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.
apparently someone set some zionists in colorado on fire. thats really terrible it's awful that they experienced what israel has been doing to Palestinian children for the past several decades. really really sad. i'm actually upset, i actually feel really upset now.
When the embassy staff shooting happened I initially panicked and I was certain it would be used to ramp things up aggressively but then it was just… out of the news cycle within a few days.
If people were straight up set on fire though that’s actually wild and this could be different especially given how recent the last one was.
Israeli diplomatic staff are hard to make sympathetic in the same way a health insurance CEO is hard to make sympathetic. Random elderly civilians are a different story. It's hard to say what will happen, given what's going on both domestically and globally. There could be some sort of Trump news tomorrow that pushes this out of the headlines in a day or two.
The man who carried out the operation was calling them child killers.
The organization that runs the event which was targeted is hard-core zionists Run 4 Lives a Front group for Hostage and Missing Families Forum
I understand that there's always deeper ties with these more "innocuous" Zionist front groups to more nasty stuff, but that isn't going to get reported in the news. They are going to say a bunch of old people got firebombed, and that's just not a great look visually to "normies". The biggest things against this blowing up right now are that seemingly no one died and that from what I am hearing about the videos of the guy who did it, he sounds mentally unwell. The wildcard here is what sympathy the American public even has to Israel, it's supporters, or the hostages at this point.
The news also implied the embassy workers were randomly killed for being jewish, I'd be shocked if this moves the needle either way
I also just dont give a $&^* about US public opinion. Damn them all.
Humans are being starved to death then corralled into locations under the pretense of food and then shot by drones and snipers. And Im supposed to care about US public opinion and "normies".
The operations must continue. Only through action can theory and strategy be sharpened into weapons.
Firebombing random senior citizen Zionists who hold no actual power in a hippie college town isn't an "operation". It would be one thing if this guy firebombed like one of those auctions of illegally seized land in the West Bank or something. This wasn't even that.
I saw someone rewrite the headline: "6 fascists suffer burns following violence at pro-genocide rally in America"
Every Yankee-European pro Palestine organization and organizer should be self critical that people are so enraged but don’t have any organized avenue to wage higher forms of struggle.
(Consequently they take what is available to them, regardless of its tactical efficiency.)
Nothing is ever good enough for you people.
"Well actually Elias Rodriguez said some ableist stuff and also criticized my favorite socialist protest organization so I dont support him" was literal discourse on this website last week.
Unfortunately the victims here were ancient American Jews, one of which was a 88 year old holocaust survivor. They were zionist genocide deniers, but still.... oof.