AN EXISTENTIAL THREAT FOR EACH

On By rebelbreezeIn Current Affairs Comment, Imperialism, Indigenous or Original People, Middle East, National Liberation, National Sovereignty, Palestine, Political Analysis, US Imperialism, ZionismLeave a comment

Diarmuid Breatnach

(Reading time: 8 mins.)

As we face the possible escalation of an extended regional war in West Asia it is worthwhile to consider what’s at stake for some of the various ‘players’.

‘Israel’ constantly claims existential threats to its state but Iran has stated the same with regard to attacks upon it by the US and ‘Israel’. The Resistance in Palestine and in Lebanon have also spoken in those terms with regard to themselves.

It might seem that the US is the only major participant in the wars in Western Asia which is not itself threatened existentially. However, in a sense it too is facing a kind of existential threat, the threat to its continuing existence as a superpower.

Dr. Mohamad Hasan Sweidan, one of the panel of regular news updates on YouTube for The Cradle online media regularly states that in reality, all of the principal actors are indeed fighting a threat to their existence, though the weight of threat being of varying degrees for each.

The ‘Israeli’ state

The Zionist state of ‘Israel’ came into being in 1948 as a Zionist-led European settler project to impose itself on the indigenous Palestinian people of all ethnic groups. Supported by the USA, Zionism gathered force since 1945 to the full-blown terror and ethnic cleansing of the 1948 Nakba.1

Despite claims of recovering ancestral lands, the culture of Ashkenazi colonisers and their languages were European, not West Asian, in keeping with their origin. Citizenship was opened to any Jewish person around the world but not to the Arab Palestinians who had been driven out.

The Zionist state is of course completely dependent on western imperialism for its defence and its very he existence. But ‘Israel’ is not content with that alone and in the logic of all settler colonialism, is constantly fighting wars of expansion with its neighbours.2

The location of this settler colony makes it of important political and military value to western imperialism and in particular to the USA superpower. It is a dagger at the throat of West Asian sovereignty, let alone socialism and in the region is totally free of both those dangers internally.

The settler colony is never secure until it has either wiped out the indigenous people or totally broken their resistance and scattered them. Consequently the indigenous people will resist and if they can, logically, aided by their threatened neighbours, will overthrow the occupation.

Therefore the Zionist State is truthfully facing an existential threat.

The Resistance

The Resistance to imperialism and Zionism in West Asia is wide and multi-faceted but for the purpose of this examination we’ll look at sum of the factions inside Palestine, both Islamic and secular factions as one Resistance; and Hizbollah and political allies in Lebanon as another.

Because of its practices, its origins and attitudes to the cultures of West Asia, ‘Israel’ is viewed by Palestinians and most people of the region as an occupier. It has functioned as a proxy of imperialism, particularly the US variety, in the region since it came into being.

Like settler colonies in general, the Zionist state has been expanding its territory since its inception.

It has also waged war on its neighbours for most of its existence: 1948 against Palestinians and Arab states, 1950s-1960s against the Palestinian Resistance; with France and UK against Egypt (Suez) 1956; 1967 against Egypt, Jordan, Syria; 1973 against Egypt and Syria.

And in 1971-1982 in South Lebanon.3 In September 2024 it attacked Lebanon with assassinations and exploding pagers and in December of that year, invaded Syria4 (though it had regularly bombed it previously) and attacked Iran (during peace negotiation) in February 2026.

The Zionist military carried out a great number of major attacks within Palestine including against the West Bank and Gaza in between what the Zionists call ‘mowing the lawn’, i.e. regular assassinations, raids, arrests and imprisonment of hostages.

The attitude of the ‘Israeli’ occupation to the Palestinian resistance is typified in its attitude to Hamas, the political party elected by significant majority across Palestine in 2006: it totally rejects the people’s choice and attempts to eliminate it in Gaza through economic and military means.

In the West Bank the Occupation’s proxy, the Palestine Authority refused to accede to the popular vote and collaborates with the Occupation, even though the even more extreme elements in ‘Israeli’ government and society despise it, regularly denouncing it and calling for its elimination.

The PA represses criticism by Palestinians in the West Bank, jails critics and fighters, sets them up for ‘Israeli’ jailing and has even murdered Resistance fighters.

‘Israel’ and the US are in concert attempting to use elements of the Lebanese Government against Hizbollah and political parties close to or friendly with them, attempting to turn the Lebanese Army to that purpose. Were they to succeed this would result in another Lebanese civil war.

It is a fact that the state of ‘Israel’ has no formal borders, except where its present territory reaches the borders of Egypt and Jordan.5 The ‘Greater Israel’ concept6 and Zionist aspiration exceeds far beyond even those,7 including Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and swathes of Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

Many Israeli political leaders including Ze’ev Jabotinsky,8 Menachem Begin9 and Benjamin Netanyahu, Smotrich and Ben-Gvir10 have openly promoted the ‘Greater Israel’ (sic) concept as an objective and seems to have the support of US foreign policy and the ‘Israeli’ opposition.11

In all ‘peace’ proposals the ‘Israeli’ establishment seeks the ‘disarmament’ of the Lebanese and Palestinian Resistance, while itself remaining the most heavily armed state in the whole of West Asia, the only one with a nuclear weapon and a long history of committing massacres and genocide.

Hizbullah and the Palestine Resistance are therefore indeed facing an existential threat.

Image by D. Breatnach

The USA

The USA is the chief world imperialist power and in order to maintain that position has a number of requirements, among which are that it can direct or at least influence events around most of the world and that its military might is seen as impossible to defend against.

The Warsaw Pact bloc, a former impediment to expansion of US dominance has gone, though the Russian Federation remains. However the rising economic power of China already threatens the world dominance of the US imperialist ruling class.

But it has faced a new threat to its hegemony of West Asia. Although the non-compliant regimes there of Iraq and Syria (and Libya in North Africa) have been overthrown, US influence in Iran12 had been defeated by uprisings and founding of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979.

Despite war against the Republic (1980-’88) by then western-supported Saddam Hussein, the Islamic Republic survived and supplied resistance organisations in Lebanon and in Palestine with weapons.

The US failed to subdue Iran with decades of sanctions or to instigate popular or separatist insurrection against the ruling elite during unprovoked attack in February, having to accept the stability of the Republic and to agree to ceasefire terms, losing much of its mythos of invincibility.

Not only were its military installations in West Asia shown to be vulnerable but they became regular targets in retaliation for US strikes against Iran. Client regimes began to wonder whether they could even afford to have such failed protection US military bases on their soil.

The repercussions of that will extend right around the World.

Iran

The Islamic Republic of Iran came into existence in 1979 in a revolution against the Pahlavi monarchy, its repressive Savak secret police and against Iran’s client status of US imperialism (such that the CIA’s head office for the whole of West Asia was located there).

The revolution found the CIA desperately shredding their spy documents (many of which were later painstakingly stuck back together by the Iranian revolutionaries). The revolutionary leadership and its followers were immediately targeted by imperialism, in particular by the USA.

The imperialists instigated Saddam Hussein (at the time their client) to have Iraq invade Iran in a war which lasted eight years during which 188,015 to 217,489 Iranians were killed (about 70 people per day).13 Hussein used gas attacks14 as well as bullets and explosives.

In addition, US imperialism has imposed sanctions on Iran since 1979, which is to say threatened sanctions on any state prepared to sell to or trade with the Islamic Republic and these have had a heavy negative impact on the population, in particular in the area of health treatment.15

In January 2026 the USA manipulated currency trading and the value of the Iranian rial fell. Protest demonstrations took place which Israeli and US intelligence operatives in places turned into armed attacks on police, government buildings and even some place of religious worship.

The Iranian authorities issued figures of 3,117 killed during the disturbances,16 which included civilians and agents acting under foreign direction, without identifying which was which. A significant number of those killed were State employees, including public security and police.

Sources sympathetic to the West have issued a range of fatal casualty numbers, rising to 36,000. It does not seem possible to separate real figures from propaganda, certainly of Western sources and possibly too of the Iranian State.

