Image is sourced from this article.
Those who were around in the early days of the news megathread may remember Pedro Castillo, the left-leaning leader of Peru who was deposed in December 2022. He was replaced by Dina Boluarte, the first woman to be President of Peru, who described herself as a progressive but afterwards routinely sided with Peruvian conservatives and American interests. To say she was unpopular is an understatement of titanic proportions - she descended to such lows that she was, at one point, the single most unpopular leader on the planet. As with most deeply unpopular leaders that side with the West, she kept power for a bafflingly long time.
However, on October 10th, after a period of protests against the government, she was impeached and removed by Peru's Congress in a unanimous vote. José Jerí was sworn in as the new President, who was previously the President of the Congress and is a member of a centrist Peruvian party. The government is trying the classic strategy: keep doing the same thing as before, and sacrifice an unpopular figure - here, Boluarte - in the hopes that this appeases the crowd.
Is this strategy working? It doesn't really seem to be - protests are not only continuing, but strengthening, as it is clear that neoliberalism will not reformed and the brutality by police will not stop (there was very recently a high-profile case in which a musician, Mauricio Ruiz, was murdered). Controversies surrounding Jerí, including allegations of SA, are already being reported. If Jerí is deposed, the next person in line to try their hand at ruling will be the former army general Roberto Chiabra, who would be the ninth President in less than a decade.
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The Zionist Entity'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.
This has to be one of the coolest fucking things I've read in a very long time: Everything we know about the Louvre jewellery heist
The BBC:
The louvre is a triumphant celebration of an attack on the histories of like a third of the globe...
u know why the pyramids are in egypt?
the british museum was too smol
Oh god. This is gold. I'm snaggin' it.
pls do it's collectivisation
Political outcry from the right I bet. They just love that protofascist napoleon
??? Wild misreading of history here if you think Napoleon was a reactionary force
This is about Napoleon III fyi, who is absolutely a protofascist. The crown jewels that were stolen belonged to his wife, not the OG Napoleon.
Ah thought it was original Napoleon mb
What do you mean? He is glorified by french official storytelling but he was a colonialist who re-instated slavery and consolidated a bourgeois state.
Sorry not a fan of the french "republic". They throw grenades at the crowd and kills arabs.
He was a bourgeois revolutionary who smashed apart the feudal states. He’s historically progressive, in the same way that a figure like Abraham Lincoln was - in that he moves history dialectically forward destroyed revanchist and aristocratic feudal systems
He also violently suppressed leftist movements, that's kinda important too.
That's not in contradiction with them being historically progressive
So did Abraham Lincoln and Stalin. Doesn’t mean they weren’t historically progressive overall
So we are debating whether he was a reactionary or not, he might be more "progressive" compared to the Bourbon royalists or the Habsburgs, but he was definitely a reactionary in the context of the French Revolution: his dictatorship, his anti-egalitarianism, slavery, his making up with the Catholic Church, and he did reinstate a kind of feudalism with a new regime. I don't think this is a controversial issue among (Marxist) historians. Everyone else in Europe was so far behind the French Revolution he was historically progressive compared to them, sure. Bonaparte was the embodiment of the dialectic, heh.
I guess at this point the debate gets a bit scholastic.
Which book do you recommend on Napoleon?
I've read Tarle's. I have Lefebvre's on my list, but probably not gonna read it for a few years, I'm more inclined to read a zoomed out narrative like Hobsbawm or Soboul.
Was he not? My general understanding of him is that he was an opportunistic general who usurped the First French Republic and crowned himself Emperor of the French, which was effectively an absolute monarchy just like the Ancien Regime, just without the Bourbons in charge.
So what's the Hexbear Party Line on Napoleon the Tragedy (I presume we don't like Napoleon the Farce)?
intro to the 18th brumaire, he was a progressive force (bourgeois) but not a progressive force (proletarian) that would have ushered in socialism
his prose is goated
He created the modern capitalist state and consolidated bourgeois rule with an iron hand.
He also destroyed like 17 different monarchies that were then replaced by republics
I meaan, didn't the first one reinstated slavery?
You can't just say this and not elaborate
napoleon was the one that ended the french revolution. A proper pos placed there by the rich. He turned a more or less democratic state into this centralized shitshow we know now. He brought back slavery and created the black code.
The “republic” which Napoleon overthrew was one that was already completely recaptured by royalist factions. He didn’t kill the revolution, it was already dead. That “democratic state” was a corrupt dysfunctional state akin to the Russian interim government after the February revolution, it was going to collapse and be taken over because it was non-functioning and conspiring with the revanchists.
Every country in the 1800s and 1700s could be called fascist then, but that's obviously completely wrong and ahistorical. Fascism is not vaguely authoritarian leadership or bad things being done, again that's stupid.
Besides, France under Napoleon was a lot more progressive than any of the other European monarchies so it's weird to single him out .The French revolution was dead a long time before Napoleon, the decaying corpse of it was somewhat preserved under Napoleon
He also pioneered the use of ~~gestapo~~ a modern secret police surveilling and arresting political opponents.
i mean the sarkozy son, who said "kill-em-all" about palestinian, is a big fan.
If I as a communist go out and say "I love Adam Smith", 300 years after he died, does that make Adam Smith a communist?
That would be a sick ass power
They implicitly state the jewels were stolen. Load-bearing "belonged to." Who did they "belong to" before the imperialist pigs?
Clearly the jewels came from the local diamond mines that are indigenous to France…
Mined in Brazil & India mostly. Empress Eugenie was a famed collector. Usually jewelry got passed around due to various marriages and it wasn’t that common to craft new pieces.
probably some monarch that stole them from people who stole them from somewhere else. jewels are common spoils of war that trade hands/are stolen/coercively taken as part of exploitative peace treaties multiple times. not to excuse french (or british) imperial theft, more that establishing providence of 'treasure' items like this is often harder than providence of 'cultural' artifacts like stolen totem poles or Indigenous art
"We investigated thoughtfully and the conclusion of the investigation was that it was a robbery"
What we've learned over the decades of our service is that when a crime has been committed, it's almost always a criminal that did it.
My issue with such theft is that it ends up in some private collection owned by rich people. At least gold and cash can be laundered more easily.
I really hope a movie gets made of this one day
Louvre Actually
Dr. Strangelouvre
The French and They're Furious
O Brother, Where Art Now?
when you try to hit that 18th brumaire date, but consult with ai
I bet it's trump. No shit. He's gonna crown himself like napoleon
My head canon is Gorka did it to try and crown Trump
GTA V ass level robbery