Image is of Joseph Robinette Biden, who has stepped down and will not run against Trump in the 2024 election.
In the aftermath of Trump surviving an assassination attempt, many professional opinion-havers are now talking about the scourge of "political violence" that has overtaken, or will soon overtake America, and how we must not let chaos rule. This is, of course, patently absurd. The American government and its allies have been the greatest force of political violence on the planet since the beginning of colonialism, and the foundations of the country are made of corpses. Today, America commits political violence by forcing Ukrainians into the maw of Russian artillery instead of trying to reach a peaceful settlement, which Russia has repeatedly expressed interest in and offered Ukraine relatively favourable terms. They supply Israel with endless weaponry to destroy entire cities and populations, while Biden supporters insist that somehow things could be worse than daily massacres and mass starvation.
In May 1945, French police fired on protestors, causing retaliatory attacks on French settlers, killing about a hundred. In response, the French murdered 45,000 Algerians in a little under two months, in a frenzy of political violence called the Sétif and Guelma massacre. As the massacre was being completed, the International Court of Justice was established. It goes without saying that Algeria never benefited from the ICJ, and the War of Independence from 1954 to 1962 was made inevitable. Over a million Algerians were killed before France could bear the fighting no longer and gave up, and Algeria won itself a state. Comparisons to the ongoing war of independence and genocide in Palestine are obvious.
While the means of colonial violence have evolved over the centuries, the basic structure of it has not. As in Algeria, Vietnam, and Cuba, resistance groups in and around Palestine are fighting for a world with less political violence. The American government would drown every city in the developing world in blood to prevent peace.
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 Algeria! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
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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.
I don’t want to exaggerate or overstate, but this is the sort of action that I think could genuinely bring down the Israeli state.
If the people of Israel no longer feel safe in Israel, they will leave eventually. Knowing that you are never safe and there can be an attack from a missile or a drone anytime anywhere, that’s not a situation people can live in. I think it’s fundamentally different from say suicide bombings. There is ultimately a limit on how much that can happen. But there’s no limit theoretically on the number of drone or missile strikes.
If enough people leave, the state will collapse.
I do wonder if we will eventually see Israel demand that the US do a boots-on-the-ground invasion of Yemen because of this. I don’t think the US will because that will absolutely be Afghanistan 2.0 only now US military resources are stretched even thinner.
I genuinely do not believe that the US can do a boots-on-the-ground invasion anymore. Anywhere. Period. They've switched to proxy forces for a variety of reasons and when they do try big operations like Prosperity Guardian, they get trounced. Naval invasions are substantially more difficult than just sitting in a strait trying to intercept drones and missiles, and while they could gather forces in Saudi Arabia, I'm unsure if the Saudis would like that very much given recent animosity and the force buildup could also be hit by missiles, like that one US base on the Syrian border which Iraqi forces managed to hit, producing an array of very coincidental heart attacks and brain injuries in US troops there.
its pretty funny how even neoliberalism reached the military, now they even have to outsource wars!
I think this might be a stretch. The U.S. could not efficiently pull off boots on the ground anymore, yes. But it would certainly jump at the opportunity for as much wasteful military spending as possible to line the pockets of the military industrial complex beneficiaries. With enough money you could do just about anything short of making earth spin backwards
I think Yemen's ability to put drones on zones anywhere they want means the Saudis will oppose being the launching point for any invasion, their number one priority is to prevent their oil production capacity from being destroyed
Couldn’t we just get thousands of “Free Parking” signs to make settlers feel unsafe?
Regarding your second paragraph: both illan pappe and Noam Chomsky have spoken about the propaganda of being totally free from bombardment being the only thing keeping the settlers in the land.
If Isntrael can't keep up the act then people will leave, why tf would you want to stay in a spot where you've been told your whole existence that people around you would commit a second Holocaust given the opportunity? Regardless of whether or not that is true (it isn't) the settlers will not tolerate living under Arab rule, especially after having committed a genocide of those same people. Most people either have a passport themselves or are the children of people with a passport of another country; their true homes.
As for those mizrahi and Sephardic Jews; they will be forced to decide between returning to their homes (among the Arabs, who have seen the atrocities their "state" committed and that they the settlers have reveled in) or applying for citizenship elsewhere. That's assuming those Arab countries will actually take them back. There is the very real (and probably what is going to be their case) reality that because of their allegiance to and participation in the Zionist project, they will simply be denied return. Which if you ask me, is extremely fair considering the nature of their crimes against humanity.
The entity's top brass and minds know this is true, the challenge will be whether they act on this reality or not. They can make arrangements to have them sent to their home countries or new countries willing to accept them, or they can stop everyone from leaving ala Ukraine and fight to the last settler.
tl;dr: the settlers will have to go back to their European homes or will now have to reside in New homes outside the MENA region. Assuming the entity doesn't decide to pull a Ukraine and draft every settler in a destined to lose war.