However the involvement of agents working for foreign powers to destabilise Iran has been established, not only in results of raids by Iranian State security forces but also in statements by US and ‘Israeli’ authorities17 and in admissions of Starlink-linked devices smuggled into Iran.18

Trump admitted that the US had supplied weapons to Iranian Kurdish pro-independence groups at this time also and complained that the Kurds had failed to use them against the US. Probably Baluchistan separatists were similarly urged to rise but did not do so in any numbers.19

The presence of foreign agents in Iran was also evident not only by intelligence possessed by the aggressors during the following war but also by when drones were launched against targets in Iran from within the country.

‘Israel’ accompanied by the USA,on 28 February, during negotiations, assassinated the religious and political supreme leader, Ali Khamenei and others, along with families and launched air strikes across Iran, including killing 124 schoolgirls with their teachers in a ‘double-tap’ strike.

The USA is too far away for a retaliatory strike but their military assets are distributed around the Gulf and Iran’s response struck those hard, US defences proving inadequate in action. Iran also closed the Strait of Hormuz, cutting the flow of essential gas and oil from the region to the West.

The US was forced to negotiate and to agree to Iranian terms in a Memorandum of Understanding for peace talks, most of which the US has yet to carry out in practice and much of which it has violated. But it is difficult to see what final options it has other than compliance.

The intentions of US imperialism to the Islamic Republic of Iran are irremediably hostile, proven in sanctions, assassinations, war, subversion attempts, rhetoric and threats, wishing the Iranian revolutionary regime overthrown and Iran dismembered, i.e. indeed an existential threat to Iran.

CONCLUSION

The mutual existential threats of antagonists do not usually cancel each other out. Rather, one of the antagonists must fall. Liberal solutions of ‘peace’ between them are illusory and chasing such mirages is not only fruitless but diverts attention from the necessary resolution.

In fact, wars where none of the antagonists feel they can afford to give way are complicated and very hard to resolve.

In the short term, for relative peace in Western Asia, both the US imperialists and the Israeli Zionists need to be severely weakened and those who wish for that relative peace must logically wish success to the struggles of the Islamic Republic of Iran and of the Resistance organisations.

In the medium term, the existence of the state of ‘Israel’ needs to cease and the democratic state of Palestine to come into being with US Imperialism weakened further or overthrown.

The ruling class of the strengthened Iran will need to see how they can manage Iran’s new status and the Resistance organisations how they develop and grow their respective nations as independent and sovereign states.

In the longer term, new threats and new conflicts will emerge throughout the world. As long as capitalism exists, parts of it will grow into monopoly capitalism and that in turn will seek to maximise its profits by venturing abroad in competition and/or in coercion.

End.

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FOOTNOTES & SOURCES

1During the 1948 Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”), approximately 750,000 to one million Palestinians were displaced from their homes, and an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 Palestinians were killed.

More than 80% of the Palestinian population living in the territory that became Israel was forced to leave.At least 530 villages and towns were destroyed or depopulated.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency reports that this initial displacement grew into an ongoing crisis, with nearly 6 million Palestinian refugees registered today. Historians and organizations generally estimate that 10,000 to 15,000 Palestinians were killed. Deaths occurred during combat, in dozens of targeted massacres, and from the general violence of the war.

2https://thecradle.co/articles/israels-permanent-security-doctrine-turns-war-into-the-states-condition

3From 16 to 18 September 1982, the IOF’s proxy, the Lebanese Forces, one of the main Christian militias in Lebanon, massacred between 1,300 and 3,500 civilians—mostly Palestinians and Lebanese Shias — in the Sabra neighbourhood of Beirut and in the nearby Shatila refugees camp, with the support of the IOF. 

4As the Syrian regime collapsed in early December 2024.

5https://campaigns.acri.org.il/50yearsen/

6https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Israel

7https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Greater_israel.jpg

8An early leading Zionist ideologue and activist.

9Leader of Zionist terrorist group Irgun, founder of political parties Herut and Likud, Prime Minister of ‘Israel’ 1977-1983.

10Respectively in order: Leader of Likud party of current ‘Israel’ government coalition; leader of Religious Zionist Party and current Finance Minister since 2022;  National Security Minister since 2022, leader of Otzma Yehudit (“Jewish Power”), an Israeli far-right, Kahanist and anti-Arab party which won six seats in the 2022 legislative election and is part of the thirty-seventh government of Israel (Wikipedia).

11https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/26/what-is-greater-israel-and-how-popular-is-it-among-israelis

12 Formerly referred to internationally as ‘Persia’ until 1935.

13https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23981159/

14Western media were not interested at the time – Hussein was attacking Iran and was therefore one of ‘the good guys’. Journalists who tried to get western media to cover the wiping out of a Kurdish village Halabja by gas attack in 1982 were getting nowhere. However, many years later, when the Saddam Hussein had switched and started defying the western imperialists, western media suddenly found the story valuable even though years old by then.

15https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanitarian_impacts_of_U.S._sanctions_against_Iran

16https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/5/questions-after-irans-government-releases-victim-list-in-protest-killings (Qatar-based Al Jazeera, while hostile to Israeli Zionism, is also hostile to the Islamic Republic of Iran. However other online sources I found in a quick search were even worse.)

17https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/1/14/iran-accuse-foreign-intelligence-behind-protest-movement

18https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgzk91leweo and https://www.aa.com.tr/en/science-technology/us-sent-thousands-of-starlink-terminals-to-iran-after-january-protest-crackdown-report/382849

19https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/trump-claims-he-disagreed-with-arming-kurds-against-iran-ill-remember-that-kurds/

“AIRPORT FOR AIRPORT, PORT FOR PORT, BLOCKADE FOR BLOCKADE”

On By rebelbreezeIn Current Affairs Comment, History, Imperialism, National Liberation, National Sovereignty, Political Analysis, Popular ResistanceLeave a comment

Diarmuid Breatnach

(Reading time main text: 5 mins.)

The words are those addressed to Saudi Arabia’s Monarchy by the Ansar Allah leadership of Yemen. They indicate a coming change in the whole of Yemen, responding to a changing of the balance of power in the rest of West Asia.

Ansar Allah went on to list the Saudi airports, ports and oil facilities within reach of Yemen’s missiles.1 And as of 20th July, Ansar Allah announced a maritime blockade of Saudi Arabia.2

The Yemenis were responding to an attempt by Saudi military planes to enforce its blockade of Ansar Allah’s Yemen by preventing through bombing an Iranian plane landing at Sanaa Airport on 13th July.3

The Saudi bombing of Ansar Allah’s Sanaa Airport. (Photo sourced: Internet)

The follow-up was a bombing of the Saudi airport in retaliation for the Saudi bombing of Sanaa along with hitting two Saudi tankers on 22nd July for ‘violating the blockade.’ The Saudis foolishly bombed Hodeidah port in retaliation and the Yemeni’s response in turn is still burning days later.

Yemen’s Ansar Allah bombed Saudi’s AramCo oil installation with a black smoke plume visible from cameras in space causing damage which may take years to repair.

The 13th July Iranian passenger flight to prevent which the Saudis bombed Sanaa Airport had challenged a 12-year long Saudi blockade, Mohamed al-Bukhaiti, senior official and politburo member of the Ansar Allah Government explained recently.

Speaking in a ‘Rock the Cradle’ podcast interview by Sharmine Narwani4 of The Cradle online media, al-Bukhaiti revealed that in discussions with Iranian and Omani government figures it had been decided to send a plane to collect Yemen’s delegation for Iran’s Supreme Leader’s funeral.

Those discussions took account of the changing power relations in West Asia, al-Bukhaiti related, the rise of Iran as a regional power challenging the imperialist domination of US and of its client states, of which the Saudi Arabian rulers are a prime example.

No doubt the falling out between former regional partners-in-crimes Saudi Arabia and the UAE also seemed to present a good opportunity for Yemen to break out from their joint blockade.5

But al-Bukhaiti stated that Ansar Allah had been preparing for that challenge when the October 7th 2023 breakout by the Palestinian resistance had occurred and shifted their focus into solidarity action with Palestine instead, bombarding ‘Israel’ at different junctures from 2024 to 2025.

