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TPQ
Gary Robertson ⚽ As Gaelic Warrior stormed up the Cheltenham hill to land the Gold Cup for champion trainer Willie Mullins and jockey Paul Townend spring felt in the air. 

Spring when a young man’s fancy turns to love but in tennis love means nothing and nothing gets the heart beating faster than football. I dare anyone to disagree. I’ll be waiting over there 👉🏻 ….
 
Saturday and what looked on paper some intriguing matches. Potential for failure or the title race blown wide open and so it proved but not perhaps as many predicted.
 
Aberdeen under new boss, ex St Mirren man Stephen Robinson took the lead finally in the 73rd minute over a resilient Falkirk, and for a while (16 mins at least) it looked like the new manager was to start with a victory. However once again a young man mentioned before in this column, Falkirk's Barney Stewart, had other ideas and levelled in the 89th minute. A share of the points about right in my opinion.
 
Hibernian v Livingston. I want to tell you this was a great game full of action and controversy but it wasn’t. It was dull, very dull and 0-0 flattered both sides. Instantly forgettable and so let’s not spend too much time on it.
 
Watching Celtic at 3pm on a Saturday is something of a novelty in Robertson Towers as with Sky now dictating kick off times we often find ourselves playing midday Sunday or 2/3pm the same day so to enjoy Celtic playing at home against what I generally consider to be the best footballing team in the league, Motherwell, I made it clear to all necessary that unless there was a likelihood of an imminent nuclear explosion not to call me between 3 and 5. 

I settled back apprehensively and watched the two take the pitch. The pressure immense as a draw or defeat and it would be curtains for the season; a victory and the gap to Hearts would be closed to two points (at least for a few hours before they faced Kilmarnock at Rugby Park). Much to play for and for some especially a way to win back the adoration of the fans, myself included, after some lacklustre displays. Early opportunities for Nygren and Tounekti were dealt with by Well keeper Ward, Tounekti's shot going wide before a bullet from Oxlaide Chamberlain was touched onto the post and squirmed along the goal line without ever actually crossing it. Agony for Celts, relief for the Steelmen. Celtics pressure was relentless and for all the world it looked a matter of time. 

Then just when you’re thinking “it’s gotta pay off” you remember it’s Celtic you're watching, and a defensive mix up between Sinisalo and Hatate, the midfielder robbed of the ball and Elijah Just slotted past the big Fin to give Motherwell an early lead. 32 mins and Celtic were on the verge and no less than Motherwell deserved. Once again Celtic's defensive woes were there for all too see. However it wasn’t long before O’Neill's men bounced back and took advantage of some sloppy Motherwell defending and a shot from Yang just inside the 18 yard box slammed home hard past a furious Ward - and the teams were level once more. 

Both sides continued to create chances - as you’d expect from these two - Nygren hitting the post when it looked easier to score one of the early second half highlights. Then the controversy, again involving Ref John Beaton. Longelo of Motherwell clearly hauling Maeda to the ground, the ref initially awarded a goal kick. Bearing in mind he had a perfect view of this incident why we needed the intervention to award a penalty had many shaking their heads in disbelief. However eventually after a VAR check Beaton gave Celtic their penalty and a, in my opinion harsh, red card to Longelo. Cometh the man Cometh the hour and up stepped Ibrox hero Cvancara to fire the penalty past Ward into the net and Celtic fans onto cloud 9. A mere 7 mins later and a rejuvenated Yang latched onto a long ball that split the Motherwell defence and fired home for Celtic and a, in the end, comfortable 3-1 victory. The gap now two points as Hearts travelled cross country to Kilmarnock. Hopes high of restoring their lead to five points. Killie though weren’t just there to make up numbers, and so it proved.

 
Both sides had chances in this match. A shot in the 6th minute from Killies Curtis came crashing off the post much to the relief of the travelling fans. In the 13th minute it looked very much like Hearts' Braga had been clipped in the box but the Hearts striker, to his credit, maintained his balance and chased the ball. Costing his side a penalty perhaps,  I’m fairly certain Braga will be made aware there’s no room for sportsmanship in Scottish football by McInnes and you can rest assured, knowing next time he’s hitting the floor. Then the goal, the goal that blew the lid off the title race. An exquisite cross from the much underrated Kiltie was met by the onrushing Larsen, and Kilmarnock found themselves with an unlikely and unexpected lead in the 17th minute. Wave after wave of attack from both sides and superb goalkeeping, poor finishing and excellent defending meant the score remained 1-0 to the home side.

Kilmarnock probably should have had a penalty themselves in the 73rd min when Hearts captain Halkett pushed Kilmarnock's Curtis in the box. However, the offence was deemed to be just outside and that was pretty much that. The gap cut to 2 by Celtic, and Rangers now 6 points behind but with a game against St Mirren on Sunday: a chance for Rohl's men to brush off their Scottish cup disappointment and instead focus on a title challenge.
 
A Sunday lunchtime game for the boys in blue, I don’t think anyone will chastise me for saying this wasn’t a classic. Rangers did exactly what they had to do, nothing more nor less. An in-swinging cross from Raskin in the 32 min met by Rangers' Rommens bundled into the net gave the Gers, the three points needed to close the gap on the top two. It’s now in their own hands. Sinply put: whoever holds their nerve, keeps their discipline and grinds out results from here on in wins the title. Three separated by three points, Motherwell now looking out of it. The run in looks exciting.
 
To close the weekends fixtures we had the Dundee Derby. 11,000 plus of the city of discoveries finest descended on Dens Park. However the first half was another easily forgotten 45 mins. The highlight, the single highlight of the piece being a United cross that was headed over the bar otherwise let’s not waste ink talking about it
 
The second was a totally different kettle of wild haggis as within 5 mins of the restart United were awarded a penalty when the ball was adjudged to have struck the arm of Simon Murray. On reflection it was harsh in my opinion but rules are rules, I guess, and up stepped Fatah to fire the Arabs ahead. The away side were soon to find themselves two ahead when a bullet header from Lewis Stephenson hit the underside of the crossbar and into the net. A special mention to Will Ferry who’s ball in was top drawer and helped create the goal. 

