What? EU’s Ireland supplying Russian military with lethal weapons alumina

So now we know the truth. A Russian-owned smelter on Ireland’s west coast has continued to supply alumina to Russia since the invasion of Ukraine. What? How? Mmm; possibly because aluminium, thank God, has absolutely no use in war, apart, that is, from missile casings, rocket-fins, fighter fuselages and control-surfaces, aircraft drop-tanks, troop-train carriages, petrol-tankers, weapon-satellites, laser-scopes and range-finders. Plus a few hundred other things. 

In other words, Russian merchantmen have been daily berthing at a private jetty in Limerick and filling their holds with alumina for transport to St Petersburg, and thence to weapons factories in Siberia. Russian imports of Irish alumina now account for 68 per cent of the plant’s production, up from 23 per cent in 2020. Better still, last year, one of the Russian vessels, the  Arne, halted over the AEC-1 data cable, linking Ireland with the USA, trailing an “anchor” 120 metres in its wake.

Later “investigations” indicated that suspicions  about the Arne’s behaviour were entirely unjustified. Quite so: comparably monstrous allegations were made about the Luftwaffe photo-reconnaissance aircraft snooping over Britain’s cities in the summer of 1939.  That a smelter in the EU remained working for the Russians munitions’ industry four years after the invasion of Ukraine is the equivalent of Canada continuing to sell arms to Italy after the allied landings in Salerno in 1943.

But it was another war that underlines the existential failure of the EU. One of the reasons why the Yugoslav civil war of 35 years ago was so torrid was the presence of large Orthodox Serb populations amid largely Catholic Croats. Why were they there? Because, out of strategic necessity, Serb-warriors had been settled there by the Hapsburgs to serve as garrison-protectors against the Ottoman empire. The locations of the bloody fighting in the 1990s spelt the same message: the final syllable of Vukovar comes from the Hungarian, Var, for “fortress”, while the larger area is known as Krajina, which simply means “border”.

But from the outset, the EU was never meant to be “defended”. It had no armies, and certainly no Serbs to protect its frontiers. It was a nascent state without the essential characteristic of statehood, namely a defended border. Thus Ireland is neither a krajina nor a var but as a – new word here – wimp. So though Ireland holds the EU’s westernmost flank, it has no air force or navy, and no underwater protection for the vital cables linking Europe with the USA. Let’s get a little Serbian on this. A fortress with an unguarded wall is a death sentence for the entire garrison. How was this nonsense possible? Because, at its identifying core, the EU is no more than a vast welfare state, legally administered by a self-ordained priesthood of liberal politicians and human-rights lawyers.

That same perception is partly what emboldened Putin in February 2022 to invade Ukraine in his “Special Military Operation,” indeed so very special that it had no defined goals. It failed, and prompted the EU to embargo the purchase of Russian oil, with various EU countries supplying Ukraine with arms and aid. But Ireland refused to send any “lethal” military assistance to Ukraine, with its defence minister, the egregious Simon Coveney, simpering that such deadly aid would make him feel “uncomfortable”. 

Ah poor likkul wuzzums…

Anything Putin can do, Trump can do better: Hence the USA’s recent and almost experimental Special Military Operation into Iran, to see the outcome when the world’s most powerful country attacks a ruthless clerico-fascist  state, killing thousands of people, some of them  guilty as hell, the rest clearly not. But what did that matter? As Trump so winsomely proclaimed, “We’ll just keep bombing our little hearts out,” or as his self-styled war-secretary, the tattooed himbo Hegseth, triumphantly yodelled, “Iran is toast”.  

These words were not from a particularly unpleasant pair of fourteen-year old troublemakers at a special school for psychotic delinquents, but two of the most powerful men in the world. Yes, there are very definitely a few differences between them and the portly, many-chinned madman who runs North Korea, but I’m not too sure what they are. Moreover, did no one in the Pentagon realise that much of the world’s energy-cycle either passes through Iranian-controlled waters or is within the known range of the Republican Guard’s missile batteries? 

Thus Trump’s SMO master-plan has gifted authority over Europe’s economy to a handful of suicidal Islamo-zealots in a bunker somewhere beneath the Zagros Mountains. In addition, that same cartel of crazies now have their itchy index-fingers on the carotid-jugular nexus that controls the manufacture of the six products that define modern civilisation: fertiliser, bricks, cement, plastic, steel, and the key to so much, glass. Without this, which took thousands of years to master, we could not have tall buildings, which need windows, or fast ships or cars and planes of any sort, and the conquest of space would be impossible. We take glass so much for granted that that even the very great Vaclav Smil doesn’t list it as one of the vital elements of modern civilisation, perhaps because he is from Bohemia, the world-home of glass and crystalware. Who in the Sargasso notices the seaweed?

At least Trump’s forays on his Persian carpet have inadvertently warned us of the massive Green threat to our civilisation.  We cannot  transform oil into plastic and sand into cement or glass without the ferocious heat generated by the bonfires of necromancy. Either  we incinerate the fossilised corpses of ancient earthly lifeforms or we harness the posthumous radioactive legacy bequeathed to us in their final  gasps by distant, expiring stars. For the past quarter of a century, science has frantically searched for a third way, and found little save costly, incompetent carbon-capture. 

Thus Hormuz has given us terrifying glimpses of what lies ahead in the longer term if those hypothetical green lunatics are ever in charge, and of the immediate future towards which a deeply non-hypothetical  lunatic is steering us. The mobilisation of both the 82nd Airborne and the US Marine Corps offers various exotic outcomes, one hypothetically even managing to fuse the gory glories of Gallipoli (1915) with the silken rout at Arnhem (1944). Wow.

So marvel now at Trump’s great plan, 

The cost free conquest of Shia Iran,

WHAM! –  there you see it! –  BAM! – now you don’t!

That mighty cosmos twixt will and won’t…

Kevin Myers is an Irish journalist, author and broadcaster. He has reported on the wars in Northern Ireland, where he worked throughout the 1970s, Beirut and Bosnia.