Image is from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ recent article on Kashmir.
It looks like the spat between India and Pakistan could be dying down, due to a new ceasefire. As of the time of me writing this paragraph, it seems both sides want to maintain it (despite some reports of violations here and there).
Both sides have declared victory, which is completely expected given their mutual political parties and nationalist histories. It’s a little harder to say which side has actually won, as both sides seem to have managed to shoot down aircraft and hit military bases. India has, in my opinion, had the more embarrassing moments, but international conflicts aren’t cringe compilations. I feel no good-will towards Pakistan’s comprador government, but it is at least nice to see Modi knocked down a few pegs. Regardless of the final technical victor, it’s obvious that - if the ceasefire is maintained - who won are the hundreds of millions of people who won’t have to live in fear of dying in nuclear hellfire.
This conflict is a good example of what multipolarity will truly entail. Countries that have been previously limited in their nationalist ambitions by American pressure will now take opportunities to revolt, sometimes against America itself, and sometimes against other countries in their regional neighbourhood. It’s also why, as communists, our goals do not stop at multipolarity; it is merely the establishing act of a new era of agitation against peripheral and semi-peripheral capitalist countries that are forming powerful national bourgeoisie classes as the international American capitalists are forced away.
Last week’s thread is here. The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
Please check out the RedAtlas!
The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
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 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.
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.
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.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
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.
If your posts are any indication, the answer to that is no. Precisely why I’ve been losing my will to live.
And if everything has gone according to the U.S. plan, if the U.S. is and always has been 100 steps ahead of everyone else, what’s the point of caring anymore? It’d be more feasible to just disappear and let everything burn.
My point is that if you expect revolutions to fall onto your lap, it’s not going to happen.
In the US, they haven’t even had their own vanguard party yet, and people are already giving up? Not even trying to shoot their own shot, and already believe everything will fail?
They haven’t even had their own Bolshevik-Menshevik split yet, the years of exile for its leaders and organizing underground for those who stayed while evading persecution and terror by the Okhrana secret police.
Or the Long March in China - a 6000 miles trek through the most arduous mountainous terrain, where 95% of the CPC rank and file were murdered or died of attrition.
That’s the price you have to pay for a revolution. In both Russia and China, if things had just gone slightly differently, the entire party would have been wiped out. And yet they emerged victorious in the end.
The problem with the left in the Imperial Core is that they already gave up without even making an attempt. Incidentally, these are also the same people (online, at least) who cheered about how brave the Palestinians and Houthis are, how noble their sacrifices have been etc.
This feels like a point that’s already been re-iterated over and over already.
Mostly the parts about a revolution not falling into your lap, and how there is no organized left in the imperial core. I’ve already heard it before.
Thing is, repeating this isn’t going to get people to go “Oh my god, I’ve had it all wrong all along!” and spur them to go outside to form a vanguard party or anything like that. How do you even make an attempt without knowing what you’re supposed to do? Especially in these conditions?
This is also kind of the reason I believe people tend to fall into adventurism, it’s only the thing they can think of because of how direct it is. The only way they can feel like they can exert some sort of power or control.
And admittedly I don’t have plans to do much, if anything at all. The obvious answer is because I am lazy and selfish. My excuses are I still have too much to lose, too comfortable, and still have obligations to others. That and also not knowing what to do, but that’s a smaller reason compared to the rest.
(Addition: Also I don’t think you actually answered the question of “why these countries are even pretending to care”)
China repeatedly fumbling the bag won’t save the US from its numerous internal contradictions and if China refuses to step up, there will eventually be other actors that will step up instead. It’s a bit chauvinistic to suggest that the fate of the world rests solely on the shoulders of China and if China shrugged its shoulder, then the whole world might as well not bother fighting.
The AES is a great counterexample to this. They don’t take cues from China at all, going so far as to expel a couple of Chinese nationals from Niger because those Chinese nationals were fucking up. They take their inspiration from Thomas Sankara and overall have warmer relations with Russia than China. The AES has already exceeded what Sankara has done because Sankara only led a single country while the AES is three countries working together.
The US is at the stage of every declining empire where it is/will soon face a massive crisis. In its attempts to weather the storm, the declining empire has to either completely reorganize itself and resolve some of its internal contradictions or face destruction. The US civil war was this massive crisis with reconstruction being the potential reorganization that would’ve prolonged the empire, mainly by resolving the internal contradiction of the masses of Black people as an internal colony with massive potential for insurgency and instability. But the empire was ideologically incapable of integrating Black people within the largely settler-colonial project, so the internal contradiction still remains and the rot continues to spread.
You’re more optimistic than me and I appreciate that. However, we cannot just be making rhetoric without also confronting the material reality of the situation.
The world has spent the last few decades creating a “global supply chain” that feeds into a system where the US is at its source, running a huge deficit. Countries that extract raw materials, countries that export manufacturing goods etc. have all been integrated into this “global supply chain” where the initial source of spending came from the US, that drives the global economic activity.
There is simply no alternative that can replace this supply chain, or at least, the major countries are not invested in it (except maybe Russia) because they have been the beneficiaries of this very imbalanced system.
