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

If you have evidence of Israeli crimes and atrocities that you wish to preserve, there is a thread here in which to do so.

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.

          • pooh [she/her, love/loves]@hexbear.netEnglish
            12·
            3 months ago

            A couple of things:

            1. Using “transgenders” as a noun like that comes off as dehumanizing and is more often than not derogatory. I know this wasn’t your intent there, but it clearly bothers people and so is something important to be aware of.

            2. I know how easy it is to feel defensive, but just getting angry at people for calling it out isn’t very helpful. There’s no shame in doing self-crit and admitting you weren’t aware, and I think most people would appreciate a willingness to understand and learn.

            EDIT: I should mention that I once posted an article that had a full-blown transphobic rant because I was half-awake and didn’t read it all the way to the end. I deleted it and apologized as soon as someone pointed it out, but I still feel kinda embarrassed. So what I did was way worse than the above post, but I suppose important thing was learning from the mistake.

              • ashinadash [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
                10·
                3 months ago

                Editing the original post to say “idk anymore ffs” and saying “+5 cynism” in response to this is a massive L. The removed comment is absolutely terrible, self crit time please.

      • SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
        63·
        3 months ago

        it makes sense from the perspective of their interests but from an internationalist perspective, it’s very bad form to say “I’m willing to unconditionally vote for you and thus endorse your policies of murdering and impoverishing millions abroad so long as my interests are satisfied by this arrangement.” You will win many fewer friends abroad with this “I will instantly sell you out, without even making real demands of my leadership, if I perceive that I will benefit” mentality, when international solidarity is more important than ever.

        so in a certain sense I can’t “blame” them, I understand their motivations perfectly well given the Republican threat, but that doesn’t make the endorsement not shitty and a counterproductive plan in the medium-to-long term, as per Gramsci:

        The concept of the “lesser evil,” most relativizing, can be conceived as this kind of apologia. There is always a lesser evil than the previous lesser evil, a greater danger in comparison to the previous greater danger. Each greater evil becomes lesser in comparison with an even greater one, and so on indefinitely.

        This turns out to be nothing more than the form taken by the process of adaptation to a regressive movement, such that while reaction proceeds efficiently, the antithetical force is determined to capitulate progressively, in small stages, and not all at once. If it were otherwise, the condensed psychological effect might give rise to an active competing force, or to a reinforcement of it if such a force already existed.

        • mkultrawide [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
          46·
          3 months ago

          but from an internationalist perspective, it’s very bad form to say “I’m willing to unconditionally vote for you and thus endorse your policies of murdering and impoverishing millions abroad so long as my interests are satisfied by this arrangement.”

          It literally reinforces the reactionaries in the Global South who say that the “LGBT agenda” is a tool of oppression of the Global North.

        • carpoftruth [any, any]@hexbear.netMEnglish
          21·
          3 months ago

          , it’s very bad form to say “I’m willing to unconditionally vote for you and thus endorse your policies of murdering and impoverishing millions abroad so long as my interests are satisfied by this arrangement.”

          I mean yes, but let’s be real here - the American electorate is completely politically ignorant and at the level of the broad electorate, has literally no understanding or care for the rest of the world of any kind. There’s nothing magic about pronouns or gender affirming surgery that makes one understand US imperialism more just because someone is trans. I agree that it’s bad form, but how many American advocacy groups of any kind whatsoever acknowledge America’s role as imperial hegemon over the rest of the world? A tiny handful, not many at all.

          Its absolutely fair to shit on shitlibs for being shitlibs, but it isn’t fair to expect a more sophisticated understanding of imperialism and the importance of international solidarity from trans people/trans advocacy orgs just because they are trans. As I’ve said here many times, the collective American electorate has literally no interest in anything outside the borders of America. American imperialism and foreign policy has not been a meaningful driver of American electoralism for 3 generations.

      • Yor [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
        45·
        3 months ago

        I do blame them because it’s more than just what can she do for us. Harris is now playing around with being better than Biden on Palestine, but only after fumbling so badly and desperately needing to fix what she did. How will she be as time goes on? Her position at this time is not even good yet.

        Also let’s not forget her track record when being an attorney general too (which included being shitty to trans people in prisons). At the end of day, juxtaposed to Biden, I’m sure it’s nice at first to have someone who can from words and isn’t actively dying, but she’s a snake like all the rest and buying into that at the expense at who she will hurt is bad. Sure, trans voters have power, but imo this is fumbling that power and not having true solidarity