It all looked like to be going swimmingly for United as they held onto their lead and with only stoppage time between them and victory what could go wrong? What indeed? I’ll tell you now this match finished 2-2 in the most bizarre circumstances possible. In 90 + 4 a scramble in the box, the ball squirms into the United net off the heel of Hay. Even then despite the commentator on Premier Sports going crazy it looked like a United victory was on the cards. However 90 + 6 and a free kick to Dundee swung into the box and headed home past the United Keeper Maynard - Brewer by tangerine shirted and red faced Graham and the points were shared.

And so closes another weekend of Scottish football and a three horse race to lift its premier prize. Before I go I have to mention Montrose and their crazy 5-4 victory on Saturday night over Alloa in League One. The home side could yet push for promotion. It’s still all to play for.

Til next time …

🐼 Gary Robertson is the TPQ Scottish football correspondent.

All To Play For

Barry Gilheany ✍In a recent cover story for the Observer New Review, the author and journalist Ian Buruma considers the proposition whether America is becoming a fascist state and, ergo, whether President Donald Trump is a fascist and the MAGA movement that is his base is a fascist movement.[1] 

The thesis is that the features which have characterised Trump’s second Presidency (and arguably his first) such as the ICE raids for undocumented migrants; the imperial aspirations to seize Greenland and Canada and ventures in Iran, Venezuela and the Caribbean; mass rallies; attacks on ‘elites’ and the dog whistle rhetoric aimed at racial and other minority out-groups constitute evidence that the USA is on the superhighway towards a fascist dictatorship. 

In examining the case for the affirmative, Buruma does tick the relevant evidential boxes and convincingly fleshes out archetypal themes. But he also issues judicious cautionary notes around the definition of fascism, pointing out how some references to it are so catch-all as to put the mark of Cain on enemies who clearly do not fit the criteria. He acknowledges that fascism, like its antonym communism, is so often used as a term of cheap abuse by polemicists so as to lose its meaning. 

As well as its grotesque uses by Marxist-Leninist sects and regimes, think of the former GDR’s regime’s description of the Berlin Wall as the “The Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart”; there are also peculiarly American right wing takes on the term such as that by Michele Bachmann, the former Republican Minnesota congresswomen, who compared high tax rates with the Holocaust; or her Republican colleague from Ohio, Warren Davidson, who believed that a government mandate to get inoculated against Covid was like the segregation, persecution and the murder of the Jews. [2] Scarcely less obscene are the “neo-Nazi” slurs directed at President Zelensky’s government in Ukraine by their Kremlin aggressors. 

But does the Trumpian regime and kindred Alt-Right movements and governments across the globe fit more comfortably under another ideological canvass such as national populism rather than that belongs to a specific time period in history, namely the fascist movements of Europe of the inter-war years? Can the ideological genealogy and temporal circumstances of the Europe of the 1920s and 1930s really be mapped onto contemporary America? Because he is such as a recognisable American stereotype in his vulgarity, hucksterism and absolute worship of money and real estate, does any comparison between Trump and the fascist tyrants of yesteryear fit although certainly he shares with Hitler and Mussolini a love of the broadcast spectacle.[3]

At the outset, Buruma does acknowledge the difficulties in pinning down an exact form of fascism. For it has appeared in so many different manifestations: Mussolini’s quasi-Roman fascism; the racism and foundational antisemitism of German Nazism; the clerical fascism or National Catholicism of Spain’s Franco and Portugal’s Salazar; Japanese emperor worship; Romanian Orthodox Christian fascism; French anti-republican fascism; Flemish ethno-fascism and so on.[4]

But he does pull together common threads. For twentieth century fascist movements were cults whose members and adherents worshipped at the temples of speed, modernity, youth, revolutionary spirit, and a longing for an imaginary lost greatness. They are characterised by an almost eroticised love of force, rhetorical or real. Mussolini had his Squadristi; Hitler had the Brownshirts; the Romanians had the “death squads” of the Iron Guard; Franco had the Falange and within the British Isles there were the more transitory Blackshirts of Oswald Mosley and the Blueshirts of Eoin O’Duffy. 

As in most revolutionary movements, fascists saw a violence as a means to create a new order. The brutal experience of the First World War, and in Germany, the humiliation of defeat combined with the male camaraderie of the trenches to cement a loathing of parliamentary democracy which they viewed as a corrupt system run by soft, selfish, and dishonest elites cosseted by privilege and comfort. Political parties were just platforms for venal interests (or in the contemporary refrain, “they are all the same” or “they are just in it for themselves) and they hated bourgeois intellectuals, modern artists, international bankers, independent scientists or other emissaries of free enquiry which meant hatred of the Jews commonly associated with such “decadence” (incidentally the resemblance between this catalogue of hatreds and those of the “class enemies” of ultra-left movements like Mao’s Red Guards and the Khmer Rouge are quite striking). 

In place of the decadent, democratic order, would be a unified state, where class differences would be dissolved under the leadership of a charismatic strongman. Under fascism, as in totalitarian states generally, parties representing different interests and independent trade unions were banned and the individual was incorporated into a collective mass and reinvented as political soldiers loyal to their Fuhrer/Duce/Caudillo whose word was law. As Herman Goering put it: “Hitler is the law” and, in the words of his boss in the 1940s, “What am I? I am nothing but the spokesman of the German Volk.”[5]

Having sketched out on the canvass the broad outlines of fascism, Buruma acknowledges that comparisons with Hitler and Mussolini may not be helpful or appropriate as, regardless of his possible aspirations to be such, Trump is not a dictator. Nor has he committed acts of mass murder. However there are disturbing echoes of the fascist era around how the MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement orbits around what the Germans called, the Fuhrerprinzip, the cult of the leader. For without Trump’s personal hold over his followers and most of the Republican Party, MAGA would be confined to the rancid margins of social and political discourse. Trump luxuriates in mass rallies where his long, meandering speeches hit the spots of the fear, anger, and vengeful emotions of the crowd, convulsed by economic disparities and deindustrialisation and bewildered by global hi-tech. The MAGA crowds are not roused by ideas but by the promise of the restoration of the lost era when “America was Great” and by aggressive, threatening slogans like “Lock Her Up” and “Drain the Swamp.”

