Image is of the American military during their occupation of Haiti at the beginning of the 20th century, taken from this NYT article from 2022: Invade Haiti, Wall Street Urged. The U.S. Obliged.
In the aftermath of the assassination of Jovenel Moïse in 2021 and his replacement by Western comprador Ariel Henry, the situation in Haiti is the most dire it has been in decades - by some metrics, even worse than the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake (CW: rape, violence including against children). Millions do not have enough food. Outbreaks of disease are rampant. The government - such that it still exists, which is becoming increasingly debatable - has only a minority control over the capital city, with some estimates putting the influence of armed groups at 80%.
America's search for somebody, anybody, to intervene in Haiti has ended, with Kenya answering the call. President Ruto has announced that he will send 1000 police officers to Haiti. Kenya's Foreign Minister has tried to sell this intervention as pan-Africanism. Other Caribbean states, like the Bahamas and Antigua and Barbuda, have offered to send police officers too.
I can't really say it any better than the Black Alliance for Peace's own statement:
Kenya has offered to deploy a contingent of 1,000 police officers to help train and assist Haitian police, ostensibly to “restore order” in the Caribbean republic. Yet, their proposal is nothing more than military occupation by another name; an occupation of Haiti by an African country is not Pan-Africanism, but Western imperialism in Black face. By agreeing to send troops into Haiti, the Kenyan government is assisting in undermining the sovereignty and self-determination of Haitian people, while serving the neocolonial interests of the United States, the Core Group, and the United Nations.
There is an urgent need for clarity on the issue of occupation in Haiti. As described in a recent statement on Haiti and Colonialism, Haiti is under ongoing occupation. No call for foreign intervention into Haiti from the administration of appointed Prime Minister Ariel Henry can be considered legitimate, because the Henry administration itself is illegitimate. BAP has repeatedly pointed out that Haiti’s crisis is a crisis of imperialism. Haiti’s current unpopular and unelected government is propped up only by Haiti’s de facto imperial rulers: the unseemly confederacy of the Core Group countries and organizations, as well as BINUH (the United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti), and a loose alliance of foreign corporations and local elites.
Henry and the UN have made a mockery of sovereignty by mouthing the slogan “Haitian solutions to Haitian problems,” yet finding the only solution in violence through foreign military intervention. After repeated failed attempts to organize an occupying force to protect their interests and impose their will on the Haitian people (including appeals to the multinational organization, the Caribbean Community [CARICOM] for troops), they have now found a willing accomplice in Kenya, an east African country with its own set of internal problems.
Indeed, what’s in it for Kenya? An opportunity to both train and enhance the salaries of local police forces and garner a patina of prestige, or at least bootlicking approval, from the West. And for Haiti? White blows from a Black hand and a further erosion of their sovereignty.
And, by the way, here's the Black Alliance for Peace's statement calling for no intervention by ECOWAS in Niger, calling the organization a Western comprador organization similar to CARICOM's role in Haiti.
Welcome to our friends throughout the Lemmyverse!
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
This week's first update is here in the comments.
This week's second update is here in the comments.
This week's third update might not happen because I'm busy dunking.
Links and Stuff
The bulletins site is down.
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can.
Resources For Understanding The War
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.
Telegram Channels
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
Pro-Russian
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
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.
Last week's discussion post.
man, getting more and more exposure to the libs on here, it's just...
I, too, once thought Castro was a dictator. I, too, once thought that China was a totalitarian hellscape in which people are governed by social credit scores. I, too, once thought that the DPRK was a so-called "hermit kingdom" of its own making with effectively hereditary monarchs. I, too, once thought that the Soviet Union was an abject failure, or at best a highly imperfect project that "proved" that communism cannot work in practice. I, too, thought that liberalism and civility and rational debate and compromise between differing political parties was the only way to really achieve anything, and that you must always take the high road even while your right-wing opposite takes dishonourable stabs at you. I believed that swathes of Africa and Asia were undeveloped - rather than underdeveloped - because of corruption, not exploitation. The war in Iraq might have been bad in retrospect and we shouldn't have gone in based on a lie, but somebody had to be the world police. That's obvious, right? The police are what keeps us safe!
