Well, Iran and their allies' response may happen sometime this week and apparently they aren't talking to the US in order to negotiate how and where they will hit Israel (and Shoigu arrived in Tehran rather auspiciously), the Bangladeshi government just fell, F16s have been given to Ukraine, there are fascist riots in the UK, and Japan just had its worst stock fall since 1987 and seems to be taking several other countries/corporations with it. I don't really know where to look right now.


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 Iraq! 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

If you have evidence of Israeli crimes and atrocities that you wish to preserve, there is a thread here in which to do so.

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.


  • Tervell [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    3 months ago

    western support for Ukraine a shot in the arm

    With what equipment, from what factory? The West can talk about support all they want, but the material reality of a crumbling industrial base doesn't care.

    the opposite of what Russia needs if it wants to end the war sooner rather than later

    Why are we assuming Russia wants to end the war sooner? Like, I keep seeing people act as it's some great failure for the war to drag on, but I just don't get it - the strategic goal Russia has set for itself is demilitarizing Ukraine, and the longer the war drags on, the more equipment is destroyed (and that can't keep being replenished forever, since Western countries have already given a lot of what they could and their efforts to push the "industrialize" button xi-button have amounted to fuck all, while conversely Russia's military industry is doing very well), and more importantly (and gruesomely, but war is hell for a reason), the more Ukrainians die, ensuring less of a capacity to resist in the future.

    The whole "fast war good" is an entirely Western conception, and nothing at all to do with the Soviet/Russian attritional way of war. We have two very good case studies disputing the "fast war good" standpoint - WW2, and the US invasion of Iraq. In WW2, towards the end there were Nazi plans to carry on a guerilla resistance after their defeat, which amounted to very little in reality - because by that point, most of the able-bodied (and sufficiently radicalized) men who could become insurgents were either dead or captured, so there was essentially no-one left to be a brave resistance fighter. In contrast, bandit and partisan groups kept troubling the Soviets in the Baltics, Poland and Ukraine until the 50s and early 60s, because there actually was a manpower pool (and Western support) for such groups to draw from.

    So, a slow, grueling war certainly isn't nice to fight, but it ensured the enemy is actually defeated for good (well, that didn't quite work out in Germany's case, since a lot of those captured soldiers were captured by the Allies - who proceeded to release them, including many who were on trial for war crimes, and basically re-activate the Wehrmacht under a new name in the name of anti-communism - which I guess shows the war should have been even more grueling, with the Soviets fighting through all of Germany and ensuring such trickery doesn't happen, but that wasn't necessarily a viable option).

    Iraq, on the other hand, demonstrates the other extreme - an incredibly rapid and bloodless (for the invaders, anyway) war, one which Western military commentators insist perfectly illustrates the superiority of NATO doctrine over the Soviet one. This narrative works, of course, only if you pretend history ends with the fall of Baghdad, and completely ignore the years of brutal counter-insurgency that followed. Now, could these things that happened after one another, perhaps be... connected? Could it be that the Coalition's rapid victory, in fact completely failed to "demilitarize" Iraq - and that, combined with the later mismanagement by the occupying administration, ensured an insurgency that had a large pool of resources and disgruntled men to draw from?

    If Russia had won the war quickly, with most of the Ukrainian neo-nazi paramilitaries still intact instead of rotting in trenches across the country, they'd have had a brutal insurgency on their hands - one which Western countries would have a great time supporting. Instead, they now get to watch Ukraine feed its population and millions of dollars worth of Western equipment into the meat grinder. It's a brutal outlook, yes, but it's clearly militarily effective, if morally dubious.

    • shitholeislander [none/use name]
      ·
      edit-2
      3 months ago

      Lightning war/shock and awe/whatever you wanna call it is a western concept for sure but that doesn't mean Russia wouldn't have preferred to finish this quickly. The first month of the war was very obviously an attempt to quickly take out the Ukrainian govt and replace it - which failed because they heavily under-estimated the amount of resilience the Ukrainian state and military has built since 2014. Russia is now fighting a war of attrition and way better positioned for it than Ukraine but it wasn't their intention and it took months for them to swallow the fact that it was gonna be necessary (hence the mobilisation only coming months after).

      like sorry but this is just revisionism of what happened in 2022

      • Tervell [he/him]
        ·
        edit-2
        3 months ago

        Russia is now fighting a war of attrition and way better positioned for it than Ukraine but it wasn't their intention and it took months for them to swallow the fact that it was gonna be necessary (hence the mobilisation only coming months after).

