Image is of a colectivo: an armed group, usually operating in impoverished areas, which act to support and defend the socialist government of Venezuela. They are often derided as vigilante terrorist groups which prop up the government, because cops are only bad when they are socialist and not murdering minorities, I suppose.
Maduro's party, the PSUV, has won the election after a staggering amount of propaganda by the opposition, who said their polls suggested they were going to win and that Maduro's loss was inevitable. The reaction across Latin America is what one would expect. Left-leaning leaders are generally respecting the results and congratulating Maduro, while those on the right and/or are US puppets (such as in semirecently-couped Peru) are calling for recounts, or even that the election was illegitimate. The US itself is also unhappy about the results. We shall soon see if their unhappiness boils over into yet another coup attempt.
Personally, I think they should have ran Guaido again.
Thank you to @Redcuban1959@hexbear.net for the election coverage here, and everything else they do in the news megathread.
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 Venezuela! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
Please check out the HexAtlas!
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.
Looking at Jackson Hinkle's twitter feed, I just don't get how this guy is supposed to be an op. The man has a huge following and is out here tweeting solid pro-Maduro propaganda.
Don't get me wrong, he's a "MAGA-communist" shithead and not a leftist by any stretch of the imagination, I just don't see how he's a CIA plant or something like that. I don't understand why the CIA would want a guy like this around, why they would want him to delegitimize the US' current attempt to overthrow Maduro. He's not a blatantly unhinged freak that makes his "movement" look bad either, unlike Haz. I also don't believe MAGA communists are "infiltrating the Western left", nobody to the left of Bernie would ever entertain unironically supporting Trump.
If he's a grifter, who is he grifting? How much money is there in being an American political commentator who's pro-Palestine, pro-Russia, pro-Iran and now pro-Maduro?
Again, I'm not trying to defend Hinkle, he's a conservative who probably likes Putin and Iran because of their social conservatism and hates Israel because of actual antisemitism. I just wanna know what his deal is, whether he takes these positions because he himself is a grifter, because some 3-letter-agency pays him to do so or because he actually, genuinely holds these incoherent political views.
The point is to associate communists with something bad which thus kneecaps the ability of communists to reach new people.
By regularly having good takes he's actively hurting our ability to get those takes into mainstream because the shit person with the shitty racist nationalist chauvinist views holding it makes any points they bring up instantly dismissable to a good portion of people.
Additionally when a critical moment comes, it becomes a platform from which to misdirect large swathes of people who would otherwise be proper leftists if they were being directed by a non-fed. How do you think this dude will behave when real revolution kicks off? Not on the side of the revolutionaries that's how. He'll be a voice against it, leading some people into the jungle.
First of all I wanna say that if you put a gun to my head, I would guess that he is an op because of his personal history. I'm just wary of calling things a psyop because these theories very quickly delve into unfalsifiable territory, even though I know they do happen and have happened. I'm not trying to prove you wrong or anything, I just wanna think about it as critically as possible before I can fully agree.
See I think this makes sense in theory, but in practice, is this actually happening? The mainstream is not aware of people like Hinkle. If this is the plan, it's not being executed from what I can tell. I don't see libs or centrists pointing at people like Haz or Hinkle going "Look! These communists are actually conservatives!". Horseshoe theory is a decently common rhetoric and libs call us redfash tankies, sure, but are these guys brought up in those conversations?
Hinkle and the rest of his gang exist mostly on twitter, at least as far as America is concerned. He is taken more seriously in non-Western countries if I understand correctly. He gets hundreds of thousands of likes on his anti-Israel posts, which he's done consistently for months now. Same with pro-Russia and now pro-Maduro posts. I'm not sold that him associating himself with communism is doing enough harm to communism to justify the harm he's doing to American foreign policy propaganda, and I'm not sold that any agency which might have him on a payroll would see otherwise.
The establishment rhetoric has been pretty consistently "Not voting for Biden is the same as voting for Trump", they have not needed MAGA communists to call us Trump supporters and they have never been brought up by anyone outside of twitter. The only people I see talking about them at all are leftists. Again, I believe the theory that Hinkle is an op to make communists look bad makes sense in theory, but what I've personally seen doesn't corroborate that that's what's happening. I don't see any libs going "Look at this communist simping for Trump, all communists are actually right-wingers", what I see is Hinkle posting pictures of rubble in Gaza and getting 300k likes.
The mainstream does not need to know about them. The soft-left does.
The people they want to keep from becoming communist are the anti-capitalists that still call themselves liberals because they don't know any better, and the anarchists that they don't want to learn more about communism.
They deployed the "tankie" campaign as part of this. Creating a scareword for a specific group of people (MLs) aimed at getting us dismissed before even hearing what we have to say.