Yemen’s Ansar Allah acting directly against ‘Israel’ due to latter’s genocide in Gaza 2024/ 2015 (Cartoon by D.Breatnach)

RECENT YEMENI MOBILISATION

That some kind of initiative was planned by the Ansarallah Government was evident when it recently organised and called for national mobilisations but also when an Ansar Allah attack was reported on a Saudi occupying military outpost 3-5 July, killing 14 occupation soldiers.6

Prior to the bombing of Sanaa Airport, the specific purpose of the internal preparation by mobilisations was unclear, nor was it clear whether the short military action was a prelude to further action, a probe or limited action under a local command.

But after Ansar Allah’s declaration of intention to break the blockade and to respond in kind to any military attack or blockade of their country, it seems likely that their Government will not be content with a relaxation in the application of sanctions but intends the liberation of all Yemen.

It seems clear that Yemen’s actions now are based on what is widely seen as a new balance of forces in West Asia, with western imperialism and in particular its chief, the USA, in decline while much of the axis of Resistance – in particular Iran, Yemen and Hizbollah – are in ascendant.

But according to Prof. Mohamad Hasan Sweidan on The Cradle’s news round-up podcast on YouTube,7 Yemen is also ensuring that it is a participant in the ongoing war in the region and will therefore be a party to its ending, with attendant benefits for Yemen and its people.

Trump of course has threatened to attack Yemen, though it’s difficult to see what different result he can expect a from his previous bombing campaign of March-April 2025 from which he had to walk away on May 6th without success but the loss of many Reaper drones and two fighter aircraft.8

Saudi Arabia has been joining a consortium to free the Red Sea ports from the Ansar Allah blockade. Most of the Gulf States included do not have a navy and only three members can contribute much9 Pakistan, Egypt and Turkiye. The EU has wisely stayed out.

However, some members such as Nigeria could contribute substantial ground troops. And Saudi Arabia is reported about to attack Ansar Allah on land too.10

Huge plume of smoke from Saudi Arabia’s Aramco refinery in Jazan after being hit in retaliation by Ansar Allah’s Yemini missiles. (Photo cred: Getty Images)

THE FALSE ‘GOVERNMENT OF YEMEN’

When we read of the ‘Government of Yemen’ in the mass western media11 it may surprise some that the entity to which being referred is not at all what one would think with such a title. It is in fact nothing but a proxy of Saudi Arabia and of the western imperialists, the USA chief among those.

The real Government of Yemen in effect is actually Ansar Allah, to which the aforesaid media tend to refer as ‘the Houthis’, controlling 75% of Yemen’s population12 with strong internal societal allegiance, something that cannot be said for the region under the proxy ‘Government’.

If we acknowledge Ansar Allah as a national state, which it clearly is, we must also acknowledge that it was the only state in the world that has taken clear physical action to end the Zionist genocide of the Palestinians, which it did without any interests of its own in its attack on ‘Israel’ in 2024-’25.

On behalf of the Zionist State, the US in 2025 sent two aircraft carriers near to Yemen and bombarded the country but had to retire its ships further and further away from Yemeni defences, lost a number of piloted aircraft and drones13 and Trump soon gave in and pulled out on 6th May.

PAKISTAN THREAT?

In what seem to be promising prospects for Ansarallah in particular and the people of West Asia in general, Pakistan is the fly in the ointment. This is despite its Government’s strenuous efforts in pursuit of a peace deal between Iran and the USA and its publication of the agreed MOU.14

In September of last year, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia signed a mutual defence treaty, in which an attack on one will be seen as an attack on the other, obliging the first to come to the military assistance of the second.15

Whereas repulsing Saudi attacks on Yemen and even on Saudi military assistance to their proxy there might not activate the mutual defence treaty provisions, it’s hard to see how sustained attacks on Saudi Arabia itself would not, even perhaps if in justified retaliation for attacks on Yemen.

However Prof. Sweidan observes that with the USA’s breaking of agreements and commitments, these generally are not being taken as seriously as used be the case and he predicts that, having nothing to gain from military intervention, Pakistan will let the Saudis fight Yemen alone.

End.

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APPENDIX: BRIEF HISTORY OF YEMEN

(Reading time: one min.)

The land of Yemen has an ancient history16 but at the end of the 19th and early 20th Centuries, had come under control of the Ottoman Empire with the British maintaining a mercantile imperialist foothold through the East India Company, officially extended by the victorious British after WWI.

A national liberation struggle forced the British to abandon their occupation of south-eastern Yemen and the port of Aden in 1967, to be replaced by the Marxist People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, known as South Yemen, under the patronage of the USSR.

After the collapse of the USSR ‘South Yemen’ and ‘North Yemen’ unified and also came under US Imperialist influence. The USS Cole bombing in Aden in 2000 by an Al Qaeda offshoot sparked a war against the latter but President Saleh prioritised a brutal war against northern Shia.

The main tribe being targeted was the Houthi.17 In 2012 the US pressured the resignation of President Saleh (with immunity from prosecution for human rights abuses) and replacement by Hadi, who in 2014 was captured with his cabinet by an Ansar Allah (leading the Houthi) offensive.

Hadi and his ministers subsequently fled to Saudi Arabia which then led a war against the Ansar Allah-controlled North Yemen, with the support of the UAE, western imperialism and the UN Security Council’s Resolution 2216.

From that date Yemen has been under UN-led sanctions supported by the western Imperialist powers and a coalition of US client Gulf states which Mohamed al-Bukhaiti stated has been hard mainly on civilians18 including a Saudi-imposed ban on flights into Sanaa Airport.

FOOTNOTES

1https://www.palestinechronicle.com/one-battle-yemens-military-announces-forthcoming-major-announcement/

2https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/yemens-houthis-declare-naval-blockade-against-saudi-arabia-statement-2026-07-20/

3The Iranian pilot avoided Sanaa but went on to land at another Yemeni airport instead.

4https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fvH1h1FzkU

5https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-growing-rift-between-saudi-arabia-and-the-uae

6https://thecradle.co/articles-id/38613

7https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDuyDX16GQM at 10.40 mins.

8At an estimated combined cost of $369.6 million.

9Pakistan, Egypt and Turkey.

10https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/middle-east/artc-saudi-arabia-prepares-offensive-against-houthis-that-could-include-ground-assault

11And even, shamefully, by Al Jazeera. And the Saudi-occupied rump of Yemen is also often characterised in the media as “the internationally-recognised Government.”

12While the Ansarallah Government controls only about a quarter of Yemen’s physical territory, their zone of administration encompasses the most densely populated urban centres in the north and west, including the capital city, Sanaa, and the critical Red Sea port of Al Hudaydah.

13Two Boeing F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter aircraft and 7 General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper combat drones (Wikipedia)

14The famed Memorandum of Understanding, a number of terms of which the USA has violated to such degree that it is no longer in operation.

15https://globalsecurityreview.com/understanding-the-pakistan-saudi-defense-agreement/

16Including coming under expansionist Persian, Arab and native rule and monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam overcoming the older tribal ones, then struggling for domination among themselves with attendant massacres and suppression.

17“Whom Saleh accuses of separatism and of trying to impose their religious orthodoxy on the state. The Houthis, in turn, complain of discrimination and disenfranchisement under Saleh’s autocratic rule. (Yemen’s population is 40-45% Zayidi Shia, with Sunni Muslims making up most of the remainder. Zayidi Shi’ism is distinct from Iran’s Shi’ism.) https://unfoundation.org/what-we-do/issues/peace-human-rights-and-humanitarian-response/yemen-a-brief-background/

18https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fvH1h1FzkU

SOURCES

Recent events: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fvH1h1FzkU&t=4s

https://apnews.com/article/yemen-houthis-airport-saudi-strikes-7bddae3006304df8bf7f89e980006b33

Understanding the Pakistan–Saudi Defense Agreement

https://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/yemen-threatens-retaliation-over-sanaa-airport-restrictions

Biased of course but interesting: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/27/world/middleeast/houthis-saudi-arabia-iran-war.html?eafs_enabled=false

Sanctions (biased UN source): https://globalsanctions.com/region/yemen/

History: https://unfoundation.org/what-we-do/issues/peace-human-rights-and-humanitarian-response/yemen-a-brief-background/

DEATH OF MUSICIAN AND DOUBLING NUMBER OF HOMELESS

On By rebelbreezeIn Capitalism, Current Affairs Comment, Housing Struggle, Ireland, SongLeave a comment

Diarmuid Breatnach

(Reading time: 3 mins.)