Buruma notes how Trump employs the classic strongman weapon of selecting specific groups for ill treatment. Migrants from “shithole countries” are denigrated as “animals;” they “eat pets;” they are “not human;” they are “drug dealers, criminals, rapists” (Mexicans) or “garbage” (Somalia). Such groups represent classic scapegoats for the fears and resentments of the most devoted of the demagogue’s followers. The invective directed at such out-groups serves as a prelude to their isolation and persecution as exemplified by the performative cruelty of Trump’s mass deportation programmes and their zealous implementation by his ICE shock troops, comparisons of which to Brownshirts may be, in Buruma’s words “an exaggeration but not much.” 

For the use of this state-sanctioned militia to effectively intimidate political opponents in Democrat-run cities and to project strength rather than the upholding of law based on consent is surely a replication of the acts of force majeure typically carried out in authoritarian states not in democracies which pride themselves on the rule of law and the separation of powers. The open embrace of violence is yet another blast from the past from the dark eras of history. At a rally in Pennsylvania, Trump said he “wouldn’t mind if someone were to “shoot through the fake news,” gesturing at reporters, whom he called “bloodsuckers.” [6] And, of course, the events of January-6-2021 illustrate the propensity for MAGA followers to engage in violence to thwart the outcomes of democratic elections in the successful manner of Franco in 1936 and Pinochet in 1973 and the failure of the French far right forces in their attack on the National Assembly on 6 February 1934 in the Veterans Riot which was intended to overthrow the leftist government democratically elected in 1934.

And the other parallel with European inter-war fascism is hatred of the elites: the afore mentioned universities, law firms, international financiers, and journalists. While not on the scale of the mass burning of books and the 1937 Exhibition of degenerate art in Nazi Germany, Trumpian America is becoming an increasingly chilly house for free enquiry academia and culture. For, as part of an anti-woke crusade, Trump in March 2025 signed an executive order targeting the Smithsonian Institute and the museums and memorials overseen by the Department of the Interior. The order directed Vice President JD Vance, who sits on the board of the Smithsonian, to eliminate “improper, divisive and anti-American ideology” from the museums and to work with Congress to keep from funding exhibits or programmes that “divide America by race.”[7] In this way kulturkampf has become a weapon of choice for Trump’s second administration.

Furthermore, Trumpland’s culture war is fought on perverse and contradictory terms. Arrests of and threatened deportations of pro-Palestinian student protests and the harassment of liberal professors on Ivy League campuses are carried out on the rationale of the protection of Jewish students from antisemitism while at the same time a Trump campaign ad pushes the openly antisemitic trope of Jewish control of world finance by featuring the prominent Jewish bankers George Soros, Lloyd Blankfein and Janet Yellen, portraying them as part of an international conspiracy to plunder American wealth and rob American workers.[8]

Writing admittedly near the end of Trump’s administration in 2019, David Renton urges caution to be exercised around the articulation of ideas that suggest Trump is a potential tyrant or that he veers towards fascism.[9] He invokes ‘Godwin’s Law”, an invention of online discussion moderators whose maxim is that the longer an online discussion continues the greater the likelihood that one or other of the participants will compare someone to Hitler. The point of the rule is to guard against hyperbole; to warn against the cheapening of the term “fascism” to simply to describe somebody or something one does not like. In his refutation of the description of Trump as a ‘creeping fascist’ by the British left-wing historians Neil Faulkner and Sam Duthi, Renton argues that it is the most loaded of terms, associated with different kinds of experience; with a political party characterised by top down leadership and a one-party state, with the suffering of millions of people, and with broader notions of intolerance. In the model of Faulkner, Duthi and other leftist polemicists, the fascism of the past was a tool to destroy a rising socialist movement; its counterpart today arises out of the confidence of the right.[10]

Renton contests this narrative by asserting that many of the characteristics attributed to fascism, for example, that it is a middle-class protest movement map do not merge seamlessly onto the circumstances of today. Part of Trump’s base, certainly at the point of emergence of the Trump movement, has been a generation of underemployed male internet warriors who grew out of the gaming world and who in cyberspace congregated around the website Breitbart. This cohort of young men are college-educated and compete for a narrowing pool of professional jobs, often while depending on the bank of Mum and Dad to cover the costs of their student loans. Sociologically, comparisons with the social layers that comprised interwar fascist movements hardly stacks up in Renton’s analysis. He cites Gramsci’s account of how the Italian state was maintained at a lower level by military bureaucrats chosen from a caste of wealthy landowners who had sound reason to fear for their privileges in the event of a Communist revolution, while in Germany, students, teachers and junior civil servants were also committed to the maintenance of their status difference from the mass factory proletariat. In both countries, the fascists found their first recruits among such occupational strata, rather than industrial workers, who were immunised by a sub-culture of workers’ clubs and socialist unions and newspapers. Everywhere in Europe, university students were a major social basis of fascism.[11]

By contrast in MAGA land, the alt-right has attacked the universities, not because it expects to win recruits there but in the same vein that Italian fascism once attacked the socialists their trade union halls – to intimidate its most resolute enemies in the spaces where they should feel strongest and most secure. Eighty to ninety years on from the era of European fascism, the American state does not depend on the support of a caste of aristocrats. [12] Nor can the left claim to have the same organic link to the working classes as it enjoyed prior to fascism for a myriad of reasons including deindustrialisation, class and electoral dealignment, the long-term decline in trade unionism, the migration of class signifiers from the occupational to cultural milieux and the insecure, precarian nature of work. In many respects, the tragedy of Trump and the global Alt-Right is the distancing, if not disassociation, of the forces of labour from the forces of social (woke?) progressivism.

