My sources for the preamble come mostly from here, here, and here.
The thread image depicts Kenyan police, trained by the Zionist entity, in a meeting with President Ruto before being sent to Haiti, sourced from this article.
As has been planned for the last couple years, foreign police officers have been inside Haiti for a few months now. It will surprise nobody to learn that this has not gone very well. Gangs continue to control much of the country, and violence has continued in the form of massacres and forced relocations (approximately 1.3 million). Something like 80% of the capital, Port-au-Prince, is under the control of one gang or another.
The aim by the US was to import 2500 police officers to Haiti from a wide variety of countries. One of those was Kenya; President Ruto had to fight his own country's courts to force this through, and ironically is now apparently considering withdrawing those officers once the UN mandate expires on October 2nd. The issue here is not only the limited manpower (Haiti has a population of 12 million), but also very pedestrian things, like the fact that the officers who arrive don't even speak the language.
The situation in Haiti appears to be a fairly standard operation of American national control, in which both battling sides are being supported by the US in order to create maximum disorganization and prevent a coherent political force from arising and thus threatening their Caribbean interests. While the US funds foreign forces to arrive in Haiti to "control the situation" or similar justifications, the Haitian gangs get their weapons smuggled in from the US itself. That this is happening alongside escalations against Venezuela is obviously not a coincidence - in a world in which American interests are being gradually shrugged off, and where the American state military is becoming rapidly more impotent and unable to dissuade and defeat even tiny states like Yemen, total imperial dominion of their immediate surrounding territory must be ensured by any means necessary.
The police and the gangs are likely designed to be mutually reinforcing, without even much kayfabe of fighting each other. As an example, once the Kenyan police arrived, they immediately began brutalizing anti-government protestors instead of focussing on gang activity. They were trained by the Zionist entity, after all.
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's Genocide of Palestine
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. 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.
Some notes on the political economies of Thailand and Malaysia
Understanding semi-peripheral economies remains weak in a lot of political discourse. This leads to uncritical repetition and dominance of liberal and idealistic discourses during the inevitable crashes and social instabilities caused by neoliberalism. I wanted to rectify this by elaborating a bit about what mainstream media will never talk about.
Neighbours with different histories
There are similarities at first glance, such as both being constitutional monarchies with parliamentary democracy, historical economic development, periods of one-party rule and extensive anti-communist counter-insurgency operations throughout the 20th century. Indeed, out of all national monarchies, Thailand would be the 2nd most populated and Malaysia the 6th (or 7th if you count countries under the commonwealth).
Malaysia and Thailand had great historical divergences in the advent of colonialism. As much as Malaysia claims to be a successor of the Malaccan Sultanate in the 16th century, this is not the case and the country is as invented as you can get after the wave of decolonisations that characterized the middle 20th century. Thoroughly colonized through direct and indirect means, the Malaysian colonial economy, first under some influence from the Portuguese and Dutch, really festered under the British Empire, whose rule was characteristic to many other places that had fallen under her dominion. The colonial economy was unique in Southeast Asia, for it involved large migration of coolie labourers juxtaposed to a native peasantry, more akin to the histories of the Caribbean and Eastern/Southern Africa.
Thailand on the other hand can claim much longer continuity in both their royal family lineages and their state. Although not directly colonized, being under the influence of a globally subjugated Third World, meant that it’s ability to defend it’s own territory was fickle at best and the country faced a lot external and internal pressures starting from the 20th century to modernize. Integration with US security arrangements by the middle of the century was essential in stabilizing monarchical rule, which lead to it’s reactionary role in the Vietnam war for example.
etc
Shared peoples
Sharing a border, both have a somewhat sizeable shared populations of their national ethnic groups. However, this is more prevalent in Thailand, where the country has a 5-12% Muslim population (there is conflicting information even between different government sources), mostly concentrated in the Malay-speaking south. This has fueled seperatism due to the Southern provinces being ceded to the Thai kingdom after imperial agreements in the early 20th century. Nowadays the separatism has lessened in militancy but faces a stalled peace process between the separatists, and the military/government. That said, there is still deep resentment and continual securitisation in the Southern provinces, with the endurance of emergency laws that started in 2005. This 'insurgency' has largely been hidden from public media and especially Western media, in which all state and non-state actors seemingly agree to lay low to dissuade foreign interference.