The death of Glen Hansard, Oscar-winning Irish musician in accident on his motorcycle in the early hours of Wednesday1 shocked and saddened many, not only in the Irish music community but among campaigners against Dublin homelessness too.

Hansard first gained fame playing Outspan Foster in The Commitments, the 1991 Alan Parker film based on Roddy Doyle’s first novel but developed his career in music, first with The Frames band, then as part of the duo The Swell Season and later as a solo artist.

Hansard, while often traveling to perform around the world, lived in both Kildare and Helsinki, home also of his wife, the poet Maire Saaritsa. Hansard won an Oscar in 2008 for the song Falling Slowly, written with musical partner Markéta Inglová2, featured in the John Carney film Once.

The musician was also one of a group of high-profile individuals who occupied the Apollo House building in a protest against homelessness and as a shelter for Dublin’s homeless in December 20163 (ironically the centenary year of the 1916 Rising against British occupation of Ireland).

In the decade since the Apollo House protest occupation, the number of homeless in Ireland has significantly more than doubled.4 Housing is of course part of the property sector in a capitalist society and the current situation benefits speculators, big landlords and financing banks.

January 2016 rally in support of Apollo House occupation in Poolbeg Street, Dublin. The large banner read ‘Homes Not Hostels.’ (Photo: D.Breatnach)

The Irish national ruling class serves those finance-capitalist interests and therefore successive governments have made no impact on the problem other than allowing it to grow. Some politicians are themselves landlords as are also a number of Gardaí and ex-Gardaí.

Clearly the Irish ruling class feels no incentive to end the homeless crisis, though it could do so, even without ending its capitalist system. Glen Hansard admitted in an interview with him I recall viewing that he had been somewhat naive in his hopes of the Apollo House occupation.

The obvious solution, restated many times, is to provide universal rented accommodation through the State and municipal authorities. The rents should be affordable, with the spread of the higher ones helping to maintain those lower income or on social welfare.

Rental income over time finances not only maintenance and repairs but also new building. Employment is provided in construction, maintenance and administration. Streets can become cleaner and safer and more attractive. Addiction problems become easier to address.

But that setup, though not destroying the capitalist system, would cut the swag-bag of the unproductive finance and property parasites so the crisis stays and grows. And the alternative Left movement is not threatening the Gombeens’ overthrow so they have no incentive to change.

Glen Hansard, Damien Dempsey and other musicians performing outside Apollo House. (Photo sourced: Internet)

Many years ago, home in Dublin on holiday from London, someone I was walking and talking with stopped a young red-haired man and they began to chat. I remarked that I had seen the man before — or had we met? Perhaps he thought I was kidding but admitted his role in The Commitments.

He mentioned The Frames also – he was Glen Hansard of course. Naturally I had seen the film in London but never heard of The Frames. As we parted company I felt a kind of disconnect from Dublin but also remarked that I hoped Hansard hadn’t thought I was ‘taking the piss.’

Decades later, as I gathered at rallies outside Apollo House (and sang at one of them) that episode did not intrude on my memory – because it was the homelessness protest upon which I was concentrated and not the famous people fronting it – but it comes to me now.

One of my brothers, Cormac, had a connection with Hansard as in August 2023 the latter requested of Dónal Lunny to play at a friend’s wedding the air of his composition Across the Hill, aired in a Seán Ó Riada Retrospective in 1987. Lunny replied he couldn’t play it but recommended Cormac.

Cormac got a trio together to play the air at the wedding but mislaid his sunglasses when leaving so had to return another day for them and they spent a short time together.

Two years later, in October 2025, Cormac met Hansard again on the occasion of the funeral mass for Manchán Magan, a gathering of many in the fields of Irish language, writing and music.

Glen Hansard (Photo sourced: Wikipedia)

Back in 2023 when Cormac had returned to Hansard looking for his sunglasses, Hansard gave him a Songbird whistle in low D made by Phil Hardy as a present.‘I can’t play it’,said Glen Hansard.‘You might as well have it.’ Cormac demurred, Glen Hansard insisted.

‘I’ll accept it,’ said Cormac eventually, ‘on condition that I record something for you, gratis, or we get together some day and record playing some music together.’ Hansard laughed. ‘That could happen’, he replied.

But now it can’t. Not on this plane of existence, anyway.

End.

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FOOTNOTES

129th July 2026.

2 Musical partner in the Swell Season duo.

3https://www.thejournal.ie/apollo-house-homeless-3144658-Dec2016/

4The number of homeless people in Ireland was approximately 6,900 in late 2016 (and around 6,189 in mid-2016), and has risen to a record high of 17,447 people in state-funded emergency accommodation as of May 2026. But there are also people ‘sofa-surfing’, facing eviction or in otherwise insecure accommodation or even sleeping on the street.

SOURCES

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/music/2026/07/29/glen-hansard-dies-in-dublin-motorbike-crash

https://www.thejournal.ie/apollo-house-homeless-3144658-Dec2016

RACIST RANTER CLAIMS HE HAS BEEN A ‘POLITICAL PRISONER’.

On By rebelbreezeIn Anti-Fascism, Current Affairs Comment, Current Event Report, IrelandLeave a comment

Clive Sulish

(Reading time: 4 mins.)

Racist Graham Carey, unfortunately familiar to many for his posted videos of himself in a vehicle or in his bedroom, ranting about various things, in particular during the Covid epidemic in Ireland, has ended up in court for his virulent racist posts.

In common with most racists, he posted lies that he invented himself or parroted those invented by others. He’d been doing that for a long time but what got him into trouble with the Law was his role in mobilising people for an attack on Finglas Garda Station back in January 2023.

A woman had reportedly been attacked in the area and the rumour quickly spread that a migrant had been responsible. Of course Irish people can and do attack women but that wouldn’t be reason for a riot – but a migrant suspected? Obviously Irish warrior Carey would have to do something!

And so did other ‘Irish Warriors’ who quickly gathered and threatened the Garda station because allegedly ‘they weren’t doing anything about it’. The Gardaí went so far as to state that the alleged assailant was Irish but of course, to Carey and Co., that was obviously a cover-up.

Carey first came to the attention of the suffering public on social media when he was screaming on his video about Covid conspiracies, ‘unreasonable’ mask-wearing requirements and travel restrictions of the time but he quickly enough progressed to rabid racism.

Carey tended to be a solo video warrior and on at least one occasion in a larger gathering, possibly with Irish Yellow Vests1 on Custom House Quay, could be seen on video making threatening moves towards a few counter-protesters but moved away when they stood their ground.

His public defiance melted quickly when arrested over the Finglas incident and social media posts, apologised to Gardaí for being in error and in his first court appearance meekly offered the judge to have his bail on condition imposed he refrain from posting any more rants on social media.

In court more recently, with a pack in the courtroom to give him immoral support, he’s got some of his spine back as one can tell from this unusually detailed report on his court hearing.2

Carey claimed he had been ‘tried by media’ and accused the Garda witness, Detective Inspector Gavin Ross of not doing his job and said “there was never a rape in Finglas, they set it up to get me” and claimed he was “a political prisoner”.

He’s also claimed in the past that MI5 were stirring up other well-known fascists and racists against him.

