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.
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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.
I guess Biden will soon pretend it's success if Israel starts a "low-level" campaign where it's only "targeting" Hamas and "only" killing something like ~100 people a day.
Related - What do you think of this statement? "Israel will find it difficult to continue this campaign for another 50 days." - Hexbear
I think the broad analysis is correct, but the given timescales are too short. During the Ukraine War, we repeatedly saw speculations that some high-up figure in the US government has given only a limited amount of time to Ukraine to fulfil its objectives and that funding or military supplies simply could not be supplied beyond that point, and those deadlines came and went without even the slightest indication of a change in pace. I think we will, similarly, watch January roll on by while Netanyahu and his cabinet say that, actually, they need another month or two to really wrap things up - they're 95% of the way there, they just need a little more time! This will repeat until either Israel's government as we currently conceive it no longer exists (which seems plausible but not in the short term), Hamas is destroyed (which currently seems unlikely), or everybody in the region is irradiated by a hundred nuclear bombs.
Israel - or, more specifically, Zionism - is facing an existential threat. So is Hamas, and Palestine more broadly. They are in contradiction - they can no longer co-exist. Negotiations may occur, but that central issue cannot be resolved without one side being defeated - not necessarily total defeat, but effective defeat. Israel could say that Hamas has been destroyed and then retreat to the pre-war borders, but if that didn't actually occur, Hamas would almost certainly retain the ability to fire rockets into Israel and even potentially do military operations outside the fence, and so that's not really an option in practice. This isn't even getting into Hezbollah, who I think is the actual major threat to Zionism here and has been largely ignored by the Western media.
At current rates of attrition, I don't think Israel can be meaningfully defeated for at least a few more months. I have absolutely no idea what the state of Hamas' stockpiles are, nor the state of their tunnels, but out of the 30k fighters that most people seem to believe exist, I have a hard time believing that even in the absolute most pessimistic view of the war, that more than 10% of them have been killed so far, and I think it's probably in the 5% range. Hamas fighters seem to be sufficiently trained, prepared, self-sufficient, and... whatever the opposite of demoralized is. Moralized? that to defeat them, you'll either have to kill almost all of them or use up all their weapons. Either way, a long war. Israel's current status is some ways easier and also harder to analyse, because while more is immediately known about how anti-Hamas they are (very, obviously), it's difficult to determine how strongly held that viewpoint really is throughout the country. For example, white South Africans under apartheid were, I believe, quite strongly pro-Apartheid under the pressure on them became too much, and the government and population fatigued of the conflict, and there was a very significant minority (even a majority according to some analysis I saw) of white South Africans who still held positive views about apartheid years after it ended - but apartheid did, nonetheless, end, because it was forced to end, regardless of what its supporters thought or how in favour of it they were. A similar thing could occur in Israel, but only, I think, if Hezbollah joins in, because the Gazans alone simply cannot cause that pressure throughout the populace and the economy, even if they're being quite effective in taking down the army. Guerilla warfare without external help have a depressing rate of success, but guerilla warfare with external help can actually genuinely work, as we saw in Vietnam. The death rates are always dismal, though. To pull a figure out of my ass, I think we'll see somewhere in the realm of 200,000 to 500,000 dead Gazan civilians before this is over (e.g. similar to the 20% of the North Korean population killed during the Korean War, in which there was a similar campaign of total destruction of every single above-ground structure in the country).
In a Gramscian way, I believe that the worst case scenario will occur, and that the Resistance will nonetheless overcome it.
So the question of "when will the war end" is partially linked to "when does Nasrallah deem it necessary to give the command to attack, whatever an attack even looks like from a sorta-guerrilla, sorta-state military force," and I have absolutely no idea and I don't think Israel does either. It could be tomorrow, it could be in March, it could be in September 2025. The answer could, if you're a pessimist, be "never". And I think Nasrallah likes the ambiguity that way.
motivated, committed
EDIT: steadfast
goated with the sauce
Americans public has no idea about anything related to this war. The American media parrots Netanyahu talking points, Biden talking points, and ridiculous IDF propaganada, etc. Israel itself released statistics that showed they ratio of civilians kill to Hamas killed was ~9 to 1.
And then recently the IDF lied and said it was ~2 to 1. Using the lying math if Israel wants to kill half of Hamas which is 15,000 fighters - that's 45,000 dead in total. But "defeat Hamas" is the media's mantra. And dems are ghouls and will believe anything and won't do the horror math...
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On tv news I think in the last couple weeks I've heard phrases like "Iran's proxies" more than I have the word Hezbollah. Podcasts like the one I linked to you are describing what seems to be a different war.
I don't know what to think.
That would be... I have no idea. I'll google and if I find something good - I'll get back to you.
The population of Gaza seems to be ~2.1 million. Israel will have killed 1% of the people of Gaza by next month if not sooner. I wonder if the Israeli MIC believe they can kill a horrific number (~2%?) and not have to worry about about Hezbollah right now.