“HEZBOLLAH FIRES AT ISRAEL IN FIRST STRIKE SINCE THE CEASEFIRE” reads the headline so it tells us all we need to know.
Of course those horrible Islamic terrorists are violating the ceasefire with those poor Israelis, which the good old democratic USA and France worked so hard to broker.
Ach ní mar a shíltear a bhítear, or at least not as the media headline would have us believing.
Further down, in the text, it actually gives a much fairer and accurate report and it turns out that this was the first
warning shot by Hezbollah after over 50 violations by the ‘Israeli’ Occupation Forces, which neither the ceasefire arrangers nor UNIFIL have done anything to stop.
But if you’ve only read the headline, as many do, it’s the message that remains in your head.
Even though the main text is fairly accurate, an important additional piece of information is missing. A Zionist source admitted that they are not acting in accordance with the actual text but rather in accordance with a “side document” of an agreement they have with the USA.
They still claim that they’re not violating the negotiated ceasefire agreement, however, even though the document upon which they’re relying was not part of the official ceasefire agreement, was not agreed with the Lebanese side or even disclosed to them at the time of signing!
You’d have to wonder whether Baron Munchausen, Charles Ponzi and Richard Nixon would be relied upon so uncritically by the western mass media today as are the ‘Israeli’ Zionist spokespersons who have been exposed time and time again in lying accusations and denials.
I suppose the answer is that a) it would depend on whether the lies in question suited their purposes or b) how long they thought they could get away with it.
After the some might say overdue missile response by Hezbollah, an official ‘Israeli’ source was quoted as saying that their artillery firing at Lebanon had come to an end. Well – for how long? And the airstrikes, drone flying, destruction of buildings and facilities?
By the way, this admission of “the side document” by ‘Israeli’ sources is not the first known reference to its existence; it was reported referred to in ‘Israeli’ media as soon as the ceasefire agreement was signed.
Over 54 IOF violations of the ceasefire agreement at time of writing, including:
○ Airstrikes on 11 different locations
○ Artillery shelling of four different locations
○ Raids from drones on five different locations.
Since the ceasefire agreement the IOF have injured and killed a number of civilians in shelling etc and drone-murdered a state employee on a motorbike, wrecked dwellings and a mosque, also a football pitch … and also advanced to occupy locations they were never able to during the war itself.
The agreement should have stipulated total Israeli withdrawal within a week – three months was unreasonable and asking for trouble.
Clare Daly stood for election in the 2024 elections of the Irish State, in the Dublin Central parliamentary constituency, one with a tradition of independent representation going back to Maureen O’Sullivan and Tony Gregory before her.
Daly was standing as one of the loose Left coalition of Independents for Change in a heavy competition for the four-seat constituency.
Clare Daly has a track record as elected public representative and socialist political activist, also as a prominent Socialist Party activist, with which organisation she partedcompany in August 2012.
She was elected MEP for the Dublin constituency from July 2019 to July 2024, TD1 for Fingal from Feb. 2016-July 1999 and TD Dublin North Feb. 2011-2019; in recent years Daly has been better known outside Ireland due to her public interventions in the European Parliament.
Daly and her partner Wallace were both vilified by pro-imperialist liberals and ‘Left’ for publicly opposing US/NATO/ EU imperialist campaigns against Islamic regimes and the Russian Federation, being subjected to a host of unfounded allegations contrary to their actual record.
Tik Tok clips of Daly’s biting attacks on the EU’s complicity in the US-backed ‘Israeli’ genocide provided relief for many around the world from the Zionist sycophancy and insincere and ineffective concern for the victims of that daily genocide prevalent in the EU Parliament.
And who can forget Daly’s calling German politician and EU Commission President Ursula Van Der Leyen out as ‘Frau Genocide’ in the European Parliament in December last year!2
While an MEP, Daly also intervened in the discussion around the Irish Gombeen3 class’ attempt to push us towards NATO, further undermining a quite tattered Irish neutrality. And while a TD, she and her partner Mick Wallace TD were arrested protesting the foreign militarisation of Shannon.
To their credit both risked jail by refusing to pay the fines imposed but the Gombeen ruling class decided to restrict the damage of its exposure of collusion with US imperialism by also reducing the punishment of both to a few hours in captivity.
Daly has been one of the few TDs prepared to speak in public against the repression of Irish Republicans and to visit some of the consequent victims in jail.
In the EU Parliament, Daly also denounced the Spanish State’s police invasion of Barcelona and violence against voters there on 1st October 2017 during the referendum on Catalunya’s independence.
2024 Dublin Central election poster for Clare Daly.
In Ireland today
In her election flyer here Daly highlighted representation independent of political party for her electoral area, housing, health service, cost of living, Palestine, the endangered climate and Irish neutrality without any indication of how these issues might be effectively addressed.
Daly’s election flyer did not mention capitalism or imperialism, nor did she campaign on a platform of overthrowing the current neo-colonial and neo-liberal capitalist system in force, instead indicating her wish to “hold to account the people who’ve got us into this mess.”
“Holding to account” is something to which Daly is accustomed doing and does it well, eloquently, with passion and fluently, scarcely having to refer to her notes while doing so. But like ‘speaking truth to power’, it has little effect on those who are in control of the political-social system.
It can indeed have an effect on the victims of the system but we are left with the question of what to do about the situation. Refreshing as it may be to hear her again in Leinster House, neither voting Daly in — nor fifty Dalys — is going to change any of the conditions under which we suffer.
BY THE WAY,
in case anyone’s interested, I gave my first preference vote to Daly and hope she does get elected.
End.
1Teachta Dála, the title of a public representative elected to the parliament of the Irish State.
2Imperialist politician and proven plagiarist in her doctoral thesis.
3Vernacular term in Ireland for huckster, carpet-bagger-type capitalists, derived from the Irish language gaimbíneachas, profiteering, nowadays used to describe the neo-colonial Irish capitalist class.
NB: Edited by RB from original article for formatting purposes
Sinn Féin has said that it would ask for a review of the national broadcaster RTE’s biased coverage of Palestine and other international conflicts. They were criticised by almost all and sundry for doing so.
They were accused of censorship and their own use of lawsuits to silence critics was raised once again.[1]
The National Union of Journalists (NUJ) came out with guns blazing, claiming it would be in breach “of the principles of the European Media Freedom Act and would set a dangerous precedent in terms of direct and indirect State interference in the remit of the existing regulatory body.”[2]
The NUJ has rarely challenged what it sees as state or private interference in the media before and less still at RTE. RTE’s board is made up of cronies and business interests, people whose interest is served by limited coverage of financial and other issues.
Many of them come from the financial sector. Six of the eleven board members are appointed by the Minister for Communications, so there is already government interference in RTE.
The NUJ itself would not come out well of such a review, if the review were honest. For decades it implemented Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act, censoring Sinn Féin, even when the party was standing in elections.
A brave RTE journalist Jenny McGeever was sacked because she broadcast one sentence from Martin McGuinness, “If that is ok with the Police, that is ok with us”, in reference to arrangements for the transport of three IRA volunteers’ bodies back to Belfast.[3]
It was an innocuous statement. The NUJ did next to nothing to defend her. They did not defend her just as they meekly accepted the sacking of the RTE Authority in 1972. Colum Kenny commenting on his time at RTE remarked that:
During my years at RTÉ, I became for a period what is known as ‘The Father’, or chairman, of the Programmes Chapel of the National Union of Journalists. I found no great appetite among its members, or indeed among the membership of another union representing many producers, for industrial action aimed at drawing public attention to the existence of the gagging Order known as Section 31.[4]
In other words, neither the union nor the members did anything about it. They either agreed with it or decided the truth was not that important, not as important as their careers.