Having drawn out the sociological contrasts between classic fascist movements and the landscape of Trump and MAGA, a closer examination of the ideological complexion of the Alt-Right is required in order to come to a verdict as to whether Trump is a fascist or not. |A coherent description of contemporary Alt-Right ideology is given in Bloomfield and Edgar’s booklet The Little Black Book of the Populist Right who develop the concept of national populism and its overlap and divergence from classical fascism. National populism on their account is an amalgam of a multiplicity of right-wing forces who coalesce to exploit the failings of the neo-liberal establishment and its economic orthodoxies. Former fascists have remerged from the shadows; ‘post-fascist’ parties seek to sanitise their image; new right-wing populist parties have emerged; some existing conservative (the GOP certainly and the British Conservative Party in real danger of it) have been infiltrated and taken over.[13]

National populism shares a number of political characteristics with fascist parties to its right: nationalism, xenophobia, glorification of an idealised national culture, an identified threat from an excluded ‘other,’ an anti-global conspiracy theory and a charismatic leader (for example Nigel Farage, Mario Silvini, Marine Le Pen). National populists have popularised a new lexicon of terms to stigmatise the ‘luxury beliefs’ and ‘virtue signalling’ of the ‘new elite.’ National populists have been major beneficiaries of the mythology that the ‘will of the people’ is being thwarted by a ‘woke’ establishment that is stoked by powerful press barons. National populism focuses on issues of culture, tradition, and identity but, in public at least, eschew the explicit racist and antisemitic themes of past fascist movements. However, demagogues like Trump, in their simple and intoxicating narratives about national decline and ‘American carnage’, do draw upon disturbing themes of pre-war far-right rhetoric -  and Muslims and immigrants have become objects of fear and loathing. Just as Mussolini’s fascists chanted “God, fatherland and family’ (“Dio, patria, e famiglia”), a slogan which Prime Minister Georgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy uses today, so in a 2017 speech in Warsaw, Donald Trump spoke up for “family, for freedom, for country and for God”.[14]

While Bloomfield and Edgar note the ideological affinities between fascists and national populists and acknowledge that many of the latter parties are successors to the former, they also caution that they are not the same. Casting the definitional net of ‘fascism’ so wide so as to encompass all that is unpleasant or dangerous on the right risks the failure to recognise the real thing when it emerges.[15] However, the popularity of the Great Replacement Theory and Soros and Rothschild theories within the New Populist Right and the capacity of social media algorithms to radicalise millions of the disaffected online poses real potential for the racial conflicts and worse in the near future as their roles in the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, the Buddhist extremist incited pogrom against Muslims in Sri Lanka and the anti-immigrant riots in England and Northern Ireland in the summer of 2024 illustrate.

Lastly on whether it matters if Trump is a generic fascist or not; the outworking of Project 2025, the transformative Heritage Foundation plan for permanent conservative revolution, in the wake of his 2024 PE victory offers plenty of raw material for a study of a proto-fascist USA. As does the progressive neutering of America’s democratic guardrails and Trump’s uniquely erratic style of rule in which the truth and reality become daily shape shifting phenomena in a manner that George Orwell would recognise. Perhaps the major caveat is that fascism took root in fairly homogenous nation states whereas the USA is not a European style nation state but rather an ideal meant to transcend ethnic and religious divisions. If Trump 2.0 is the harbinger of the end of this ideal; it could well be in a post-Civil War fracturing of the Union into mini states and territories.

References

[1] Ian Buruma, Is America Becoming a Fascist State. The Observer New Review. 1 March 2026 pp.8-11

[2] Ibid, p.9

[3] Ibid, p.9

[4] Ibid

[5] Ibid

[6] Ibid

[7] Jennifer Varasco and Elizabeth Blair. How will Trump’s executive order affect the Smithsonian. NPR Culture. 30 March 2025

[8] Buruma, p.10

[9] David Renton. (2019) The New Authoritarians, Convergence on the Right. London: Pluto Press p.103

[10] Ibid, p.104

[11] Ibid, p.105

[12] Ibid, pp.105-06

[13] Jon Bloomfield and David Edgar (2024). The Little Black Book of the Populist Right. London: Byline Books p.10

[14] Ibid, pp.10-11

[15] Ibid, pp.11-12

⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.

Is Donald Trump A Fascist And Does It Matter?

Liam O Ruairc 🎤This is a postcard from the second half of the 1940s (I am not sure of the precise date).

This is either produced by the Irish Anti-Partition League or the Dublin government at the time of the All-Party Anti-Partition Conference in 1949.



⏩ Liam Ó Ruairc is the former co-editor of The Blanket.

Patrick's Day 2026

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

 

A Morning Thought @ 3088

Christy Walsh 🔖 I have spent years building an argument: that the British learned to use institutions to conduct violence while keeping their hands clean. 

 I did not expect to be finishing the manuscript while watching that argument play out in real time.

I am writing a historical fiction thriller, The Belfast Doctrine. The novel grows out of decades of research into how the British state managed the conflict in the North of Ireland -not simply the street violence or the bombings, but how the institutions are set up. What began as a piece of historical fiction is now uncomfortably contemporary.

The argument behind the fiction is straightforward, if uncomfortable: Britain developed a model of warfare in which operational violence could be outsourced to proxies, deniability could be built into legal and civic structures, and the directing hand of the state could remain insulated from accountability even when events on the ground became impossible to defend.

I did not expect to be watching elements of that logic play out over the Middle East while I was still editing the final chapters.

