Over the last week, Sri Lanka has been hit by their worst national natural disaster since the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami. Over 2 million people (about 10% of the population) were affected; the death toll is currently climbing past 600; nearly a hundred thousand homes have been damaged or destroyed, transport infrastructure is heavily damaged; industry has been damaged; and farmland has been flooded. The cost of damage so far looks to be about $7 billion, which is more than the combined budget spent on healthcare and education in Sri Lanka.
While there is plenty to say meteorologically about how this yet another concerning escalation as a result of climate change (Sri Lanka does experience cyclones, but they are usually significantly weaker than this), it's important to note that such disasters are, to at least a certain extent, able to warned about and their impacts somewhat mitigated. However, this requires both access to early detection and warning equipment, and an economy in which development is widespread - in this case, particularly in the construction of drainage systems and regulated construction, which has not generally occurred.
The IMF, on its 17th program with Sri Lanka, is doing its utmost to prevent such an economy from developing, as they instead promote reductions in public investment. On top of this, the rebuilding effort for Sri Lanka is already being planned and funded, and such donors include, of course, many Sri Lankan oligarchs, who will rebuild the damaged portions of the country yet further according to their visions, while sidelining the working class.
Perhaps neoliberalism's decay into its eventual death occurring concurrently into the gradual intensification of climate change and renewed wars signifies the rise of the era of disaster capitalism.
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.
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.
Mirrors of Telegram channels that have been erased by Zionist censorship.
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.
I agree that Chinese policy isn't necessarily the most optimal, but I feel like you're somewhat nostalgically overrating the success of the Soviets' policy, outside of "their backyard" in Europe.
Cuba's like, the one big success, and that involved threats of nukes, which isn't exactly something one should do often. The Soviets weren't able to do much for other Caribbean or Latin American countries - they didn't stop Grenada, they didn't stop Panama, they didn't stop a multitude of coups. Over in the Middle East, they couldn't stop a coup in Iran (which is actually arguably as much "in their backyard" as the Warsaw Pact states, and in fact had been partially occupied by the Soviets just some years prior), and while their military support to various Arab states at least allowed them to resist Israel (which the Soviets actually supported at first, something I feel a lot of people forget), in the end this didn't stop the eventual Israeli ascendancy. And of course, one of the notable instances of the Soviets actually intervening directly (rather than just providing arms) - Afghanistan - was a grinding counter-insurgency that didn't exactly do them much good.
Hell, it was China itself which demonstrated the limitations of the Soviets in the Sino-Vietnamese war (I talked a little about this in this other comment, in the final section). I think I learned of that interpretation of the war from you, on a previous account, although I may be misremembering. Again, one of the points I want to emphasize is that making security guarantees that you can't back up can turn out worse than if you hadn't gotten involved in the first place - being shown on the international stage as unable to actually fulfill your commitments can be very discrediting to any further efforts.
The Iran-Iraq war is also an event that I think is very relevant - for one thing, the Soviets supported Iraq, which I wouldn't exactly consider their brightest moment, morally speaking, but it also clearly demonstrates why the formation of regional defense networks isn't trivial. How would such a network navigate the various regional conflicts and disagreements between the parties involved? Sure, it's easy to imagine the scenario of the alliance resisting an outside enemy, but what happens if there's a conflict within the alliance, either between separate members or internal conflict in a particular member? The Warsaw Pact had to militarily intervene in member-states twice to deal with the latter scenario, which of course had political costs, and the second time Romania refused to participate (which soured relations with the Soviets) and Albania just left the alliance altogether. There were also various conflicting territorial claims between the members which had to be managed.
Now, these difficulties don't mean that you should just give up and not try in the first place, but we just have to recognize that forming and successfully maintaining a defense network of co-equal states is, indeed, difficult - NATO doesn't necessarily serve as a successful example of longevity given how many of its members basically don't have sovereign foreign policy (and back when some did, there were events like the French and British pulling their Suez scheme and pissing of the Americans, and the French partially dropping out precisely to maintain their independence). Yes, it'd be nice if we could all put national chauvinisms aside and get together, but that's idealism - the actual real process of achieving that would be long and arduous. And in the mean time, all these conflicting national interests have to be managed somehow, and foreign faraway powers are going to have a very hard time doing that without being viewed as imperial meddlers, however fair or unfair that view may be.