The union will not look well, if coverage on Palestine is looked at, nor will it come out shining if coverage of Ukraine is also included, as on this issue, the union itself intervened directly in helping to shape a narrative at odds with reality.
It is as clear as day that on Palestine, Irish coverage has been very biased, in terms of who it gave interviews to, the issues it refers to and the kid gloves that apologists for genocide such as the Israeli Ambassador have been treated with.
It is clear even in the language used. The word ‘genocide’ is never used in reporting, unless quoting someone and even then, sparingly. It is referred to as ‘the war’, ‘the conflict’ etc.
It has mainly used the term when reporting on the case taken to the International Court of Justice and gave a succinct but incorrectly limited definition of what genocide is.
It stated “In short, genocide is the intentional destruction of a people in whole or in part.”[5] The definition is actually a lot broader than that and Gaza fits the bill on various counts.[6]
When reporting on the murder of civilians in Palestine, it never uses such terms. It says ‘killed’ and the casualty figures are always referred to as “According to the Hamas-run Ministry of Health”.
The message is clear, that these figures come from an organisation that is considered to be a terrorist group and therefore the figures are not reliable. But it is actually the elected government.
The last time there was an election in Palestine, Hamas won, both in Gaza and in the West Bank, though it only assumed power in Gaza with the Vichy Palestine Authority appointed by Mahmoud Abbas undemocratically taking control of the West Bank.
So, of course the Ministry of Health is run by the elected government. This language is never used in relation to Israel, we are never told “according to the Likud-run Ministry of Defence”. In fact, such caveats are almost never used, not even when quoting the most vile dictatorships in the world.
At best, they state “according to an official government communiqué”, which is technically correct and does not have the same moral =laden judgement contained within it.
In Lebanon, they engage in a similar sleight of hand, referring to attacks on “Hezbollah strongholds”, which is the type of language they hope will give some justification to the bombings. But what are Hezbollah strongholds? They are areas in which the organisation has mass support.
You would be hard pressed to find in the media, in general, and RTE in particular any significant explanation of what Hezbollah is.
Many viewers hearing about strongholds being bombed would not know and are never informed that what this means is areas in which the organisation has a support base, which is also electoral.
We know which areas are Hezbollah strongholds because they are the areas where people voted for them. It is an electoral and military force, increasing its number of parliamentary seats in the 2022 elections from 13 to 15, though its allies in parliament lost seats.
But the point is, it is a force with a huge popular base.
Likewise, when Israel told Irish UN soldiers to leave, the President of Ireland described it as a threat — but the media was more hesitant.
When Israel then used UN compounds as shields in their attacks, the resulting damage was described as damage caused by the exchange of fire between the two. You would never guess that one of the sides deliberately used them as protective shields.
In terms of RTE bias and coverage, whilst it has reported on Palestine over the years, once October 7th happened, the official discourse emanating from RTE and most other media outlets was that history began on October 7th.
No attempt was made to look at the history of the region, nor the context of Israeli aggression and crimes against humanity prior to October 7th. Previous Israeli attacks and crimes were rarely if ever mentioned.
It made one attempt at explaining what Hezbollah was in an article published on its site.[7]
The article recognises that it has political support, but constantly refers to the fact that it is designated as a terrorist organisation by the US and that other bastion of democracy, Saudi Arabia, whose leaders have never been elected.
Saudi Arabia, despite having a nominal parliament is led by a bunch of royal head-chopping kleptocrats. Though RTE quotes them favourably as a source of analysis on the nature of Hezbollah.
The organisation is according to RTE nothing more than a group that “…has risen from a shadowy faction to a heavily armed force with major sway over the Lebanese state. The United States, some Western governments and others deem it a terrorist organisation.”
The headline on the piece reduces Hezbollah to just being a group that supports Hamas. And that was about it from RTE on the nature of the organisation.
Likewise in Ukraine, though RTE had reported on the country previously, once again history started on a particular date, this time February 22nd 2022.
They ignored the 2014 Maidan Coup, the breaking of the Minsk Accords by Ukraine, the repression of non-Ukrainian cultures, which included not just Russians but also gypsies and others.
The promotion of WWII fascist Stepan Bandera, the fascist nature of the Azov Battalion were all ignored to favour a simplistic account. Previous acts such as the burning to death of trade unionists in Odessa by fascists in 2014 were never mentioned again.
RTE presenters even questioned why NATO wasn’t pushing for all-out war with Russia, and they included in that the possibility of going to the brink of nuclear war.
The Irish Times has recently doubled down on this, basically resurrecting the “Russia will invade and attack everyone scenario” so common when the war began.
It argued in a piece written by Kier Gillespie from the right-wing think tank Chatham House that Ireland should abandon its “neutrality” and Europe should get ready for all-out war with Russia.[8] Incidentally, a sentiment echoed to some degree by the “pro NATO left” in the Irish parliament.
The NUJ for its part, whose members push the narrative on Palestine and Ukraine were not content with the complicity of its members in a particular narrative but organised a protest to skew the debate altogether.
Shortly after the war started the NUJ organised a protest at the Russian Embassy to protest the lack of press freedom and attacks on journalists by the Russian state. The Russian state has a dreadful record on the matter, but so does Ukraine.
Moreover, in its attempt to portray the Russians as the only threat to freedom of the press the NUJ invited ambassadors from other countries to join in with it at the protest.
Fine, except with one exception, those ambassadors represented countries with a poor record in the matter, such as Georgia, Poland and Ukraine coming in 89th, 66th and 106th respectively in Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index for the year 2022.
By doing this the NUJ set a narrative that the only threat to press freedom was Putin and whitewashed a number of regimes with dubious records themselves.
Whilst it has condemned the deaths of journalists in Gaza it did not protest at the Israeli Embassy but held a vigil instead at an art gallery.[9] You couldn’t make such cowardice up.
So, an investigation of bias in the coverage of conflicts would be welcome. Neither Sinn Féin, RTE, nor the NUJ would come out of it well. But the problem is political.
The reason why RTE does that, is that it gets away with it because there is no challenge to its bias. Sinn Féin and the Irish left represented by such stalwarts of mediocrity like People Before Profit, applauded and egged on the push for war and bias about Ukraine.
They now find the media supporting those same reactionary forces (NATO, US, EU) in their assault on Palestine. The penny has almost dropped for them, but not quite. RTE was biased on Ukraine and they agreed with it, now it is biased on Palestine and it is too late.
But RTE and the Irish media in general represent the interests of the Irish state and so it should come as no surprise that it is biased.
This does not mean we should accept it lying down, but you can’t call for bias on one issue in favour of a NATO proxy (Ukraine) and against bias in favour of another proxy, Israel. The two are linked.
In the case of Palestine, the NUJ is passive, passing resolutions and issuing communiqués.
As with the Irish censorship law Section 31, the union is content to not take any industrial action on the issue and let its members lie, downplay the seriousness of it all, treat the Israelis with kid gloves and use language that deliberately distorts what is happening.
Their role in echoing Their Master’s Voice should be exposed, though Sinn Féin is not the best -placed organisation to do so, given its prioritising of its relations with Washington and its own attempts to censor Palestinians in Ireland who did not follow the Palestine Authority line.
The elections for a government in the 26-County state are only days away now and, while many are advocating a vote for this or that party or candidate, some are opposed to voting at all.
ARGUMENTS AGAINST VOTING
An amusing take on abstention advises: Don’t vote – it only encourages them! Anarchists have long been opposed to voting in national elections and I recall a poster in Britain exhorting people to Vote for Guy Fawkes – the only man ever to enter Parliament with honest intentions. 1
Revolutionary marxists have also often called for a boycott of elections.
