Image is of a solar park in Cuba, donated last year by China, sourced from this article.
To be honest, I don’t have much to say about ongoing geopolitical events that hasn’t already been said in previous threads (e.g. with India/Pakistan, Trump/Putin, and of course occupied Palestine), so this is more of a “news roundup” preamble for this week.
As we all know, the US (and the imperial core generally) has only three permitted international actions: sanctions, color revolution, and war. None of these have been going well lately, but sanctions are in particularly dire straits right now. Three examples from the last week or so:
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The EU is on its 17th sanctions package, apparently, which is surprising, as I thought they were on their 76th or something. It apparently targets Russia’s shadow fleet of oil tankers, but I don’t think anybody actually gives a shit because we all know it won’t achieve anything, so, moving on…
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The head of Nvidia (as well as many others) have come out and said that the US chip export controls on China have failed, remarking that China’s internal motivations to develop alternatives are strong and proceeding rapidly, especially as China’s number of skilled scientists is only growing. Nvidia has said that they had a 95% share of China’s AI chip market in 2020 or so, but now they only have 50%.
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Lastly, an interesting one: Iran has received its first set of railway shipment of solar panels from China, and there is hope for accelerating shipments of even more products. Myself and many others have predicted a decoupling of Iran from the West and towards China and Russia (especially if any Western-built product could have Israeli devices implanted into them, such as with the pager terrorist attack on Lebanon’s doctors), and having a strong link with China will be a necessary step for Iran and their allies to continue their offensives against Israel.
Last week’s thread is here. The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
Please check out the RedAtlas!
The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on Israel’s destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia’s youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don’t want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it’s just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists’ side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR’s former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR’s forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster’s telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a ‘propaganda tax’, if you don’t believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
Who the hell was in charge of the camps during the last six months???
according to the article the SDF
the Kurds
Eight years ago I made a big fuss on the old sub about the danger these concentration camps pose for the future of “Rojava”; that most of the people in there are the victims of ISIS not the beheaders and glorified mercs themselves, who largely escaped by the time Raqqa fell
Farmers, the sons of farmers, townspeople, people bombed out by the US air force while robbed by ISIS, stuck in a prison with radicalized ISIS members for eight years plus and about to be released by an ISIS government in charge of the entire country
The 21st century Khemer Rouge is about to be born
Yeah the anarchs messed up really bad there. Why one would not execute captured ISIS soldiers but put them with rando arabs into an enclosed space for years, is beyond me.
Racism overpowering common sense, shit even the racism didn’t make internal sense considering how much of ISIS was comprised of foreign fighters
They kinda forget the difference between revolutionary decolonialized nationalism and chauvinism. But that has been an issue in many anarchist-adjacent movements in history.
Technically Isis is still beefing with the government but we’ll see how this plays out in practice
The org is still beefing, but the actual fighters move orgs based on where they think they can best get their keep, and ISIS has a hard time making a case that it’s them.
what do you mean? I am interested
ISIS was largely born out of the US prison camps in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion, countless men were abducted, tortured and radicalized thanks to the US military
Now an ISIS sympathetic government led by ISIS Syria’s “former” second-in-command is about to be put in charge of massive camps filled mostly with innocent traumatized farmers and a cohort of left behind hardened ISIS fighters
Mass killings and lynchings.
Not really accurate to conflate Al Quaeda with ISIS tbh, the extremists now governing Syria have been at war with ISIS for many years and their Islamism is substantially different. It’s not the 90s or 2000s anymore, and there’s a long and contentious history between AQ and IS in many different regions, including Syria.
These camps have been a timebomb since they were set up though, that’s true. It’s a sword of damocles hanging over the country, with the US ultimately in control of whether it falls or not. Their interest is in keeping Syria divided, weak, and unable to confront aggression.
I believe in the case of Syria the conflation is accurate, many of the former leadership of Syrian ISIS were absorbed by the Al Qaeda affiliates after the fall of Raqqa, and it’s no coincidence the “former” second-in-command of Syrian ISIS worked his way back up to command; these people are fundamentally mercenaries first and foremost, old beefs didn’t prevent thousands of homeless ISIS fighters from Iraq and Raqqa province finding a new home in northwest Syria
The “war” between Al Qaeda and ISIS remnants post-Raqqa is just factional infighting as a result of hurt feelings by the ISIS bandits who were left behind by the mass retreat to Idlib
Al Jolani was literally an ISIS commander. The overlap in personnel is massive.
Sure. And Trotsky was a Bolshevik commander, so Trotskyites must be great lovers of the USSR, right? Makes sense.
The Jolani and Al Qaeda defender has logged on
dawg go fuck yourself
you first chauvinist scum
I was wondering why this comment was so stupid, and then I realized it’s the same person who was earlier shitting on the Axis of Resistance. The Syria understander has arrived to talk like a 2016 bernie bro about the based Kurdish compradors and moderate rebels TM
Pot calling the kettle black here, you do nothing but post uncritical, uninformed bullshit in these threads, and have done so forever. Your understanding of the topics you try to discuss is repeatedly proven wrong and yet this never seems to stop you from carrying on. What’s going wrong?
3 month user and ban evader.
I was correct about the Kurds being compradors who assisted ISIS and Al Qaeda and Israel. You were wrong. Yet you wont shut the fuck up
Saying that “the Kurds” “assisted ISIS” is a fucking vile thing to say. Thousands of Kurdish people were killed by ISIS, and many died fighting it. Why are you talking about an entire ethnic group in terms like this??? tf?
ISIS commander now controls the country, partially thanks to their complicity in assisting American and Zionist forces. It’s their fault that ISIS controls the country now, they could have simply allied with Hezbollah, Iran, Russia and not stole oil to sell to Israel. Your “based marxists” are my genocidal fascist enablers.
The Kurds went and signed an agreement to merge back with the state only after Assad’s government was toppled. Meaning they prefer the fascist pro-Israel ISIS run government over the pro-Palestine secular government. It happened during the peak of the alawite massacres too, just a sprinkling of chauvinist scum on top.
I guess you aren’t aware that Israelis refer to the Syrian Kurds as “our allies up north” when discussing their plans of Greater Israel and where to push to.
Do you happen to have any further information on this? Not doubting you, just criminally underinformed about the region.
All my links and old posts were lost after we were purged from reddit, one of the genuine disasters of 2020 was the amount of info and sources lost by the mass banning campaigns against leftists all over the internet
This was their intent, the chapo subreddit was rising to become one of the largest places on that platform and was effectively speaking to many in the imperial core, while also uplifting global south voices. It was a genuine anti-hegemonic cultural pole born out of the desire for a better path for western societies and therefore represented a danger to the current order.
thanks anyway
The US also transferred weapons from Libya to the Middle East - there’s a public DIA memo warning that it would create an ISIS