A fun fact is that after the dissolution of the Malayan Communist Party in 1991, past guerrilla members resettled into “peace villages” across Southern Thailand due to Malaysia barring Communist members from re-entering the country. There is some evocative writing there, where chinese migrant labourers who ultimately fought for an egalitarian Malaya forced to reside in a region in which itself was separated from Malaya about 80 years prior.
Southeast Asian developmentalism
Both countries were tailing the main “Asian Tigers” (Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong), with some level of industrialization and transition towards full industrial capitalism by the early 1990s. This however would see it’s first major cracks in the Asian financial crisis of 1997-8. There has been extensive rhetoric for why Thailand and Malaysia failed to escape the middle-income trap and succumbed to neoliberalism and deindustrialization. Many fall into bourgeois-liberal culturalism or “crony capitalism”/“patronage politics” debates that fails to connect the two countries into the global processes of accumulation, uneven development and imperialism while considering local/national class structures. This neglect is itself a product of neoliberalism, leading to atomized analysis of individualistic policymaking of leaders.
The 1997-8 Asian Financial Crisis
There has been extensive literature on this topic so I won’t elaborate too much on it and urge people to read through the news and literature if they are interested.
Post-crash recovery
I like to highlight this era a bit more, to set the stage of the slowdown but not full crash of the two national economies, unlike that of other countries facing structural adjustment. This is because after the crash, it lead to heightened class-based struggles that were reflected in some rethinking and resistance to the “Washington Consensus” in both countries, highlighted by responses by Thaksin’s and Mahathir’s post-crash administrations. This was through debt moratoriums, targeted low-interest loans for rural populations and improved healthcare access schemes (Thailand), and capital controls, renationalization and greater emphasis on social-based Islamic financial instruments (Malaysia). These policies helped propelled Thai Rak Thai (TRT) and Barisan Nasional (BN) to overwhelming electoral victories in their respective elections in the early to mid 2000s. But as capitalism always does, another resulting cyclical crash occurred globally (the 2008 financial crisis), which was especially detrimental for the export oriented businesses.
Current political-economic developments
Household debt to GDP in Thailand and Malaysia are one of the highest in ASEAN, and generally in the world. This is symptomatic of debt-based financialization and is especially concerning for underdeveloped and semi-industrialized countries. About 65% of Malaysian household debt is due to real estate and 17% from vehicle purchases, compared to Thailand’s 33% (real estate) and 16% (vehicles). Thailand’s debt problem however has increasingly come from credit card and personal loans (18%).
Thailand’s economy is characterised by quite large disparities of urban and rural classes, with the affluent urban middle classes advocating for democratisation against the military aligned national bourgeosie. Other more savvy bourgeois groups also support democratization due to the perceived outdated superstructure of the military. Meanwhile, the rural classes consist mainly of farmers, petty commodity producers and semi-proletarians, with consistent classism by the urbanites of being uneducated and falling for simple rhetoric and vote-buying practices. Although typical of many other economies, what separates Thailand from other semi-industrialised countries is this large gap and continual failure to fully convert into a ‘developed’ capitalist economy via disciplining financial capital for investment in modern industrial sectors. This can clearly be seen in the patterns of urbanization in Thailand compared to other Asian countries.
Malaysia on the other hand face contradictions stemming from the complete proletarianization of the peasantry and other backward classes. The rise of migrant labour consisting of 10-20% of the total population (15-25% of the workforce) and racialization as means to negate class consciousness is representative of this capitalist development. The near immiseration of the countryside and integration into the global economy has lead to a rise in Islamic and petty bourgeois reformist movements that seek to mediate their class interests with international Capital. It has also lead to the rise of the urban poor and the precariat whose livelihoods majorly depends on the whims of property developers, landlords and technology platforms.
Edit: Minor grammar mistakes.