The patsocs self defined as tankie at the same time as the communists were being called tankie in order to reinforce the negativity of the word. They began just by being hardcore stalinists but quickly realised this was having the effect of turning people pro-stalin instead of turning people away from communism. They then switched to the culture war shit and social conservatism. Becoming essentially indistinguishable from maga but with a coat of red paint.
He's doing zero harm to american foreign policy propaganda. None whatsoever. Left media is doing all of the harm and he's just following along in the tail end of it to maintain his cover, as are the other patsocs that are also feds. They're not the vanguard, they're the tail. If I post about Hamas' leader assassination today I might get a bunch of likes but guess what it achieves? Nothing. Everyone already knows. I'd be in the tail end of it. I might earn so kudos points among leftists or whatever but I'm not actually doing anything tangible that affects any of it. You've got to zoom out and look at things more hollistically rather than in isolation "hinkle + hinkle's audience". Because Hinkle's audience are not just his audience. They're also a bunch of other non-patsoc leftists too.
The art of psyops whether you're the cia or a crypto-fash is to misdirect while maintaining cover without being a contributor. Can you name a single real world event that Hinkle has contributed to in a positive way? Attendance at a protest? Speaking? Organising? Promoting good events organised by others? You can't because he's a fed and the only work they do is with other feds.
It's working too, at least to some degree. Encountered a radlib who flat out refused to believe that the West exploited the hell out of former Communist countries (to put it lightly) after the fall of the Soviet Union because nazbol/patsoc types have brought it up in the past, super frustrating.
deleted by creator
I think a large part of it was this picture of Hinkle surfing with, among others, what looks to be Tulsi Gabbard, a former Lt. Col. of the Psy Ops Command.
Yeah that's the most damning piece of evidence I've seen so far
Where's the orcas when you need them
Woah
Maybe I answered my own question here. He's getting huge engagement numbers, being anti-Israel is the popular opinion both among people with a conscience and even many right-wingers, albeit for different reasons. Maybe being an American political commentator who goes against the US on a lot of foreign policy issues is genuinely a lucrative grift?
Also wanna point out that his tweets read very chud-like, like the NPC meme in the picture I posted. I just struggle to believe that any 3-letter-agency would want this guy to post pro-Maduro memes which specifically appeal to right-wingers.
All i know is that at some point he was agressivly pushed into my feeds by the Allgoritm it seems .. Which i think, if there is a Psy Op , that Psy Op is simply the amplyfing of him , by a Interest , that is interested in having him Amplified.
If , what could that interest be ?
It is not so that Jackson Hinkle has fake or bad takes on the Satan Empire.. But by beeing this more Right wing kind of guy with the good international takes and the bad culture war ones , can simply be intended as a "Divide an Conquer" strategy. Sometimes you also just occupy a room because you know its gonna be occupied anyway by somebody ,like , i can not articulate the "spehere" that Jason and Co occupies but its more /rural /back to the Roots/ tradition ... thing.. "?Republican Party Chud Communism?" type of sphere. Sometimes you simply just let people occupy this sphere , that you have compromat on , you amplify them over others so that , so while they are genuine in the cause they occupy , they can be controlled ?
But all i know about him , is that he was suddenly there , in my feed ... always..
You have to keep in mind that it is not just hinkle that is an op. The majority of their clique is composed of the most sketchiest people you could ever meet, ranging from strasserite nazis to Schillerite larouchites to people that "coincidentally" aquire impossible to aquire high-profile items to people who have the money to relentlessly travel the world while unharassed by u.s NatSec forces but have no clear source of income, etc.
Who, Jackson?
??? There is exactly one "they" in my post and it's in this sentence:
Ah, sorry, I was meaning Jackson's repeated use of 'they' in the screencap. Not your use of they in the sentence.
Essentially it's the absent/unspecified 'they' that allows the reader or critic to insert the malicious actor of choice (i.e. anti-semitic/'the elites') to smear anti-capitalist imagery as conspiracy.
Ahh that makes sense
Likely none, but he gets a lot of attention from foreign media. Don’t forget, much of the major countries outside the west and almost all the ones he ‘supports’ are conservative. They see this guy who seemingly is anti american, anti imperialist, yet a typical white guy instead of some loud mouth college kid, an they invite him to speak at their events because it’s not embarrassing.
This isn’t strange. Intelligence agencies have assets that are aware and actively collaborate at varying levels. Sometimes it’s just subtle funding and leading the agenda to a specific point. Other times the asset is fully aware of who their employer is. Maybe he’s not literally on the CIA payroll, but he’s definitely interested in getting his name out there to anti american countries. Fame is fame.
Removed by mod
Organic intellectual 🙏
i think its a mix of all 3
deleted by creator