Image depicts Bolivian trade unionists on strike in La Paz, Bolivia.
Long preamble/summary below of recent news events.
summary
The Iran ceasefire is grinding on. After a brief period over the weekend of heightened activity where it seemed that US strikes might be resuming, Trump announced a “Memorandum of Understanding” with Iran, which initially appeared to be an agreement along Iran’s demands.
For those not following along with the diplomatic minutia, Iran’s position for several weeks has been that the nuclear issue must be discussed separately - because, well, last time they started discussing the nuclear issue with the US, they got fucking bombed - and so have proposed a two-stage negotiation where the war is first officially ended with certain preconditions (e.g. the US has to end sanctions and unfreeze assets and presumably withdraw at least some military assets), and then the second stage will begin in which the nuclear issue is handled.
The reason why a deal has still not been signed after all this time is because the US disagrees with doing it this way, and wants the nuclear issue to be handled right away (and obviously also objects with things like Iran retaining control of the Strait). Therefore, Trump’s announcement appeared to be him finally accepting reality, but it quickly became apparent that this was just another market manipulation. I’m definitely in the camp among several other analysts that believes another round of war is going to happen barring some very sudden circumstances (e.g. Trump being forced out of power one way or another, or Iran obtaining a nuke) because the US still seems agreement-incapable. And in Lebanon, consternation for the Zionists against Hezbollah’s attacks continues as the FPV drone threat only continues to increase despite them desperately seeking countermeasures.
As I’ve been perhaps too focussed on Iran lately, here’s a brief roundup of big news events from the last month or so.
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Orban losing power: Pretty cool, though his replacement being Neoliberal #2980329891 means that big changes seem unlikely.
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Strikes in Bolivia against that dipshit Paz: Very nice to see, as it appears that Bolivia has among the best widespread on-the-ground popular support for worker-centric policies and politicians in Latin America that makes it so they can genuinely pressure power (already, the Labor Minister has resigned).
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Situation in the Sahel: “Mysterious” third parties sponsored a big offensive against the AES which they largely repelled with help from Russia. The situation there is still a little tenuous as I understand it with a greater focus by anti-government forces on blockades of cities to cause internal revolts. This tactic is currently broadly failing as armed convoys are getting fuel and food into the cities, but figures like Traore are aware that more needs to be done.
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Ukraine War: Aside from the usual grinding advance by Russia on the front, there have been back-and-forth missile and drone strikes as Ukraine hit some targets in the outskirts of Moscow with drones and then Russia fired a shitload of missiles, including the iconic Oreshnik, directly at Kiev, as Simplicius and others have covered in greater detail.
I could go on and on with the recent aggressions against Cuba, Modi’s recent victories in India and the AI/chip tech war between China and the US but this preamble has to end at some point due to the character limit.
Last week’s thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
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The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on the Zionists’ 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.
Mirrors of Telegram channels that have been erased by Zionist censorship.
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.
Couldn’t have put it better myself, glad other people are seeing the obvious. Pro-Delcy arguments boil down to “we’re just a smol country that cannot ever do anything against the US, we have no choice but to prostrate ourselves and hand over everything” which just ignores the decades of struggles and victories the Venezuelan people endured and earned, which were all handed over in exchange for nothing. Then they have the gall to call us defeatists for saying no, you should not do that. You should continue to struggle, or at the very least admit to yourself you’ve given up to revanchism and are no longer an ongoing socialist project.
The thing is that “you should continue to struggle” is a meaningless prescription and you haven’t been able to describe what Venezuelan leadership should have done in response to having 100% of oil exports by sea being intercepted and having the president kidnapped.
If you were Delcy, the elected person who constitutionally is now the president, what would you have done differently? If you were PSUV leadership or a commune leader, what would you have done differently?
Without any clear plan that you can lay out with concrete tactics towards strategic goals, “if they were really about it they would have just struggled,” is literally saying nothing.
You need to be able to suggest even any action that manifests that struggle and explain how it could lead to some other outcome or else it’s 100% vibes, tea leaf reading, superstition. If you could explain how workers in Venezuela doing a strike in Venezuela would have stopped their entire oil exports being blockaded by the US, or whatever else you think the struggle they should have done would have been, it would be beginning of actually trying to have a take grounded in reality. Venezuela has no Hormuz, no Shahed manufacturing, no underground missile cities or even much anti-air. What should they have done?