What interests me is not a simple claim that one conflict is the same as another. It is that certain strategic principles travel. They reappear in changed form, under different flags, in different regions, and under different ideologies. The names change. The architecture does not.

What the doctrine is

The Belfast Doctrine is not simply about the use of proxies. States have always used proxies. What made the North of Ireland model distinctive was the sophistication of the surrounding system -the degree to which violence could be embedded within structures that also legitimised, explained, or obscured it. Security forces. Legal frameworks. Intelligence channels. Civic bodies. Community intermediaries. The violence was real. The fingerprints were managed.

That is the doctrine as I understand it. It is not just a method of coercion. It is a method of plausible deniability.

It remains one of the most adaptable models ever developed by a Western democracy for how weaker states can challenge stronger ones through irregular tactics.

Enter Professor Malik Karz

An important character in The Belfast Doctrine is a strategist called Professor Malik Karz. He is not there to lecture the reader. He is there to embody an idea. The principle he works by is simple: minimum input for maximum effect.

You do not need to destroy your enemy directly. It’s not about winning outright -but stretching US and Israeli resources until they begin to fail.

The most accessible historical illustration remains Sarajevo in June 1914. One assassination did not ‘cause’ the First World War by itself. The structural tensions were already there. But one act, at precisely the right pressure point, unlocked a chain reaction that produced four years of industrialised slaughter and the collapse of empires.

Karz understands that logic. What he does with it is the engine of the novel.

I questioned: what if Britain wasn't trying to solve instability but learning how to weaponise it within acceptable levels of violence?

Pressure Points in the Present War

That question feels uncomfortably current because the present Iran war has exposed, in stark form, the strategic power of pressure points. The US/Israeli assault that began on 28th February 2026 has produced exactly the indirect escalation that weaker actors seek when they cannot win a conventional contest on equal terms.

The first pressure point is cost asymmetry. Iran need not defeat Western and Israeli air defence systems outright. It only has to force them to use exponentially more expensive rockets intercepting comparatively inexpensive Iranian drones.

The second pressure point is the Strait of Hormuz. Roughly 20% of global petroleum liquids consumption passes through the strait per day, making it one of the world’s most consequential energy chokepoints. Iran is using the oil route itself as a strategic lever against materially stronger opponents.

The third pressure point is regional spillover. Iran does not need every action to be decisive. It needs enough simultaneous strain -on shipping, on energy, on allied air defence, on neighbouring states’ political calculations, diplomacy -to widen the field of crisis and raise the cost of escalation for everyone else. That is precisely the concern highlighted by current analysis of Turkey’s position: Ankara spent months trying to avert a wider war and now finds itself pulled toward one anyway.

The doctrine's fourth pressure point is distributed violence through regional proxies - forces that share ideological alignment and strategic direction while maintaining operational separation, creating the same plausible deniability that characterized earlier institutional models. Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping have disrupted global trade routes and forced expensive Western naval deployments, at a cost to Iran of nothing beyond training, weapons transfers, and ideological alignment.

This is what minimum-input strategy looks like at scale. The object is not victory in the old sense. But pressure on the whole system.

From Belfast to the Gulf

There is another layer to this that makes the comparison with the North of Ireland more than superficial.

In the late 1970s the IRA shifted away from older, more easily penetrated military style structures and toward smaller Active Service Units. The strategic logic was plain enough: a flatter, more cellular organisation could survive arrests, infiltration, and disruption better than a single exposed hierarchy. Strategic direction remained central, but operational knowledge became more compartmentalised.

Analysts now describe Iran’s wartime “mosaic defense” in similar structural terms. With senior Iranian leadership decimated, local IRGC commanders have been given more latitude to continue operations under decentralised conditions. That is the resilience advantage of cellular design. It allows a system to keep functioning after the command layer has been hit.

But decentralisation has a second function too, and it matters.

Missiles that crossed into Turkish airspace and were intercepted by NATO defences are the kind of escalation that decentralised command structures can produce, where local units may act independently while the state keeps diplomatic ambiguity about intent. Turkey says NATO has now intercepted multiple Iranian missiles, while Iran has denied targeting Turkey directly. That is precisely why decentralised violence is so useful: it can generate pressure, danger, and political effect even when deniability remains contested.

Systems built on dispersed command can create a zone of plausible deniability around escalation. The state may benefit from the consequences whether or not every act was centrally ordered.

The doctrine travels. The discipline does not.

That is the distinction that matters. A cellular structure built slowly through organisational learning is one thing. A decentralised wartime system activated under decapitation pressure is another. The architecture may look similar. The quality of control is not.

Who Still Benefits?

What the current conflict illustrates, with uncomfortable clarity, is that the Belfast Doctrine and the minimum-input principle are not separate ideas. They are two layers of the same architecture. One manages deniability. The other manages effect. Add a resilient IRA-style cellular structure and the system can continue functioning even after its visible leadership is attacked.

That is why the present moment feels less like news to me than recognition.

The architects of such systems are rarely exposed in full. Individual outrages may be investigated. Particular operations may be condemned. But the deeper institutional design -the structure that makes deniable coercion sustainable -is seldom named in public, let alone dismantled.

That is the question the book asks. Not how the doctrine works. But who is still protected by it. And why.

There's one twist my novel never imagined: what happens when a powerful state turns the Belfast Doctrine logic inward on its own national security interests? The Trump administration has decimated every sector of its own national security infrastructure and interests, from sacking all its experienced generals to gutting the FBI counter-terrorism, intelligence, cyber, and critical incident response units. The FBI has also reassigned between 25 and 45 percent of its agents who handle counter-terrorism to immigration control. With national counter-terrorism capacity dismantled against adversaries using cellular structures, the ASU logic of the Belfast Doctrine, the detection of ‘sleeper cells and lone wolves’ becomes a matter of luck rather than capability. Through self-sabotage the US has made itself more susceptible to minimum-input disruption than at any point since those structures were constructed post 9/11.

