Image is of a protest in Pakistan after the attempted assassination of Imran Khan in November 2022.
What a clusterfuck of an election.
Imran Khan, the previous official Prime Minister of Pakistan, was removed by the command of the United States in April 2022 in a no confidence motion. This made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. Imran Khan and his supporters have protested since then against the Pakistani state, which is more-or-less governed by the military despite the furnishings of civilian rule. This has ranged from largely peaceful protests to trying to burn down and occupy houses and headquarters.
It was assumed by the Pakistani elite that they could make the problem go away by arresting Imran Khan and effectively forcing many PTI candidates to run as independents while hounding them with police raids and stopping them from campaigning - and adding salt on the wound by disabling social media access and mobile services on the day of the election to make it more difficult to co-ordinate. Fortunately, these people don't seem to quite understand how the internet works in the current day, and so Khan's supporters started up WhatsApp groups and improvised websites and apps to spread the word about which candidates to vote for, leading to Khan's party getting the plurality, though not the majority, of votes in the election.
This has created a rather depressed mood in the Pakistani elite. A coalition of eight parties joined together, obviously excluding the PTI, but this coalition is shaky and lacks much legitimacy, with two major parties inside it, the PML-N and PPP, being ideologically opposed on several issues. It has been regarded as "the coalition of losers" by Khan's supporters. The new Prime Minister is Shehbaz Sharif, who also ruled from April 2022 until August 2023 and is the younger brother of Nawaz Sharif, who served as Prime Minister three times before in the last few decades. With inflation at 30% and the economy greatly struggling, there are fears that things may only stay together for months, not years, before the coalition fragments and something else has to be done.
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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'll be honest your comment is better than the the post link. Bhadrakumar is good most of the time but some of his rationale here is wrong period.
This is the same line pushed by western media since literaly the start of the war, if you remember the very first comment Putin said a war with NATO would be a nuclear war. None of this is new.
But his crime here is pondering over a nonsensical possibility. The amount of NATO troops necessary to push around 500k Russians is just not something NATO can deploy. It is not something any western country except the US could readily deploy today, and even the US would need months of preparation(see Iraq).
But worse yet, where is this nonsense about losing Ukraine somehow triggering some Russian national identity crisis? Did he sleep through the Prigozhin coup? I expect more from him. Prigozhin had minimal popular support. To be clear there is open criticism towards the military even in the mainstream(e.g Rybar) but when the time came nobody stood up with him.
The point is, if Russia somehow, by some miracle is faced against 200k NATO troops all with modern tanks and air support, that is WW3 scenario. At that stage, what you will get is near 100% national support behind the war against the west.
This is important to realize because if the premise is Putin will use nukes because he feels insecure about the war then this premise is shit. This is still a SMO, Russia will just mobilize another 1 million troops and declare a real war well before they use the red button with the label [PRESS THIS BUTTON TO END THE WORLD].
A few things. Thanks for the compliment on the post, but I think the Bhadrakunar piece is focused on the reaffirmation of those threats and how they are being used in the context of the west trying to get to the next stage of "Doing Something". He was a diplomat from what I remember so it makes sense that that's what he focused on and not fully understanding the military realities.
I think after reviewing the article again and your reply I understand the way this is evolving if it follows what I outlined. The war would change from a NATO proxy war against Russia into a NATO "coalition" war against Russia. The verbiage might need some work but it seems like we're in the process of that real change where NATO as a block isn't fully at war with Russia and so there's that semantic game they can play where the US and countries like Spain and Turkey aren't fighting so it's not a full "NATO war" that provides an out while NATO forces die in Bakhmut 2 Estonian Boogaloo.
Again, it's hard to know how this evolves. I just want to see Germany lose another war.