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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/52298474

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cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/11017215

Archive link: https://archive.ph/qzon0

Iran is considering allowing a limited number of oil tankers to pass through the Strait of Hormuz on the condition that the cargo is traded in Chinese yuan, a senior Iranian official told CNN on Friday.

The official said the potential move is part of Tehran’s plan to manage the flow of oil tankers through the strategic waterway. Global oil is predominantly traded in US dollars, except for sanctioned Russian oil, which is priced in rubles or the yuan, said CNN, adding that China has sought for years to expand the use of yuan in oil transactions, but the dollar remains the world’s primary reserve currency.

Concerns about disruptions in the strait, a critical route for the world’s energy supply, have pushed oil prices to their highest since July 2022, following the start of the Russian-Ukranian conflict that began earlier that year, it said. The Strait of Hormuz carries about 20 million barrels of oil a day and roughly 20% of the global liquefied natural gas trade.

The UN warned on Friday that restrictions on shipping through the strait could have a “massive impact” on humanitarian operations in the region.

Tehran has effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz since March 1, following Israel and the US launching joint attacks against Iran on Feb. 28, which have so far killed around 1,300 people, including then-Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Hostilities have since escalated.

It is precisely the discourse of “authoritarian repression”—deployed at the historical moment when the Islamic Republic of Iran is fighting a war for national survival—that reveals the material function of imperial feminism. The language of women’s rights reaches its highest pitch not during decades of sanctions, assassinations, and economic strangulation, but at the moment when the state targeted for destruction is mobilizing to defend itself—and its people—from military aggression.

Greg Shupak documents the logic openly at work in U.S. media. Leading newspapers such as the New York Times and Washington Post advocate bombing Iran while presenting military force as a means to “help” Iranian protesters and “free” them from “bondage” (Shupak, 2026). The discourse of authoritarian repression becomes the ideological cover for imperial violence. Outrage over the Iranian government’s actions is converted into justification for the U.S. government to inflict more violence on Iran—a formula for devastation presented as solidarity.

What does ‘opposing authoritarianism’ mean materially?

Abstract invocations of “authoritarian repression” detach a legitimate analytical category from the historical structure in which it operates. Once severed from the reality of imperial war, the concept becomes politically functional: it legitimizes the destruction of the very institutions capable of organizing collective defense.

The contradiction becomes visible when we ask a simple material question: what is the actual alternative being offered? Those invoking the language of liberation from positions of imperial power have supported authoritarian client regimes across the region for decades—from the Shah to the Gulf monarchies to Israel’s apartheid state. What does it mean for supposedly radical or revolutionary figures and organizations to wield the same discourse?

The question imperial feminism cannot answer is straightforward. Is there a concrete political force capable of taking power in Iran while simultaneously defending the country from U.S. and Israeli aggression? Since February 28, no such force has appeared on the ground.The current opposition promoted in Western media is not a liberation movement but a restoration project aligned with the very powers conducting the bombing. Voices opposed to “authoritarianism” celebrated abroad possess neither a mass base among Iranian workers nor the institutional capacity to defend Iran’s national sovereignty at this critical moment.

The outcome of such politics is already visible elsewhere. Where sovereign states have been destroyed under the banner of liberation, the result has not been democracy but devastation. History has shown this repeatedly—from Iraq to Libya to Syria. The collapse of the state exposes the population to fragmentation, militia rule, and foreign domination.

The ground refuses abstraction

Events on the ground tell a different story.

Consider what Professor Mirandi reported just days ago: when the bombs fell on Tehran—while thousands filled the squares to mourn and protest the U.S.-Israeli attacks—the crowd stood still. No one panicked. No one ran in fear. That stillness was not passivity. It reflected the political knowledge of a people who understand a fundamental truth: their survival—and any possible future freedom—requires defending their sovereignty against the empire that seeks their destruction.

These Iranians refuse the false equivalence imperial feminism insists upon. They reject the demand that while U.S. and Israeli bombs are falling, one must balance opposition to “authoritarian repression” with opposition to imperial war—as if these were symmetrical moral choices rather than a life-and-death struggle for national existence.