⏩ Christy Walsh was stitched up by the British Ministry of Defence in a no jury trial and spent many years in prison as a result.

The Belfast Doctrine 📚 Writing The Book While The World Enacts It

Merrion Press 🔖 has just published a new book by Gerard Shannon.



Rory O'Connor:

To Defend The Republic

Gerard Shannon

The first biography of the IRA leader Rory O’Connor, close comrade of Joseph Plunkett, Michael Collins and Kevin O’Higgins and key revolutionary figure during the Irish War of Independence who was controversially executed during the Irish Civil War.

The execution of IRA leader Rory O’Connor on 8 December 1922, along with Liam Mellows, Dick Barrett and Joe McKelvey, marked a bitter turning point in the Irish Civil War and remains one of the most infamous episodes in modern Irish history.

An unlikely revolutionary, in his early years, O’Connor qualified as an engineer and worked on the Canadian railroad. Returning to Ireland in 1915, he joined the ranks of militant Irish republicanism and became devoted to the violent overthrow of British rule. After playing his part during the Easter Rising, in its aftermath he became a key figure in rebuilding the revolutionary movement.

By the outset of the Irish War of Independence, O’Connor was the IRA’s Director of Engineering and also worked in the Dáil’s Local Government department, where he began a close friendship with Kevin O’Higgins, who would later sit on the government cabinet that approved O’Connor’s execution.

On the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, O’Connor became the public face of IRA opposition to the settlement. Captured several days into the Civil War, his execution in an illegal reprisal propelled him into the pantheon of Irish republican martyrs. In this first biography of O’Connor’s life, historian Gerard Shannon brings together various archival sources and accounts to help understand this important and often enigmatic IRA figure.

Paperback • €19.99|£18.99 • 336 pages • 234mm x 153mm • 9781785375842

Buy your copy

Launch Events

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Thursday 26 February, 6.30pm
Chapters Bookstore, Parnell Street
with Éamon Ó Cuív & Liz Gillis
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with Mairéad Farrell TD
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Out Now 📚 Gerard Shannon

Dr John Coulter ✍ While St Patrick’s Day tomorrow is traditionally associated with shamrock and Irish tricolours, it also marks the anniversary of the formation of one of the most fundamentalist and vocal Protestant denominations - the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster.

March 17th this year will be especially poignant for the Church, affectionally known as the Free Ps, as it marks the 75th anniversary of that formation in 1951 by a certain firebrand cleric - the Rev Ian Paisley, who later became First Minister of Northern Ireland with former Londonderry IRA commander Martin McGuinness as his Deputy First Minister.

How time flies! It only seems like yesterday that I penned an analysis of the Free Ps to mark the 50th anniversary of their formation in 2001, which was published in the Sunday Business Post under the headline: ‘Fifty years free and saved for Ian.’

A few days ago, a leaflet dropped through my letterbox detailing plans to mark that 75th anniversary. The blurb read:
 
Seventy-five years ago, on 17 March 1951, the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster was founded on the day the world recalls Patrick, who preached the same Gospel first entrusted to His apostles. While the world is rapidly changing, the message of the Gospel is unchanging and it is needed as much today as when it was first proclaimed.

This year, we celebrate 75 years of the Free Presbyterian Church by continuing to share that very same Gospel. Throughout 2026 our churches will be holding special services and mission events.

What struck me about the well-designed informative leaflet was that there was no mention of its historic founder Dr Paisley. When I penned the 50th anniversary article in 2001, Dr Paisley had been the Moderator of the Free Ps for virtually all its existence and would continue to be its leader for some years to come.

This is unlike its rival in the mainstream Presbyterian Church in Ireland (PCI), which elects a new Moderator each year. However, it can be suggested that Dr Paisley paid the price for entering a power-sharing Stormont Executive in 2007 with McGuinness in a working partnership which became dubbed ‘The Chuckle Brothers’.

While this era saw perhaps the most stable period of devolved government at Stormont since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, ultimately the ‘Chuckle Brothers’ routine sparked great unease among the ranks of the Free Presbyterian Church. It would lead to Dr Paisley’s resignation as Moderator.

But the Free P Church of 2026 is a far cry from the denomination I wrote about in 2001. While it would be some 20 years from the Free P foundation in 1951 to the launch of the DUP in 1971, the Free Ps were often later dubbed ‘the DUP at prayer’.

For many years since 1971, and especially through the generations of the Troubles, the Free P Church had a significant influence in the party. It seemed to be an unwritten edict that you had to be a communicant member of the Free Ps to rise to any role within the DUP.

Traditionally, when Protestants became disillusioned with PCI or the Ulster Unionist Party because of their respective liberal views, they quit both and joined the Free Church or the DUP.

The political problem for the Free Church came when current North Antrim MP Jim Allister quit the DUP and established the more hardline Traditional Unionist Voice party.

TUV members and supporters who were also members or worshippers at the Free Church did not necessarily leave those Free churches. Numerous TUV supporters chose to remain within the Free Church, thus creating a unofficial dissident Unionist movement within the denomination.

It would be this internal dissenting voice within the Free Church which would ultimately lead to Dr Paisley’s quitting as both Free Church Moderator and DUP boss.

In my 2001 article on the Free Church, I noted:

For its 40th anniversary celebrations in 1991 it packed 1,500 people into Belfast’s King’s Hall. The half century celebrations come at an opportune time - a matter of weeks before the expected British general election and local government elections in the North.

Those 50th anniversary celebrations in 2001 - at which Dr Paisley was the keynote speaker - were to provide a springboard for the DUP to overtake the rival UUP at both Assembly and Westminster levels.

Mind you, one observation I noted in 2001 still applies to the Free Church in 2026. Then I wrote:

Over the next two weekends many Free Presbyterians will be pondering what the spiritual and theological direction of the church should be, not just for the new millennium, but also for the next half-century.

