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TPQ
Dixie Elliot ✊I'm certain that everyone is well aware that Bobby Sands used the melody of Gordon Lightfoot's 'The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald' for his own song, 'The Voyage', which Christy Moore retitled, 'I Wish I Was Back Home In Derry' because he already had a song called 'The Voyage.'

But did you know that Gordon Lightfoot was asked why he hadn't sued Christy Moore for using his melody?

Lightfoot admitted that the melody was in fact from an old Irish folk song he had heard as a child and it stuck with him. He said he always intended to use it in a song some day and when he heard of the tragic sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald he used it to write that song.
 
So when Bobby used it, the melody had simply reverted to it's place of origin, Ireland.

There are quite a few instances of old melodies being used in songs which went on to become very popular. One being 'Danny Boy' which used the melody of 'The Derry Air.'
 
The 'Derry Air' was not in fact the original title of this melody. It was actually called 'O'Cahan's Lament' and had been composed by a blind harper called Rory Dall O'Cahan to lament the theft of O'Cahan land during 'The Plantation of Ulster'.
 
He believed that the fairies had played it to him as he slept under a tree near the River Roe.

Many years later Jane Ross, a collector of old melodies, heard a beautiful tune being played in the street outside her home in Limavady on a market day in 1855.
 
She went outside and discovered that it was a blind fiddler called Jimmy McCurry. She paid him the then princely sum of a florin to play the tune over and over until she got it taken down.
 
It is interesting that both the musicians connected to this melody were blind.
 
Jane Ross is remembered for her connection to the famous melody with a blue plaque outside her former home.
 
As for poor Jimmy McCurry, he is buried in an unmarked grave in Tamlaght outside of Ballykelly.
 
Isn't it about time that Jimmy is also remembered for his part in a melody went on to become one of the most played songs in the world, Danny Boy?

Thomas Dixie Elliot is a Derry artist and a former H Block Blanketman.
Follow Dixie Elliot on Twitter @IsMise_Dixie
I

Two Famous Songs Which Were Composed Using Old Irish Melodies

Electronic Intifada  Editor’s note: Teuta “T” Hoxha is one of the “Filton 24” prisoners currently being held on remand in British jails facing charges relating to direct action carried out against Israeli arms firm Elbit near Bristol in August 2024. She is currently on her second hunger strike, but this piece was written between her first and second hunger strikes. Palestine Action is currently banned under British “anti-terror” law.

As a prisoner, you learn three things. First, no one tells you anything. Second, you’re usually the last to find out information pertaining to yourself. And third, requests and complaints are shut down with two words: “security reasons.”

Take the example of my library job, removed without reason on 1 August 2025. I was checking my timetable when I noticed the unemployed marker. At my previous prison, HMP Bronzefield, I was security-cleared to work as a Shannon Trust mentor, a one-to-one role helping other prisoners improve their reading skills. I was working as a peer right until my sudden and immediate transfer to HMP Peterborough. It was not until day eight of my hunger strike that I gained clarity behind the decision.

Letter From A British Political Prisoner For Palestine

Christopher Owens 🔖 Five decades on, events that took place in the 1970’s continue to have a reverberating effect on today’s world.


No more so than in the Middle East.

A lot has been written about events since October 7th. But few have really sought to understand the history, the nuances and the missed opportunities that have come and gone over the years.

Quite the tall order and, producing a book that runs nearly 700 pages, it’s a task that journalist Jason Burke has clearly relished as he has given us a tome that not only tells the story of Palestinian resistance but also how secular Marxism ended up being replaced with theocratic Islamism.

Beginning in 1948 with the creation of the state of Israel as well as the Nakba, Burke looks at the history of Leila Khaled, George Habash, Wadie Haddad and what motivated them to fight for Palestine as well as the actions that would shock the world as well as taking in the likes of Carlos the Jackel (or Ilich Ramírez Sánchez to his mother), Yassar Arafat, Ali Hassan Salameh, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Ulrike Meinhof, Fusako Shigenobu, Wilfried Böse, Saddam Hussein, Ruhollah Khomeini and many, many others.