The position that they hold in common is that changing this or that party in government does not change the system and that it is that which is in need of change; as Connolly2 famously declared capitalist governments to be “committees of the rich to manage the affairs of the capitalist class.”
However, it is possible to hold that opinion but yet to vote – and even to advocate voting – in some circumstances. However among some Irish Republican circles there has been a trend maintaining that voting in these elections is a recognition or acceptance of their alleged legitimacy.
A massive spoiling of ballot papers is often advocated by those who wish to ensure that the boycott may not be interpreted as apathy among the electorate. The number of spoiled ballot papers is supposed to be recorded and the papers available for inspection.
ARGUMENTS FOR
Those arguing in favour of voting in elections come at the question from a variety of points, including that voting is a democratic right for which our ancestors fought; that if we fail to vote we have no right to complain about government actions (or inaction).
They may maintain that not voting for some parties is equivalent to voting in favour of their opponents; or that voting a particular party into power can be used to overturn undesired legislation or conversely to promote desired legislation or to put them in power so that they may be exposed.3
The reformists and social democrats (often presenting themselves as revolutionaries) advocate for reforming or at least controlling capitalism under a Left Government. Despite the impracticability of the latter in many historical experiments, the hopeful and deluded keep advocating it.
Then of course, there is the ‘Lesser Evil’ argument, which is probably the most seductive; we witnessed that during the Harris-Trump USA Presidency competition. The Greens in Europe even appealed to Stein of the USA Greens, running against Harris on an anti-Genocide ticket, to desist.4
The claim that we might as well use our votes to elect a ‘lesser evil’ government is seductive precisely when we feel that no other option is available, combined with fear of worse economic and social conditions to be imposed upon us by the ‘worse evil’ party or candidate.
To follow the ‘lesser evil’ road is not only to perpetuate the system in one form or another but also fail to recognise our potential strength as the producers of all wealth; to fail to strengthen our energies to break firstly the mental chains, then the physical ones; to make fundamental choices.
THE TACTICAL VARIANT
Some argue that although in general national elections don’t change the system, they can be used at times to effect a tactical change: show rejection of a specific government position or individual.
They sometimes argue in favour of voting to put a specific individual or group of individuals into parliament for tactical reasons.
Can it be of use to have a few individuals in the Irish parliament who will attack the government and ruling class in speeches? Or to put specific issues forward on which to expose the ruling elite? Or to ask questions to gather government information? I am sure that it can and has been at times.
Can it be useful to have a handful of individuals elected to the Irish parliament who are prepared to seek entry to prisons to talk to political prisoners? Or who will head an investigation into some kinds of abuses and publish the results? Such can be and has been of use at times.
The important thing is to ensure that the message we give is that useful though such people and positions may be at times, they are not the solution, which can only be the overthrow of the system and the establishment of a socialist system with power in the hands of the working people.
ELECTIONS IN A CAPITALIST DEMOCRACY
What are known as ‘democracies’ are states concentrated across ‘Western’ regions, i.e western Europe and its former colonies of the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, with varying degrees of effect upon states on the African and Asian continents, along with ‘Latin America’.5
These are without exception, regardless of variety, systems of governing their working people without having to resort to wide-scale constant repression and suppression. For that project, the illusion of choice is essential, hence the regular elections and different political parties.
But the illusion of any fundamental choice is failing. Increasingly, governments in many European ‘democracies’ are becoming coalitions between a number of political parties and in Ireland, the main Government-Opposition parties for decades have exposed the reality by governing together.6
The effect of such exposure of the lack of real choice is impacting upon the consciousness of the populations concerned so that progressively less of them are willing to participate in the charade. In Ireland now more than one-third of the population do not vote.
This situation is of great concern to the ruling classes and to their intellectuals who are busy trying to devise schemes to offset the drift such as advocating voting from home, spectacles such as televised confrontations between competitors and ‘Citizenship’ programs in schools.
Clearly revolutionaries should not assist in any attempt to justify the system or to perpetuate the illusion of elections in capitalist ‘democracy’ being anything else than a periodic choice for slaves between the overseers employed by their masters.
DOES IT MATTER ANYWAY?
The nub of the question as to whether to vote boils down to what we hope to achieve and its prospects. If there were a massive abstention from the polls then of course that would be seen as a huge vote of no confidence in the parties standing and perhaps in the system itself – but from what perspective?
From the Right? From the Left? From apathy? In any case at the moment that looks like a moot question since there’s a likelihood of a turnout of around 60% of the registered voters.7
Will abstention make people more politically aware or conversely will participation in the elections turn people away from the possibilities of organising on the ground and ultimately of revolution? Perhaps for some – but overall, I think not many in either case, not on a longer-term basis.
From a revolutionary point of view, does it matter whether people vote or not? Or even sometimes who they vote for? Surely what matters is organising and supporting the movement for fundamental progressive change? Can that be done by people who vote as well as by those who don’t?
I’d say that is at least as likely.
During capitalist state elections the best we can do, I think, is to point out the inadequacy of the choices presented to us and to advocate stronger and more militant organisation as an alternative to the calls to vote for one party or another.
Whatever party or individual gets elected to Leinster House, the principal struggles remain: for a free united independent Ireland, for a socialist system, against the imperialist world system, against environmental destruction. It is on that we need to concentrate.
The newly-elected management committee of the capitalist class should be savaged mercilessly for its inevitably broken promises and its continuing attacks upon the economic and social conditions of the working people, and on Irish national neutrality.
Most of all, we need to improve our organising, strengthen our ranks and find ways to strike blows against the system to win victories in our march towards the overthrow of the neo-liberal and neo-colonial Gombeen ruling class and its foreign masters.
End.
1While amusing as a caption, given that Guido Fawkes plotted to blow up the English Parliament on 5th November 1605, upholding Guido Fawkes as some kind of historical hero is problematic, as he was a militant Catholic and the date of capture, Guy Fawkes’ Day, was a regular occasion for the exhibition of anti-Catholic prejudice even into the 20th Century in Protestant Britain, which more often than not, manifested itself as anti-Irish racism.
2James Connolly (1868-1916), revolutionary socialist activist, theoretician, journalist, writer and trade unionist, leading participant in the 1916 Irish Rising for which he was sentenced to death and shot by British firing squad.
3Lenin famously advocated voting the British Labour Party into government for the first time to ensure their exposure, supporting them “as a rope supports a hanging man”, advice misused by social democrats and others on the electoral Left and about which revolutionaries have argued ever since.
6Throughout the existence of the Irish State, the Fianna Fáil party has been the longest in government, with Fine Gael second, both socially conservative parties with strong loyal electoral bases. However now they are governing in coalition, along with the Greens. It is worth noting that there has not been a government of absolute majority by any party in the Irish state since 1981, when Irish Republicans stood as H-Block (e.g. hunger strike) candidates and two were elected with another having a near miss.
7Despite a trend of dropping percentages of the potential voters actually participating, in 2020 the turnout was a little over 62%.
Kit Klarenberg (republished with author’s kind permission from Al Mayadeen)
(Reading time: 6 mins.)
On November 15th, The Times published a remarkable report, revealing serious “questions” are being asked about the viability of Britain’s two flagship aircraft carriers, at the highest levels of London’s defence establishment.
Such perspectives would have been unreportable mere months ago. Yet, subsequent reporting seemingly confirms the vessels are for the chop.
Should that come to pass, it will represent an absolutely crushing, historic defeat for the Royal Navy – and the US Empire in turn – without a single shot fired.
The HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales first set sail in 2017 and 2019 respectively, after 20 years in development.
HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales in dock and at anchor.
