Image is sourced from this article.
It takes very little effort to find an article from Western state propaganda decrying Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas as authoritarian and rife with human rights abuses. This is the natural reaction the US has to any successful liberation movement. This fairly long report from Jason Cohen, a socialist who travelled to Nicaragua one week ago, should quell any suspicions.
He describes a country with high political consciousness among the masses, who are working to construct critical infrastructure for the country and their communities. There is a virtual education system that is free across the entire nation, which serves the dual goal of democratizing education and ensuring that those in rural areas or without much free time for university can still achieve degrees and a quality education; and these classes cover technical skills in the production of infrastructure and agriculture, but also political and ideological education in order to counter the fascist propaganda produced by imperialist nations abroad.
While Nicaragua is deeply invested in its nationality and national figures who led to their socialist revolution, such as Sandino, they are also immensely proud of their indigneous history, recognizing it as also part of their anti-colonial history which continues to the present day. Additionally, they honour the struggles of other nations on the continent, such as the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, as well as Castro in Cuba and Allende in Chile. Countries around the world are also celebrated and admired, such as Burkina Faso; during the Reagan administration, Nicaragua and Burkina Faso were comrades in arms, and now Traore is continuing the legacy of Sankara's anti-imperialism in the present. Perhaps most relevant today is their dedication towards Palestine, involving the creation of the Parque Palestina (shown in the post image), in which the Palestinian flag flies alongside the flag of Nicaragua. In July, Leila Khaled of the PFLP gave a speech in Nicaragua, in which the solidarity of the two nations was highlighted.
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 Nicaragua! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
Please check out the HexAtlas!
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.
here's a quasi-philosophical, quasi-therapeutic blob of text that may or may not help you or other people in your position
spoiler
I could go through each of your points in turn and disprove them but I don't think that would be terribly helpful. I think you're feeling merely the "vibe" of late-stage capitalism which feels very... gestalt. Greater than the sum of its parts. As if, even you go through and knock down every pillar supporting it by disproving every argument above, proving that its defeat is inevitable, it would still remain standing, seemingly uncaring about the fact that it should have collapsed. It's an almost religious force. I think finding ways to mentally contain and/or contend with that almost supernatural feeling of capitalism's permanence and "stay in objective reality" (so to speak) is something most people go through, though not that many are able to specifically name their malaise in that way due to a lack of political reading, and it instead comes out in a massive array of forms, sometimes liberatory, sometimes reactionary.As all humans are not capable of perfectly logical thought, at least not for very long, we do have to live in our feelings and find coping mechanisms in order to keep functioning. Some go to stoicism as a coping mechanism, while others choose to ignore politics entirely and live as hedonically as possible. Personally, I would say I have three coping mechanisms to deal with the Bad Vibe, though nobody else here must (or even should) follow them:
A fatalistic view of the past and future. There's only one path that we shall ever experience, and so our "job" is to find the best way to react to and understand events as they come; we should not stress about all the possibilities. I do think this is literally true in a physics perspective (until the many-worlds-hypothesis is proved true, at least). This isn't to deny human agency; if anything I'm a firm believer in it, and come down on the "indomitable human spirit" side, against the "cold indifference of the universe" side. I just believe that humans and their organizations are "wielded" by historical forces and are how change comes about, whether those humans are aware of it or even hate that fact. I think there's a Mao quote around where he remarks on how capitalism or colonialism in China didn't end itself through deterioration into nothing, it was the Communist Party that destroyed it. I think that is true, but a key part of the deterioration of capitalism is precisely the creation of revolutionary organizations which will replace it. Lenin, Stalin, and Mao were wielded like swords by history against capitalism, in the same way that Napoleon was wielded as a sword by history against feudalism. Today, Sinwar and Nasrallah and al-Houthi and others are wielded as swords by history against Israel. But there are many potential swords in history's arsenal, and so Great Man Theory is still essentially false.
Taking a far-future view of current events. I've talked about this before in a comment months ago, where I said that one example I like is imagining some now-nameless individual who lived during the Mongol conquests of Asia - caught up in momentous events in which they heard of far-away cities being sieged and burned, not knowing if they would soon also be killed, and yet nonetheless needing to feed the cattle and harvest the fields and wash their clothes in the river and raise their family, because what other options are there? I then imagine myself, say, 300 years into the future, looking back on the events of today, when the great ongoing genocides and pandemics and horror of war has been made distant by history, where the Ukraine War is just as distant as the American Revolutionary War is today, and I imagine how little my current worries and anxieties about the future matter in the face of such large and inevitable historical forces. It's a human-centric version of when people look up into the sky at billions of galaxies and think about how little things matter down on Earth. I think that can eventually generate a sort of... antipathy towards humanity and can feed into a "humans are the disease" ecofascism, whereas keeping humanity front and center is better.
Trying to maintain "socialist realism", in the face of capitalist realism. This is the mechanism that most directly stabs at the heart of the problem, and so I try and cultivate a genuine belief that socialism not only can win, but that it must win. A Good Vibe, to counter the Bad Vibe. I think the best way to do this is a method that is generally difficult for people raised with the belief in taking in all information and trying not to be biased. That method is to simply and knowingly try and pay most attention to the good news, at the expense of the bad news. That's not to say you should ignore the bad news per se, but I merely use the other two coping mechanisms to minimize their mental impact. Bad events can be safely quarantined in fatalism or through a far-future lens, but good news can be fully enjoyed. Doing this is nearly impossible without decent social media discipline and requires you to give up, at least a little, on the idea that "echo chamber = bad" as well as the idea that it's your "duty" to witness suffering online despite (or even because) how bad it makes you feel. Some people, maybe even here, may fight you on those tendencies. But it's worth doing in order to have substantially better mental health in my opinion.
I suffered through fairly intense social anxiety in my childhood and adolescence, and so I eventually had to formulate and dedicate discipline to these kinds of coping mechanisms to remain functional through personal and geopolitical hardship. It's served me pretty well both irl and on this site, where doomers and irony-poisoned people are pretty common.