What is particularly illuminating is how early combatants and victims did not fit into the orthodox Israeli Jew/Palestinian Muslim roles that would be commonplace later on in the decade: the Israeli Olympic team killed at Munich were not particularly religious, Habash and Haddad came from Christian families and Mohsen Sazegara (founder of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) grew up in a Tehran household that detested mullahs. Little details such as these demonstrate how the idea of this being a religious war (at least in the early days) gave the wrong impression about the aims of the PLO and their various offshoots, although the Iranian revolution would bring this misconception to life.

Some of it is unintentionally hilarious, especially the period in the mid/late 70s whenever identity politics usurped revolutionary aims. As one such example, when surveying the capabilities of the second generation of Red Army Faction members around the time that they were ordered by Baader and Ensslin to break them out of prison, Burke notes in pithy fashion that:

The RAF was scattered across West Germany: two militants in Heidelberg, half a dozen or so in the so-called Black Forest group in Karlsruhe, four or five in Frankfurt and three slightly ineffectual young women known derisively as ‘the Hamburg Aunties’ in the northern port city.

Burke is also not afraid to note the various issues that were never resolved: antisemitism, tensions between secularism/Marxism and Islamism and how public intellectuals and left wingers allowed themselves to be seduced by prominent activists only to be either let down at how vacant they were (Jean-Paul Sartre meeting Baader) or with egg on their faces when their true intentions were revealed (Foucault and Sartre praised Khomeini).

Of course this is nothing new. Writing in 2015, Don Milligan talked about this grand left-wing tradition being:

…a simplistic response towards imperialism. It is common for people on the left to engage in elaborate apologetics or even smile upon dictatorial regimes and reactionary movements of many different stripes as long as they can be described as ‘anti-imperialist’.

And it’s not a surprise that this carries on to this day.

Demystifying folk heroes/villains, laying out the various fragile alliances in the Arab world, the influence of Soviet/US intelligence and demonstrating how legends were created, Burke has given us one of the finest books of 2025.

Jason Burke, 2025, The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s. Bodley Head. ISBN-13: 978-1847926067

⏩ Christopher Owens was a reviewer for Metal Ireland and finds time to study the history and inherent contradictions of Ireland. He is currently the TPQ Friday columnist and is the author of A Vortex of Securocrats and “dethrone god”.

The Revolutionists

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Nine Eight Hundred And Eight

 

A Morning Thought @ 2990

Pádraig Drummond  ✊ "There’s no “emergency” when the same conditions repeat every month for a decade; that’s policy."

The October 2025 homelessness figures land like a brick through the window of Ireland’s so-called social conscience. Sixteen thousand seven hundred and sixty-six human beings, living, breathing, thinking citizens and children, boxed into “emergency accommodation” that resembles a stopgap solution only if you squint hard enough and ignore the smell of systemic failure rising from the numbers. Eleven and a half thousand adults, over five thousand children, a whole small town’s worth of kids growing up in hotels and hostels, and the government has the gall to present this as a monthly report instead of a national indictment.

In a normal society, these numbers would be a siren from the watchtower. But in Ireland’s mad bureaucracy, they're just another spreadsheet cell. Every statistic in this report reads like a casualty figure from a war that shouldn’t exist, a war waged quietly, efficiently, against the poor. Families make up a quarter of the homeless households, and single adults nearly three-quarters. That’s not just a housing crisis; that’s a generational collapse. Almost six thousand children under eighteen caught in the gears of a system built to grind the vulnerable into administrative dust.

You can practically hear the bureaucrats patting themselves on the back as they churn out percentages about gender and age distributions, as if the tragedy becomes easier to swallow once you convert it into pie charts and percentages. Nearly 60% of adults are men, sure, that tracks, men always get hit first and worst when the floor collapses, but the real horror is in the age bands. Over half the homeless adults are between 25 and 44, prime working and living years, the years society claims it rewards. A quarter more are middle-aged, staring down the barrel of a future that’s shrinking by the day. Two hundred and sixty-seven people over 65, elderly people, shoved into emergency accommodation like some kind of grim retirement plan for a country that forgot how to care.