The former arrived at the Royal Navy’s historic Portsmouth base with considerable fanfare, a Ministry of Defence press release boasting that the carrier would be deployed “in every ocean around the world over the next five decades.”
The pair were and remain the biggest and most expensive ships built in British history, costing close to $8 billion combined. Ongoing operational costs are likewise vast.
Fast forward to today however, and British ministers and military chiefs are, per The Times, “under immense pressure to make billions of pounds’ worth of savings,” with major “casualties” certain.
Resultantly, senior Ministry of Defence and Treasury officials are considering scrapping at least one of the carriers, if not both.
The reason is simple – “in most war games, the carriers get sunk,” and are “particularly vulnerable to missiles.” As such, the pair are now widely perceived as the “Royal Navy’s weak link.”
Matthew Savill of British state-tied Royal United Services Institute told The Times that missile technology is developing “at such a pace” that carriers are rapidly becoming easy for Britain’s adversaries to “locate and track”, then neutralise.
“In particular,” he cautioned, China is increasing the range of its ballistic and supersonic anti-ship missiles.
Meanwhile, Beijing’s “hypersonic glide vehicle”, the DF-17, “can evade existing missile defence systems,” its “range, speed and manoeuvrability” making it a “formidable weapon” neither Britain nor the US can adequately counter.
Savill advocated “cutting one or both of the carriers,” as this “would free up people and running costs and those could be reinvested in the running costs of the rest of the fleet and easing the stresses on personnel”.
Nonetheless, he warned that scrapping the carriers would be a “big deal for a navy that has designed itself around those carriers…and that the £6.2 billion paid for them would be a sunk cost.”
That the Royal Navy has “designed itself” around the two carriers is an understatement.
For just one to set sail, it must be supported by a strike group consisting of two Type 45 destroyers for air defence, two Type 23 frigates for anti-submarine warfare, a submarine, a fleet tanker and a support ship.
British aircraft carrier as part of allegedly “strike force” but in reality sailing with its necessary escorts. (Photo sourced: Internet)
This “full-fat protective approach”, Savill lamented, means “most of the deployable Royal Navy” must accompany a single carrier at any given time:
‘You can protect the carriers, but then the Navy has put all of its eggs in a particularly large and expensive basket.’ ‘National Embarrassment’
March 2021 saw the publication of a long-awaited report, Global Britain in a Competitive Age – “a comprehensive articulation” of London’s “national security and international policy,” intended to “[shape] the open international order of the future.”
The two aircraft carriers loomed large in its contents. One passage referred to how HMS Queen Elizabeth would soon lead Britain’s “most ambitious global deployment for two decades, visiting the Mediterranean, the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific”:
“She will demonstrate our interoperability with allies and partners – in particular the US – and our ability to project cutting-edge military power in support of NATO and international maritime security.
Her deployment will also help the government to deepen our diplomatic and prosperity links with allies and partners worldwide.”
Such bombast directly echoed the bold wording of a July 1998 strategic defence review, initiated a year earlier by then-prime minister Tony Blair.
As world naval policeman: HMS Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier docked in Cyprus (where the UK has two military bases)
Its findings kickstarted London’s quest to acquire world-leading aircraft carriers, which culminated with the birth of HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales.
Britain’s explicit objective, directly inspired by the US Empire’s dependence on carriers to belligerently project its diplomatic, economic, military and political interests abroad, was to recover London’s role as world police officer, and audaciously assert herself overseas:
“In the post-Cold War world, we must be prepared to go to the crisis, rather than have the crisis come to us. So we plan to buy two new larger aircraft carriers to project power more flexibly around the world…
This will give us a fully independent ability to deploy a powerful combat force to potential trouble spots without waiting for basing agreements on other countries’ territory. We will…be poised in international waters and most effectively back up diplomacy with the threat of force.”
Blair’s reverie appeared to finally come to pass in May 2021, when HMS Queen Elizabeth set off on a grand tour of the world’s oceans, escorted by a vast carrier strike group.
Over the next six months, the vessel engaged in a large number of widely-publicised exercises with foreign navies, including NATO allies, and docked in dozens of countries. Press coverage was universally fawning.
Yet, in November, as the excursion was nearing its end, an F-35 fighter launched from the carrier unceremoniously crashed.
The F-35’s myriad issues were by that point well-established. The jet, which has cost US taxpayers close to $2 trillion, entered into active service in 2006 while still under development. It quickly gained a reputation for hazardous unreliability.
In 2015, a Pentagon report acknowledged its severe structural issues, limited service life and low flight-time capacity.
Two years later, the Department of Defense quietly admitted the US Joint Program Office had been secretly recategorising F-35 failure incidents to make the plane appear safe to fly.
Despite this, the HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales were specifically designed to transport the F-35, to the exclusion of all other fighter jets.
However, Britain has all along struggled to source usable F-35s, which produces the ludicrous situation of the two carriers almost invariably patrolling seas with few if any fighters aboard at all, therefore invalidating their entire raison d’être.
In November 2023, the Daily Telegraphdubbed these regular “jet-less” forays a “national embarrassment”.
‘Carrier Gap’
An even graver embarrassment, rarely discussed with any seriousness by the British media, is that the two aircraft carriers have been plagued with endless technical and mechanical issues as long as they’ve been in service.
Flooding, mid-operation breakdowns, onboard fires, and engine leaks are routine. Both vessels have spent considerably more time docked and under repair than at sea over their brief lifetimes. In 2020, an entire HMS Prince of Wales crew accommodation block collapsed, for reasons unclear.
As the elite US foreign policy journal National Interest acknowledged in March 2024, “the Royal Navy remains unable to adequately defend or operate” its two carriers “independently” – code for the Empire being consistently compelled to deploy its own naval and air assets to support the pair.
This is quite some failure, given British officials originally intended for the vessels to not only lead NATO exercises and deployments, but “slot into” US navy operations wherever and whenever necessary.
The Empire’s inability to outsource its hegemonic duties to Britain has created a critical “carrier gap”.
Despite maintaining an 11-strong fleet, Washington cannot deploy the vessels to every global flashpoint at once, grievously undermining her power and influence at a time of tremendous upheaval worldwide.
In a bitter irony, by encouraging and facilitating London’s emulation of its own flawed and outdated reliance on aircraft carriers, the US has inadvertently birthed yet another needy imperial dependent, further draining its already fatally overstretched military resources.
Frame 2 of a DB cartoon depicting US Navy aircraft carrier sailing to teach Ansar Allah (‘Houthis’) a lesson but instead getting chased out of the Arabian Sea by Yemeni missiles in June this year. (Image source: DB cartoons)
Several Royal Navy destroyers were originally part of abortive US-led Operation Prosperity Guardian, launched in late 2023 to smash Ansar Allah’s righteous anti-genocide Red Sea blockade.
Almost immediately, it became apparent the British lacked any ability to fire on land targets, therefore rendering their participation completely useless.
Subsequently, photos emerged of areas on Britain’s ships where land attack cruise missiles should’ve been situated. Instead, the spaces were occupied by humble treadmills, for use as on-board gyms.
It transpired that the appropriate weapons hadn’t been purchased, due to a lack of funds – the money having of course been spent instead on constructing barely operable aircraft carriers, which now face summary defenestration.
By investing incalculable time, energy, and money in pursuing the mythological greatness associated with carrier capability, Britain – just like the US Empire – now finds itself unable to meet modern warfare’s most basic challenges.
Meanwhile, its adversaries near and far have remorselessly innovated, equipping themselves for 21st century battle.
Days after The Timesportended the impending death of London’s aircraft carriers, mainstream media became awash with reports of savage cutbacks in Britain’s military capabilities, in advance of a new strategic defence review.
