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.
cute edit to your op to seem more salient there, i just noticed
"real world systems of bourgeois nation states" are related to the abstract concept of nationhood. the USSR fostered the known elements of bourgeois nations within its constituent republics, a national language, culture, and borders. it was expected that solidarity and socialism could hold these nations together despite that, and it probably would have if the Union at large had not faltered.
gasp i edited something to clarify my meaning? How shocking
The USSR was composed of bourgeois nation states? You sure about that one? Pretty sure they were worker republics and more like provinces or administrative regions within a greater socialist union. You want to revise your error here?
The concept of "nations" in the vague sense of "peoples" has existed for thousands of years. It is not the same as making a Modern Liberal State which was created in the Modern Era. Stop conflating things. The USSR was not a Modern Liberal State nor was it composed of them.
where is my error? the formation of bourgeois nation states was predicated on the establishment of discrete borders, a national cultural programme, and a national language. the "french" were 20 dialects within a smattering of medieval bordergore before the national project establishing one language on the parisian dialect to be taught in obligatory schools, governmental centralization, and a sponsorship of a national culture that dominated their minorities.
in the west we called this 'modernization' and the soviet union emulated it to a much more merciful degree creating many autonomous carve-outs. but they still followed the rubric because that's what 'nations' are understood to be. by no means was the national question handled perfectly, look at central asia, but we're talking in different languages if we cannot agree on what nationalism actually means. which in the soviet union meant the republics speaking different languages lol
the error is that you are now conflating 3 things, not just 2. You are also saying that a Liberal Nation State (bourgeois state) is the same as a Socialist Worker's Republic (proletarian state) just because they both have discrete borders and language - completely disregarding what a state is, a massive bureaucratic organization of violence with very specific functions.
Separate from both of these is the abstract concept that has existed for thousands and thousands of years, through all of recorded human history, of various "peoples" or "nations" in this broad historical sense. These are not talking about states. The people of Galicia are a nation, and the people of Crimea are a nation, the Russian speaking people of the Donbas are a nation and there are many nations within the border of the so-called "Ukraine" nation state.
I don't agree at all that Ukraine has any right to Bourgeois Liberal Statehood. When we talk about the ideology of Nationalism, we are talking about the creation of Nation States. You know this, I know this, the reactionaries of Ukraine know this. Let's stop being cute about this and playing word games. Stop talking about Nationalism in connection to "peoples" and "historical nations" because it is not connected, the connection between the two is entirely contrived and artificial. Ukrainian Nationalists do not care about the peoples of Crimea, or the peoples of the Donbas, etc. so why are you pretending like they do? The Ukrainian Nationalists have more connection to 1945 German Nazis than they do to the peoples of the Ukraine. It's a western imported reactionary project, like I said.
the defining characteristic between the Ukrainian SR and the Ukrainian 'Republic' is the class character of the state, not necessarily how the state was expressed. pre-bourgeois states have engaged in national programmes emulating nationalism without relinquishing the class control of the feudal aristocracy, the soviet republics engaged in national projects without the class control of the bourgeoisie. but the expression of the programme crosses these class lines, the soviet republics enforced national language, they enforced legislative power of national blocs. there literally were not borders where tajik was not the language vs. uzbek or kyrgyz before the soviet union, it was all extremely porous and what could've been considered ethnic groups (tajik-speaking city-dwellers present across the whole region) were simply assimilated to the new national borders. this is nationalism, and frankly unavoidable in the historical moment but i cannot see how it is essentially different when workers decide it has to happen instead of the bourgeoisie.
i'm open to an ultraleft perspective that moves that no people have that right
but in the context of a conflict with a different bourgeois state their subordination is neither a historical necessity or justified on these grounds. Ukraine ought to be denazified, by force. but "It doesn't "need" to exist in any sense" is going too far and carrying too much water for great russian chauvinism.
what the hell we were even talking about. sans nazis the ukraine/russian relationship in the USSR, even post break-up before the coup was amicable, my view is that they can get along without russia controlling them, when the US stops propping up a regime that refuses to be amicable. even in a bourgeois context nations with historical emnity can cooperate instead of fighting when conditions are right
I think you will instead find that the Ukrainian Nationalists will ride this war until no Ukraine exists anymore because they will never comply with forced neutrality and not joining NATO. It will be their attempt at building a fascist western nation state that becomes their undoing, just like the German nationalists sowed the seeds of their own destruction with their aggression and genocidal methods. Their striving so hard for their little ethnostate will result in no state.
What is under the control of the Ukrainian state will keep shrinking over time until they agree to surrender, which may not be until they reach Kiev or Galicia. The people of the Donbas will be Russian, not Ukrainian. The people of Crimea will be Russian, not Ukrainian. Oblast after Oblast will become Russian not Ukrainian until the Nazis in Kiev give up and I don’t know if they will until it’s far too late.
The Ukrainian people will still exist, but as Russians. As a people within the Russian federation like the Chechens.
I’m neutral on this from a nationhood point of view, and in fact I think we have seen clearly Russia is a better steward of autonomy of the Crimean and Donbas people than Ukraine was so the change in borders is a positive.
Where bourgie states draw their borders is irrelevant. I don’t see line moving as innately bad or good if it’s between two bourgie states it depends on the context.
Exactly unlike the Iraqis and Afghans the people of the oblasts governed by ukrainianism will have the choice. Will they become more like siberians, uralians, novgordians or the people of the kuban? Or will they languish under western debt and exploitation for an national idenity that verabted out of austro-hungarian galicia?