Put bluntly, where does the Free Church now go post-Dr Paisley to see the denomination mark its centenary in 2051? One anecdotal evidence seems certain - the Free Church does not wield the same influence in Unionist and Loyalist politics as it did during the Dr Paisley era.

Dr Paisley for many years was also the keynote speaker at the Independent Orange Order’s annual Twelfth demonstration. Free Ps also played an influential role in Protestant pressure groups, such as the Evangelical Protestant Society and Caleb Foundation.

As Northern Ireland is now perceived to be a more secular and pluralist society, so too is the perception that these groups do not have the same influence within the Christian and pro-Union communities.

Other questions also need to be posed of Free Presbyterianism. Would the Free Church have had such a high media profile had a number of its leading members not dabbled in politics?

Would Dr Paisley have become the Billy Graham of Western Europe if he had stayed out of Ulster politics?

Similarly, the Free Church must use its 75th anniversary celebrations to ask itself how it will maintain its numbers in the pews given the current popularity of other fundamentalist and evangelical Protestant denominations, such as the Baptists, Elim Pentecostalists, Independent Pentecostalists and even the Brethren?

Like PCI, is the Free Church perceived to be an ageing denomination in terms of the folk in the pews? The real challenge for the Free Church in the years ahead will be to make itself more appealing to the youth of Ireland, north and south.

Young people are the lifeblood and future of any place of worship. If a church does not have a vibrant youth movement, the elderly will eventually literally die out, as will that church.

The Free Church was always perceived to be very traditional in its music and dress codes, especially for women. The latter must always wear hats to worship, not short skirts or trouser suits.

Like many Christian denominations across the geographical island of Ireland, the answers to these questions will be the key to the Christian churches development and survival.

While my late dad, Rev Dr Robert Coulter MBE, was best known for his ministry within PCI, he was at one time a minister in the early Free Church. The photo with this column shows my dad, on the left, with a very youthful Dr Paisley, on the right, at one such Free P event.

Before meeting my mother, dad was minister of Mount Merrion Free Presbyterian Church in Belfast in the Fifties. Before he became a born again Christian, dad had played in a dance band. His favourite musical instrument was the piano accordion.

During his brief ministry at Mount Merrion, dad would have Sunday evening Auld Tyme Gospel Music praise events. When Dr Paisley discovered that more people were going to Mount Merrion on Sunday evenings for the music praise instead of coming to hear him preach at his church in Belfast, he urged folk not to go to Mount Merrion!

Dad saw the writing on the wall in terms of his tenure in the Free Church and quit soon afterwards, later joining PCI. In spite of this, dad and Dr Paisley remained on good terms throughout their lives.
 
Follow Dr John Coulter on Twitter @JohnAHCoulter
John is a Director for Belfast’s Christian radio station, Sunshine 1049 FM. 

Future Of The Free P’s Depends On Youth Appeal

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

Anthony McIntyre ☠ For the past fortnight the two most warlike states on the planet, the USA and Israel, have been attacking Iranian society in what looks like a bid to bomb it into the stone age.

Two thousand reported dead and millions displaced from their homes, this is dark ages stuff from two states that have the technology, the capability, the intellect but not the mindset to be global leaders in enlightenment rather than envelop the world in the darkness of a mushroom cloud.

In a most informative article on The Pensive Quill this morning, Cam Ogie draws comparisons between pre-enlightenment rule by the Caesars and that by Trump/Netanyahu. And they have the audacity to claim that Iran and Gaza are led by obscurantists.

Mehdi Hasan cut to the chase with his acerbic observation:

Israel is bombarding, literally bombarding two Middle Eastern capitals. Beirut and Tehran, literally killing hundreds of civilians, and yet the US and UK media continue to portray Iran as the threat to the region Israel has nukes, but Iran is the nuclear threat. We live in Orwellian times.

The fog of the war over Iran might obscure what happens elsewhere in the region, but happen it does. In the West Bank village of Abu Falah on the night of March-7, three Palestinian residents were butchered by Israeli Nazis seeking to intimidate them out of their land so that it could be stolen in pursuit of the expansionist policy of Lebensraum. The IDF stood by and observed as the attacks took place, only entering once the Nazi settlers had departed, their work for the night done. When the Israeli SS came in the wake of the Nazi settlers it was not with ambulances and medical equipment but with jeeps, tear gas and stun grenades.

Mondoweiss, sketching the background to the triple murder, highlighted the spike in Nazi settler violence:

They weren’t the only Palestinians whose lives were taken by Israeli settlers that week. A few days earlier, another Israeli attack killed brothers Muhammad and Fahim Muammar in the village of Qaryut, east of Nablus. Another Palestinian, Ameer Shanaran, was killed by an Israeli settler in Masafer Yatta of the South Hebron Hills on the same day as the Abu Fallah killings.In total, settler pogroms had killed five Palestinians in the West Bank in less than a week, part of a broader escalation in settler violence and Israeli military restrictions on the lives of Palestinians since the start of the ongoing U.S.-Israeli war on Iran.

Israeli Nazi settler violence has been unrelenting: 486 attacks in January, 511 attacks in February. It is Kristallnacht every night for the residents of the West Bank. Muhammad Abu Karsh echoed a sentiment often expressed by Jews living under Nazi rule in the 1930s: "There’s a feeling of vulnerability and humiliation that you can be killed in our own town without consequences.”

A Palestinian can also be raped in custody, have it recorded only then to experience the vulnerability and humiliation that comes with finding out the five IDF rapists are not to face prosecution - again no consequences for the perpetrators of sexual violence.

In Gaza, where Israel has killed "more than 72,000 people in its genocidal war . . .  the majority of them women and children, and reduced almost the entire enclave to rubble," the Israeli air force this week murdered four civilians, including two seventeen year old boys. This brings the total of murders committed by Israel in Gaza to seventeen since the start of the onslaught on Iran. So much for a ceasefire.