Potentially a huge pile of scrap or to be dumped on an ally …
Five Royal Navy warships, all of which had lain disused due to staffing issues and structural decay for some time, were among the first announced “casualties”. What if anything will replace these losses isn’t certain, although it likely won’t be an aircraft carrier.
While thousands marched once again in Palestine solidarity in Dublin, a section of the demonstration marched as a bloc in specific solidarity with the Palestinian Resistance with banners, flags and slogans declaring their position.
The Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign with a number of branches has been for many years the major organiser of Palestinian solidarity events and had once again called for a national march in Dublin, again to Leinster House, home of the Irish Parliament.
Section of the front of the Palestinian Resistance Solidarity Bloc in Dublin on Saturday. In this photo may be seen the flags of three factions of the Palestinian Resistance and, left foreground, the flag of Irish revolutionary socialist Republicanism, the Starry Plough (Photo: R.Breeze)
This has become a pattern of the main IPSC street activity in Dublin, along with holding a rally on the central pedestrian reservation in Dublin’s O’Connell Street, with occasional marches to the Department of Foreign Affairs (though in the past it organised boycott pickets of ‘Israeli’ products).
The US Embassy seems to have become out of bounds for the IPSC. This is despite the clear responsibility of the USA for supplying most of the armament, political and financial backing for the genocide being carried out by the Zionist state against the Palestinians.
Some believe that the IPSC leadership is complying with the wishes of the Irish police, the Gardaí, not to have Palestine solidarity marches go to the US Embassy. The offices of the EU, Germany and the UK, major contributors to the genocide, have also been given in effect a waiver.
The national march called by the IPSC at its destination in Molesworth Street last Saturday. The photo is taken from the platform and PA lorry facing the crowd, with its back to Leinster House (of the Irish Parliament) which also has crowd barriers erected behind it. (Photo sourced: IPSC)
Neither the march last Saturday nor any organised before it by the IPSC was going to promote solidarity with the Resistance, despite their former chairperson having once said of them in public that they are ‘freedom fighters’. Of course, to the ‘Israelis’ and EU they are ‘terrorists’.
Section of the front of the Palestinian Resistance Solidarity Bloc in Dublin on Saturday (Photo: R.Breeze)
The IPSC has organised only one public meeting during this year’s genocide to highlight the terrible conditions of the thousands of Palestinian political prisoners in ‘Israeli’ jails and rarely mentions them, nor in solidarity with the Samidoun1 organisation being banned in USA and Canada.
In October last year, as this phase of the genocide began, the IPSC dithered over whether to call for the expulsion of the ‘Israeli’ Ambassador to Ireland, as did the Sinn Féin leadership until a near revolt of the party’s members forced them to return to their previous position. As did the IPSC.
Clearly the IPSC leadership is trying to keep itself somewhere around the ‘middle road’ in Palestinian solidarity, probably in order — as it sees it – to remain with influence among the ruling circles. However, the actual results among those circles do not bear testimony to their effectiveness.
NO CHANGE
The Irish state continues to permit US military planes and personnel to violate the State’s nominal independence through Shannon International Airport, to permit Zionist armament overflights of its air space (similarly with the RAF) and to permit British Navy docking in Irish ports.
The relatively mild Occupied Territories Bill, long approved through Leinster House, remains not brought into force, blocked by the Coalition Government of Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Green Party. It could not be clearer that the ruling class in Ireland do not feel under enough pressure.
This is despite a clear popular feeling among the public in Ireland of solidarity with Palestine and revulsion at their genocidal attacks by the Zionist state.
There is a long-established train of thought that maintains that solidarity with the Palestinians is not just calling for the genocide to stop – that alone is charity and that actual solidarity means solidarity with the people’s resistance and the political prisoners.
If the IPSC were to adopt that position they might find it easier to support more radical action to pressure the Irish state to break with the western powers’ consensus of support for the ‘Israeli’ state and consequently for its genocide against the Palestinians.
Perhaps that is one of the very reasons that the IPSC leadership will not take that stand and that its stewards have at times even tried to convince people to remove their flags supporting various Resistance factions.
Section of the front of the Palestinian Resistance Solidarity Bloc in Dublin on Saturday (Photo: R.Breeze)
On Saturday independent activists joined those of Saoirse Don Phalaistín, Anti-Imperialist Action Ireland and Queers For Palestine in forming a sizeable bloc on the march with banners, flags and call-and-answer slogans advertising its solidarity with the Resistance.
This seems a welcome trend likely to grow.
End.
FOOTNOTE
1Palestinian political prisoner support and advocacy organisation.
Opinions seem divided on whether ‘Israel’s’ recent attack on Iran did much damage and whether Iran will retaliate. On the first, the Zionist Government and its allies claim great success while Iran claimed most missiles shot down and minimal damage.
One takes it for granted that all sides in a war will have an eye to useful propaganda. During the attack, while Zionist and western mass media were claiming numerous ‘Israeli’ strikes on Iran, allegedly real time videos of a quiet Tehran were being posted on line.
It must be said that no satellite photos of any real damage to Iranian installations have been posted on the internet and one of a military facility seeming to show a huge crater appeared later intact on the Internet with a claim that the earlier photo had merely shown a shadow.1
The Iranian authorities did admit to the deaths of four soldiers and a little minor damage, the latter quickly repaired, according to their updates. They also claimed to have shot down all but a few of the incoming missiles.
It seems that none of the manned Zionist aircraft entered Iranian airspace but a few approached the border from Iraq in order to launch their missiles from there, which raises another issue regarding the violation of Iraqi sovereignty by the US military.
According to Alastair Crooke, commentator on Middle East affairs, former British diplomat (then probably MI6 asset) on Judge Napolitano’s Youtube site,2 the first of three planned ‘Israeli’ attack waves encountered something unexpected in the Iranian air defence and the rest of the attack was aborted.
Narratives from each side would be tailored to suit their own propaganda needs but even some of the ‘Israeli’ media and other commentators were critical of the effectiveness of the attack, some saying Iran was hardly damaged while others said economic targets should have been included.
It also does seem that the Zionist attack was unusually restrained in restricting its targeting to military installations.
The speculation has been that the reason for that restraint was the US being quite firm with Netanyahu that the oil etc. installations were not to be hit as Iran’s retaliation would have engulfed not only the Zionist colony but wider western interests in the region and the world economy.
Whichever side is correct in its damage estimation may be relevant or may not. Iran has reiterated its right to defend itself but seemed not to be saying that it would definitely retaliate.
But on Wednesday Admiral Ali Fadavi, Commander-in-Chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran was quoted in some media stating that his country’s military will retaliate, stating that such “is inevitable”, today backed by the Director of the Supreme Leader’s Office.
Michael Jansen, a correspondent on the Middle East in the Irish Times wrote that because Iran was allegedly hard hit in the ‘Israeli’ attack, it will not retaliate and claims that Iran’s previous retaliation was a flop. If that is Jansen’s main basis for her opinion, it is to my mind an unsafe foundation.
In the past I’ve had respect for Jansen’s analysis of the war in Syria and the positions of different factions but this time I think she is very wide of the mark. The previous Iranian retaliations swamped the Zionist air defence system3 with cheap drones but hit many targets with missiles.
It seems to me that Iran WILL retaliate and the only thing that might hold that off or at least moderate the strength of its attack would be if the ‘Israeli’ Government ties up a peace deal with the Palestinian Resistance, led by Hamas. And that looks extremely unlikely, for a number of reasons.
The Resistance is sticking to the terms that were announced by Biden back in May, which he claimed were the ‘Israeli’ Government’s and to which the Resistance agreed, only to see the talks sabotaged again and again by Netanyahu in proposing additions and deletions.