        Yes - and now that they have shifted to attrition, why would they be in a hurry to end things?

        You wrote in your original comment that "Politically this will have given western support for Ukraine a shot in the arm which is the opposite of what Russia needs if it wants to end the war sooner rather than later", but if Russia has accepted the framing of this being an attritional conflict, why would they "[want] to end the war sooner rather than later"? And thus, why would this be "embarassing", rather than just the plan to attrit Ukraine continuing on? You can't attrit the enemy if you don't actually fight them.

        like sorry but this is just revisionism of what happened in 2022

        I don't disagree that Russia's original strategy was maybe naive (although I also disagree with the framing people have of assuming Russia didn't have, you know, a plan B - to me, the drive towards Kiev was just an opportunistic "if it works, it works" move, with a more conventional attritional plan to fall back on otherwise; there's also other strategic considerations beyond just taking the capital)- but they're not fighting according to that strategy anymore, so what is its relevance exactly? Yeah, sure, we can criticize them for taking so long to adapt - but they have adapted. Like, this is the kind of thinking that causes Westerners to think Finland won the Winter War, because the Soviets happened to underperform, even though they actually achieved all of their strategic objectives, and more. Could the Soviets have carried out the campaign better and with less casualties? Maybe, but we can argue about counterfactuals all day long. Did they win? Uh, yes!

      • CascadeOfLight [he/him]
        ·
        3 months ago
        I'm gonna post it again!

        Show
        Show
        Show
        Show

        Russia's raid against Kiev was both a low-probability stab at ending the war immediately, as well as a pinning maneuver that held a large Ukrainian force immobilized and covered Russia's two other campaigns in the south and east. If the Russians had expected the Kiev column to work on its own, why would they have bothered with the other two prongs of their attack?

        Conversely, if it gives a huge strategic advantage and there's a chance it could end the whole war instantly, why not do it? (In fact, as we now know, if not for Boris Johnson personally visiting Zelensky and swearing that NATO would give everything to ensure a Ukrainian victory, a peace deal would have been signed in April 2022)

        This way of thinking betrays an undialectical understanding of why actors act, where they do things for 'a' reason rather than because the set of reasons to do it outweighs the set of reasons not to do it. Then, if the action fails to achieve 'the' reason, it is a failure as a whole: the actor must be foolish or have made a mistake, and any advantage gained was an accident, or it's even asserted that because of the apparent failure they cannot have gained any advantage! Western commentators are unable to go beyond this - frankly, they're unable to grasp that their enemies act for reasons rather than just an innate urge to do evil - but it's useless as a way of analysing the world, especially when it comes to questions such as why the US even started this war in the first place.

        I've seen people argue that the US miscalculated, that the war has been a failure because neither the Ukrainian military nor the sanctions have put a dent in Russia's performance, but actually destroying Russia and breaking it open for the neoliberals to feast on was only the most favorable possible outcome.

        • Cutting Europe off from Eurasian economic integration and making them dependent on US gas imports is still a win for the Empire
        • Laundering enormous amounts of money through Ukraine and back into US MIC stocks and (Democrat) politicians' pockets is a win for a subset of high-ranking imperial ghouls
        • Privatizing Ukrainian assets to pay for war debts and seizing control of land and state resources is a win for rentier megacorps like Blackrock
        • Tightening security in the face of an external enemy and dipping their beaks in the pot of US arms spending - even as their real economies die off - is a win for the European suzerains

        Even if the capital-R 'Reason' of destroying Russia had only a slim chance of success and, as we can see, has failed, the other reasons to start the war still far outweighed the reasons not to.

        • carpoftruth [any, any]M
          ·
          3 months ago

          This way of thinking betrays an undialectical understanding of why actors act, where they do things for 'a' reason rather than because the set of reasons to do it outweighs the set of reasons not to do it.