Antifascist counter protesters have observed on many occasions how lenient the Gardaí have been towards fascists and other racists in general but leading a mob invading a Garda station and threatening the Gardaí presumably tends to remove some of that tolerance.3

Charged with using words that were threatening, abusive or insulting and intended to or likely to stir up hatred and distribution of a recording of images or sound likely to stir up hatred, both charges which he denied, Carey was found guilty by a unanimous jury last April.

The quoted statements from a transcript of his livestream produced in court were typical Carey style: the Government is “rewarding evil” by allowing “rape-ugees” into the country “in order that they can rape our people” and this is “putting your daughters on the fucking menu for them”.

The virulent and lying content continued: “we’re here because women are being raped, Facebook want your children raped. If we don’t see this as a war, then we are going to lose the war.”

“Our own people are going to be raped by them. These are not refugees. We are going to get these fucking rapists out of here.”

“Get back to where yiz (sic) came from. Get the fuck out of here before you die on this island. If you refuse to get the fuck out of here you’re going to die on the island and we’ll fuck your bleeding corpse into the sea.”

“We are going back to the law of the land. We have enough local lads to do what has to be done.”

Carey certainly knows how to stir up some people’s fears though otherwise his level of intelligence may be in question .

When he claimed that he had not been in Finglas but rather in ‘Northern Ireland’ (sic) when he recorded his 30-minute ranting video, Carey might not have been aware that the lorry he was driving would prove he had been driving in the State jurisdiction, which it did.

More to the point, perhaps, it seems he was actually on video leading a mob into the Garda station.

The offences come with a maximum penalty of a fine of €10,000 or two years imprisonment. The court was told Carey has previous convictions for careless driving, driving while over the limit, intoxication in a public place and threatening and abusive behaviour and two speeding offences.

The intoxication while driving might well assist in producing the volume and vitriol of some of his driving cab videos.

Carey chose to defend himself but wanted legal representation when found guilty as he could be facing a prison sentence. Of course, solicitors currently are engaged in industrial action in protest at the recent flat-rate one-off payment to lawyers representing clients granted legal aid.

He has been granted three adjournments to facilitate finding legal representation but apparently continues to be unsuccessful.

It would be a pity were this rabid racist ranter able, whatever the sentence, to claim unfair treatment due to lack of legal representation. But what could a lawyer actually do to help him? Ask for mercy (in front of his support pack)? Claim a difficult childhood? Mental illness? Substance abuse?

End.

SOURCES:

https://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/graham-carey-to-be-sentenced-for-incitement-to-hatred-offences-1931021.html

1An Irish initiative piggy-backing on the French movement of the same name, it attracted a wide support until it became clear that the leadership were Islamophobic, homophobic and with racist threads within the movement.

2https://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/graham-carey-to-be-sentenced-for-incitement-to-hatred-offences-1931021.html

3  The Garda witness said that Carey stated that “if gardaí don’t get out, he wasn’t responsible for what happened in the Garda station.”

Literature that must not be forgotten

On By rebelbreezeIn Capitalism, Cultural Comment, Political Analysis, WritingLeave a comment

Gearóid Ó Loingsigh

Reprinted from author’s substack 26 July 2026 and reformatted for Rebel Breeze

(Reading time: 9 mins.)

The history of societies is the history of their ruling classes. So it comes as no surprise that we are told that Lord X built a palace, Lady Y built a garden and so forth.

The history of society is the history of great men (and the occasional woman, when she’s allowed) with those who actually do anything written out of history.

Take a tour of any stately home and you will be told that the Earl built the west wing in a given year, an incredible chippie, brickie and plumber all in one with some artistic flair to boot.

The workers who actually carried out the work are not mentioned and if it was slave labour, well let’s not go there at all.

It is the type of situation that led the great German poet and dramatist Bertolt Brecht to ask the question

Who built Thebes of the 7 gates?
In the books you will read the names of kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock ?

And Babylon, many times demolished,
Who raised it up so many times ?

In what houses of gold glittering Lima did its builders live ?
Where, the evening that the Great Wall of China was finished, did the masons go?

Great Rome is full of triumphal arches.
Who erected them ?

Over whom did the Caesars triumph ?
Had Byzantium, much praised in song, only palaces for its inhabitants ?

Of course it is not just the obvious contribution of workers to the construction of buildings no fat cat could ever build, their contribution to the world of literature and art is also deliberately ignored.

The aforementioned poem of Brecht is titled Questions From a Worker Who Reads. Brecht was well aware that in order to overthrow capitalism you have to be able to question it and reading is part of the process.

His famous quote from his poem In Praise of Learning is “Hungry man reach for the book, it is a weapon”.

It is indeed and the weapon is mightier if you think that people like you wrote it. It is partly why the history of literature is a bit like the history of stately homes, the Lords and the Ladies did everything.

No workers, no peasants, no one putting down the hammer for a minute wrote a poem or pausing the plough either.

Literature belongs to the rich, so working class writers or even just opposition writers are routinely written out of history and their literature is reserved for small literary circles and revolutionaries who have retired to the café.

Under no circumstances should it ever be read by other workers, lest the reader get the idea that they too can produce it. Of course there are lots of writers from a working class background, but they are a minority in comparison to the middle and upper classes.

Or least they are in terms of contracts with commercial publishers and libraries tend not to organise catalogues of their works, as they are not worthy of merit in the eyes of the middle class pedants who populate literary studies.

The working class writer Kit de Vaal asked where were all the working class authors and published an anthology of such authors.[1] There is no anthology of middle class or rich authors, as they are the norm, they are everywhere, ubiquitous, ever present.

Pick a book at random on a library shelf or in a book shop and you will invariably pick one written by someone who is not working class, even with non-fiction.

One thing is writing about the working class, which can be financially rewarding and lead to career advancement especially if you are already not of the working class.

But there have been many writers, written out of literary history, or relegated to specialist circles in some academic institute where increasingly the working class can be studied, but not study.

There is one Japanese author, Tajiki Kobayashi who had been on my must-read list for a long time before I eventually got around to him. His most famous novel is The Crab Cannery Ship (also translated as The Factory Ship) which is based on a real incident.

In Japan in the 1920s workers revolted on the ships where they were kept in almost slave like conditions harvesting crabs and then canning them on the ships themselves (hence the title).

The novel is a searing indictment of Japanese capitalism, nationalism and the emperor, who was in Japanese law a divinity.

Takiji Kobayashi (Photo source: Wikipedia)

We often think, in fact we are told that Japan is a land of hard working obedient workers who never question authority and this is the key to its success. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Japan experienced waves of social unrest as it industrialised along with brutal repression from the state and following the end of WWII trade union membership boomed reaching 5 million by 1947.

This movement was repressed with the US military occupation playing a key role in the Red Purge with thousands of workers hounded out of their jobs, the Communist Party was effectively banned and freedom of speech was suppressed.

The Japanese consensus is the result of oppression, not of some quaint cultural quirk.[2] But if you are to buy into this consensus myth then not only has history to be ignored, but so too must the literature that talks of it.

Kobayashi didn’t just write about the working class, he wrote for them as part of his political militancy. He paid dearly for his commitment. In 1933, at the age of thirty, the Japanese police tortured him to death, leaving two of his novels incomplete.

The Crab Cannery Ship had been serialised in a magazine, Senki, and was not available as a novel in Japan until 1948, though its English translation was available in the year of his murder.

It is a strange consensus that requires torturing poets and writers to death, but not so strange that we would be asked to forget them.

Not that Takiji’s novel had ever been entirely forgotten.

It occupied a secure position in Japan’s modern history as the best-known literary product of the proletarian movement, a major cultural and political current of the 1920s and early 1930s—a time when labor activism, socialism, feminism, and antimilitarism were briefly in the ascendant, while paintings, posters, prose narratives, poetry, and plays depicting the lives and struggles of the dispossessed enjoyed a considerable degree of popular interest and critical esteem.

By the mid-thirties, however, as the country’s elites led the nation ever closer to an all-out war on the Asian continent, this progressive groundswell had been largely obliterated through a combination of internal dissension, government propaganda, and intensified repression: arrests, beatings, imprisonment, and censorship.[3]

He was part of a movement of proletarian literature and president of the Proletarian Writer’s Guild of Japan.