The basics of the Resistance position are:
Immediate end to the ‘Israeli’ attacks now and in future
Total withdrawal of the IOF from Gaza (including the Nezarim Corridor and Rafah)
Total removal of all obstacles to arrival of humanitarian food, medicine etc. supplies
Return of all displaced from parts of Gaza as they wish
Exchange of prisoners (including bodies of dead Israelis and to include Palestinians nominated by the Resistance, without Israeli veto)
Reconstruction of infrastructures and buildings: housing, medical, educational, social, commercial
None of those terms except the exchange of prisoners has been agreed and even there, Netanyahu wanted to exclude some Palestinian prisoners from the exchange. Most fundamentally, he insists on the IOF staying in Gaza, in particular in the “Nezarim corridor”.
It is frequently commented that Netanyahu cannot afford personally to end the attacks in defeat as a postponed court case for alleged fraud and bribery awaits him and, without a victory in his belt, his political fascist friends would abandon him to be savaged by his enemies in the Zionist entity.
However, the continuing Zionist massacres of civilians and wide-scale urban destruction is intended in large part to force the Resistance to accept terms with which the Zionist state agrees, to gain in negotiations what it has been unable to win on the battlefield against the Resistance fighters.
No doubt there are some who think that the Resistance should abandon its demand about total IOF Gaza withdrawal, just to end the massacres. That kind of thinking results in a partial peace to which the enemy will return again and again with violence.
The Palestinian Resistance has clearly decided that they will tough this out in the sacrifice of their people, fighters and leaders in order to get a more stable position for the Palestinian nation, from which to go forward to self-determination – and peace, should that be obtainable.4
US Imperialism in the form of Bill Clinton supervises handshake between Yitzhak Rabin, Prime Minister of US proxy’Israel’ and Yasser Arafat, then leader of Fatah in control of the PLO at the conclusion of the Oslo pacification process. The Agreement spawned the Zionist-colluding and repressive Palestinian Authority but never gained the Palestinians anything. (Image sourced: Internet)
The last time the Resistance caved in to Zionist and imperialist demands was with the Oslo Accords in 1993, signed for the Fatah leadership by Yasser Arafat. Since then not only did the Palestinians not make any advances but additional Zionist settlements have grown apace.
And every few years have seen new genocidal attacks on the Palestinian people.
The Axis of Resistance considers the Zionist State to be a constant threat to the Arab states and indigenous people of the Middle East, in addition to the Islamic Republic of Iran. The history of the Zionist state’s wars with its neighbours and its backing by imperialism seems to bear that out.
Looked at soberly, the Palestinian Resistance has inflicted a huge defeat on the IOF and the Zionist military mystique on October 7th and, notwithstanding daily genocidal massacres, the Resistance has gone on for a year to deny the IOF a victory in Gaza or on the West Bank.
Hezbollah’s bombardments have cleared much of north Palestine of settlers in addition to hitting targets in central ‘Israel’ and they’ve also fought the IOF to a standstill on Lebanon’s borders. Missiles and drones of the Iraqi Resistance and the Yemeni State have also hit the Zionist State.
The balance of battlefield supremacy is tilting against Israel, thanks to the adaptability, courage and sacrifice of in particular the Palestinian people but now also the Lebanese — and world popular opinion is against the Zionist European settler project as never before.
Iranian drones, one launching, Iran 4 October 2023 (Photo cred: Reuters)
It is necessary to continue the process both to inflict an unmistakeable defeat on the Zionist State and to win substantial advances for the Palestinian people and, incidentally, for the people of the Middle East. These advances entail in addition setbacks for US and western imperialism.
It is important to hammer that nail home, lest it works itself loose before long. I think that at some point Iran will likely retaliate against the Zionist state for its own dignity and defence but also as part of the Axis of Resistance, striving to rid the area of an extremely dangerous infestation.
End.
FOOTNOTES
SOURCES
1The imperialists have Iran constantly under satellite surveillance and it beggars belief they would not have posted photos of significant damage were such to exist.
2Crooke claims that the first wave was to destroy the air defences but failed and encountered something which put all the rest of the attack in danger so they called the attack off and then claimed a victory. Crooke is speculating up to a point about the reasons but claims the facts about the attack are from ‘Israeli’ sources. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txkNk76E3SI
3Both ground-based, as with Iron Dome and David’s Sling but also airborne with US and European allied aircraft.
4A similar position was outlined with respect to Hezbollah by Sheikh Naim Qassem in his first speech on Wednesday since his election to the General Secretaryship of the organisation.
A number of years ago I read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book We Were Eight Years in Power, which was a eulogy to the Obama era and people like himself who had done well out of that period in the US.
It was a terrible book, rightly slated by many and led to black academic and activist Cornel West describing him as the neoliberal wing of the black freedom struggle.[1] The book was so bad, I barely got half way through it and put it down never to pick it up again.
Cornel West (left) described Ta-Nehisi Coates (right) as the neo-liberal wing of the black freedom struggle.
I never thought I would read another of his books, though I have read some articles of his. Then came his new book The Message and the criticism from the Right on his comments on Palestine. So, I surrendered and read it. This time in its entirety.
It is an easy well-written read.
As with all his books, this is very much about him. His preferred pronouns are definitely I and My (yes, I know My is not a pronoun, but none of this pronoun nonsense obeys the rules of grammar in any case).
It deals with three trips he made and how he felt about them and the issues that arose. Given the CBS interview I fully expected to find some hard critique of the US, Israel and Apartheid, though that is not his style.
Instead, he relates stories about his experiences in Palestine, talking to Palestinians and also to Israeli settlers. That is it. The Israelis obviously do not come out well in the book. How could they?
Coates likens his experiences in Palestine to Jim Crow in the US and Apartheid in South Africa. They are the comments and observations on what he saw, and pretty much middle of the road.
He is no Norman Finkelstein with his searing condemnations of Israeli massacres and Apartheid. It says more about the US media that Coates’ interesting, but in no way extreme comments, have provoked such fury.
This part of the book, is partly a Mea Culpa for previous articles he had written in which he praises Israel, chief among them, apparently, is his essay published in The Atlantic, The Case for Reparations.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
In the essay, he liberally and uncritically quotes terrorists and murderers such as David Ben-Gurion and Menachem Begin.[2] He has much to apologise for in that essay.
The essay starts off with a biblical epigraph from the book of Deuteronomy and also an anonymous quote from 1861 “By our unpaid labor and suffering, we have earned the right to the soil, many times over and over, and now we are determined to have it.”
Except the land in question, that which Lincoln promised to give to freed slaves was land that had or would be stolen from native American Indians, who do not figure in his case for reparations, just like Palestinians didn’t exist for him.
It is a thoroughly vile, though well researched piece, that I have criticised previously in an essay entitled Reparations Without Talking About Capitalism[3] and won’t go into again here.
He now says that he is ashamed of some of the things he said in that essay, which he mentions in his book. He does not mention an earlier essay which leaves no doubt as to where his loyalty and politics lies: The Negro Sings of Zionism.[4]
In it he compares Zionism to Black Nationalism, Theodore Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement to Huey Newton and even Malcolm X! This essay was written only months before Obama, his hero, came to power and was in the throes of his election campaign.
Obama was and, like Kamala Harris, still is an ardent supporter of Israeli atrocity. Coates was not going to challenge Obama on this point, ever.
