Beware the War Drums Beating

This article by Eoin Ó Murchú first appeared in Unity, the weekly publication of the Irish Communist Party.

WHILE Europe, including Britain, reels from the obvious disdain with which Trump treats them, threatening Danish sovereignty even as they obsequiously avoid condemning his barbarous attack on Venezuela, we should note that the drums of war are still beating throughout Europe.

If the EU gets its way and a full-scale war erupts between Russia and Europe, even if it doesn’t descend into a nuclear conflagration that will kill us all, it is the working class who will pay with their lives.

Young Irish men, Catholic and Protestant, will be among the hundreds of thousands of victims, and all for the sake of European and NATO elites saving face as their Ukraine gamble comes unstuck.

The dissolution of NATO, while by no means certain yet, is no bad thing, as NATO has been an aggressive threat to the national sovereignty of many countries, from Serbia to Libya and beyond.

But NATO has always been just a front for the US, and if Trump believes he no longer needs to keep up the pretense surrounding NATO the underlying truth remains.  The US is a major threat to world peace, and, because our rulers, in London, Brussels and Dublin bow their knee to the American master – no matter what the threat or what the issue – this places all of us in danger.

Europe is at the fore in trying to keep the Ukraine war going, ignoring the incredible power of Russian missiles which we have just been shown.

The second Oreshnik missile fired by the Russians in this war travelled 1,800 km in fifteen minutes from the training ground in Astrakhan on the other side of the Caspian sea to Lvov in Western Ukraine, just 60 km from the border with Poland.

Even without a war head, this missile, which travels at Mach 10 and is unstoppable, completely destroyed a major underground gas storage facility – a facility relied on by Germany and Poland in particular.

From a combat base in Belarus, the Oreshnik can reach London or Paris in just over eight minutes.  It has multiple war heads and can hit as many as ten different targets from the one missile.

And Europe wants to go to war with an enemy equipped with such a weapon, and not for any real threat but to save face for its disastrous support for the Ukraine proxy war and the sanctions imposed on Russia which have damaged the European economy far more than they have damaged Russia.

Of course, the only threat to any European state at the moment is Trump’s threat against Denmark over Greenland.

But Starmer, Macron, Merz and their crew – including the pathetic Micheál Martin – may bluster as they will but they will cave to the US over this.

The danger to the young men whose lives they are now gambling with comes still from their effort to expand the Ukraine war into a major war with Russia.

The Unionist parties believe they can prove their ultra-Britishness by resolutely backing war – though it isn’t Jim Allister or Jamie Bryson who will actually do the dying.  It is young Protestant men and women, from working class estates.

The nationalist parties, including Sinn Féin, insist that Europe is our safeguard, even as it is Europe that is leading us into war.  Again, it is not the leaders of SF or the SDLP who will do the fighting but young men and women from working class estates who are being sold the myth that the EU is their saviour.

We should not allow them to mislead us.  Say NO to war.  Let Catholic and Protestants speak with one voice on this, and work instead for an assured future for all of us.