Due to American cluster bombing campaigns advised by Kissinger during the Vietnam War to damage supply lines, over 2 million tonnes of ordinance were dropped on Laos over about a decade, averaging a planeload of bombs every 8 minutes. Laos is thus the most bombed country on the planet up to this point. 80 million bombs failed to explode - the cleanup operation is expected to take centuries, and 25,000 people have been killed and injured by bombs in the last 50 years. About 50 people are killed or injured every year to this day.
After the United States withdrew from Laos, the Pathet Lao took power and abolished the monarchy. Kaysone Phomvihane became a dominant figure in Laotian politics, keeping the course on Marxism-Leninism and implementing the first Five Year Plan in 1981. The second Five Year Plan in 1986 was modelled on Lenin's NEP, and this doubled rice production and significantly increased sugar production. After the fall of the USSR, Laos allowed a small capitalist class to exist, with similar control over them as in China. Laos maintains a 48-hour work week with paid sick leave, vacation time, and maternity leave, and workers are well-represented in trade unions. They faired relatively well during coronavirus from a social standpoint due to quick and efficient action to lock down the country, experiencing ~750 deaths out of a population of over 7 million.
There is hope even after utter destruction by genocidal oppressors.
The weekly update is here on the website.
Your Tuesday Briefing is here in the comments and here on the website.
Your Wednesday Briefing is here in the comments and here on the website.
Your Thursday Briefing is here in the comments and here on the website.
Your Friday Briefing is here in the comments and here on the website.
The Country of the Week is Laos! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
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.
Your Friday Briefing
If the German election was held today, Scholz' party would receive only 14% of the vote - the lowest since June 2021. 17% of eligible voters say that they are satisfied with the SPD-led government, the lowest approval rating of a German chancellor since polls began in 1997 - though there have been worse German chancellors.
Slovakia's opposition is warning that Fico's government is working to gain absolute control of the arms industry, which... uh, yeah? That's how... war typically works...?
Armenia and Azerbaijan have reportedly had a breakthrough, and are exchanging prisoners and working towards normalization. Meanwhile, a US diplomat visited Azerbaijan and was received positively, although it doesn't seem like the hunt for US spies will be curtailed. And Aliyev warned that India and France arming Armenia will increase the chances of more war.
Putin has announced that he is indeed running for re-election in March 2024. Putin has also said that tech-sharing with China has no limits, not even military limits.
Burkina Faso's government has revised the constitution to ban French as an official language, demoting it to the role of "working language".
China is banning new steel plants in order to cut atmospheric pollution, and is working on converting factories creating blast furnace-produced steel into factories creating electric furnace-produced steel, which involves the import of scrap steel from abroad and has lower emissions (69% of US steel production uses this method). In Hebei, the top steel producing province, the number of iron and steel companies have been cut by 70% over the years to meet local targets, which has dramatically cut particulate emissions.
China has granted tariff-free access to Angola, Gambia, DRC, Madagascar, Mali, and Mauritania, in order to boost agricultural imports from Africa. They join 21 other African countries with similar tariff cuts. Xi says that he plans to import products worth $300 billion from Africa by 2024; in 2023 so far, total trade was $234 billion and imports to China a "mere" $91 billion. Meanwhile, Chinese global exports have edged up for the first time in seven months, increasing by 0.5% year-on-year to $291 billion, probably due to exporters cutting prices.
Thousands of protestors have rallied against the new far-right government of New Zealand, organized by the Maori Party, due to the anti-Maori policies that they are proposing. The co-leader of the Maori Party has said that the laws would take New Zealand "back to the 1800s."
Most Americans have depleted their excess savings accumulated during the pandemic, and 99% of Americans will be financially worse off than pre-pandemic by mid-2024. I'm still not entirely sure whether this whole "excess savings" thing is even an actual thing that has existed, because most Americans seem exceptionally unhappy about the economy and going into major debt to continue survival and have been for many months, which contradicts the idea that they had much savings at all.
Famous penis owner, Hunter Biden, has been indicted on new federal tax evasion charges, following previous charges of tax evasion and unlawfully owning a gun.
Zelensky is going to attend Milei's inauguration, which is so freaking epic. It's like that scene in Endgame where Captain America (more like Captain Ukraine!) is like, standing there, and then the dude comes flying out of the portal behind him, and they're like, about to fight Thanos's army, but Putin is Thanos and the army is worldwide communism. Thanks for the gold, kind stranger!
Re: Scholz… it seems like in Europe and North America, neoliberal politicians seem to be running on pure hubris, completely oblivious to how all their policies and positions are getting increasingly unpopular every day. All the warning signs are there of a massive rightward swing and they aren’t even trying to stop it or acknowledge it. Just keep pumping more money into Ukraine, keep gaslighting workers that inflation isn’t really a problem, etc.
That’s just what neoliberalism is, pretending the trends of the late 1990s will never end.
Lmao, EVIL socdem Fico wants his country to have control of their own stuff? That's bad!
Nice I’m ahead of the curve, catch up suckers 😎
Mixed feelings. Playing with people's languages can be a prelude to various kinds of repression and you often can't blame people for their language proficinies. But it's reassuring that it's being kept as "working language", which suggests that the goal is not overt repression of french speakers. So that's good. Ongoing critical support to NE Africa's program of de-frenchification. o7