And even now in the midst of the genocide in Gaza he has publicly called for people to vote for Kamala Harris, saying that sometimes the choices are bad.[5]
And further, he says a Kamala presidency which supports “apartheid and genocide” would be nightmare scenario “of being the first Black woman president and having 2,000-pound bombs with your name on them dropping on Gaza.”[6]
Except it is not. It is business as usual. The only nightmare is for the Palestinians, not for him or the rest of the liberals who will vote for Harris.
Under Obama, the US bombed at least six countries, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, where the Houthis are actually challenging both the US and Israel and of course Libya
where the toppling of Gaddafi led to the reintroduction of open-air slave markets where black Africans were once again for sale. Not a minor point you would think for a black identitarian.
In 2016 alone, Obama in his final year of his presidency dropped a staggering 26,171 bombs i.e. three bombs every hour, every day of the year.[7] Meanwhile Coates was waxing lyrical about how he and others like him had spent eight years in power.
He should own it! That was on Coates as well. He doesn’t get to wash his hands now.
Sometimes the choices are bad, he claims. But would he tolerate a white person voting for a racist politician on the grounds that they had good positions on other issues, such as abortion? I think not.
His arrogance leads him to think he and Harris deserve a pass on this now. He doesn’t, nobody does. Neither does the hypothetical white voter who wants to vote for some racist who has good positions on other issues.
The level of ignorance that Coates claims for himself is hard to fathom and even harder to believe. He claims to not be sure when exactly in his visit to Palestine he first heard the term Nakba.
He also states that “For as sure as my ancestors were born into a country where none of them was the equal of any white man, Israel was revealing itself to be a country where no Palestinian is ever the equal of any Jewish person anywhere.”
Revealing itself? Under which rock had Coates been hiding? Had he not heard of Operation Cast Lead?
It was launched in the same year he sang his hymn to Zionism. It resulted in around 1,500 Palestinian deaths, mainly civilians and the displacement of 100,000 people. Did he never hear of the Goldstone Report on that operation?
And the scandal when Goldstone was forced to recant? It was one of many such assaults on Gaza. All of this and other incursions have been well documented.
Writers write. Everyone knows that, it is their art, their trade. But more than write, they read. All writers read, even the bad ones have to read something occasionally. Coates’ ignorance is not credible.
When he researched his essays praising Zionism, did he not come across a single solitary article to give him some pause for thought? Any piece by Finkelstein, Ilán Pappé, Chomsky, anyone at all? His feigned ignorance is not plausible.
In his song to Zionism, Coates looked at the conflict through his identitarian eyes, and chose a side that he thought was closest to his own identity. His “repentance” is a similar process. He now sees the Palestinians through those eyes.
We have no idea how far he will go with this and when he will backtrack. Like many writers he can read the room and probably feels now is a good moment to be on the Palestinian side. But his repentance only goes so far.
If Harris wins the election, he will at some point write Another Eight Years in Power. Or if she loses, The Land of Milk and Honey We Were Deprived of.
He states early on his book that “we could never practice writing solely for the craft itself, but must necessarily believe our practice to be in service of that larger emancipatory mandate.” Like Gandhi said of British civilisation, it would be a good idea.
But what is that mandate? Abortion rights in the US, but genocide in Palestine?
He has little understanding or willingness to deal with issues of capitalism, imperialism, or his own role in it all. The book will through its anecdotes prove interesting to many and he has an easy-to-read style. You could read this book in one sitting.
Just don’t expect any deep analysis or understanding, there isn’t any. I have said nothing of the other two parts to the book, which almost deserve a critique of their own, though it would be more favourable than I have been thus far on his coverage of Palestine.
Borrow it, don’t buy it. Money is hard to come by, Coates is not short of a bob or two and there are better things to spend your money on.
In future, there will be no red lines in attacking your country.
Yes, I do mean YOUR country, wherever you are. In whatever war it’s in. And in this imperialist world, it’s a safe bet your country will be part of a war, directly or a little indirectly, sometime in your lifetime. Or in your kids’ lifetimes.
The Adversary will be able to carpet-bomb your residential areas, your hospitals and medical centres, schools and universities, places of religious worship, markets, restaurants, coffee shops, bars, bakeries, internet access sites, gyms, your infrastructures and municipal authorities.
There might be some condemnations at high levels abroad, even threats of court cases but nothing will be actually done in practice.
The Adversary will be able to attack your food stores, blockade you from food and fuel imports, bomb your farms and fishing fleets. It will be able to call down aerial strikes on people in their homes, in vehicles or shoot them by snipers or drones as they walk in the street.
Your cities’ food delivery trucks, construction and rubble-clearing and heavy lifting vehicles will be targeted, along with their drivers and operators. That is so that your people will have to dig with your hands to find victims under the rubble of bombed buildings.
Your ambulances and paramedics will be targeted so that picking up wounded or even corpses becomes a high-risk job and your hospitals will be bombed, shot at and invaded to reduce the life chances of any bombing victim found alive in the rubble or on the street.
Your country’s infrastructures of electricity generation and supply, water supply, sewage collection and treatment, waste collection and treatment, telecommunication and public transport will be bombed and bombed and bombed again.
Your reporters will be shot on the street and their homes bombed, as will your media networks offices. That hardly seems necessary anyway since no-one who sees any of the atrocities, no-one with power anyway, will even try to stop what is being done to you and your people.
That’s because there are no red lines anymore.
Your populations will be refugees in your own land and their tents and shacks will be bombed and fire-bombed. They will be bombed wherever they go and they will be bombed on the way there. They will be told some areas are safe and then they’ll be bombed and shot at there also.
Food, fuel, water and medicine supplies will be blocked, blockaded and even bombed. Many of you will be hungry, thirsty and cold. The weaker ones, also the very young and the elderly, will die prematurely of diseases and ailments or untreated wounds and sores.
People with special medical needs will die from lack of specialised medical treatment, procedures, equipment or medication.
Your children will be denied education, safety and even life. Your young and middle-aged men and women will be denied work, safety and even life. Your elders will be denied safety in retirement — and even life.
Some of you will resist, of course. Those the Adversary can catch will be put in prisons; mostly not even a trial will be required but when it does, it will be a mockery of standard judicial procedure. In jail they will be beaten, humiliated, tortured, degraded, half-starved, raped and die.
Some of your resistors will be shot after they’ve been captured. Random civilians will be shot by snipers or drones, thrown into graves and earth pushed over them, perhaps even while alive; other bodies will lie in the street to make you sick with terror and the smell of their decomposing bodies.
Other civilians – including children – will be used as human screens or shields for the Invader’s troops and even their armoured vehicles. They will be used to test mines, booby traps and IEDs.
You will be taught how little your lives matter and how easily they can be wiped out.
There is no longer humanitarian international law, no Geneva Convention; there are no longer any red lines.
It will happen because …
The Zionist state has committed all the crimes listed above and has done so while being photographed, filmed and even live-streamed by reporters, victims, witnesses and even by the Zionist soldiers themselves, in thousands of boastful videos and photographs.
Jabalia, North Gaza, IOF rounding up Palestinian civilians after destroying their neighbourhoods.
Their military leaders, politicians and media have proclaimed their intentions and followed them up in practice.
There have been some high-level international complaints and criticisms and even court cases but nothing in practice has been done by the relevant international bodies to physically stop the Zionist genocide or even to deprive them of the weapons and finance to carry out that genocide.
Yes, we know that there have been many human rights violations committed by Western powers in other wars: Dresden, Hiroshima/ Nagasaki, Korea, Algeria, Vietnam, Ireland, Lebanon, Iraq … And some of them were photographed too.
But never before has there been such blatant anddaily violation of all principles of international law at so many levels to be seen live on our screens while Western powers leaders justified it and all international institutions were either complicit or helpless.1
So now that the unthinkable has been done there, it is no longer unthinkable anywhere. And if not unthinkable, then history shows us that it will indeed be thought of. History shows us too that what is thought of will also be done.
