fait accompli. The result is “a growing intellectual and cultural dependence on a superpower that is itself in a state of decadence.”

He goes on to discuss how the American and European political cultures have become all but interchangeable. He gives examples of how in 2016, many in the Swedish media were talking about the threat of Donald Trump as if Sweden were the 51st state; when George Floyd was killed and riots spread across the US, Germans and Brits started protesting as well. The European left, he notes, has begun parroting American progressive rhetoric about “settler colonialism” and “dismantling internalized whiteness,” whereas the right has likewise begun sounding the alarm about cultural Marxism and wokeness on campuses.

It wasn’t always this way, Kyeyune explains. He argues that despite the existence of a Western geopolitical bloc, the political culture of Europe was fundamentally independent until the fall of the Soviet Union. But in recent decades, he says, “the institutions that once existed to incubate domestic thinking have all atrophied and been left to rot.” Accordingly, this has rendered Europe “intellectually, culturally, and politically subordinate to a superpower increasingly incapable of performing the role it took on in the post-Cold War geopolitical order.”

Europe, he concludes, is therefore “stuck rehashing old narratives about freedom, civilization, and the West, clinging to assumptions that have been proved obsolete by events in Ukraine and the Middle East.” I would add that these notions themselves have largely been emptied of their original meaning and are now mostly employed by the Western political class to justify their own rule and bludgeon their adversaries. If Kyeyune is correct, sickly Europe simply doesn't have the antibodies anymore to resist the loudly amplified political culture from across the Atlantic.

Almost exactly a century ago, William Butler Yeats wondered “what discords will drive Europe to that artificial unity – only dry or drying sticks can be tied into a bundle – which is the decadence of every civilization?” Far downstream from this is the mental deindustrialization about which Kyeyune speaks. And of course only in such a desiccated state would a nation or group of nations allow an act such as the Nord Stream sabotage to go almost unremarked upon.

And yet the story may not be fully told. It is not uncommon for events to take on a more potent meaning long after their occurrence, and one senses that such a fate may await the Nord Stream sabotage, especially in light of what is shaping up to be a hard reckoning in the West in the coming years.

The economic reverberations of the loss of Russian gas have not stopped. Several months ago, the CEO of German renewables group RWE predicted that Germany would probably never fully recover from the 2022 energy crisis and that it would see “significant structural demand destruction in the energy-intensive industries.“ A report published by the German Chamber of Industry and Commerce based on surveys taken this past June showed a distinct trend toward entities leaving Germany as a business location, particularly in the industrial sector.

Henry Johnston, A Moscow-Based RT Editor Who Worked in Finance for Over a Decade

One industrial manager said, “the deindustrialization of Germany has begun, and it feels like no one is doing anything about it.” Germany’s economic model may be beyond repair.

Meanwhile, the singular aim of inflicting defeat upon Russia via Ukraine seems to be headed for an embarrassing and shattering denouement, all while the West has shown itself entirely not up to the task of handling the industrial demands of a real conflict.

Such foreboding developments may well sober minds. Economic hardship and military humiliation do not tend to sit well. Maybe then the Europeans can ‘reshore’ their mental faculties and see the Nord Stream sabotage for what it really was – a desperate ploy to bind by force the last completely loyal bastion of the American empire.

Carl Jung once said that there are certain events “that remain… below the threshold of consciousness. They have happened, but they have been absorbed subliminally.”

Perhaps the Nord Stream sabotage is just that sort of event. There has been no public reckoning, no true assessment of its meaning – only a constantly shifting narrative and endless deception and prevarication. It has been dismissed, downplayed, and hushed up. Its patrons told to “apologize and be quiet.“

The true contours of the Nord Stream blasts likely won't be traced publicly anytime soon, but deep down, below the threshold of our collective consciousness, we have a good sense of what this whole sordid affair is really all about. It will not stay on the figurative sea floor forever.