New preamble:
Palestinian resistance groups have launched an operation in and around Gaza to fight the genocidal settler state oppressing them. Thousands of rockets have been launched towards the so-called state of Israel, overwhelming the Iron Dome. Settlers and the troops protecting them are being killed in the settlements surrounding Gaza, with many caught by surprise in the first few hours of the operation.
Palestinians are taking many Israeli settlers and soldiers hostage and bringing them back to Gaza. An Israeli general, Nimrod Aloni, has been confirmed captured. Palestinians are also taking military and civilian equipment back. Drones and MANPADS appear to be in use, and a number of Merkava tanks have been destroyed/disabled and their occupants removed and taken hostage. Palestinian forces appear to be heading in two main directions so far: southeast in the direction of Be'er Sheva, and along the coast in the direction of Ashkelon, but settlements all around Gaza have been assaulted and taken. It is obviously unknown how far they intend to go, or what their intermediate goals are.
Israel is bombing the Gaza Strip with aircraft, destroying buildings. It appears that their intelligence on the location of Palestinian forces outside of Gaza is very poor, and haven't been able to meaningfully strike them. Netanyahu has given a statement declaring that Israel is in a state of war. Iran has issued statements in support of the uprising, and Israel has responded with hostility to those comments. In all, the IDF appears to still be in a shockingly bad state hours after the assault began.
Old preamble on Antarctica:
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Much of the information for this news post, including both the images in the preamble, came from this article at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, which has been circulating in the media lately.
Image has been taken from this article.
Antarctica has had a uniquely bad year.
While the sea ice extent in the last 50 years or so has been very gradually declining, it has done so very slowly on average - by 0.1% per decade. This began to change in 2016:
Even so, this year is different, showing a remarkable decrease in the maximum sea ice extent. It is unconfirmed (I think) but this year may be the first in which the maximum extent fails to reach 17 million square kilometers - and is more than one million square kilometers lower than the previous record low maximum in 1986.
The fall in sea ice has been linked by some researchers to warming in the uppermost ocean layer caused by lateral and upward mixing of warmer water. The ocean is a gigantic heat sink, and has been absorbing much of the excess heat that humanity has generated via the greenhouse effect. But put enough heat into a heat sink and it will eventually fill up.
These changes in sea ice extent is no mere abstract climate worry or scientific curiosity. It is having a direct, catastrophic impact on the Antarctic's ecosystem. Emperor penguin colonies have had trouble breeding, so much so that:
...there is high probability that no chicks had survived last year in four of the five known emperor penguin colonies in the central and eastern Bellingshausen Sea. This was because the sea ice had melted well before chicks would have developed waterproof feathers. ... Today's report says about one-third of the 62 known emperor penguin colonies in Antarctica were affected by partial or total sea ice loss between 2018 and 2022.
And, last year, scientists conducted a study on the two plants that are able to grow near Antarctica, looking at a single Antarctic island for simplicity, and found that the populations of these plants had exploded in the last decade - growing as much in the last decade as they had in the last 50 years - due to rising air temperatures. It was warm enough for the scientists to wear shorts and remove their shirts.
The Country of the Week is Syria! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
The weekly update is here!
Links and Stuff
The bulletins site is down.
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can.
Resources For Understanding The War
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.
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.
Telegram Channels
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
Pro-Russian
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
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.
Last week's discussion post.
BRICS: An Anti-Imperialist Fantasy and Sub-Imperialist Reality? – Patrick Bond
Well, the most important thing is that you've found a way to keep the pristine and pure Marxist anti-imperialist tendency untainted by minor things like "reality" and "praxis" and - gasp - "difficult questions".
I see this a lot from my Trotskyist sources, like the WSWS and Green Left. They can scarcely go a week without a headline popping up on my feed along the lines of "Sure, the United States is imperialist, but BRICS is no better!" and I do wonder if they just don't understand the absurd mismatch between the mountain and the molehill, or if they have some personal problem with China and they're just trying to insert a bunch of terminology to make the argument appear more cerebral. Either way, very frustrating.
Anyway, moving on to Yves's preamble:
I've heard this point a lot before (usually from Naked Capitalism) and I'm increasingly thinking it's not really a good comparison. The EU is an organization designed to funnel wealth from the poorer countries to the richer ones - namely Germany, France, and the UK. It may pretend to be a merely political project of unity and blahblahblah, but it's just a microcosm of global imperialism. If - if - China can maintain its focus on genuinely improving the conditions of foreign countries via the BRI and various banks and so on, then I see no particular reason why BRICS would necessarily have to fracture and fall apart. The contradiction between the interests of poorer and richer countries in the EU don't necessarily have to exist in BRICS+. It might anyway if other contradictions arise, but "The EU's dysfunction suggests BRICS will be too" doesn't seem like a strong argument to me.
This is the actual point; nonetheless I still believe that this whole thing is going to be a case of "Before the revolution, it appears impossible; after the revolution, it appears inevitable."
"Of course China can't reduce their dollar dependency meaningfully! Of course the dollar can't be dethroned! Anybody who believes that the current situation could possibly be otherwise needs to read more economics books, because I've explained numerous times all these factors that make the transition virtually imposs-- huh. Well, actually, here's the top ten reasons why the dollar was obviously doomed to failure from the get-go. What a weak currency it was in hindsight!"
Let's take their premise as something true, if there is no alternatives to that bipolar Imperial cold wars. Then what is the tangible choices for the third world? Certainly not some college nerds organization that the member will become Center-left voter once daddy give them a job in his small lawyer firm.
You don't need to understand leftist theory to understand that BRICs is just a bank that gives third world more favorable conditions and not try to seize everything every time you can't pay back in time
More importantly, it's a bank that imposes imperialist policy on a much more limited scope than the World Bank and IMF does. China may have it's favorable free-trade ports, that absolutely fit Lenin's definition of imperialism even if attained by peaceful means, but that is a long-shot away from dictating the trade, investment, and social spending policy of an entire country, let alone the amount of actually violent imperial policy that the U.S. and it's related national and multi-national organizations engage in on a regular basis. For fucks sake, they just voted to put troops on the ground in Haiti.
It's pretty simple. When China comes into a country, people migrate into that town and country to try to stay there to make money. When the west comes into a country, people try to leave. Imperialism or not, that is a real tangible difference and I don't see any reason China or Russia would want to change that policy, at least in the short term.
Yeah utopianism and puritanism (in terms of ideology) on the left is a big issue across all tendencies. It's not just the stereotypical trots, anarchists and Maoists either. I remember telling a Marxist Leninist I disagreed with Lenin's definition of imperialism, and it was if I had told them that the earth was flat.
Fellas is it Puritanism to tell Darwin his Theory of Evolution is wrong
Well Lenin states that imperialism is a specific stage of capitalism (the highest stage), while others disagree and state that imperialism and capitalism are intrinsically linked at all stages of their development, from the transition from feudalism/mercantile societies to industrialised capitalism, to the modern day global economic system