What hasn’t been done yet?
Poisoning your water supplies? Why not? So long as there be a water supply for the invading soldiers and good clean water for the occupiers, the settlers. Germ warfare? Why not? As long as the invaders and settlers are immune or the pathogens die out in time for occupation.
There are no red lines any longer and you can expect none when war comes to your country.
Anything goes.
End.
Footnotes
1And people who protested it in western states were maligned, hounded in work and academia, beaten on the street, arrested …
On 26 September 2022, an explosion blew a section of the Nord Stream 2 gas supply pipeline from Russia to Germany, incidentally causing an environmental disaster for sea-life in the area. Investigations confirmed that it was an act of sabotage.1
Amidst accusations and theories,2 no perpetrator was conclusively identified.
But two years later, in September 2024, an important item of previously-suppressed information came to light in a Danish newspaper. It was not however picked up by the mainstream western media, despite its potentially crucial contribution to solving the mystery.
Alternative sources however alighted on it and it is now coming into the public light.
In any investigation of culpability for a human action, one of the first established principles to investigate is – and targets of investigation should be — cui bono? (in Latin, who benefits?). Next, Qui habet potestatem? — Who has the means? Finally, Who had the opportunity?
Map of route of the Nord Stream pipelines showing neighbouring state. (Source image: Financial Times)
Potentially, any in the anti-Russian coalition around NATO stood to benefit by harming not only a Russian installation but also a major source of financial benefit to Russia, i.e of sales of gas to Germany. Many eyes turned towards Russia’s opponent in the Ukraine, the Zelensky regime.
However, neither Russia nor any other serious commentators ever considered that NATO proxy to be the culprit. Russia and others stated that the operation required a major state, both in the depths concerned, in surface support needed and in the explosive type and detonation system.
A number of commentators pointed the finger at the USA, which denied any involvement. Well, the USA is a major state and certainly had the motive, as Russia was and remains its major target in the Ukraine war and it also had the potential technical and personnel means.
It would also of course, as an enemy of Russia, benefit from harm to its opponent. It would benefit the USA financially too, though that was yet to become clear.
From whom would Germany buy its power to warm its population and production through the winter as an alternative to Russian gas? That new source would turn out to be – yes, the USA.
OK, so suspicion should fall heavily on the USA, leader of NATO and chief among the enemies of Russia. But did it have the opportunity?
Since there was no record of a US naval presence in the area at the time of the explosion (even though they had been there previously in one of those major joint exercises they like to carry out to bring their allies closer and intimidate their opponents), the media investigation floundered.
Russia asked at the UN Security Council for an investigation, which was rejected. No decision of the Council can be made against a veto of even one of the five Permanent Members, of which three are part of the NATO coalition (USA, UK and France).
A number of alternative theories began to be put around, including mention of large yacht in the area and a Ukrainian oligarch financier. Official investigations were launched by two states in whose economic zone the operation must have taken place: Denmark and Sweden.3
Both regimes are part of the US/NATO/EU coalition and there may have been suspicions that their investigations might not be sufficiently thorough. In any case, in February this year both states closed their investigations without having identified the perpetrator.
Germany’s investigation is ongoing and it issued an arrest warrant for a Ukrainian oligarch who fled to NATO proxy Ukraine with assistance of NATO member Poland. However Russia and serious commentators have always said that a major state, something Ukraine is not, was culpable.
On 17 July 2024, the German government refused to publish the preliminary results of the investigation after the Alternative für Deutschland (AFD) party asked for it, or to comment about the possible involvement of American intelligence services or Ukraine in the pipeline attack.4
In October 2024, the Swiss newspaper Die Weltwoche wrote an article based on an interview given to Danish Politiken by John Anker Nielsen, the harbourmaster of Christianso in Denmark on the day of the two-year-anniversary of the Nord Stream pipelines sabotage.
Back in September 2023, the Christianso harbourmaster detected the presence of ships in the area with their transponders, equipment identifying the ship and its course, silent. Assuming some kind of accident, Nielsen sailed out to investigate, finding US Navy there.
With no evidence of disaster and a request that he leave, Nielsen turned for home. (Suppose that information had been included in the Danish investigation, would the fingers pointing at the USA not have multiplied?)
Nielsen says he was told to keep quiet about what he knew but decided to end his silence in September and his story was published in a local newspaper. Later alternative commentators such as Glen Greenwald and others on X picked up on it and now it’s finding its way into wider media.
The Swiss newspaper article went on to note that the USS Keararge three months earlier had participated in the BALTOPS 2022 exercise that included unmanned underwater vehicles suitable for demining and other underwater operations.5
Such vessels as those could transport explosive charges suitable for blowing the Nord Stream pipelines. The Swiss newspaper claimed this new information calls into question the assumption that a Ukrainian group was responsible for the sabotage and that investigations are continuing.6
OUTCOMES
The outcomes to date are that Russia has received heavy financial damage, both in the cost of the pipe and any repair costs but also through loss of a customer who might well have resumed its purchase of gas from Russia in preference to dearer fuel from elsewhere.
Carlos Latuff cartoon outlining the major suspicions at the time.
The USA has benefited financially because it is also an energy exporter, including to Germany, where Russia was its main competitor.
In 2022, Germany imported 44.65 million tonnes of hard coal. Its leading coal suppliers were Russia (29.2%), the United States (20.8%) and Colombia (16.3%).7 So in the event of any embargo on Russian hard coal, the US stands to benefit enormously.
But what about natural gas, formerly supplying 55% of Germany’s power supply, no longer possible from Russia through the Nord Stream 2 pipeline? About 45% …. comes from Norway through pipelines, 4% from the Netherlands, 5% domestic production … the rest from western neighbours.8
Norway and the United States were the top suppliers of gas to the EU in 2023. Norway provided almost 30% of all gas imports. But the actual origin of those supplies is not so easy to identify and reports even estimate that a small percentage of the EU’s supply is actually Russian.
Although additional suppliers include North African countries, the UK and Qatar, in 2023, the United States was the largest LNG supplier to the EU, representing almost 50% of total LNG imports. In 2023, comparing to 2021, imports from the US almost tripled.9
It seemed likely that some at least – and perhaps a lot – of Germany’s current LNG supply, though perhaps through another country, would actually be of US origin. And it turns out that the US has been the dominant LNG supplier to Germany since 2022 at 82% of total imports.10
IN CONCLUSION
While the USA has benefited significantly financially from the pipeline explosion and strategically through damaging an opponent, Germany has at the same time suffered a loss in having to buy more expensive fuel (from the USA).11 But Germany is an ally of the USA and a prominent one in NATO.
This episode demonstrates that 1) the USA, in advancing its own interests, is prepared to break the law and to see an ally suffer but also that 2) a major European capitalist power has surrendered a substantial portion of its own interests for the benefit of the USA, as a price of membership of the NATO club.
Germany, though an enthusiastic supporter of NATO, due to its dependence on natural Russian gas, had been reluctant to engage fully in the economic sanctions against Russia proposed by NATO. The blowing up of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline removed that dependence, transferring it to the USA.
The USA benefited, both politically/ militarily in hurting its opponent and in increasing the dependence of an ally. It also benefited subsequently financially, in gaining a major customer market share. The USA had more than enough Motive to carry out the sabotage.
It also had the Means (the capability) and now, as we know, the Opportunity also! Circumstantial? Sure but a mountain of evidence nevertheless.
4Receiving the answer: “after careful consideration, the Federal Government has come to the conclusion that the question cannot be answered for reasons of public interest”.
rebelbreeze 