The South Pars workers demonstrated the same clarity. As Iranian scholar Helyeh Doutaghi documented through fieldwork during the December 2025 protests, when workers struck against wage theft and exploitation, they did not attack the legitimacy of domestic security institutions. They recognized that in a nation subjected to decades of sanctions, assassinations, and foreign-backed destabilization, doing so would play directly into the hands of those seeking to justify external intervention (Doutaghi, 2025). Their struggle for better conditions was inseparable from their defense of national sovereignty. They understood what imperial feminism cannot: that the state imperialism seeks to destroy remains the indispensable terrain on which any future working-class victory must be won.

Material reality of imperial war and international solidarity

When a nation is under siege, the survival of the population becomes bound to the survival of the state. That is not a matter of opinion but of political gravity. The structural logic of imperialism targets sovereign institutions precisely because in times of war they are the only force capable of organizing collective defense.

The human cost falls overwhelmingly on the working class. When sanctions block medical supplies, when infrastructure is bombed, when scientists and engineers are assassinated, those who suffer and die are the ordinary men and women whose liberation imperial feminism claims to champion. The destruction of sovereignty does not free them. It kills them.

Solidarity begins with recognizing the conditions people actually face. Do Iranian women need more sanctions? More bombs? More destabilization carried out in their name? Or do they need the violence of imperialism to stop so that their own struggles—against internal repression and external domination alike—can unfold on their own terms?

The people gathered in Tehran’s squares have already answered.

Defending sovereignty in the face of imperial war does not imply endorsement of every internal policy of the Islamic Republic. It reflects a simpler political reality: without sovereignty, there is no terrain on which struggles for democracy, workers’ rights, or women’s liberation can occur.

Imperial feminism obscures this reality by converting legitimate grievances into ideological instruments of war. Military aggression is then reframed as humanitarian intervention. When bombs are falling, the discourse of “authoritarian repression” does not liberate. It provides moral cover for the forces inflicting the violence.

The abstraction costs nothing to those who deploy it from afar. For those living under sanctions and airstrikes, the cost is measured in lives .Under conditions of siege, the survival of the people and the survival of the state are inseparable. Pretending otherwise is not nuanced analysis. It is complicity disguised as solidarity.

Solidarity with Iranian women therefore requires refusing to let their struggles be weaponized for imperial ends.

References:

Doutaghi, H. (2025, January 6). Iran’s Indigenous Labor Movement and Working Class Sovereignty. Progressive International. https://progressive.international/blueprint/e57562a0-4dbd-479f-b77d-ed23bee16394-irans-indigenous-labor-movement-and-working-class-sovereignty/en/

Marandi, S. M. (2026, March 8). Iran rejects ceasefire – demands new status quo[Interview]. Interview by G. Diesen. YouTube. https://youtu.be/0bjW0uh1J60

Shupak, G. (2026, February 10). Leading Papers Call for Destroying Iran to Save It.https://fair.org/home/leading-papers-call-for-destroying-iran-to-save-it/

The post Imperial feminism in a time of war appeared first on Bulatlat.

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Snip:

During the first two months of the year, Cuba exceeded its production targets for oil and associated gas, reversing a trend observed in 2025.

The additional crude has a direct destination. With increased extraction, thermoelectric plants have more fuel available for power generation. In that context, the Cespedes thermoelectric plant unit in Cienfuegos will come online this weekend with more than 100 megawatts of recovered capacity.

[...]

The Cuban president also mentioned a significant technological intervention through a 50-megawatt battery storage project whose purpose is not to generate electricity but to regulate the frequency of the national electric power system.

[...]

Currently, new photovoltaic parks are awaiting technical validation from their suppliers in order to synchronize with the national power grid. Once that process concludes, the installed solar capacity — which today covers between 49% and 51% of daytime demand — will increase.

Snips:

Within hours of the US launching ‘Operation Epic Fury’, Iran unleashed retaliatory strikes against American military bases in the Middle East. Behind a veil of censorship, it’s clear that the damage is far more severe than the Pentagon is admitting.

