Due to American cluster bombing campaigns advised by Kissinger during the Vietnam War to damage supply lines, over 2 million tonnes of ordinance were dropped on Laos over about a decade, averaging a planeload of bombs every 8 minutes. Laos is thus the most bombed country on the planet up to this point. 80 million bombs failed to explode - the cleanup operation is expected to take centuries, and 25,000 people have been killed and injured by bombs in the last 50 years. About 50 people are killed or injured every year to this day.
After the United States withdrew from Laos, the Pathet Lao took power and abolished the monarchy. Kaysone Phomvihane became a dominant figure in Laotian politics, keeping the course on Marxism-Leninism and implementing the first Five Year Plan in 1981. The second Five Year Plan in 1986 was modelled on Lenin's NEP, and this doubled rice production and significantly increased sugar production. After the fall of the USSR, Laos allowed a small capitalist class to exist, with similar control over them as in China. Laos maintains a 48-hour work week with paid sick leave, vacation time, and maternity leave, and workers are well-represented in trade unions. They faired relatively well during coronavirus from a social standpoint due to quick and efficient action to lock down the country, experiencing ~750 deaths out of a population of over 7 million.
There is hope even after utter destruction by genocidal oppressors.
The weekly update is here on the website.
Your Tuesday Briefing is here in the comments and here on the website.
Your Wednesday Briefing is here in the comments and here on the website.
Your Thursday Briefing is here in the comments and here on the website.
Your Friday Briefing is here in the comments and here on the website.
The Country of the Week is Laos! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week's thread is here.
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 daily-ish 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 (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
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.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
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.
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.
What is the Hexbear position on the Venezuela-Guyana situation?
I need a high level briefing on the situation now!
Well, our best analysts have returned with their statements which actually just consist of an image of Maduro as the chad wojak and the leader of Guyana as the soy wojak, so I think this sufficiently distills the conflict.
(idea I had while writing this: a boomer newspaper cartoon of the first zoomer president receiving their daily briefings from the CIA in the form of memes, in a "father I cannot click the book" style)
First zoomer briefing is a cuck and chad power ranking
The first CIA briefing is just the alternate angle of the JFK assasination
Drill goes in, oil comes out, you can't explain that.
Guyana is a neo-colonial puppet state. Its a conflict over 125 year old lines drawn by The British and Americans with no input from the actual people involved. The dispute is in a legal process that has been stalled for decades. Guyana benefits from the status quo as it only has things to lose. Guyana made moves to invite oil companies to the disputed area which triggered Venezuela. The fact that there was litigation pending in the ICJ says that Venezuela does have some valid claims.
There is little to no input from the people who live in the disputed area. Its is mostly indigenous peoples who get little from the Guyana government. Infrastructure and services are almost strictly built to assist the resource extraction companies. whether any of that would change under Venezuela is debatable.
From my reading it seems very similar to the Iraq-Kuwait conflict. In both cases the british drew borders to make small resource rich countries that they could bully/bribe into submission. They cut nations of people in two and made the smaller country feel special by giving them a better quality of life and used the larger country as a fear incentive to not demand a fair price for extracted resources.
I don't like it. This situation is very similar to what we in Guatemala face with Belize. They've got almost the same history as Guyana and are also coveted for resources that we lack. There's a long backstory about how they were once part of Guatemala and our dumbass presidents jump on this every time their polls drop or talks of revolution spreads.
There is no reason for Venezuela to do this and I've lost a level of respect for Maduro over this. The PCV was right about him.
The dumb shit: guyana found oil, and they are not sanctioned to shits, so got lots of quality of life gains recently. If venezuela takes it, they'll sanction them even worse, and the guyana oil still couldn't be sold, so maduro would get very mad civilian population. Legally its iffy, should have resolved it 50 years ago, not until they found fucking oil.
That's all skipping that usa will invade them via deathsquads
Exxonmobil vs Vuvuzela yeah I think that is an easy one. short article: https://web.archive.org/web/20231128200248/https://mronline.org/2023/11/28/exxonmobils-land-grab/
We must pledge our critial support to Maduro in his struggle against Guyanese imperialism
Are we using the lib version of "imperialism" now?
I don't pretend to know a lot about the situation. It seems like Venezuela has some valid claim to the territory and that Guyana is under the control of the evil empire. On the other hand it doesn't seem like anybody has cared to ask the people actually living there what they think of it all and I fail to see how Venezuelan irredentism is actually going to benefit the Venezuelan people (or the Guyanan people for that sake). Venezuela's greatest problem is that they are under constant attack by the evil empire. I can't see how picking a fight with Guyana is going to improve that situation.
Imagine Malvinas conflict but even stupider this time
Maduro got baited and it's not going to go well.