And Dublin, the gleaming jewel of Irish capitalism, hoards more than 70% of all homeless adults, like some monstrous magnet for misery. Eight thousand one hundred and forty-one adults, enough to fill a small stadium, shuffled between PEA, STA, TEA, and other alphabet soup euphemisms for “we don’t have real housing, so here’s a stopgap.” The fact that the majority of accommodation is still Private Emergency Accommodation, hotels and B&Bs, is a quiet confession that private profit has long since eaten the state alive. There’s no “emergency” when the same conditions repeat every month for a decade; that’s policy.

The report’s self-congratulation about “preventions” and “exits to secure tenancies” reads like something cooked up by a PR team rather than public servants. One thousand six hundred prevented from entering homelessness and 1,234 moved out sounds impressive until you view it through the proper social lens: these are crumbs dropped from the banquet table of a housing system engineered to fail. Tenancies created through Housing First barely hit double digits in multiple regions. Meanwhile, thousands more fall in the front door of emergency accommodation every quarter. You don’t need chemicals to see the hallucination here, it’s all right there in the numbers: the exits are dwarfed by the scale of the problem.

The citizenship breakdown adds another layer of quiet cruelty. Half Irish, half non-Irish, a reflection that capitalism’s failures don’t discriminate, but its apologists will. You can almost predict the cynical debates this will fuel, the narratives that whisper the problem away by blaming migrants instead of the decades-long political decision to outsource the housing system to developers, landlords, and “the market,” as though the market ever cared whether a child sleeps in a bed or on a floor.

Let's call it what it is: state-sanctioned neglect dressed up as progress, a bureaucratic fever dream where human beings become inputs and outputs, and the state issues monthly newsletters instead of solutions. A social analysis doesn’t have to look far, the very structure of the report betrays the ideology behind it. Everything measured, nothing solved. Everything counted, nothing changed.

This isn’t a homelessness report. It’s a confession note slipped under the public’s door. A society that tolerates nearly 17,000 people in emergency accommodation, including more than 5,000 children, is not malfunctioning. It is functioning exactly as designed: protecting property over people, private interest over public need, profit over humanity. And until that design is smashed, these monthly reports will read less like statistics and more like obituaries for the social contract.


⏩Pádraig Drummond is an anti-racism activist.

Hotel Ireland 🏠 Vacancy For The Damned

Irish Times ★ Written by Colm Keena. Recommended by Jim Monaghan.

Fresh detail about the decision of President 
Catherine Connolly to visit Syria in 2018 has emerged since the October election.

During the campaign Connolly repeatedly declined to say who had organised the trip to the war-torn country where the Russia-backed government of president Bashar al-Assad was involved in a complex and vicious civil war.

However, two days after the vote, the former TDs and MEPs Mick Wallace and Clare Daly, who accompanied Connolly on the visit, disclosed that they had organised the trip along with Daly’s sister Elaine, a trade union employee who separately ran non-profit tours for people who wanted to visit the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

“We organised that trip ourselves, lads, seeing as you are so bloody interested,” Clare Daly said, speaking on the I4C Trouble podcast she co-hosts with Wallace.

She said the June 2018 trip was arranged with the help of people in Syria that she, Clare Daly, knew from an earlier trip she and Wallace had made in 2017.

Continue @ Irish Times.

New Detail Emerges About President Catherine Connolly’s 2018 Trip To Syria

Enda Craig ⬟ Are British royal charters still in existence, valid in Ireland and do they mentions Lough Foyle specifically?

Yes, some British royal charters remain valid in Ireland, particularly in the Republic of Ireland, due to specific legal accommodations made after independence. While the monarchy no longer grants new charters, existing ones were largely incorporated into the new Irish legal system, often with the agreement reached during the 1922 treaty negotiations. This has allowed some organizations, and even some specific rights like certain fishing or land rights, to continue to exist or function legally under the authority of their original charter.
 