[...]

The strikes on American air bases serve the immediate goals of reducing US ability to conduct air sorties over Iran, and forcing it to move air assets further away, from where they must rely on aerial refueling to continue their attacks. Data from FlightRadar24 showed a mass exodus of KC-135 Stratotankers from Prince Sultan Air Base on March 9, after a combined drone and missile attack the night before. A rudimentary calculation by analyst Anusar Farooqui suggests that the US ability to fly missions over Iran has been degraded by 35-50%.

Iran’s campaign has focused heavily on blinding the US military and crippling its THAAD missile defense network. An Iranian Shahed drone slammed into an AN/TPS-59 radar dome at Naval Support Activity in Bahrain on the first day of the conflict, obliterating the $300 million system. Installed in 2007, the radar was described by Lockheed Martin at the time as “the only 360-degree coverage mobile radar in the world certified to detect tactical ballistic missiles.”

[...]

The US has adopted a policy of silence and denial, with the Pentagon refusing to answer press requests. Asked about damage to THAAD stations, the Department of War told CNN that “due to operations security, we are not going to comment on the status of specific capabilities in the region.”

https://www.npr.org/2026/02/18/nx-s1-5702503/trump-government-lawsuits-pay-himself-billions

Short grabs.

A man with a rifle who crashed into a large Michigan synagogue in what federal officials say was an attack had lost four family members in an Israeli airstrike in his native Lebanon last week, an official said Friday.

Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, 41, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Lebanon, was killed by security after ramming into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield Township near Detroit and driving down a hallway in a vehicle that then caught fire, according to authorities.

...

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and U.S. Sen. Elissa Slotkin during a news conference Friday praised Temple Israel's private security for swiftly stopping the attack.

“If they had not all done their jobs almost perfectly, we would be talking about an immense tragedy here with children gone,” Slotkin said.

Whitmer urged Americans to “lower the rhetoric” amid what she called a rising wave of antisemitism. She said the children attending school at the synagogue were 5 and younger.

“This is targeting babies who are Jewish," Whitmer said. "That is antisemitism at its absolute worst.”

Ghazali came to the U.S. in 2011 on an immediate relative visa as the spouse of a U.S. citizen and was granted U.S. citizenship in 2016, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

An Israeli airstrike killed four people in the eastern Lebanon town of Mashgharah on March 5, Lebanon's state agency and the Lebanese Health Ministry reported. A woman was also wounded.

The ripple effects of the Iran war have spread across the Middle East. 

Cocoa prices hit all-time highs in 2024 and 2025. Producers in West Africa sold hundreds of thousands of tons to buyers in China, and poor growing conditions led to record prices for Western chocolate companies.

But over the past year, cocoa prices have plunged by 70%, as weather improved. Yet chocolate candy prices have increased, despite collapsing input costs.

"Shrinkflation" and "Skimpflation" were deployed by candy companies in Europe and the United States. Smaller packaging, and the substitution of cocoa butter with inferior oils, resulted in booming profits even while cocoa prices soared.

Now that input costs have fallen, chocolate companies have maintained those strategies, and are more profitable than ever.

https://archive.ph/v7MNk

"Netanyahu’s first press conference since the war began was interrupted by yet another Iranian missile barrage — and in trying to project strength, he admitted something far more important: Israel still cannot fully stop or destroy Iran’s buried missile capability. Thirteen days in, with thousands of targets hit and billions already spent, Iran is still firing, Hezbollah is still launching rockets, and even Netanyahu conceded regime change cannot be guaranteed by military force alone.

In this video, we break down: • What Netanyahu admitted about Iran’s underground missile and nuclear infrastructure • Why six more Iranian salvos hit on the same day as his speech • How Beit Shemesh exposed dangerous gaps in Israel’s warning and interception system • Why U.S. intelligence reportedly does not believe this war will bring regime change in Iran • What Mojtaba Khamenei’s rise means for the next phase of the conflict"

Anybody familiar with this Global Military Update show?

https://archive.ph/2kWce