Image is of one of Ireland’s only manned navy ships, the Samuel Beckett. Image sourced from this BBC article.
Putler has been HUMILIATED by the Kursk offensive and this proves that Russia’s army is in tatters and unable even to defend its own territory. However, it is simultaneously true that Russia poses an existential threat to countries thousands of miles away, as this recent Politico article demonstrates. Ireland - a country that immediately springs to mind as one surrounded by enemies - is being bullied due to its lack of military.
Despite bearing responsibility for 16 percent of the EU’s territorial waters, and the fact that 75 percent of transatlantic undersea cables pass through or near Irish waters, Ireland is totally defenseless. And I mean completely unable to protect critical infrastructure, or even pretend to secure its own borders. […] Ireland’s “navy” of six patrol vessels is currently operating with one operational ship due to chronic staff shortages. […] Ireland simply has no undersea capabilities. How could it, when it barely spends 0.2 percent of GDP on security and defense? And it has, in effect, abdicated responsibility for protecting the Europe’s northwestern borders.
For all we know, the dreaded sea-people from the Bronze Age Collapse could soon emerge from the North Atlantic.
Unfortunately, things are even worse up in the skies. Ireland has no combat jets, and it’s the only country in Europe that can’t monitor its own airspace due to the lack of primary radar systems. Instead, the country has outsourced its security to Britain in a technically secret agreement between Dublin and London, which effectively cedes control over Irish air space to the Royal Air Force. This must be the luck of the Irish — smile and get someone else to protect you for free.
While this is very silly, rearmament has long been a part of US imperial strategy on an economic level. Desai, discussing the US imperial strategy in the WW2 period:
By 1947 […] the domestic postwar consumer boom was nearing its end. While financing exports became more urgent, the 1946 elections returned a Congress unlikely to approve further loans. Now the Truman Administration concocted the ‘red menace’ to ‘scare the hell out of the country’, enunciated the Truman Doctrine of US support for armed resistance to ‘subjugation’ which launched the cold war, and Congress granted $400 million to prevent left-wing triumphs in Greece and Turkey in 1947.
One reading of history states that the US was so intimidated by the USSR that this forced a policy of massive arms production even outside of official wartime. Why this arms production is not occurring today can be puzzling, and (very reasonably) explained by neoliberals exporting industrial production overseas. However, a different historical reading can explain both the first Cold War, and the ongoing situation in which American weaponry is being almost purposefully given in insufficient numbers to give Ukraine a chance of victory and thus only prolonging their suffering (while generating massive profit for the military-industrial complex):
In this sense the Cold War was not the cause of US imperial policy but its effect. It combined financing exports with fighting combined development by national capitalisms as well as communism. When such ‘totalitarian regimes’ threatened ‘free peoples’, ‘America’s world economic responsibilities’ included aid to countries battling them.
By selling massively expensive weapons to Europe, America could simultaneously guarantee export markets for its industries, trap Europe into reliance on American industries at the expense of their own, and divert European funds away from constructing factories which could compete with American ones. Providing a way to defend against Soviet communism (and now Russian “imperialism”) is merely a happy side-effect, and so the lack of effectiveness of American weaponry is causing no great panic among the military-industrial complex, nor an urgent plan to quintuple artillery shell production or Patriot missile production - the deals for F-35s and such are still there, and they are what matter.
The COTW (Country of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific country every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied nations. If you’ve wanted to talk about the country or share your experiences, but have never found a relevant place to do so, now is your chance! However, don’t worry - this is still a general news megathread where you can post about ongoing events from any country.
The Country of the Week is Ireland! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
Please check out the HexAtlas!
The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week’s thread is here.
Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA daily-ish reports on Israel’s destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia’s youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don’t want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it’s just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists’ side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR’s former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR’s forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster’s telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a ‘propaganda tax’, if you don’t believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
Do we know why the “Iron Dome” (of course they had to give their missile defense system a name with the most fash vibes ever) has been eating so much shit lately? It used to work as advertised back when th resistance was firing a couple of missiles from Gaza once in a while but now it routinely fails.
Is it just a shitty system only capable of dealing with a few small unguided missiles at a time that was over-hyped all the time, are they running low on interceptor missiles or has the resistance come up with some sort of countermeasures?
they named it after a fash essay by jabotinsky called “the iron wall”. the thrust of this essay was “if we put the Arabs on the other side of an iron wall, maybe in 3 generations they won’t be so mad anymore?”
“if we simply put them in a concetration camp, they’ll stop being mad at us”
utterly deranged
I don’t think he believed it as he was writing it… he was just hoping the Zionist military domination was so thorough that Palestinians would either be too dead or too desperate that they would abandon hope and submit. he was just throwing a bone to the more squeamish Zionists who (through pure delusion) thought there was a more humane way to colonize Palestine. he correctly acknowledged this was ridiculous, but instead of giving him any sort of moral pause he goes “if you think Zionism is immoral then you shouldn’t have become a Zionist. checkmate liberal.”
I have read a lot of jabotinsky (he wrote in a lot of languages, it’s hard to get everything he wrote together) - his stuff shows basically the difference between opinions and actual comprehension. The man had a lot of opinions, a single one of which proved to be right (the only way for zionism to work as intended is violence, because the palestinians like any other colonized people will never voluntary accept colonialism).
He was a racist (dont let his professions to the contrary fool you!) and eclectic liberal with not many principles (I know, I know) and had no issues politically cooperating with fascism, which he had previously condemned, once it became convenient for him - look up his collab with
more like yappatinsky am I riht?
I have read a lot of jabotinsky (he wrote in a lot of languages, it’s hard to get everything he wrote together) - his stuff shows basically the difference between opinions and actual comprehension. The man had a lot of opinions, a single one of which proved to be right (the only way for zionism to work as intended is violence, because the palestinians like any other colonized people will never voluntary accept colonialism).
He was a racist (dont let his professions to the contrary fool you!) and eclectic liberal with not many principles (I know, I know) and had no issues politically cooperating with fascism, which he had previously condemned, once it became convenient for him - look up his collab with
Nobody has mentioned the most crucial thing. Hezbollah has spent the last 10 months (ya rabb it has been 10 months of this 😭) carrying out a strategy of “blinding the enemy.” All those videos of them destroying radars and sigint (signals intelligence) equipment has left the US-israelis having to rely on AWACS and drones to achieve their spying but neither of those are adequate to pick up projectiles in the air.
In order to track a projectile and successfully shoot it out of the sky, AD needs to have enough advance notice to pick it up. The only radars that still work have been pulled back away from the border. With so many of zio data collection equipment being destroyed, it makes sense why the zio interceptors are so terrible.
This in conjunction with the fact Hezbollah has far superior weapons to the Hamas rockets, more of those weapons, and that the plastic dome interception rate was a lie from the start.
That’s what my understanding is at least.
Yeah they basically fired them all back in October.
All of the above, probably
Nope. The Iron Dome never worked as advertised. Back when it was said to be “working”, it’s because Palestinians were mostly firing tiny, unguided rockets which were full of fertilizer. They hit random places and created potholes and minor structural damage like broken windows. Israelis could basically just hit the dirt and be safe, but they also have bomb shelters literally everywhere and had plenty of forewarning to get into them. An explosion in the sky does not equate to an effective interception. The Iron dome was always 99.9% propaganda.
Iron Dome or Iron Sieve? Evidence Questions Effectiveness of U.S.-Funded Israeli Missile Shield