Thank you to @carpoftruth@hexbear.net for covering my position as Supreme Dictator of the Goddamn News while I was moving and getting set up in my new home in a top secret Kremlin-funded bunker five hundred feet below the ground. Our regularly scheduled programming returns this week.
On October 9th, Daniel Chapo won the Mozambique general election with about 70% of the vote. Chapo is the head of FRELIMO, the Marxist-Leninist party of Mozambique's liberation, which fought an internal anti-communist resistance called RENAMO which was backed by Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa; Frelimo won in 1975. However, as the USSR fell, Frelimo began to allow elections inside Mozambique, and has ruled the country with significant majorities in each election ever since.
The main opposition party inside Mozambique is Podemos, which is led by Venancio Mondlane, a former member of Renamo and trained inside the USA. He alleges that his polling figures predicted a majority win for him, not Frelimo, and has accused Chapo of electoral fraud. There have been the usual slogans about how they yearn for freedom. The EU, of course, "witnessed irregularities." As @WilsonWilson@hexbear.net has pointed out, Mozambique has massive undeveloped gas fields and is outsourcing the development process to France, Norway, the UK, and the USA, while mysterious Islamist groups have popped up to cause chaos in the exact regions which have the gas, slowing the process of actually developing those gas fields. Overall, it appears to be a cookie-cutter colour revolution attempt by the imperial core designed to install a comprador for cheaper resources. Its proximity to BRICS+ member South Africa may also be significant, noting the colour revolution in Bangladesh earlier this year exerting influence near India and China.
Protestors have been battling against the police and government since late October, resulting in dozens of deaths and injuries as well as massive disruption, as the government has intermittently blocked access to the internet and social media. As of today, calm appears to be returning, with border crossings beginning to reopen.
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 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.
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.
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.
There are multiple summaries out there, such as this one here
The short of it is that the mod team, as part of an initiative to shift site culture, shuttered the dunk tank and dredge tank and opened up c/gossip and c/counterpropaganda to generally, but not entirely, replace the two comms. This was, depending on your position and level of knowledge, either a brave attempt to encourage better values in a time of massive upheaval where organizing will become more important, or the mods being bitter wet blankets who think they know better and are dictating to and patronizing independent adults.
This was pretty unpopular, especially because there was no democratic vote; the comms were just locked out of nowhere. A series of massive communication errors from both the moderators and admins alike culminated in responses that failed to address the concerns of the users and made remarks that were offensive to the userbase (saying that the users gave off "white cishet vibes" when the userbase is not largely cishet) especially without the context of knowing who said those remarks (thereby making people think that some clique of bioessentalist transphobic moderators existed, when none in fact did).
TC69 returned and was getting re-acquainted in the middle of this chaos, instantly promoted to admin, for better or worse. This gave TC69 the power to just start waving the banhammer left and right like Sauron taking out soldiers without actually considering whether this was helpful, or perhaps even completely counterproductive, and there was a mixture of irony-poisoning and patronizing statements basically stating that those who objected were just widdle babies who needed to take a week off.
Eventually, other admins stepped in and stopped this, apologizing and unbanning most people. TC69 decided to resign and leave the site again, after doing far more harm than good. I also resigned from the mod team for my (small but still non-zero) impact during all this, though will stay on the site and keep doing things pretty much how I've been doing them, so no significant changes are expected in the news mega.
mashallah by far the best part of this site will remain unchanged
Death to America
Pretty much all the megas were completely insulated from the drama.
as a regular reader of both megas i feel compelled to inform you all that i stay winning
Death to America
I stand by my longstanding decision to remain ignorant of the rest of the site
It's news or nothin'
never leave the news mega folks, it's not worth it
We’ve been fortifying this position since the start of the Ukraine war.
Damn I wish I learned that lesson
The General Mega is pretty safe and you always get what you expect from badposting.
Honestly I think I'll do this in future. All I got from wading into the shit storm was a bunch of death threats. I'll just post about my true loves from now on: Marmite and missiles.
You can check your dms? I don’t think I’ve ever checked mine.
Nah, someone decided to create over a dozen alt accounts and do it in public comments, not through DMs.
After also missing the struggle sesh and reading everything in what you linked...
This shit right here is why i almost never venture outside of the news mega anymore lol
The rest of the site is for when I run out of newsmega posts. Should I fall some day in a sitewide struggle session, just know, dear reader, that it was YOUR fault for failing to post here
somehow TC69 returned
I actually had no idea who she was until this last week and I joined only two months after she did.
She was a prolific poster on r/cth in the end times as well
Thank you for the rundown, comrade!