Yes, there is a an imperialist war on Iran which we very much oppose. But Drogheda Stands With Palestine, each Saturday holds up a candle that refuses to allow the fog of that war to turn Gaza or the West Bank into a cosmological black hole from which no light can escape. We don't have to believe in a god to observe the biblical edict of let there be light. And we who gather here each Saturday remain determined that light from the heart of darkness will reach Drogheda

⏩Follow on Bluesky.

Let There Be Light

Ukraine Solidarity Group ✊ A Digest of News from Ukrainian Sources ⚔ 2-March-2026.

In this week’s bulletin

⬤ Ukrainian socialist Taras Bilous: what peace means.
⬤ Crimea resistance to occupation.
⬤ Oleksandr Kyselov interview.
⬤ Resistance to occupation manifesto.
⬤ UK unions on solidarity.
⬤ Welsh MP: next steps.
 ⬤ Russian socialists: four years of war.
 ⬤ Russian torture & religious persecution.

News from the territories occupied by Russia

Brutal Russian roulette with the life of gravely ill political prisoner (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, February 27th)

Russia brings long sentences for pro-Ukrainian social media posts to occupied Ukraine (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, February 27th)

The Face of Resistance: Crimean Tatar Activist Rustem Izmailov (Crimea Platform, February 27th)

Forum “CRIMEA: The Home We Are Fighting For” Opens in Kyiv to Mark the Day of Resistance to the Occupation of Crimea (Crimea Platform, February 26th)

Joint Statement by Participants of International Crimea Platform (Crimea Platform, February 26th)

February 26 – Day of Resistance to the Occupation of Crimea (Crimea Platform, February 26th)

Help force Russia to free abducted and tortured Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant employees! (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, February 26th)

Crimean Jehovah’s Witness sentenced to six years for refusing to renounce his faith (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, February 24th)

Brutal FSB set-up to sentence 21-year-old Donetsk woman to 20 years for patriotism (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, February 23rd)

20 February – The Official Start Date of the Occupation of Crimea (Crimea Platform, February 20th)

News from Ukraine

Energy system attack a double Crime (Tribunal for Putin, February 28th)

Premiere of Film “Forgive Me, Mom” in Honor of Hennadii Afanasyev (Crimea Platform, Feb 27th)

The story behind ex-minister Herman Halushchenko’s arrest (Meduza, 27 February)

Rail bombing aims at collapse (Tribunal for Putin, February 27th)

Human rights organisations call for veto of law on forced evacuation (Zmina, February 27th)

Gaps in housing and social security provision (Cedos, 26 February)

The ECtHR will examine complaints concerning violations during the July attack on anti-corruption activists (Zmina, February 23rd)

Russian soldier sentenced to life for killing two Ukrainian POWs in cold blood (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, February 23rd)

Still Standing: The Ukrainian Labor Market at War (Rockwell Foundation, February 2026)

War-related news from Russia

Cardboard coffins and countertop monuments: Russia is increasingly cutting costs on the burial of its war dead (The Insider, February 28th)

No connection: Blocking Starlink for the Russian military has changed the situation at the front in Ukraine (The Insider, February 27th)

Residents of Russia’s Belgorod are feeling the effects of war (The Insider, February 27th)

Orthodox church helps recruit Kenyans to Russian army (Meduza, 27 February)

Prison sentence increased for protester who told the court “death to Putin, glory to Ukraine” (Mediazona, 27 February)

Anti-war political prisoner’s wife barred from his funeral (Mediazona, 26 February)

Record losses. minimal gains: Assessing 4th year of Russia’s full-scale war (The Insider, Feb 26th)

Russian casualty figures – a corrective (Meduza, 25 February)

Spinoff of the Legendary Zombie Franchise (The Russian Reader, 23 February)

“People are still stuck in this cage” (Posle.Media, February 18th)

Analysis and comment

Resistance: Manifesto in defence of Ukrainians living under occupation (Zmina, February 26th)

Statement: 12th anniversary of Crimea’s resistance to Russian occupation (Zmina, February 26th)

rs21's Retreat – A Case Study: How the British Left Lost Ukraine (Red Mole Substack, February 25th)

A Ukrainian Socialist Went to War. Here’s What He Thinks About Peace (Jacobin, February 24th)

Four Years of War in Ukraine with Oleksandr Kyselov (Jacobin Radio, Febr 24th)

As the Kremlin’s war of aggression is entering its fifth year (Facebook, Febr 24th)

International solidarity

Fourth Anniversary of War: Statement by the Posle Editorial Collective (Posle.Media, February 24th)

Statement by UK trade unions in solidarity with Ukraine, on the fourth anniversary of the full-scale invasion (Ukraine Solidarity Campaign, February 23rd)

Peace in Ukraine: the next steps (Labour Hub, February 23rd)

Four years after Russia’s invasion: Stand by Ukraine (Real Democracy Movement, February 23rd)

“For dictators, ‘peace’ is when we don’t fight back” (Ukraine Solidarity Campaign, February 22nd)

Upcoming events

Wednesday 4 March, 6–8pm, Ukraine Solidarity Campaign Public Meeting. Wilson Room, Portcullis House, Parliament, 1 Victoria Embankment, London SW1A 2JR. Chair: John McDonnell MP. Speakers include: Mick Antoniw MS / Yuliya Yurchenko, Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Ukraine / Yuliia Bond, Ukrainian Association of Wales / Tanya Vyhovsky, Vermont State Senator / Mariia Pastukh, Vsesvit – Ukraine Solidarity Collective / Johanna Baxter MP / Clive Lewis MP / Stephen Russell, TUC International / Mick Whelan, former ASLEF General Secretary. 

🔴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.

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News From Ukraine 💣 Bulletin 185

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