The Selective Outrage of Jens Stoltenberg

Martin SIEFF During his 24 years as a senior foreign correspondent for The Washington Times and United Press International, Martin Sieff reported from more than 70 nations and covered 12 wars. He has specialized in US and global economic issues.

The potential consequences from Stoltenberg’s ridiculous, appalling NATO policies and infantile wet dreams will be horrible, Martin Sieff writes.

Why was the storming of the Capitol “Shocking and Unacceptable” to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg when the violent coup toppling democracy in Ukraine with the open shameless support of the United States and the European Union was not?

“Shocking scenes in Washington, DC,” Stoltenberg tweeted on January 6. “The outcome of this democratic election must be respected.”

Yet hardly more than a month later, Stoltenberg personally welcomed with open arms at NATO headquarters in Brussels the prime minister of Ukraine, head of a government and political system that was established in 2014 with full NATO, European Union and United States support by toppling the genuinely democratic government of President Viktor Yanukovych.

Eager to stoke up thermonuclear tensions between East and West, and not caring at all if nuclear weapons fall on London, New York and Washington as a result, let alone Moscow, Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyha proudly declared on February 9 that two new NATO naval bases would open on the Black Sea before the end of this year.

Yet the Black Sea has historically been a crucial defensive a region against invasion for Russia for the past quarter of a millennium since before the American Declaration of Independence in 1776.

The shocking Maidan coup in Kiev in 2014 was accompanied by a wave of killings and out of control mob violence that dwarfed the tiny, embarrassing protest that spilled over into the U.S. Capitol on January 6 and that has now been cynically rewritten in the liberal totalitarian Newspeak of the 21st Century West as an Assault of Huns and Nazi White Supremacist Hoards on All That is Holy and True.

The Democratic Party leaders of Congress – always eager to make further exceptional asses of themselves, now mindlessly record the riot as an “Insurrection.”

By contrast, in the 2014 Kiev real insurrection, President Yanukovych and his family fled Kiev in genuinely fear of their lives. Veteran U.S. Senator John McCain and serving Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland openly prowled the streets of Kiev loudly calling for revolution and the immediate and violent toppling of the constitutional government. Nuland handed out cookies to assure the rioters and revolutionaries that the U.S. government supported them. President Barack Obama and his then-vice president, one Joseph Biden, Jr. kept her in office.

On May 2, 2014, Ukrainian nationalists locked protesters in Odessa’s House of Trade Unions before setting the building on fire. Almost 50 people died and around 250 others were injured in clashes between demonstrators and radicals and the fire, according to the UN figures. No heartfelt tributes in the United States Congress for them! –

Later that same year, Stoltenberg, the former prime minister of Norway, was propelled to be Secretary-General NATO. His only previous experience in a mi any kind of security crisis was letting scores of innocent teenagers in his own ruling Labor Party to be massacred by a single crazed gunman on a supposedly safe island retreat near Oslo on July 22, 2011.

Since then, this ridiculous little “Napoleon of the North” has reveled in the empty pomp and glory of being applauded at a Joint Session of Congress and being acclaimed as a favorite puppet – sorry “statesman” by successive U.S. presidents.

Now, Stoltenberg appears especially focused on pushing the United States and Russia torwards a catastrophic collision over the Black Sea region by maniacally

“I think we have to understand that the Black Sea is of strategic importance for NATO and the NATO allies — our littoral states, Turkey, Bulgaria and Romania. And then we have two close and highly valued partners in the region, Ukraine and Georgia,” he proudly proclaimed on February 9.

Not to be outdone, U.S. General Tod Wolters, NATO supreme allied commander (SACEUR), head of U.S. European Command and the latest American four star commander to pull Stoltenberg’s strings added substance to Stoltenberg’s regularly worthless rhetoric.

“Recently … we have strengthened our maritime posture with superb support from Georgia and Ukraine,” Wolters said.

Deeds do follow words, just as the great 19th century German poet Heinrich Heine warned us. The U.S. Sixth Fleet destroyers Porter and Donald Cook have been operating with allies and with Ukraine’s navy in the Black Sea since January. On February 8, the day before Stoltenberg greeted Shmyha in Brussels, both warships, along with a P-8A reconnaissance plane, joined with two Turkish frigates and F-16 fighters in an integrated surface, air and subsurface warfare drill.

Yet as Stoltenberg relentless pushes the United States and NATO towards a crazy head-on clash with Russia, in the only serious life-or-death security crisis he ever had to face, the Napoleon of the North and his then-government proved utterly worthless.

On July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik, a hate crazed young Norwegian neo-Nazi, singlehandedly paralyzed the national security services by setting off a bomb near the prime minister’s house in Oslo that killed eight people.

Amid the confusion, Breivik then traveled out to a youth camp of Stoltenberg’s own ruling Labor Party on a nearby island where he massacred 69 people, almost all of them teens or in their early 20s. There was not a single armed security guard on the island. It was the worst mass killing in Norwegian history.

Stoltenberg had been prime minister for seven years: The appalling state of the security services and of security for the summer camp for the children of his own followers were his responsibility as national chief executive and party leader. He was even due to give a speech at the camp the next day and was preparing it while the young people were being slaughtered. He was never held responsible for his shameful bungles.

The idea that such a man could be raised up only two years later to lead the largest and most wide-reaching military alliance in European history is mindboggling. Nothing Stoltenberg has done in his years running NATO has done anything to unboggle the idea.

Once head of NATO, Stoltenberg underwent a predictable transformation: The lifelong anti-war dove who had protested the Vietnam War in his youth, overnight became an armchair war hawk.

Today, Stoltenberg is all for sucking both Ukraine and Georgia – weak, unstable and violent states lastingly destabilized by U.S. and Western coups – into his (supposedly) mighty NATO.

Stoltenberg’s raving ego and vanity have just been fed by the witless ovations of Congress and his successive American handlers, much as U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, a century ago reveled in the adulation of the crowds of Europe as his own mad, megalomaniacal policies sold them down the river for 30 more years of war, poverty, fear, conquest and death.

In this thermonuclear 21st century, the potential consequences and (literal radioactive) fallout from Stoltenberg’s ridiculous, appalling NATO policies and infantile wet dreams will be infinitely worse.

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/02/13/the-selective-outrage-of-jens-stoltenberg/ The Selective Outrage of Jens Stoltenberg