Historical context:  Royal charters were granted to organizations and for rights during the period when Ireland was part of the United Kingdom.

Post-independence: After the creation of the Irish Free State, the legal status of these charters was addressed. Many were confirmed and transitioned into the Irish legal framework.

Continuing validity: As a result, some charters that were recognized by the Crown continue to have legal standing in the Republic of Ireland, as affirmed by the 1922 Treaty and subsequent Irish law.

Examples: This includes organizations that still use "royal" in their names (like the Royal Irish Academy) and certain property or rights, such as those in Lough Foyle, which remain Crown property due to a royal charter.

New charters: No new royal charters can be granted in the Republic of Ireland since the country abolished the monarchy.

Are British royal charters still in existence and valid across former colonies?

No, British royal charters are generally not valid across former colonies in a legal sense, as each former colony is now an independent state with its own laws. While some organizations in former colonies may still retain their "royal" designation or have their original charter acknowledged, these charters do not hold legal authority over national governments or their citizens in the new nations.

Why charters are not valid in former colonies.

National sovereignty: When former colonies gained independence, they became sovereign states with their own constitutions and legal systems, which superseded any authority from the British Crown or its charters.

Repeal of colonial laws:  Acts of independence have typically included provisions that repeal British laws, including the colonial laws that would have upheld the charters' authority.

Legal distinction: A royal charter is a UK legal instrument that is valid within the UK's jurisdiction. It does not extend to other countries unless specific legal arrangements have been made, which is not the case for independent nations.
 
How some organizations still retain charters

Historical significance: Many organizations continue to use their royal name or retain their charter for historical, cultural, or symbolic reasons.

Internal organization: The charter may still function as a form of incorporation for the organization itself, granting it legal status and perpetual succession within its home country's legal framework.
Legal accommodation: Some countries have made legal accommodations to allow these organizations to continue operating under their existing charters while transitioning to the new national legal timeline.
 
Modern-day relevance

The Commonwealth: The Commonwealth of Nations is a voluntary association of 54 independent countries that were formerly part of the British Empire, but it does not give the British monarchy any legal authority over its members.

Organizational status: While the charter itself may not have extraterritorial legal validity, it can continue to be a source of prestige and a basis for the organization's internal governance.

⏩ Enda Craig is a Donegal resident and community activist.

Read The Difference Between Ireland And Other Former Colonies

A Digest of News ✊ from Ukrainian Sources ⚔ 1-December-2025.

In this week’s bulletin

⬤ Ukraine’s unbearable choice.
⬤ Donetsk frontline update/ Pokrovsk & other fronts.
⬤ More responses to the ‘peace plan’.
⬤ Ukraine’s biggest corruption scandal.
⬤ Building in Mariupol.
⬤ Russian torture of prisoners.

News from the territories occupied by Russia

29 November – International Women Human Rights Defenders Day: Women of Crimea (Crimea Platform, November 29th)

The Face of Resistance: Crimean Tatar Activist Vadym Bektemirov (Crimea Platform, November 28th)

‘War tourism’ plans for Mariupol and other cities Russia first mercilessly bombed (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, November 28th)

Luxury rubble: Real estate prices in Russian-occupied Donbas skyrocket despite widespread destruction, shelling, and water shortages (The Insider, November 28th)

Monstrous sentences against Crimean Tatar journalist and activists seized in Russian retaliation for a humiliating attack by Ukraine (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, November 27th)

74-year-old Crimean Tatar historian detained and prosecuted over interview about the 1944 Deportation (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, November 26th)

Joint Statement of the Fourth Parliamentary Summit of the International Crimea Platform (Crimea Platform, November 26th)

Weekly update on the situation in occupied Crimea (Crimea Platform, November 25th)

Berdiansk man sentenced to 12 years after 18 months in Russian torture prisons (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, November 24th)

