Image is of Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, the leader of Ansarallah.
The death of Zionism has just massively accelerated.
previous preamble
BRICS has expanded to include Ethiopia, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Argentina is currently experiencing technical difficulties due to the election of the ancap clown Milei - once he's out of office, maybe they can try again.
I don't really have much to say about this one way or another. BRICS has, so far, made only nervous and small steps towards challenging US hegemony. This isn't really that unexpected, as only China and Russia are the real "true believers" in ending US hegemony (and even then, China's government either believes, or is pretending to believe, that reconciliation is still possible). Brazil, India, and South Africa are less enthralled by the concept of dethroning the US, most especially India, who had to make a firm decision in 2023 whether they were going to be on the side of America, or on the side of the Global South, and chose the former, strengthening their military relationship. They're still best of friends with Russia, but they are very obviously the sussy imposter of the BRICS group.
The prospects of BRICS are only really loosely correlated with the prospects of multipolarism, though. It's not a process that hinges on BRICS's successes or failures. It is coming because the contender states (in Desai's terminology) are irreversibly rising, and the US is irreversibly falling. If it will not be BRICS that leads, it will be a different organization. A better world is not only possible, but inevitable - unfortunately for the US.
I'm taking a week off the updates because I've been swamped lately, and also feel the need to reconfigure (and find new) sources. Needless to say that I've grown tired of Financial Times headlines, even if they do represent the actual views of the bourgeoisie.
The Country of the Week is Ethiopia! 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.
“Israel” should have been created by taking a chunk out of Germany. Funny how the people who murdered 6 million Jewish people didn’t actually pay the price for that - and instead it was paid by people who were not involved at all. Wonder how that happened…
The Allies were really insistent that Prussia be eliminated once and for all. What better way than make it a Jewish state?
That'd just be setting up Holocaust II: Electric Boogaloo. Europeans never stopped being viciously anti-semitic. The Zionist project and declaration of Israel solved "The Jewish Question" for them and got all the surviving Jewish people out of Europe leaving tolerably low numbers being.
And collective punishment is still wrong, even if you're doing it to Germans. And, on a practical level, we'd have ended up with an even more ruthlessly fascist and antisemitic prussian diaspora.
There were potential solutions, but the forced removal of europeans from an existing european state to create a Jewish state was not one of them.
Many Jewish Ashkenazi people didn't want to be in Europe. Many European post-war states denied them the right to return to their homes, flatly refused to restore their property or their rights, and kept them in refugee camps that were in some cases the same concentration camps they had recently been liberated from. A lot of them weren't even really trying to conceal their rage that the holocause had been disrupted and stopped. Fleeing Europe was a coerced decision for many European Jews.
Wanting to gtfo of Europe is entirely reasonable and understandable. There are a lot of shoulds there; the Soviets should have put the Jewish Autonomous Oblast somewhere more desirable that wasn't in the complete middle of nowhere. America should have just given every Jewish person citizenship and a train ticket to Lincoln, Nebraska. France should have been bulldozed in to the sea while we had the chance. The zionist project to create an ethnostate in Palestine was never fait acompli. Many world powers collaborated to create a situation where Jewish refugees in Europe had no safe place to go. Many chose, ultimately, to flee to Palestine. And even then Zionism wasn't fait accompli - there were people who advocated for a secular multi-ethnic and multi-religious democratic state for quite some time after. Hell, there still are a handful of Jewish Israelis who work with Palestinians to try to stop the genocide and have an end goal of some kind of multi-ethnic democratic state.
Yeah, they probably would've done just fine moving to Palestine as refugees and simply becoming a part of society there, instead of some fuckers deciding they needed to do a colonialism by creating their own authoritarian state to reproduce the Nazi project with different aesthetics.
And also failing to assassinate most of the Nazis that escaped. I imagine a good chunk of the reason is because the connected and knowledgeable ones already escaped to the west, and it would not be wise to assassinate a Nazi spy leader while he’s helping against the Russians in the Cold War
They should have ejected the Bavarian’s.
Zionists say that they’re surrounded completely by hostile nations that want to kill them. How is that any different than having a Jewish state in expropriated German land (i.e. surrounded by anti semitic European countries)? I suppose that even though Europeans were severely weakened militarily and economically after the wars, they were still more capable compared to Arab countries which makes it harder to defend.