Proletarian literature was not just written by working class authors (and also middle class authors who had turned their backs on their own class), nor was it just stories about the working class for middle class audiences.

It was for the working class with no middle class filters applied to make it suitable for chats over coffee, and it talked of socialism. His novels are political, in an overtly Marxist sense, class struggle is a key part of the plot.

The clandestine nature of political work in Japan is dealt with in the unfinished novel Life of a Party Member, and would be familiar to anyone who has lived under repressive regimes. Kobayashi himself engaged in clandestine work and was arrested numerous times and tortured.

The use of the term Proletarian rather than working class tells you all you need to know.

He was a fighter, he may well have liked coffee but his life was not that of the quaint coffee shop, arcane academic discussions where the middle class engage in their favourite pastime, talking and writing about the working class, earning royalties and accolades in the process.

His most famous novel The Crab Cannery Ship went through a huge revival in 2008, following the financial crash, selling hundreds of thousands of copies.

In 2008—the year Takiji’s novel skyrocketed to fame—over thirty thousand Japanese people killed themselves, tens of thousands were homeless, some three million were unemployed, twenty million were living in poverty, and more than a third of the active labor force comprised irregular workers who were poorly paid and could easily be fired.[4]

Reading it, it is easy to see why. I am neither Japanese nor a fisherman, yet much of what happens on the ship speaks to me, it speaks to everyone, abusive bosses, people trapped in low income, insecure work with little security, poor safety.

What Kobayashi describes is something that never went away in the third world and has made a comeback now everywhere due to the defeat of the trade union movement and, let’s be honest, the constant sell outs by the bureaucracy.

But that novel and his other writings are not about the plight of the working class or the proletariat to use the more accurate term that the middle class so loathe and despise. It is about the fight of the working class against those conditions.

He argues through his characters for a struggle for socialism, against the Japanese ruling class, nationalism, empire and also for the liberation of women.

In his novel Yasuko, two of the main protagonists are women who as the plot develops become independent forceful characters, through their participation in the class struggle and their fight against the repression of the state.

One of them, Yasuko lends her name to the title. It is obvious why the Japanese literati would not have promoted him so much. There are equivalents all around the world of proletarian writers or other oppositionists who have been relegated to a dusty corner.

The proletarian wave did not just happen in Japan, but throughout the East, Russia and also the United States.

There of course exceptions who became worldwide phenomena within their own lifetime.

One such author is Bertold Brecht who coincides in time with various proletarian literature movements around the world and then there is also the Italian artist Dario Fo, the author of many works such as Accidental Death of an Anarchist and Can’t Pay! Won’t Pay! 

The title of this particular play became a catchphrase and slogan in the English speaking world.

Both were products of their time and achieved international fame, making them hard to relegate to dusty corners and though there are always attempts to relativise writers, soften the sharp edges of their plume it is not easy with either.

Brecht was unrepentant till his death and Dario Fo and his wife Franca Rame were lifelong activists and enemies of the Italian state, so much so that fascists under orders from the Italian police kidnapped tortured and raped her in an unsuccessful attempt to silence her.

Franca Rama and Dario Fo in performance. (Photo sourced: Internet)

There was more at stake for her and her husband than artistic awards. Their work was political in all senses of the word and they were participants in the class struggle.[5]

In oppressed countries around the world various writers such as the El Salvadoran Roque Dalton, or the Palestinian Ghassem Kanafani are still remembered and celebrated amongst their people.

But they fought against foreign empires, Kobayashi was from the empire he fought against. It is harder to reinterpret him as anything other than what he was, a proletarian writer who gave his life not so much for a literature that was forgotten but for a revolution that never came.

What literature is remembered and celebrated is a question of power and politics. There is literature that must be remembered and there is that which must be forgotten or in rare exceptions begrudgingly acknowledged.

Kobayashi, however, is now acknowledged so much so that there are now Kobayashi tours, which is itself worrying, but there is no escaping who or what he was, though Sabu, the director of a remake of the film version did make an attempt at this depoliticising the novel.

There is also no escaping that the current Japanese inbred royal family murdered him. All of the post war institutions are the direct heirs of those who murdered him.

That his novel could speak to the Japanese working class 79 years after it was written, is testament to the lasting value of his writing.

Darkness never lasts and despite the best efforts of the media, the cultural gatekeepers in publishing, academia and galleries, it is as Brecht remarked in his poem Literature will be scrutinised.

But at that time will be praised

Those who sat on the bare ground to write

Those who sat among the lowly

Those who reported the deeds of the fighters

With art. In the noble words

Formerly reserved

For the adulation of kings…

Yes, a time will come when

These clever and friendly men

These angry and hopeful men

Who sat on the bare ground to write

Who were surrounded by the lowly and the fighters

Will be publicly praised.

And so literature once forgotten or relegated to a lowly category comes forth in all its glory and as Rosa Luxembourg put it, when talking about revolution, proclaims, I was, I am, I shall be.

End.

Note: You may wish to read other articles by Gearóid Ó Loingsigh on his substack https://gearoidloingsigh.substack.com/

Note: If you found this article of interest, why not register with Rebel Breeze for free, so that you will be notified by email of subsequent articles. You can de-register any time you wish.

NOTES:

[1] The Guardian (10/02/2018) Kit de Waal: ‘Make room for working class writers’. Kit de Waal. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/10/kit-de-waal-where-are-all-the-working-class-writers-

[2] For an overview of class struggle in Japan in the post war period see Ichiyo, M (1987) Class Struggle and Technological Innovation in Japan since 1945. IIRE. Amsterdam. https://fileserver.iire.org/nsr/nsr5.pdf

[3] Translator’s Preface to Kobayashi, T. (2013) The Crab Cannery Ship and other novels of struggle. University of Hawai’i Press. Pp ix & x.

[4] Ibíd., p.x

[5] The Guardian (29/05/2013) Franca Rame obituary. John Francis Lane https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2013/may/29/franca-rame

EU MINISTERS MEETING IN DUBLIN SPARKS ‘NO WAR’ PROTEST

On By rebelbreezeIn Current Affairs Comment, Current Event Report, History, Ireland, National Sovereignty, NATOLeave a comment

Clive Sulish

(Reading time:2 mins.)

As the Irish State holds the Presidency of the European Union now and for six months hence, ministers of EU governments met in Dublin yesterday and today, the latter giving rise to an anti-war and pro-neutrality picket near Dublin Castle.

Since the Irish State’s incumbency of the EU Presidency the Irish State has forbidden demonstrations from Dame Street/ Gt. George’s Street junction to Lord Edward1 Street, along with the display of flags along that stretch.

Demonstrators in favour of the retention of the Irish State’s formal neutrality took up position at the south end of Parliament Street, directly facing City Hall. The Gardaí closed most of the street entrance and had crowd barriers erected across it, which the protesters then lined with their banner.

View of some of the protesters and banner, also of the Starry Plough flag (centre photo) and pedestrianised Parliament Street leading to the river. City Hall is behind the photographer and Dublin Castle behind that again. (Photo: Rebel Breeze)

The letters on the Green, White and Orange banner read EU WAR MONGERS. NO MORE WAR. LEAVE OUR NEUTRALITY ALONE. Leaflets with the same colours on one side were distributed while the reverse expanded on the main slogan, in particular calling for retention of the Triple Lock.2

Some passing vehicles sounded their horns in solidarity.

The city was busy with pedestrian tourists and others enjoying the sun. The heat bore down on the demonstrators facing into the sun and on the backs of the Gardaí facing them and the demonstrators (some of whom had already picketed the Hatch St. EU office), packed up after an hour.

One flag alone flew over the protesters, the Starry Plough, flag of the Irish Citizen Army, the workers’ militia formed to defend the strikers and locked out workers in Dublin in 1913 and which later took part in the 1916 Rising, their leader, James Connolly,3 being overall Commander.