Fourth Parliamentary Summit of International Crimea Platform (Crimea Platform, Nov 24th)

People in occupied territories must be visible – Alena Lunova at Kyiv Dialogue (Zmina, Nov 20th)

From Crimea to Africa, Asia and Latin America: “Crimea Global” outcomes (Zmina, November 19th)

Women support each other, and it saves lives: Girl Power at Crimea Global (Zmina, November 18th)

Building on Ruins (Belling Cat, November 14th)

Life Under Occupation (Alter Pravo, October 2025)

News from the front and ‘peace’ negotiations

We Have Aces Up Our Sleeve (Tribunal for Putin, November 26th)

What the leaked transcripts reveal about US-Russia negotiations (Meduza, 26 November)

As Trump and Putin seek to force Ukraine into "peace", what's the situation in Donetsk Oblast? (Ukrainska Pravda, November 25th)

'No one will support it': Ukraine's soldiers react to US peace plan (BBC, November 24th)

US/Russia talks. Peace for our time (The Russian Reader, 24 November)

The battle for Pokrovsk and the costs for Ukraine on other fronts (Meduza, 19 November)

News from Ukraine

“Midas” vs. Mindich: How Ukraine’s NABU executed the biggest anti-corruption operation in its history — and why the EU is getting involved (The Insider, November 28th)

Gender, Equality and the EU: ZMINA presented its Shadow Report at the National LGBTIQ Conference (Zmina, November 27th)

War-related news from Russia

Journalist sentenced to 4 years for working with Radio Liberty has disappeared from a Russian prison (Ukrainska Pravda, November 30th)

Russia churns out mass sentences for ‘spying’, with only the part of occupied Ukraine varying (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, November 28th)

Worked too well together. Crimea bridge defendants sentenced to life (Mediazona, 27 November)

‘I decided to fight back. Ukraine is my home.’ Yulia Lemeshchenko’s final word in court (People and Nature, November 27th)

Ukraine’s powerlifting champion sentenced in Russia to 19 years for partisan acts in defence of her home (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, November 25th)

Analysis and comment

We don't have a spare Ukraine, former Kherson mayor says (Ukrainska Pravda, November 28th)

Ukraine/Russia: Peace Efforts Should Put Human Impact First (Human Rights Watch, November 27th)

How Volodymyr Ischenko Strengthens Russia’s Negotiating Position (Ukraine Solidarity Campaign, November 27th)

Intensified attacks on Ukraine and Russia (UN commissioner for Human Rights , November 25th)

Russia is undermining the system of international criminal justice. And the West is inadvertently enabling it (Ukrainska Pravda, November 24th)

War Against Nature (Tribunal for Putin, November 22nd)

Ukraine Faces an Unbearable Choice (Oleksandr Kyselov in Jacobin, November 21st)

Amidst talks of the war ending (Tribunal for Putin, November 21st)

Research of human rights abuses

Music in Captivity: Marine Corps Orchestra’s Story (Kharkiv Human Rights Prot’n Group, Nov 26th)

How many Ukrainian prisoners are in the enemy detention centers, and where are they located? (Tribunal for Putin, November 24th)

A seminar on Ukrainian children abducted by Russia was held on the sidelines of the Fourth Parliamentary Summit of the Crimea Platform (Crimea Platform, November 24th)

Upcoming events

Wednesday 26 November, 6.0pm UK time: What should trade unions do for Ukraine? International public meeting Register here.

Tuesday 2 December, 8-11pm. Ukrainian Winter Folk: fundraising night of live folk singing, Walthamstow Trades Hall 61/63 Tower Hamlets Road, E17 4RQ

Saturday 6 December: Ukraine Solidarity Campaign Annual General Meeting


🔴This bulletin is put together by labour movement activists in solidarity with Ukrainian resistance. More information at Ukraine Information Group.

We are also on twitter. Our aim is to circulate information in English that to the best of our knowledge is reliable. If you have something you think we should include, please send it to 2U022ukrainesolidarity@gmail.com.