          Unironically, playing any competitive game at a high level is helpful to internalize this. Chess, poker, many adversarial video games all have this concept in common, where most of the game you are not trying to do the winning move but are trying to narrow down and worsen the enemy's options while improving your own. See also, the concept of positive and negative Expected Value.

          • CascadeOfLight [he/him]
            ·
            3 months ago

            You know you're right, how could I have been fooled by the well known Russian cope-mongers at the Marine Corps Gazette

        • MrPiss [he/him]
          ·
          3 months ago

          I've seen people argue that the US miscalculated, that the war has been a failure because neither the Ukrainian military nor the sanctions have put a dent in Russia's performance, but actually destroying Russia and breaking it open for the neoliberals to feast on was only the most favorable possible outcome.

          I'm at the point where I think US foreign policy is just controlled chaos. I first heard that in reference to Syria years ago but it seems to make sense at large with how many places the US is trying to destabilize at once. If the empire can't have something then it will be burned to ash.

        • SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]
          hexagon
          M
          ·
          edit-2
          3 months ago

          Another five years of this war would be very grim for Ukraine given the ongoing demographic collapse. Even two years would be catastrophic. I'm not sure if Ukraine physically has enough men in the country for five years of war, it would have to be NATO soldiers.

        • sinstrium [none/use name]
          ·
          3 months ago

          Ukraine will not be a country in 10 years, maybe in 5. For Ukrainians, their idenity is not strong enough to warrant living in a indebted neoliberal hellhole. The Ukraine was created, it will cease the moment its cost becomes to great for Ukrainians to maintain. Unlike Iraqis or Afghans, the Ukrainians have an alternative as various oblasts of the Russian Federation.

    • miz [any, any]
      ·
      edit-2
      3 months ago

      thinking about when Paul Bremer fired Iraq's entire army, and they left bases with their arms and ordnance and no prospects

    • MelianPretext [they/them]
      ·
      edit-2
      3 months ago

      I would say that some part of the Russian experience comes from the Soviet campaign in the aid of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. You captured the major Afghan ring road and more or less all the major cities, but then what? The reactionary mujahideen simply retreated to the countryside in the same way the Taliban did following the later American invasion. Funded by American weapons in the same way that NATO now funds Ukraine, the entire strategic paradigm shifts towards an endless defensive slog against counter-insurgency. You can't abandon your own established holdings, the major cities and its peoples, to consolidate properly for both PR/morale and humanitarian reasons and so the conflict is a long bleed. Once an equilibrium is established, you cannot strike out against the mujahideen-occupied countryside without drawing resources used to defend your established urban holdings. The Soviet and US Afghan Wars are examples of how precisely a long war should not be conducted.

      The only long war in contemporary history which brutal attrition was the intention is a war that most ML don't study because it's a miserable inter-fraternal conflict between socialist states, the Sino-Vietnamese War.

      The primary literature I'll reference is from a Chinese gusano professor, Xiaoming Zhang, who worked for the US Air War College (and ironically was later recently targetted by the FBI China Initiative and subsequently lost his job): "Zhang, X. 2015. Deng Xiaoping's Long War: The Conflict between China and Vietnam, 1979-1991. University of North Carolina Press." As it was sponsored by the literal US DoD (the first book I've ever read where there's a disclaimer that says: "The views expressed in this book are mine and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Department of the Air Force, the U.S. Department of Defense, or the U.S. government."), it is obviously ideologically reactionary but because it is meant to provide for the US military an account of PLA strategic planning and thus largely focuses on military analysis, that part is therefore worth reading.

      The Sino-Vietnamese War is actually the war in all with the most parallels to the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. Deng's intentions for the war with Vietnam was principally "attitude adjustment." Vietnam had sided with the USSR in the Sino-Soviet Split and this was seen as a betrayal of China's support in the Vietnam War. It started with an initial invasion that was then, by Vietnamese argumentation, repelled. This is what NATOpedia classifies as the "official" Sino-Vietnamese War and in the Vietnamese narrative, it repelled an invader that was planning to sweep their their way through Hanoi all the way down to the Mekong Delta. But then the conflict kept going on.

