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.
I know there are broad consequences to doing so, including starting a World War, but at what point does it become a moral imperative for a communist superpower (i.e. China) to militarily intervene to stop a genocide? Or are the consequences just too great?
China, a nuclear-armed state, isn't going to go to war against another nuclear-armed state unless they are existentially threatened. I don't think it's terribly more complicated than that.
China's role here is to help the cause from behind the scenes. They can help Iran, who can then go on to help the regional resistance organizations. For all we know, they might be putting pressure behind the scenes on Saudi Arabia and the UAE to not escalate; though, Saudi Arabia doesn't need to be persuaded to not draw the ire of Yemen's drones. Their shipping companies might be obeying the blockade and not shipping to Israel (how much of it is mere paperwork and how much is the government siding with Palestine's cause, idk). And wasn't the reason why Hamas evaded Israeli surveillance because they used Chinese phones?
I will agree that events since October 7th have been fairly embarrassing for Russia and China on the diplomatic level, but anybody who knows anything about Chinese foreign policy knows that it is not very good. This conflict will almost certainly end up as no exception. They'll probably abstain on most important issues, and this will make people throughout the Middle East (and the world) rather unhappy, but the alternative is... the United States, the country arming the genociders.
I'm obviously very much of the opinion that Russia and China should give Yemen and Lebanon a hundred hypersonic missiles each and trained crews to launch them, but that's not gonna happen. It drains my sanity a lot less when I try and focus on the actors actually trying to bring down Israel and stop the genocide - your Sinwars and Nasrallahs and al-Houthis and so on - rather than like, mentally writing a letter to Xi Jinping telling him to land a million Chinese soldiers onto the shores of Israel.
The issue is that israel has too many enemies and too many nukes. If israel thought China was going to invade they'd just start throwing nukes at unsuspecting spots and the death toll would be much higher then if the entire Palestinian people were wiped out.
The only real way to stop israel is to literally starve them with unilateral sanctions and a blockade until the government breaks and force the new government to give up their nukes (and then have communist peace keepers go in there and put the fascists zionists to the wall.)
The only other option is to wait till israel is significantly embarrassed and gives up but this is only a temporary solution.
This is why the neo-cons want to escalate the war. Its the only way israel has any hope of winning. israel is losing hard on the economic front and even worse on the PR front. If the USA can invade Iran and claim that Hamas is Iranian backed and use that as a justification to go into gaza. Then the USA can (supposedly) do what the israelis haven't been able to do namely destroy Hamas.
I would say it’s past that point and China’s inaction is starting to damage them in the eyes of the world
Lol. There is no moral imperative outside of “is this affecting china’s bottom line?”
If by "China's bottom line" you mean life on earth as we know it then yeah. Come on, comrade, think about it: do you actually want two nuclear powers to engage in a hot war? I'm as outraged about Israel's genocidal actions as you are, but I don't want a nuclear Armageddon to kill a thousand times more people than have already died.
They don't have a military force designed to go stage foreign interventions. China is not a peer power to the US just because we would get smoked in an invasion. China is a peripheral country which still receives development aid. It is struggling to industrialize against the current of the global order without a neoliberal financial structure & colonies to leech off. China taking off on an unsuccessful military expedition with their proportionally much smaller military to stop this would be catastrophic not just to its bottom line but to the entire counter political and financial structure they are a part of weighing against US imperialism, all the countries which receive aid from China, trade with them. Yes, the way the UN works is nonsensical, as is the IMF and World bank. Why doesn't everyone walk away? They're still politically useful even if the US power in these orgs reflects our military and financial extremes.
They are on opposite sides of the continent, in addition. Maybe this seems silly to you.
Contrary to the belief of people who are throwing up their hands in the air, Hamas is not being left in the lurch by Hezbollah or Iran either. I don't see the reason to ignore everything these parties are actually saying either
China isn't a military superpower like the Soviet Union. It's at best a strong regional military power. China is not going to militarily intervene because it can't militarily intervene. A military intervention by China would almost certainly mean kinetic war with the US. China wouldn't be able to militarily help Palestine anyways because it would be too busy defending itself from the US. And of course, war between nuclear powers means nukes will be at play. The Chinese military is weak enough and distant enough that they can't decisively topple the Zionist entity in time for the US to retaliate.
Like, the Soviet Union was able to militarily intervene on behalf of other countries and be more aggressive in general because it had more nukes than the US at various points of its history. The Soviet Union was larger than the US with more nukes than the US. China has chosen to be an economic superpower rather than a military superpower which comes with its pros and cons.
Nukes