Iran has struck Israel.
previous preamble
The continuing fall of the remains of the British Empire is pretty entertaining from the outside: an archaic royal family that is seemingly being smote with disease by God itself for their past crimes; a navy that virtually no longer functions, ramming into foreign ports and under constant repair; and an economy that cannot seem to stop sputtering, fucked whether they're in the EU or outside it. Watching the impacts on people from the inside is a little more worrying, though.
A fifth of the population is in poverty, including nearly a third of all children. These figures have barely shifted since the Labour government in the early 2000s, aside from a decreasing poverty rate for pensioners. Actually, poverty hasn't substantially shifted since Margaret Thatcher. Before her, the poverty rate was around 14%, but her catastrophic policies caused a major increase, and poverty levels since then are still 50% higher than over 50 years ago, because neoliberal economic policy since then has not fundamentally changed. Parties and corporations have impoverished the usual vulnerable groups, such as large families, minority ethnic groups (including half of Pakistani and Bangladeshi households!) and disabled people. These differences are also regional, with the North more impoverished than the richer Southeast (but some of the poorest boroughs are in London, so it's a complex pattern).
With Corbyn's defeat in 2019 mere months before the pandemic began, the Labour Party shifted back towards the right, with left-wingers purged from the party if they did not kowtow to Keir Starmer. This leaves us with a situation where the only substantial difference between the two parties would be on social policy, but it goes without saying that economic policy is the overwhelming factor that determines if minorities can have a decent life. Worker-oriented movements since then have been largely not under the umbrella of major party leaderships, such as the Don't Pay movement in late 2022 that arose in the wake of dramatically rising energy prices where 3 million people vowed to not pay them (which did lead to results).
Most notably recently is the major upset in the constituency of Rochdale - the victory of George Galloway - who is the leader of the Workers Party of Britain, which describes itself as both socialist and socially conservative. This took place both in the context of aforementioned economic troubles, as well as anger over Israel's genocide of Gaza in the British population, especially in British Muslims. It remains to be seen how much of this is an isolated event, especially as Corbyn has, understandably, refused to collaborate with Galloway due to his socially conservative stances. The UK general election will be held at some point within the next 9 months or so, and might well be a shitshow depending on what happens domestically and geopolitically before then; parallels to the current American electoral shitshow with increasing anger over Biden are pretty apparent. The Conservatives are quite likely to lose given 14 years of uninspired rule if current polling is correct, but it truly is a race to the bottom.
The COTW (Country of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific country every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied nations. If you've wanted to talk about the country or share your experiences, but have never found a relevant place to do so, now is your chance! However, don't worry - this is still a general news megathread where you can post about ongoing events from any country.
The Country of the Week is the United Kingdom! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
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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.
Thanks for the write-up. I have a question, I remember the DPRK being struck by several natural disasters in the early 90s which, coupled with the end of the USSR and allegedly maybe mismanagement(??), led to famines in the country, is it true that during that period the north koreans were basically asking for help from the UN and also for sanctions relief and China basically didn't support them in that effort, supposedly because it was trying to get into the WTO and the US didn't want to help the DPRK? Which then led to a low point in the relations between the 2 countries?
The 90s were one of the blackest eras of reaction, with no exaggeration, in all of human history. The entirety of former USSR societies fell into a highly publicized humanitarian disaster of spiraling mass poverty. The fact that the DPRK suffered in this time is undeniable but it should be emphasized that the DPRK's 1990s famine is to the anticommunist mythology of Western propaganda what the pre-WWII famines, including that infamous Stalin's Giant Spoon-domor, were for the USSR and the Great Leap Forward coinciding famine was for China; appropriated by endless hordes of payrolled academics to outwrite any alternative accounts with their word vomit, with the intended agenda of establishing a discourse hegemony that wholly pins the disaster squarely on the man-made decisions of socialist leadership and the socialist system. This is all to say that, due to this slathering of Western propaganda and the hijacking of the narrative airwaves, so to speak, it's difficult to ascertain the material conditions of the food scarcity circumstances of the 90s DPRK, including its extent and the particular catalysts and aggrievating factors.
I had a look at Steve Gowans' "Patriots, Traitors and Empires," and this is what he interpreted:
It is true that under the allegations of an uranium enrichment program in 1994, the US put significant pressure on the DPRK right at the height of its unipolar hubris moment, which undoubtedly exacerbated conditions. The US would later, under Bush Jr., explicitly place food export licensing sanctions on the DPRK.
As for Chinese responses to this moment, here's what the US-based so-called "Genocide Studies and Prevention International Journal" in a 2012 article alleged were the conditions of China-DPRK and Russia-DPRK relations in the 1990s:
One thing to keep in mind while miring through all this is that it's clear that the DPRK weathered through its food-scarcity conditions of the 90s. This indicates that either 1) its systems of autarkic food self-sufficiency could be sustained and that those conditions were derived from principally natural causes, contrary to Western narratives of "inherent flaws of its system" or that 2) it was able to supply food imports despite the semi-public estranged relations with China (I agree with the cited ghouls above that it's unlikely Yeltsin's Russia would have stepped in). For the avenues in which foreign (i.e. Chinese) aid could have been made, as can be seen from the current circumstances of the Ukraine War, where while Chinese support is undeniable, the extent of it is still unknown and deliberately obfuscated and clandestine, I would argue that, in the midst of American 1990s triumphalism, any actions by China to support AES states, particularly the DPRK which fell under US crosshairs following the 1994 uranium enrichment allegations, would have been conducted through similar degrees of inconspicuousness and inherently contradictory to publicly stated positions.
There is some discernible evidence of this from the Jiang Zemin era China. For example, Adrian Hearn's "Diaspora of Trust: Cuba, Mexico and the Rise of China" argues that Cuba's painful Special Period sustained the survival of the Cuban revolution in a large degree through China's substitution of former Soviet assistance: "China played an important but little-known role in seeing Cuba through this tumultuous period" and that with regards to Jiang's private agenda:
Thanks again, did not know about the assist from Jiang Zemin