Image is of Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, the leader of Ansarallah.
The death of Zionism has just massively accelerated.
previous preamble
BRICS has expanded to include Ethiopia, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Argentina is currently experiencing technical difficulties due to the election of the ancap clown Milei - once he's out of office, maybe they can try again.
I don't really have much to say about this one way or another. BRICS has, so far, made only nervous and small steps towards challenging US hegemony. This isn't really that unexpected, as only China and Russia are the real "true believers" in ending US hegemony (and even then, China's government either believes, or is pretending to believe, that reconciliation is still possible). Brazil, India, and South Africa are less enthralled by the concept of dethroning the US, most especially India, who had to make a firm decision in 2023 whether they were going to be on the side of America, or on the side of the Global South, and chose the former, strengthening their military relationship. They're still best of friends with Russia, but they are very obviously the sussy imposter of the BRICS group.
The prospects of BRICS are only really loosely correlated with the prospects of multipolarism, though. It's not a process that hinges on BRICS's successes or failures. It is coming because the contender states (in Desai's terminology) are irreversibly rising, and the US is irreversibly falling. If it will not be BRICS that leads, it will be a different organization. A better world is not only possible, but inevitable - unfortunately for the US.
I'm taking a week off the updates because I've been swamped lately, and also feel the need to reconfigure (and find new) sources. Needless to say that I've grown tired of Financial Times headlines, even if they do represent the actual views of the bourgeoisie.
The Country of the Week is Ethiopia! 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.
Since the topic is Ethiopia, what’s happening in Tigray? There’s a tweet about it in the r/deprogram discord that says there’s a genocide. I’m out of the loop.
Tigray is a state on the northern border of Ethiopia, next to Eritrea. Over 95% of the people there are Tigrayan, an ethnic minority in the country. The Ethiopian government used a conflict with the Tigray People's Liberation Front, a popular leftist group in the area, to attempt genocide and kill something like half a million Tigray.
My understanding was that mostly stopped in Nov 2022 when they signed a ceasefire, but the state is still pretty heavily occupied and there could be some West Bank style operations going on.
Lol, of course the deprogram is trying to pull a fast one on people as soon as we get to countries as unknown as Venezuela and Ethiopia.
https://nitter.cz/AlanRMacLeod/status/1470468048830312449#m
I read some old thing about Eritrea and Ethiopia a couple months ago. It gets confusing when everyone calls themselves variations of PLF. With the deprogram thing I couldn’t remember much, but I thought it could go either way. TY.
I'm not really able to help much I'm just doing media criticism.
Also that tweet thread I posted is just about the events from when this first got on people's radar like several months before they joined BRICS and they were like "TPLF maoists? ethiopia allies with washington because we trade with them??" even though they were a proxy force for the bush admin & clearly still are very tight with us
Bunch of shit has happened since that Blinken clip where he was mulling a no fly zone. The whole ass failed Niger intervention threat. We're so busted. It rules
Here is an article by the war nerd: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2021/11/the-war-nerd-the-tigray-ethiopia-war.html
They also talked about it a bunch on radio war nerd. Episode 367
That podcast is so fishy
RWN is good but they are at their best when they are talking about stuff that's been over for at least a decade. It's strength is as a war history podcast and less as a current events podcast. When discussing current events, they are subject to the same source biases anyone else is. They missed the Russian invasion just like the rest of us, even though they had sources like the guy who runs BNE Intellinews telling them it was a coin flip chance of invasion. IIRC, John and Mark have had a bunch of interactions with Tigrayan activists in the US and Europe, so there coverage tends to be more slanted towards Tigray.
I don't personally have enough knowledge on the conflict to give a good analysis, and everything is further muddied by the geopolitics in the region. There have been rumors/speculation that Ethiopia wants a coastline again and might invade Southern Eritrea and annex Assab. If you have been even half paying attention to the news, you know that's a pretty strategically important part of the world, which is why everyone and their mother wants to build military bases in Djbouti right next door.
The structure of a RWN "current events episode" is best expressed by their bait-and-switch Xinjiang genocide one where they mention it at the start, discuss the Silk Road for two hours, then remark "we all know China is doing something bad in Xinjiang" and close. Would have been really cool if they instead did a deep dive into Wahabbism and its effects on Xinjiang and Kazakhstan,,,,
Take notes Bad Empanada, you don't even have to pretend to really discuss something. Talk about something related to the third rail issue.
Are you talking about the episodes they did with Carl Zha on Xinjiang? The one where they discussed like two centuries of history in the region?
Yep
Are you doing the affronted rhetorical question despite recalling the same structure. If your point is "can you expect every old person to have good takes" no, I have been looking for good podcasting historians. Heartbreaking to discover the Chapo Kevin Bacon degree does absolutely nothing
Heartbreaking to discover we are the people who need to create the stuff that hypothetically, wouldn't make me mad. I fucking HATE work
The whole conclusion of that episode was that the "reeducation camps" are real but there is no genocide and the Western claims are unfounded.
Yes, and they explicitly use the term "we all know China is doing something bad in Xinjiang", that's why I compared it to BadEmpanada
Taking an obviously batshit Evangelical christian doomsday screed and still managing to rehabilitate it into apologetics for the US war on terror is fucking ludicrous
They also did a whole book report on Adrian Zenz's insane eschatology and STILL managed to dance around this point. It was absolutely infuriating to slog through
I am aware of the chatter around Ethiopia seeking a port.
I am also very aware of RWN's source biases, I mean half the time they are retweeting Joe Kassabian and Rob Lee @RALee85
You should probably take them covering a US intervention target without mentioning anything MacLeod covers in that thread as a warning. There are a lot of other examples of them doing this.
Also a shit ton has happened then neither the pod nor this thread help there