We are now on Facebook and Substack! Please subscribe and tell friends. Better still, people can email us at 2022ukrainesolidarity@gmail.com, and we’ll send them the bulletin direct every Monday. The full-scale Russian assault on Ukraine is going into its third year: we’ll keep information and analysis coming, for as long as it takes.

The bulletin is also stored on line here.

To receive the bulletin regularly, send your email to:
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To stop it, please reply with the word “STOP” in the subject field.

News From Ukraine 💣 Bulletin 173

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Nine Eight Hundred And Seven

 

A Morning Thought @ 2988

Jim Duffy ✍One of the perversities in small countries like Ireland of the far left's hate for Ukraine, and their endless swallowing of Putin's talking points, is that they do not understand how their country's status and even survival is linked directly to Ukraine's.
 
To understand why, one needs to go back through history. For centuries, large states were dominant and used their dominance to use, invade and extinguish small countries at will. Small countries were at their mercy.
 
From the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) on, efforts were made to create a body of international rules that granted rights to states. However it wasn't until the late 19th century that a more detailed body of international law regulating the conduct of states emerged. However it had a weakness. States couldn't be forced to sign up, so end up being lured in by the fact that many conventions aren't able to be enforced, but were a kind of gentlemen's agreements that people would obey based on an unenforceable promise.
 
After World War I, the League of Nation was created to introduce an international structure that would bring countries together in one body. It too however was weak, and crucially the US never joined and the USSR ended up suspended over its behaviour.
 
The United Nations tried to create a new stronger structure but it too was fundamentally weakened. To lure major powers in. Five major powers were giving indefinite vetoes in the Security Council, which ended up preventing it from functioning as the major enforcer of the rules based order. The major five, Britain, France, the US, the USSR and China (until the 1970s the Republic of China, later on the People's Republic of China) routinely vetoed vital decisions to protect themselves or friends.
 
A core principle in the conventions, the League, and then the UN, is the central absolute rights of state:

1. The right to sovereignty, and 2. The right to territorial integrity. In other words, a state, whether large or a microstate, had a right to exist based on the will of its people, and no country had a right to extinguish it, and its territorial integrity was sacrosanct - meaning its territory could not be broken up and regions taken by other states. Those principles are written in the UN Charter.
 
That radically changed international affairs, and severely limited the powers of large states while protecting the rights of small states. It meant a common feature of European history in the past, the conquering and annexing of small states by large ones, to a large extend died out. Not totally. China seized Tibet, for example. But the the constant annexing of small countries, as Prussia did for example to Hanover, died out.
 
The UN Charter amounted to a dramatic rebalancing of the powers in favour of small countries, making their position more protected. Some large powers, used to throwing their weight around, and seizing smaller countries' territories, were more than miffed about the rules as they developed. They were also miffed at rules limiting what they could do in war, rules on war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, and human rights granted in international law based on sex, religious belief, on ethnic or cultural minorities, and much else.
 
The visions of Putin and Trump are the same: a world where all restrictions on big states are swept aside, where they can invade anywhere, annex anywhere, have their military do whatever they want to anyone with no repercussions.
 
Putin's invasion unambiguously beached all core principles of the UN Charter in Article 2.4. 

All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.

Putin's aim is unambiguously to use force against both the territorial integrity and political independence of Ukraine, through the biggest war in Europe since World War II.

In the war, Putin's military deliberately is breaking every rule in international law on war. It executes prisoners, executives civilians, deliberately bombs civilians, apartment blocks, and kidnapped children - actions that are not merely illegal but war crimes. That is all deliberate. The thinking is that if Russia succeeds in Ukraine, the whole rules-based international order will be dead-in-the-water as it has been broken completely without negative consequences. Putin will have said, yet again, to the world "fuck your rules!"
 