View of some of the protesters and banner, also of the Starry Plough flag (centre photo) and pedestrianised Parliament Street. City Hall is behind the photographer and Dublin Castle behind that again. (Photo: Rebel Breeze)

Coincidentally perhaps, City Hall was garrisoned by the Irish Citizen Army during the Rising and a steel plaque on its wall records the names of the Volunteers who fought there and in nearby buildings – half of which are women’s names (the ICA recruited women as well as men).

End.

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FOOTNOTES

1Named after Edward Fitzgerald (1763-4 May 1798), one of the leaders of the United Irishmen, the revolutionary Irish Republican organisation. Often incorrectly referred to as ‘Lord Edward’, he had renounced his title, his sister later saying of him that the only title he aspired to was that of ‘Paddy’. Edward Fitzgerald went into hiding from British occupation forces but remained in the Liberties area, where his hiding place was discovered and he was wounded and arrested, having killed one of his would-be captors and injuring another. He died in jail reportedly of neglect by the authorities of his wounds.

2A provision that no more than 12 Irish State armed forces personnel may be sent on active service anywhere outside the State unless on UN mandate, a decision of the Government and a majority decision of the Irish Parliament. The suspicion is widespread in Irish society that the Irish ruling class wishes to dispense with the ‘Triple Lock’ or even to ignore it in order to commit the Irish State to NATO (or an EU armed force).

3Trade union leader, historian, journalist, revolutionary socialist, one of seven signatories of the 1916 Proclamation of Independence. Born Edinburgh (1868), executed by British firing squad on 12 May 1916.

SOURCES

https://irish-presidency.consilium.europa.eu/en/events

TOXIC LOYALISM IN IRELAND – WORSE THAN DANGERS OF 12th JULY BONFIRES

On By rebelbreezeIn Current Affairs Comment, Human Rights, Indigenous or Original People, Ireland, irish history, National Liberation, Political Analysis, Popular Resistance, Racism, Religious Sectarianism, Traditions & Folk Custom2 Comments

Diarmuid Breatnach

(Reading time: 4 mins.)

If it turns out that the fire destruction of homes in Greenisland, Carrigfergus was caused by Loyalist bonfire embers,1 there may be renewed calls to ban the construction of such bonfires in the cause of safety.

Or even to prevent the deaths of people from Loyalist bonfire tower construction.2

If so, such calls will miss the main point, which is that Ulster Loyalist bonfires are an expression of sectarianism and racism. It is Ulster Loyalism itself which is toxic and more lethal than any mismanaged fire. That is what is expressed in burning Irish Tricolours, Palestinian flags, images of Irish individuals, representations of migrants and of Islam.

A Loyalist bonfire with Irish Tricolour and Palestinian flags to be burned along with images of the popular rap group Kneecap and an attempt at some message aimed at them in Irish. The rejection of SDLP and Alliance colonial political parties is clear, while that of Sinn Féin is taken for granted. (Photo: Niall Carson/ PA Wire).

The record of Ulster Loyalism is as the communal enforcers of settler colonialism upon the indigenous Irish. When the United Irishmen, mostly led by Protestants, were organising in unity with Irish Catholics for Irish independence, the Orange Order was founded in 1795.

At that time it was not controlling the indigenous Irish that was of greatest concern to the British ruling class as much as the Republican Protestants, in particular the Republicans among the Presbyterians and the Orange Order targeted them too with propaganda and intimidation.

Once the threat of Protestant Republican rebellion was contained through intimidation, repression and emigration, the Orange Order concentrated on the majority mostly Catholic indigenous Irish, with general repression and periodic pogroms, continuing after Partition of Ireland in 1922.

The colonial Statelet institutionalised in law and practice discrimination against Catholics, enlisting the help and support of the majority of the Protestant working class, with the result of the worst housing and generally lowest wages in the UK – for workers of both communities.

The Loyalists mobilised against the Civil Rights campaign in the Six Counties, a campaign led by liberal Protestants as well as Catholics. During three decades of war that followed, Loyalist militias with British colonial army and police help, carried out bombings and sectarian murders.3

At this time of year people concerned for their safety or just peace of mind temporarily leave areas near to those under Loyalist control and not only in the Six Counties colony but in parts of Scotland too.

A REACTIONARY FESTIVAL

Unionist and liberal propaganda tell us that some of the bonfires are just good community fun, without flags, politician faces, migrant boat or mosque replicas on top. But the historical excuse for the marking of the 12th of July is the victory of William of Orange’s forces at the Boyne in 1690.

Loyalist mural probably in Belfast depicting at top gable end King William at the Battle of the Boyne. (Photo source: https://petermoloneycollection.com/category/events-people/king-billy/)

The Unionists celebrate this chiefly because they perceive it as a victory of Protestant forces over Catholic but also because it facilitated the destruction of the remnants of the Gaelic Order, breaking the power of Irish resistance in Ulster and completed the British conquest of Ireland.

Even without a single representation of person, country or religion on top of the bonfires, their very nature and what they intend to celebrate is reactionary, sectarian and colonial.

Most Ulster Protestants are probably unaware that although William was a Protestant and James II a Catholic, from whom Irish Catholics hoped to gain relief from repression, the Battle of the Boyne was actually part of the Nine Years War with William fighting for the League of Augsburg.

And one of the supporters of that League was none other than Pope Innocent XI because of what he and the League saw as the threat of King Luis XIV of France. The News of William’s victory at the Boyne was celebrated with high mass in a number of Catholic countries.

This year’s Loyalist Bonfire in Moygashel, Co. Armagh, with a representation of a Mosque to be burned on top and a placard calling for ‘secure borders’ against emigration. (Photo sourced: Sky News)

Loyalism has gone on to extend its hatred of Catholicism to Islam, of indigenous Irish to migrants from other lands, for example in the recent riots in Belfast.4

‘ONE MILLION PROTESTANTS IN A UNITED IRELAND’

We are frequently counselled to tolerate Ulster Loyalism, told that we must make Loyalists welcome into a united Ireland, that we need to accept their culture on equal level with others and are also subtly threatened with the potential violence of ‘One million Protestants’ if not accommodated.

The culture of Loyalism is toxic. It is intolerant, racist, homophobic, sectarian and violent. Might as well ask black people or native Americans to accept the Ku Klux Klan – after all, the KKK too have a community culture and they live in the USA along with everyone else.

A united 32-County Ireland should of course accept everyone as citizens. That is not at all to say that it should tolerate religious sectarianism, racism or homophobia. On the contrary it should oppose those evils through education and if necessary through application of the law.5

As for the implied threat of “one million Protestants”, that is to assume that all are sectarian Loyalists or at least that such are in leadership over the rest. Not all those reared in Six Counties Protestantism are Loyalists nor in fact even necessarily Unionists.

Removing the military, ideological and structural support for Unionism and Loyalism and also the control exercised by Loyalists on sections of communities will reduce Unionism and its most virulent expression, Loyalism, to a much smaller core who will have to make their choice.

Adjust to get on with your fellow citizens, or leave.

End.

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FOOTNOTES:

1https://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/fire-which-destroyed-homes-likely-caused-by-embers-from-nearby-bonfire-1925794.html

22026 https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2026/0711/1582923-bonfire-death/

2022 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-62111760

3According to Wikipedia, Loyalist paramilitaries killed 1,027 people during the 30 Years War, approximately 30% of all conflict-related deaths. 911 according to https://cain.ulster.ac.uk/issues/violence/sutton.htm (a biased source) including 33 in the no-warning Dublin and Monaghan Bombings of 1974.

4https://www.politico.eu/article/anti-immigrant-terror-takes-northern-ireland-back-darkest-chapters/

5In the wording of the 1916 Proclamation: “The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty to all …”

SOURCES:

https://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/fire-which-destroyed-homes-likely-caused-by-embers-from-nearby-bonfire-1925794.html and https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/2026/07/12/fire-that-destroyed-antrim-homes-likely-caused-by-embers-from-nearby-bonfire/

2026 https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2026/0711/1582923-bonfire-death/

2022 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-62111760

IRISH STATE PRESIDENCY OF THE EUROPEAN UNION — PROTEST CLOSES DUBLIN CITY CENTRE STREET

On By rebelbreezeIn Anti-War, Current Affairs Comment, Current Event Report, Imperialism, Internationalist Solidarity, Ireland, Irish Left, National Liberation, Political Analysis, ZionismLeave a comment

Diarmuid Breatnach

(Reading time:4 mins.)

