Volodymyr Ishchenko:

It is really difficult to argue that the war is still a kind of “people’s war” if the majority of Ukrainian men actually do not want to fight. The extent to which they are ready to articulate this position depends also on their fear of repression. It’s difficult to say this within the Ukrainian public sphere – that kind of criticism exists mostly in closed chats, “friends-only” Facebook accounts, and so on, and is only very cautiously articulated in publications.

Craig Murray:

The Lebanese government have recorded 51 breaches of the ceasefire by Israel in three days.

The United States and its allies have designated Hezbollah as a terrorist organisation – a FTO in US legal parlance. The USA – which is set up as the arbiter of the ceasefire – therefore views any military action by Israel against anyone or anything deemed “Hezbollah”, anywhere and anytime, as a legitimate counter-terrorism operation.

The USA therefore simply takes the view – and the UK will take the same view – that each and every attack by Israel is not a violation of the ceasefire, but legitimate counter-terrorism.

There is no doubt of this whatsoever.

Lebanon can do nothing to monitor or prevent the reinforcement of Israeli positions in Southern Lebanon (spoiler – Israel has no intention of ever withdrawing) because the ceasefire stipulates not only that the Israeli army has sixty days leisure to leave Southern Lebanon, but that in that sixty days the Lebanese armed forces cannot enter the areas Israel is occupying: including not taking control of their own Southern border and thus they cannot check what troops and weapons Israel is moving across unopposed.

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The United States holds all of the cards. The Lebanese Armed Forces are the only army I can think of in modern history which “remained neutral” when their country was invaded. The Lebanese Armed Forces are literally in the pay of the United States.

This is a complex country. The truth is that the majority of the soldiers of the Lebanese Army would in fact defend their country against Israel given half the chance, while their leadership has other ideas entirely and has US-backed political ambitions.

The United States is a party to the conflict. The bombs falling on Lebanese heads are American bombs, dropping from American planes. The United States is put in charge of the “peace” by this Agreement. The current US Imperial hegemon is having its coat carried by the former colonial power France, in exchange for which honour France granted immunity to Netanyahu for war crimes.

Branko Milanović:

Before I try to answer the question, let me dismiss two, in my opinion, entirely wrong epithets attached to Trump: fascist and populist. If fascist is used as a term of abuse, this is okay, and we can use it freely. Nobody cares. But as a term in a rational discussion of Trump’s beliefs, it is wrong. Fascism as an ideology implies (i) exclusivist nationalism, (ii) glorification of the leader, (iii) emphasis on the power of the state as opposed to private individuals and the private sector, (iv) rejection of the multi-party system, (v) corporatist rule, (vi) replacement of the class structure of society with unitary nationalism, and (vii) quasi religious adulation of the Party, the state, and the leader. I do not need to discuss each of these elements individually to show that they have almost no relationship to what Trump believes or what he wants to impose.

Berliner Zeitung:

Während einer Demo am Kottbusser Tor kam es am Montagabend zu Ausschreitungen.

Die Berliner Polizei hat am Montagabend eine Demo in Kreuzberg abgebrochen. Hintergrund war das Skandieren von strafbaren Parolen mit Nahost-Bezug, wie die Einsatzkräfte auf X schreiben.

This is how a fair amount of pro-Palestinian activity in Berlin appears in mainstream German media. Demonstrations do not come up in conversations with my co-workers or fellow students, just as the wars in Ukraine and Gaza do not enter conversation. „News“ articles focus on the disruption of order, how illegal slogans (which? 🤔) were chanted. The rules must be followed.

Patrick Lawrence, ScheerPost:

At bottom I read the warrants as a formal, legal announcement in behalf of the vast majority of nations that the new world order many of us now anticipate—the post–American world order, the order that is to follow the Americans’ awful, disorderly “rules-based order”—is to be accepted as an historical inevitability. International law, to put this point another way, is to be restored after its decades of abuse at the hands of the Americans and their most loyal clients. In this way the warrants declare a kind of confrontation—between the old and the new, between law and lawlessness, between hegemony and global parity as a 21^st century imperative.

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It will be interesting to see how the Europeans navigate the-world-after-the-warrants in months and years to come. I take the Starmer government’s swift declaration of its intent as an interesting portent. The major European powers may decide they simply cannot stand with the Zionist regime and the Americans against the ICC. If this turns out to be so, the warrants issued last week could mark a decisive turn in trans–Atlantic relations. It is plausible.

Think of the ICC’s warrants as a great storm in a channel flowing between the U.S. and Israel and the rest of the world, and then ask yourself, Who is cut off?