So, who can step up if not China? Russia tried its best to cancel Africa’s debt ($23 billion) but clearly it is too weak to do anything substantial. Africa has ~$800 billion debt and the only country that has the amount of dollar reserves being supported by a strong enough industrial economy to actually pay off the debt for the entire African continent is China.
China has 31% of the global manufacturing capacity (US 18%, EU and Japan 5% each, for comparison) and the only country that can challenge US dominance. If China doesn’t want to step up to import the global supply of export goods, then most of the exporting economies will have to compete with China, and they will lose. The end result is the poor countries having their economies going into recession or even depression (because their export-led growth model is no longer working) and become subjects of IMF bailouts. The US finance capital still wins, and China is merely being used as a weapon to destroy those poor exporting countries.
The only way out is for the world to return to a balanced trade, and that means the US has to significantly reduce its trade deficits, and likewise China reduces its trade surplus, such that the global industrial capacity can be redistributed to the rest of the world more equitably.
This is all true, but can a country far more integrated into the “global supply chain” do that? What happens if Thailand, Malaysia, heck, even South Korea tries to do that? Do you think their export-oriented economy can survive sanctions?
Even for the AES, they still need investment and technology, and China can provide them with all that. It can survive just fine, but to actually industrialize and develop is a different story.
It’s incredibly disheartening to say, but the fact of the matter is that no state of the world is permanent. Every moment of history has its massacre, and there are people with morality and clear eyes capable of calling it out. Vastly more will try and write their memoirs as tragically sympathetic but incapable. Still more will pretend it didn’t happen. Much like how communist parties were able to bring about the last famines of Russia and China, we hope to see the last of these massacres.
The rest of the world/ “West” doesn’t necessarily hate Palestinians specifically (though they clearly don’t view them as human). Rather, climate change means we will see one billion people dead by 2035 (i am not a scientist, but this is my prediction). Climate change will induce natural disasters and reductions in agricultural land. This will directly kill a relatively small number of people. Far more will become climate refugees, and many of them will flee towards the “West”.
The “West” wants Palestine to be the blueprint for concrete slum-hells, full of constant surveillance, starvation, and bombardment. They can then construct them along the southern edge of their area of influence to funnel climate refugees into. They also want a blueprint for unpersoning millions of people in the eyes of Joe Public. This will let them wash their hands of confronting any of the moral and practical crimes of unfettered capitalism and imperialism.
The “optimistic” take is that the above paragraph will objectively never come to pass. There is a point where people will snap back, and there is such a thing as too many people for high tech surveillance, and there is such a thing as too few concentration camp guards. Even if we have to watch as demons in human skin kill one billion of our comrades and siblings, the world will not end. There will be moments of joy and bird song and good food. There will also be roughly seven billion people left on Earth, and one billion people to avenge.
Our goal as socialists and communists, and i would say as humans, is to try and stop all that shit. If we can’t stop all of it, or even any of it, our goal is to prevent it happening again. Imperialism is self-defeating, capitalism will ultimately lead itself into crisis after crisis until it is destroyed, and there will need to be cockroach communists to try and provide mutual aid in the ashes. The fate of Cassandra was to have knowledge of future events while being unable to impact them. Cassandra did not have 150 years of theory and praxis from people trying to predict the future and change it.
Sorry if this is too long, but i agree with your outrage and i’ve been thinking about how to respond for a few days.
Billions dead by 2035 is a bit overkill. Serious wet-bulb conditions are expected to start around 2040ish in the Indian subcontinent, Arizona and the persian gulf.
i said ONE billion, and i also said that relatively few deaths would be directly caused by disasters like wet-bulb events. As of AR6, the IPCC says that 3.3-3.6 billion people live in contexts highly vulnerable to climate change. They also say that given the projected global emissions for 2030, it is “likely that warming will exceed 1.5 degrees C during the 21st century”. This is because political factors force the IPCC to consider scenarios where the world cuts all emissions right now. In reality, 2023 saw a peak in demand for coal.
Even if we don’t hit any tipping points in the next ten years, and if we can predict ocean behavior and the weather, 2023 was 1.35 degrees warmer than the pre-industrial average. According to a report about climate change and insurance risk, more than 2 degrees of warming by 2050 is baked in by current policy, and that there is a roughly 90% chance of catastrophic warming between now and 2050. To be clear, they classify ‘catastrophic’ as 25% GDP loss and around 2 billion people dead. If global warming is limited to 2 degrees by 2050 then 800 million will die, and if it is limited to 1.5 with some overshoot 400 million will die.
There is a degree to which all reports are questionable, and unfortunately money for climate research, at least in USAmerica, is being cut right as our models start to diverge from baseline data. The actuaries who wrote the insurance paper aren’t more qualified than climate scientists. That said, it’s not like there’s any version of climate change extreme enough to make corporations and bourgeois governments change their spots. Is the AMOC going to turn off tomorrow? Are we going to see 8 degrees of a warming? i would say no. Everyone has to find their own signal to noise ratio with this sort of research, and i stand by my prediction.