      As the author writes:

      The Vietnamese leadership never seemed to comprehend the PRC’s strategy and war objectives, persistently maintaining that the 1979 invasion simply constituted a prelude to Beijing’s long-term scheme of infringing on Vietnamese sovereignty and independence. After China announced its withdrawal on 5 March, Hanoi called for a nationwide general mobilization for the war and began constructing defensive positions in and around Hanoi. By the end of May, the PLA had reverted to its normal alert status. Vietnam, however, remained on guard, stationing a large number of PAVN troops (allegedly 300,000) along border with China at a time when the economy was “in a worse state than at any time since 1975.”

      As a result, Hanoi’s attempts to fight simultaneously in Cambodia and on its northern border took a growing national economic and social toll, subsuming Hanoi’s effort to modernize its economy and, more important, undermining its geopolitical ambitions. According to Fred Charles Iklé, “Governments tend to lose sight of the ending of wars and the nation’s interests that lie beyond it,” and many are “blind in failing to perceive that it is the outcome of the war, not the outcome of the campaigns within it” that determines how well their policies serve the nation’s interests. The Vietnamese leadership clearly failed to grasp the gravity of the situation and continued depending on the Soviet Union until its collapse in 1991. If the Vietnamese should draw any lessons from the 1979 war with China, one is, as one Vietnamese general later remarked, “We must learn how to live with our big neighbor.

      By the conclusion of the border war in 1991-93, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, liberated from the US occupation and unified for over 20 years had still been unable to properly focus on its Doi Moi economic reforms, announced in 1986, due to the ongoing conflict:

      In the end, only in 1990, after Vietnam’s withdrawal from Cambodia, did the PLA pull its forces back from the occupied Vietnamese hills. Vietnam’s national pride and domestic politics made Hanoi’s leadership unable to tolerate Chinese occupation of any Vietnamese territory, even hills in the remote border region, and it therefore responded to Chinese military pressure with a tit-for-tat strategy. After 1984, Vietnam vigorously resisted Chinese military encroachments, initiating attacks and counterattacks with huge forces even when its economy was weak. Although the fighting took place far from Vietnam’s political and industrial heartland, the conflict encumbered the country’s economy for a long period of time. For China, battlefield costs were fractional at a time of economic prosperity. In this way, China strategically outmaneuvered Vietnam. Since the Hanoi leadership played into Beijing’s hands, China’s military pressure appears to have worked.

      In June 1990, during his meeting with the Chinese ambassador in Hanoi, (General Secretary of the CPV) Nguyen Van Linh claimed to have been a student of Mao’s revolutionary theory and stated his great appreciation for China’s aid during Vietnam’s struggles against the French and Americans. He then admitted that Vietnam had wronged China and was willing to correct its mistakes. With respect to Cambodia, the Vietnamese leader expressed confidence that the situation would be resolved peacefully but urged both Vietnam and China to work together to prevent the West and the UN from meddling in Cambodia in the future. The exclusion of the Khmer Rouge from a future Cambodian government, Nguyen Van Linh admitted, was impractical.

      The author also makes an allegation of an "agreement" between the two Communist Parties, which is rather interesting in light of the much hyped public Vietnamese antagonism towards China by the West:

      A secret deal may have been made regarding how to address the unpleasant thirteen years so that the interlude would not imperil future Sino-Vietnamese relations. The two sides allegedly reached a tacit agreement that prohibited the media from publishing stories and scholars from conducting studies about the border conflict in hopes that the recent hostility would then fade from memory on both sides of the border. Both countries could then concentrate on rejuvenating their relationship. Once again, Vietnam looked to China for direction and guidance, and the relationship was described officially as “good neighbors, good friends, good comrades, good partners” (haolinju, haopengyou, haotongzhi, haohuoban).

    • GlueBear [they/them, comrade/them]
      ·
      3 months ago

      Hexbear has been plagued by the coconut pill; it seems like everyone reverted to pre-2016 r/chapotraphouse. I've seen so many pro electoralism posts and the posts attacking Russia for "letting this happen" have the same reek as reddit armchair generals.

      This is a GOOD post order-of-lenin

      • sinstrium [none/use name]
        ·
        3 months ago

        Literally doomed to repeat history. A massive failure as a communist/socialist/whateverist.