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.
Is it fair to say that the world is closer to nuclear warfare today than it was at any point during the Cold War? That in the quest for profit, warring capitalist states have no qualms about escalating indefinitely. If so, then I guess Posadism is no longer a fringe ideology
I don’t think we’re quite at “one Soviet officer deciding not to push the button today” like we were on 27 October 1962 or 26 September 1983.
It took a few years for that information to be revealed, maybe there’s a U.S. officer who didn’t push a nuke button this year, but we won’t know
Too high on LSD
At any point? The Cuban Missile Crisis was agonizingly close and we’re not there yet. We’ve had brief flashes of potential incidents (off the top of my head, when that Russian missile hit a Polish tractor, and when Russia accused Ukraine of attempting to make a dirty bomb or exploding the ZNPP and blaming the Russians for it), and I did unironically buy a nuclear preparedness book during those times just in case something happened, but nothing as relatively prolonged and serious as the CMC.
My hunch, mostly unfounded from any reasoned analysis and just Vibes-Based, is that the Russia-Ukraine conflict will remain non-nuclear, because I don’t think that Biden, and especially Trump, really want to directly go to war against Russia. I just don’t think it figures in their plans, they wanna try and beat Russia while only risking the lives of Ukrainian men, plus the various spies and helpers that the West sends. It’s difficult to win a New American Century if half the world is radioactive, they want to keep imperialism going and profits flowing, and the desire of some random impoverished Eastern Europeans to get their oblasts back, and to have a “democracy” free of Russian interference, and peepee, and poopoo, are not more valuable than corporate profits to most Western capitalists. I think NATO and the US will threaten to get increasingly involved, they will send more weaponry, etc, but I would be genuinely shocked if they really crossed the line and sent NATO battalions into Ukraine to fight Russia, and flew NATO planes to try and attack Russian positions. Or, if that does ever happen, it’ll be preceded by a hundred smaller provocations that make a hard dividing line between pre-NATO involvement and post-involvement subjective and hard to identify, and at no point will Russia decide that this small step up the ladder is the thing that they’ve decided that nuclear warfare in which tens of millions of Russians will die is finally the appropriate response.
China-US, though… especially as Japan and South Korea and Taiwan are more worthwhile to the US than Ukraine and are much bigger parts of the world economy, and would likely feature heavily in a war there… well, I’m personally not gonna worry about it until the first Chinese missiles are slamming into Taiwan, whenever that is, and it may never happen at all. Seems like a good idea to perhaps learn some survival skills if you’re outside the zones where nukes would likely fall, though.
If the idea is that nuclear war is possible due to blind profit seeking, then there won’t be a war with China anytime soon because even non-nuclear escalation would crash the US economy, perhaps to the point it couldn’t function. The real danger with nuclear war is not the profit seeking psychopaths but the the true believers, the ideologues who think America really does stand for freedom and liberty (Biden is one of these). Nuclear weapons are a real danger because it seems like on a long enough time scale they will be used eventually, but I don’t think they are likely without massive political changes first
I meant it to be specifically about the rate of profit - that it’s the ultimate “buy more time” button and allows more accumulation to take place in a world where constant war and escalation has reached its limit, but I think you are correct that a lot needs to change for that point to be reached.
There was an incident where Soviet early warning systems had a false positive about a US nucelar missile launch and a Soviet officer had to decide whether or not to inform Moscow to launch a MAD counterstrike.
Destabilizing the US-Russian Nuclear Balance
Posadists do not have a monopoly on nukes. The imperial core being hit by a few dozen would be a good thing, a few hundred and that might cause friendly fire in the global south with nuclear winter, a few thousand we could probably recover and build socialism in the rubble but it wouldn’t be worth it, tens of thousands everyone on earth is dead, our atmosphere is now thicker than Venus.
The preferred number of thermonuclear detonations is zero, of course. We need to be at least slightly to the left of Margaret Thatcher on nuclear policies.
Nah we are doing better today than we were a few weeks ago when the americans were still debating whether they would let ukraine do deep strikes.
We’ll meet again, dunno where, dunno when…