Image is of vehicles set aflame by protestors near a government building.
Since July 1st, students have protested the unpopular proposal in which 30% of government jobs would be reserved for veterans of the 1971 War of Independence and their relatives. In a country with a youth unemployment rate of around 20% and a population of 170 million, a large number of otherwise eligible and competent people would have been forced out due to favouritism for veterans. As with basically every country on the planet over the last couple years, Bangladesh is suffering from inflation and an increasing cost-of-living, further exacerbating tensions.
The student protests have been met with significant violence by the government - local newspapers report that over a hundred protestors have been killed, and thousands have been injured. Guns and tear gas have been used. Additionally, the government has completely cut internet access throughout Bangladesh to prevent organizing, which has had some success in dividing protestors, but has also only further angered various parts of the country due to the massive impact to Bangladesh's online industries and various startups. And a national curfew has been in place to limit movement, with the population told to remain home if they want to be safe.
Yesterday, the Supreme Court of Bangladesh relented, stating that now, only 5% of government jobs would be reserved for veterans and their families. 2% would be allocated to members of minorities, with the remaining 93% distributed on merit. A period of tentative calm has arrived, but Hasnat Abdullah, a coordinator of the Anti-Discrimination Student Movement, has stated that unless the government restores the internet, removes the curfew, releases detainees, and forces certain ministers to resign within a few days, then the protests will resume.
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 Bangladesh! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
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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.
Paul Cockshott's latest video is pretty good. Basically covers what's the same and different between now and pre-WW1 world politics. Covers how the US is trying to divide the world into NATO vs. BRICS, etc. etc. Food dependency is less of a factory nowadays, but oil dependency is a big driver of scrambles for resources; US obviously bombed Nordstream 2.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWrgN33ZOQQ
Rest of the poseurs on the site don't need to watch this. This is just for us.
Poseur is such a bougie way to spell poser
seeing these two slides, and the split between NATO and BRICS/non-NATO aligned countries in the graphs, was pretty eye-opening to me. not sure i completely buy into his analysis at the end though, about the party-aligned split in the ruling class. i just don't see much evidence for the republicans actually being serious about re-industrializing
It's a real outsider's take. Their ideas really can simply be contradictory and shallow. They just have to convince an army of brainwormed Pillow salesmen to chip in 10k here and there by vaguely referencing something Ben Stein taught them in their High School economics class.
The historical analysis is fine but the Ukraine war analysis is not
1- People who keep pointing out how this war is a reversion to WW1 are doing bad history. The US never fought a peer opponent since arguably Vietnam and surely since Korea 50-70 years ago. There is no indication we ever moved away from industrialized warfare. The only thing we have is a biased sample because the US only fought imperialist wars against inferior opponents.
2- Its true that the NATO realized they lack industrial capacity, but the war is not a proof that western modern military is inferior necessarily. Keep in mind the US refuses to give Ukraine access to their top systems. Ukraine doesn't have an airforce to this day, F-16s from 1995 are a unicorn, just like the "Abrams" which turned out to be a literal dozen "export versions" we never even got to see in combat except the one time in Adviivka.
The only piece of modern equipment in Ukraine right now are perhaps the ATACAMs/HIMARS/Patriots systems and particularly the Patriots were sent in pathetic small quantities. Also keep in mind the only confirmed losses by Russian aviation was from Patriot systems.
Its probably true NATO military is inferior, but we've known this since the cold war. The US never had actual technological superiority, look back in history. US fighters getting fucked in Korea because Migs were superior. The number of historical losses of US spy planes to soviet air defenses etc. Point is using Ukraine to jump start a theory about western inferiority is questionable.
3- Dividing BRICS vs NATO is dumb I'm sorry. By definition a block has a leader that is willing to give and enforce their will on other members. This is true for the US but it is absolutely not true for China and BRICS. Maybe if China starts giving a shit about fighting things will change but the industrial capacity of Brazil is decidedly in the hands of American imperialism. The entire Brazilian capitalist class is behold to foreign interests. The same can be said for India.
Also you know its funny when the biggest recent controversy was Lula's shit neoliberal government introducing a new tax to stop poor people from buying cheap clothes from China. The same cheap clothes resold by major Brazilian retailers because Brazil literaly doesn't produce enough cheap quality clothing.
This was quite a political blunder from Lula's government, widely unpopular etc. So please be extremely careful thinking BRICS is some magical NATO-like alliance. Even if it was, the elephant in the room is China is not willing to leverage BRICS anyway into an open war with the US so all the analysis falls apart.
Also btw Brazil was forced to buy weapons from Israel despite Lula's "performance" lol.
The industrial base of nations is ultimately what determines victors in war, regardless of whether it's WWI or WWII or the Civil War or whatever else. America probably does have the most advanced weapons in the world, but wunderwaffen don't matter if you can't replace them as well as your opponent can.
Can 2024 America and Europe outproduce 2024 Russia militarily? Not right now. They could, theoretically, but it would require a decline in the rate of profit, and America especially is allergic to that now more than ever. Not hard to see why politicians want war with China - it'd force the issue like nothing else.