As the Irish State marked the start of its six-month Presidency of the European Union, a protest march calling for Irish neutrality and an end to EU collusion with ‘Israeli’ genocide in Palestine headed for the formal event, closing a principal street to traffic.

Section of the crowd at Central Plaza. (Photo: D.Breatnach)

A Call to Action poster had promoted the protest to take place at the Plaza in Dublin’s south side city centre in front of a multi-story building, formerly HQ of the Central Bank of Ireland. Curiously, the name of no party, campaign or collective convening the protest appeared on the poster.

Groups of various Palestine solidarity or of pro-Irish neutrality nature, anti-war and left-wing nature, along with many individual activists congregated at the Plaza while a group from the weekly broad Dubs for Palestine meeting outside Leinster House1 marched to meet them there.

Some banners among the crowd at Central Plaza. (Photo: D.Breatnach)

The ‘Granny Squares for Gaza’ quilt was unrolled, featuring up to 2,900 squares, each one representing 10 Palestinian children killed by the IOF and volunteers, along with its custodians, held it at around waist height.

Soon afterwards, the crowd of several hundred took up the westward traffic side of Dame Street and began to march towards Dublin Castle,2 where the Irish Government was marking the first day of its EU Presidency. However a police line blocked progress at the junction with George St.

After a temporary stand-off, the marchers moved to occupy both sides of Dame street and traffic could no longer proceed westward or eastward along the street. The crowd continued with slogans in solidarity with Palestine, against ‘Israel’, for peace, against war, for warplanes out of Shannon.

Another banner at the Plaza. (Photo: D.Breatnach)

The Irish State is the second-biggest single importer of ‘Israeli’ exports, next only to the USA. Permitted flights over Irish airspace have been identified carrying war material to ‘Israel’ and US warplanes regularly refuel at Shannon Airport, despite the state’s ‘neutral’ status.

Richard Boyd Barrett of the People Before Profit, which seemed now to be leading the demonstration addressed the crowd informing them that the police had said earlier that they could proceed to the square immediately before City Hall and hold the protest event there.

They had reneged on that which is the reason why traffic was now blocked in the street, Barrett told the crowd and introduced Jimi Cullen to perform for the crowd. Cullen, who has performed at a US Embassy picket for 122 weeks up till then, sang his We Are All Palestinians composition.

Jimi Cullen in full voice. (Photo: D.Breatnach)

The crowd joined in the chorus, words with which they have become familiar in chants through many demonstrations.

A police officer approached Barrett requesting to speak to him and both went aside as one of the Dubs for Palestine group took up leading the chants. Barrett returned later to inform the crowd that the police had offered a different route down side streets, which had been rejected.

Cullen then performed his song defending the Irish State’s neutrality status with which the Irish ruling class are trying to dispense, after which Barrett invited the crowd, while the megaphones sounded sirens to lie on the ground in evocation of the many Palestinians being killed by the day.

Also another banner at the Plaza before the march. (Photo: D.Breatnach)

COMMENT

It was good that the capital city saw agitation opposing the Irish State joining military ventures of the EU and USA imperialist alliances and also against Irish collusion in the genocide in Palestine.

Those leading the march were unwise to accept the police assurance that they would allow the march to proceed to just before City Hall. A PBP-led march to protest Hillary Clinton’s 2012 visit to Dublin Castle had been told they could proceed there but were stopped just before City Hall.

Wednesday’s march was stopped even further from the Castle, which is a step further in curtailing protest, ensuring those inside the Castle will not even hear a hint of opposition. The police obstruction could have been bypassed by diverging through side streets but it was not attempted.

Though individual members may have been there, no Irish Republican organisation was notably present which probably accounted to an extent for the very scarce presence of Tricolour flags (and only one Starry Plough). PBP and their followers do not generally fly those flags.

However their absence cannot be attributed to any ambivalence: Irish Republicans are in strong antipathy to the Irish Government and to the institution of the European Union.

Only one of the slogans called from the front of the march referred to the colonial occupation of one-sixth of Ireland, viz. ‘From Ireland to Palestine/ Occupation is a crime!’ but it was from the Dubs and as is usual with PBP, in none of the speeches was there a mention of it.

Not one word of Irish language was spoken through the PA, not even the Saoirse don Phalaistín slogan.

The lie down to conclude the protest. The Gardaí may be seen in the distance blocking any advance of the march towards Dublin Castle or even the square beside City Hall. People are in most cases lying on the quilt of which each square represents 10 Palestinian children killed by ‘Israel’. (Photo: D.Breatnach)

MOVING FORWARD

For the defeat of colonialism, imperialism and capitalism in Ireland, a revolutionary mass movement will be essential. For that in turn, construction of an anti-imperialist broad front is an essential task.

That requires those claiming Irish Republicanism to be present on mobilisations alongside those claiming revolutionary socialism or just anti-imperialism.

If use of the Irish language is to be popularised and the civil rights of Irish speakers in Ireland protected, Gaeilge must be heard in particular among the most progressive sections of society.

End.

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FOOTNOTES

1This broad group meets every Wednesday from 12 noon to around 1.00 pm. listening to speeches, songs and poems. Two of their major campaigns are seeking to have the genocide-funding Allianz company kicked out of the Gaelic Athletic Association and, more recently, to prevent the Irish soccer team playing the ‘Israeli’ one.

2For centuries centre of administration and repression of Ireland by the English occupation.

What to learn from 1,000 days of genocide

On By rebelbreezeIn Current Affairs Comment, Indigenous or Original People, Israeli Zionism, Mass Media Criticism, Massacres, Middle East, National Liberation, Palestine, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Human beings can be amazing and none more so than the Palestinians. Dr. Munir Al-Bursh Director General of the Ministry of Health in Gaza released the following short statement, posted by Resistance News Network on Telegram today. Diarmuid Breatnach.

One thousand days was not just a number on the calendar, but 1,000 days of torment, pages of pain, and stories that were never written.

1,000 days of loss and betrayal, and the worst betrayal is the betrayal of kin. Humanity has stripped itself of its humanity in these days.

Cartoon by D.Breatnach from September 2024 (’04 is an error) and still true today.

Killing children has become fleeting breaking news, bombing hospitals a recurring scene, starving civilians a method of war, and preventing medicine, water, and food a matter discussed without shame.

Since the agreement, more than 1,000 martyrs have been killed, most of them children and women.

We are living through a suffocating medicine crisis; more than 52% of medicines are missing, and more than 59% of medical supplies are missing.

The citizen can no longer find a drink of clean water. The occupation began with killing, and now it kills silently.

Gaza has taught me that victory is only born from the womb of patience, and that peoples who believe in their right cannot be defeated by any power, no matter how intense the siege and how great the sacrifices.

Gaza has taught me that starvation, thirst, bombing, burning, displacement, and forced removal are but tools of helplessness before a people who loved freedom and believed that dignity cannot be bought or sold.

Gaza has taught me that homes may be demolished, hospitals destroyed, and schools bombed, but the will that dwells in hearts cannot be buried under the rubble.

Gaza has taught me that a doctor may treat a wound while bleeding, a paramedic may carry the martyrs while waiting for his turn, and a journalist may write the truth with his blood before his pen.

Dr. Munir Al-Bursh, Director General Gaza Health Ministry. (Photo source: Resistance News Network on Telegram).

Gaza has taught me that all conspiracies break before the unity and steadfastness of the people, and that the most dangerous thing the enemies want is for us to be divided, while the greatest thing we possess is to remain one front.

Gaza has taught me that the world may be silent, the law may fail, and justice may be delayed, but the truth does not die, the rights of peoples do not lapse, and history does not show mercy to those who witnessed the crime and chose silence.

end.

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