I would have defied the American demand to hand over the oil to a Qatari controlled fund and break solidarity with Cuba, and probably been killed. I do not say this lightly, but this is what revolutionary leaders must do and must risk. Look at Iran, how they do not give in with a single decapitation but continue on in struggle. Then I expect others after me do the same, as the situation escalates into a war against the decaying dying empire further spreading it thin. Such a war would be dirty, asymmetrical, costly- but it could never cost more than the sovereignty and freedom of the people and their right to their own land and resources.
The USSR went into a total war that wiped out millions of its citizens to protect the socialist project from the fascists and invaders. Vietnam struggled for decades against multiple colonizers. It’s never easy to have a socialist project and be free from imperialists but what none of them did was surrender their entire nations resources without a fight after a single decapitation strike.
Ok so it keeps happening, the country gets bombed, thousands of dead civilians, infrastructure destroyed which won’t be able to be rebuilt, and still there aren’t any weapons on hand to strike the US so…the plan is just to die and have Venezuelans die and the economy be fully destroyed? How does it escalate to a war without any significant air force or navy or military generally? Venezuela can’t invade by land, where is the war fought?
Those are examples of a nation fighting other nations next to it and a nation expelling a colonizing force from a physical occupation of their land. Venezuela isn’t in either situation, so how does this concept apply?
How did Afghanistan win? How did Iraq win? The USA doesn’t win wars, it inflicts pain and then leaves. The pain inflicted will never exceed total vassalage to the pedophile epstein empire and cutting off solidarity to your cuban brothers and sisters. It will never exceed giving up all the oil to pedophile capitalist Trump and Israel. The victory handed to Trump was greater than anything accomplished in Iraq or Afghanistan in 20 years, in a single strike! It was handed on a silver platter. The wealth and future of an entire nation signed over to the most evil people on the planet.
Afghanistan didn’t win, it was plundered and sent into the dark ages. Iraq was plundered and is still under US influence to this day, although that is waning because it is on the opposite side of the planet from the US and closer to stronger poles.
unlike Venezuela which can be bombed endlessly with a direct supply line from a pretty short distance. Just still unclear how getting more dead Venezuelans and destroyed infrastructure leads to a Venezuela that is capable of fighting a hot war with the US on US soil. Since they aren’t on Venezuelan soil to be expelled like your Vietnam example, it seems like they would have to literally find a way to invade the US or get thousands of long range drones and missiles to do what you are suggesting which means that it was never an option and is literally a fantasy
Everyone within bombing range surrender. Communism is hopeless. That’s the end of your logic. Holy shit, you call me the defeatist. Those Bolivians might get bombed you know, they better surrender to Paz!
There are all kinds of ways to fight war. There are all kinds of ways to struggle. I can’t say legally all of them out loud but there’s a lot of options you are not considering and are downplaying as useless. Venezuela has the knowledge, resources and manpower to mass produce drones. Any medium sized nation does. There is all kinds of asymmetrical warfare tricks to inflict economic and psychological pain on the imperialists and cling to the gains of their revolution instead of handing them over, force very high costs and become a porcupine.
This is a baseless suggestion to make. If you think this is the logic behind what I said it really proves that you aren’t even trying to understand the positions of the people you engage with here, which has been said over and over at this point. Why can’t you engage with what people say instead of just doing the vibes wish casting bit? I think its obvious why but I feel like its something that needs to be asked out loud to help other people catch up.
Look at a map look at where Bolivia is versus Venezuela. Look at where US military assets are. If you think that every situation is always the same thing, as you imply by constantly harkening back to other things that have happened in other places and suggesting this is evidence to support your ideas, it is clear where the holes are. When your entire perspective is “there are things that could be done thst I can’t say, and they didn’t do them so they must have surrendered which proves chavismo is defeated,” it really seems that you aren’t going to say anything of substance at all. Yes, everyone should have done something different to be better and win more. They could have done that, whatever it is, but didn’t, because they aren’t communist enough, like me.