Seizing land and setting up fake republics, then claiming them as Russian territory is a blatant breach of Ukraine's "territorial integrity" and the UN Charter, and intended to be. That is why the international community has universally refused to recognise Crimea as Russian territory and why legally it remains, and will remain, Ukrainian territory. Even China, no fan of international law, refused to recognise Occupied Crimea as part of Russia. (Territories illegally occupied by a state in breach of the "territorial integrity" and "Political Independence" rules are known as "Occupied Territories" - for example, the "Occupied Territories" held by Israel but not owned by it in international law.)
 
Trump, to the disgust of the international community, of course wants to recognise Crimea as Russian. It is his way of also helping bring down international law - something he despises. He is also trying to collapse the International Criminal Court for enforcing war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide laws on Israel. He has made it clear he wants the US military to be free to commit war crimes without danger of prosecution. It is why he wants to recognise the "Occupied Territories" in Palestine as part of Israel - as another way to give the finger to international law.
 
Irish people who say "what has the Ukraine War got to Ireland?" don't get it at all. It has everything to do with Ireland and all small countries. Their status is explicitly protected by international law. If Putin and Trump get their way, those protections would collapse as would all protections. It would return to the horror days of "might is right" where big countries could do whatever they wanted, as all protections built up over one hundred years, and indeed right back to the Treaty of Westphalia, would be swept aside.
 
If Russia was to succeed in capturing and annexing Ukraine (Putin's aim is to capture Ukraine, sweep aside its democratic institutions, impose pro-Russian puppet, Viktor Yanukovych, who had been driven from the presidency by a popular revolution and fled to Russia, and then have Yanukovych in Ukraine's name apply for Ukraine to join Russia), it would mean that it was open season on all other countries for invasion and annexation as the protections in international law for small states have been swept aside and dead-in-the-water.

Russia would then feel free to invade Finland, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, or any other country in Europe. Georgia and Azerbaijan are on the menu. Trump's America is free to seize and annex Greenland, or any other country or territory. China can invade any of its neighbours.
 
In Africa, large countries would have carte blanche to invade and annex any of their neighbours. The international rules that for one hundred years that have managed, with uneven success rates, to make such invasions and wars relatively rare, and which largely led to the disappearance of annexation post World War II, would be de-facto dead. If Russian could get away with it in Ukraine, then everyone else can too.
 
That is why for Ireland and all small states, Russia's war in Ukraine is potentially existential. The idea that it doesn't matter to Ireland couldn't be more wrong. The rules that protect Ireland's right to exist and territorial integrity, and which do so for small countries all over, are on the line in this war. Putin intends this war to be the battering ram to collapse the rules based order that protects millions but which he despises. He, and Trump, want to sweep away all rules that get in their way. They are using Ukraine to attack those rules. Ukraine and most governments get that. That is why they are so strongly supportive of Ukraine. They realise how crucial the war is for their interests.

⏩ Jim Duffy is a writer-historian.

Russia's Existential Threat To Small States

The Hartmann Report ✏ Written by Thom Hartmann. 

How a small nation’s pragmatic, humane approach exposes the lie behind America’s manufactured “crisis” and offers a roadmap for defeating the racist strongmen weaponizing immigration for power…

Razor wire in the sunrise, shadows waitin’ at the gate,
Families walk from fire only to meet another state.
Little hands on chain-link fences, tired eyes that plead for grace,
A journey made for freedom ends in fear they shouldn’t face.
’Cause the cruelty ain’t a bug—it’s the whole damn plan,
Turning hope into a weapon in the heart of this land.
But we can guard our borders without losing dignity;
We can choose the road of mercy over cold strategy.

The most gruesome feature of the Trump/Vance/Miller regime is their glee in brutalizing nonwhite people and terrorizing anybody who objects or tries to hold them to account. Their entire rationale is that the barbarity and savagery are “necessary” to deal with millions of “illegals.”

Denmark is onto something that could blow up their entire excuse for this violence against both people and our Constitution, and Democrats need to pay attention.

Back in June 2008 I did my radio program for a week from the studios of Danish Radio in Copenhagen. 
Continue @ Hartmann Report.

Did Denmark Find The Answer To Immigration 🪶While Trump Chose Barbarism Instead?

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