These were all beliefs I had when I was young and sheltered from the world, when the hard edge of economic consequences hadn't yet really hit me. When those consequences and problems did hit me, I didn't have the classic experience of going from a dreamy liberal living in fantasies of equality to a hardened conservative who understood that things have to be unfair because that's just life. I realized, through personal experiences and also through exposure to ideas from the left, including some of the people on here, that most of what I knew about other countries and history was tainted with misinformation, or twisted beyond recognition, or just flatly not true. I wasn't brainwashed. I haven't been turned into an agent for a foreign government. I'm certainly not in an echo chamber - I'm literally surrounded by contrary ideas every day because other people play the radio or watch the television around me and expose me to the latest and greatest of liberal arguments for X and Y.
Others have expressed this point before, what strikes me about all the libs on here is that they seem totally unaware that the vast majority of us once held the exact same positions that they once did and have moved past them. That we might have been in their shoes. We all know the arguments, we've not only seen them, many of us were previously convinced by them.
And they never, ever, ever read. Like I've read Locke, Smith, Mills, Rawls, and all the rest of the lib shit. Hell, I've read a little Strasser and Evola even. Show me one lib who has, in good faith, read State and Revolution.
for most liberals, books are something to look nice on a shelf
Also, for anyone interested in my drunken opinion: Adam Smith was a genius, JS Mill was a lib but tbh a fairly smart guy, Locke was a colossal dumbass and possibly the worst philosopher of all time, and Rawls is sooooooo fucking tedious and shitty. Hobbes was based and actually pretty rigorous philosophically, Blackstone literally made me want to blow my brains out. Robespierre was the one really actually cool lib.
Most fash philosophers have nothing interesting at all to say, and are just like a muddle of bad interpretations of Nietzsche (himself, ofc, NOT a fascist) and nonsense. The one exception being Heidegger, who is incredibly interesting.
I'd also like to add that like 90% of the lib theory I've read (Mill, Locke, etc.) was for classes in university, while 90% of the non-lib stuff I've read was fully on my own time. Like WHERE are these fucking university profs supposedly obsessed with "postmodernism" or whatever the fuck. Like forget actual Marxism, I'm out here having to read Derrida, Foucault and shit on my own time. I thought my proffs were supposed to be shoving that down my throat????
I'd actually enjoy hearing more discussions and examinations of lib theory from a marxist perspective - or from a marxist dunking session - as a means of helping people develop a more rounded understanding of the world we live in with all of the underpinnings that it's built upon. Also because I thoroughly enjoyed reading your drunken dunkin and think a little more of that sort of merriness would really help brighten up the place.
Huh, thanks! I'll have to do some effort posting on lib theory when I have the time and energy
I kind of hate continental philosophy. It’s so complicated and it’s all like, to understand X you first need to read Y which requires this nuanced reading of Z etc
The complexity and opacity of continental philosophy is because it’s fucking bullshit. The complexity and closely and strictly defined “nuance” of it allows so many bad ideas to be smuggled in with the good.
I really feel the truest continental idea is when Focault tells us all this opacity and intellectual rigor is to make philosophy the domain of the well educated and wealthy elite, an aspect and tool of social status and rigid social hierarchy, and not much more than that.
Which isn’t quite the same as saying it has nothing to say because it does, but it renders itself meaningless through it's deeply referential pseudo-logical rigor.
The Harry Potter jokes are there for a reason. Most US folk never read a book of their own volition past their school years. You don't need to read a lot, or even read theory at all, but even a nominal amount of personal reading will lend a lot to deprogramming the propaganda.
I usually just suggest the Jakarta method and Manufacturing Consent and if someone won't read those then talking is pointless
Forget State and Revolution, they haven’t even read any of the liberal shit. You know more about the basis of their own ideology than they do. They don’t have a language to describe their own beliefs to themselves, let alone the means to test those beliefs against literally anything. It’s absurd. I don’t know how to have a conversation with someone about a topic that they insist they understand through pure osmosis.
Daily Adam Smith was actually based and would have been a communist had he been born later post. (Also him and Hume were gay and I cannot be convinced otherwise)