Aletho News

Weaponizing Salt Water: An American Tradition

Deprivation and Destruction in the Spirit of ‘73

BY N. JOSEPH POTTS • UNZ REVIEW • OCTOBER 12, 2023

It all ends up in salt water. The tea in 1773 Boston’s harbor, the Russian natural gas in 2022’s Baltic Sea. Of course, the tea would have drifted away and eventually sunk, while the gas bubbled to the surface and from there dissipated into the atmosphere, but either way, nobody got to buy, much less drink, the East India Company’s tea, and nobody in Europe got to buy or burn Russia’s gas, which was the American perpetrators’ purpose—in a word, deprivation.

Both times, and many of the times in between, the Americans either flew a false flag (“Mohawk Indians” in Boston) or were totally concealed underwater (the Baltic), emerging first to let Russia to take the rap for destroying its own pipeline, then to foment a rumor about a gang of incredibly intrepid Ukrainians on a sailing yacht. The East India Company was going to distribute (sell) the duty-free or -privileged tea to thirsty Bostoners, while Russia’s Gazprom proposed to sell natural gas cheaply to cold, energy-hungry Germans. The fact that 1773’s gangsters (Benjamin Franklin deplored their act) destroyed the actual goods while the US Navy’s unseen marauders destroyed the means of delivery does not change the character of the deeds, nor does the fact that the victims in Boston included the perpetrators’ own countrymen and the victims in Germany were foreign allies conquered by the USA over 70 years ago.

In both cases, the American perpetrators stood ready to “make good” their victims’ losses—at higher prices, to be sure, and certainly in 2022’s case in insufficient quantity. That is, the 1773 hooligans were professional smugglers of tea and other goods subject to duties levied by the British government on imports, and the infusion of “government tea” wrecked the market for their illicit goods, inspiring the famous raid in the first place—pretty much a turf war, viewed in its essence. That disruption would surely have petered out as the shipment of tea was exhausted, but the patriots were never a patient lot, as oppressed populaces sometimes are not (and other times such as the present apparently, are). The 2022 caper, on the other hand, promised to have far-more-nearly permanent effects on its hapless European victims, despite the rapid diversion of gas supplies from America via tankers loaded with liquified natural gas (LNG) in quantities far too small to make up for the destroyed pipelines’ capacity, never mind the higher costs that have to be borne by the sacrificial lambs of America’s brutal, covert foreign policy.

And speaking of prices, the draining of America’s supplies of natural gas to fill the tankers bound for Germany, however inadequate to make up for what the Russians would have delivered if only they were allowed to, cannot but drive up the prices paid for what is left by … Americans, the benighted dupes of their very own clandestine, vicious government. If they only knew these undeniable, practically obvious facts, it surely would warm the cockles of their ever-patriotic hearts as we head into the second of many, many winters made colder and more-costly by the greatest destruction of energy infrastructure so far this century. And they think the tea-bearing British of the Eighteenth Century were tyrannical brutes!

Depriving other countries of critical imports of energy as well as other resources has long been a staple of the American playbook of aggression and an immediate cause of war, including the one pitting Japan against the US and the British Empire that began in 1941. In this instance, the US at least operated in the open, teaming up with the UK, China and the Netherlands to deprive Japan of 80 percent of its petroleum consumption in the nefarious ABCD (American, British, Chinese, and Dutch) Pact. Since the Japanese attack on the US Fleet at anchor in Hawaii in 1941, Americans in particular have remained little aware that Japan attacked the colonial holdings of both Britain and Holland in Malaya and the East Indies at the very same moment, although the date in those places at the same instant was December 8, 1941 instead of the infamous December 7 date of Pearl Harbor. The role of the Pact in triggering Japanese military actions would seem obvious in the light of this fact.

Perhaps the most-wanton American act of spiteful destruction took place on the Pacific island of Espiritu Santo in the aftermath of World War II and, as in the Nord Stream case, made a European ally (France) its victim. Its scale dwarfed that of the Boston Tea Party, but still had nothing approaching the impact of destroying the Nord Stream Pipeline, which already after the mild winter of 2022-2023 is credited with having led to 68,000 excess deaths in Europe.

In 1947, the US Navy was preparing to pull out of its huge base on Espiritu Santo, which at that time was brimming over with supplies and equipment costing untold millions of (big, 1947) dollars staged for the invasion of Japan two years earlier that had never transpired. Having decided not to ship all this matériel back to the US, the Americans invited France (the colonial overlord of the island) to pay 6 cents on the dollar of its cost in order to inherit the massive trove. Noting that the US was indeed “stuck” with a great deal of material that it would be difficult and uneconomical to move, the French cannily chose to decline this seemingly generous offer.

The French had correctly figured that the US would be abandoning the haul in any case, so why pay anything at all for it? But the French had forgotten about the American tradition that began in Boston Harbor in 1773 involving the deliberate destruction of goods by immersion in salt water, plenty of which happened to surround Espiritu Santo. True to their tradition, the spurned Americans built a long jetty out from the island to nearby deep water, and drove, dragged and rolled hundreds of trucks, tractors and even tanks out to the end of the jetty along with thousands of cases of Coca Cola (1947’s equivalent of tea), bale upon bale of brand-new clothing and countless other treasures, and deep-sixed it all, creating an underwater junkyard that draws SCUBA-diving tourists to the island to this day, to a destination since named “Million-Dollar Point.” For good measure, the ungenerous Americans even blew up the jetty after they had completed their exercise in wanton destruction. At least, uniquely in this case, the Americans actually owned what they destroyed. And they performed their misdeed very much in the public eye, for all to see.

Doing this sort of thing after a major war might be dismissed as merely a materialistic tantrum little worse than that of the piqued child who gathers up his marbles and runs off home.

But doing this sort of thing before a major war could incline the thoughtful observer to see cause and effect.

This is much more serious than marbles. America could greatly improve the lot of humanity by desisting from such behavior. If it isn’t already too late.

October 13, 2023 - Posted by aletho | Timeless or most popular | United States