Image is of Stepanakert, essentially the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh. It is now a ghost city, and Azerbaijan has recently torn down the parliament building and various other important places. Sourced from this article.


Despite the predictions and assertions of various NATO-aligned commentators that Russia's influence is waning, the opposite generally appears to be occurring. ASEAN has become more strongly aligned with Russia despite claims to the contrary. In Central Asia, there has been a propaganda push to declare that countries there are "emerging from Russia's shadow", while in reality, as Bhadrakumar analyzes, Russia's significant economic growth and ongoing march towards victory in Ukraine is creating opportunities for further integration, not separation, and there are no major political shifts there in terms of Russian ties. And in Niger, Russian soldiers have now entered an airbase which once hosted American soldiers, now kicked out, and generally Russia's diplomacy and economic deals (nuclear power plant construction, military equipment, grain shipments, etc) have accelerated in Africa.

Where Russia's influence has actually seemed to decrease (outside of the West, of course) is in Armenia. Nagorno-Karabakh's remarkably rapid collapse in late 2023 demonstrated that Russia was not willing to escalate things in defense of Armenia to fend off Azerbaijan. One hundred thousand Armenians - most but not all of them in the region - fled in advance to avoid mass persecution, which received remarkably little attention by a West which calls itself overwhelmingly concerned with borders changing due to military action as in Ukraine. Since then, Armenia seems to be on some kind of self-annihilating bender, allured by the potential of Western military and economic deals. Armenia froze its membership in the CSTO due to its failure to protect them, and the head of NATO, Stoltenberg, visited the region in March. The West has offered up hundreds of millions of dollars in assistance to Armenia and is helping them "modernize their military"; given the poor track record of Western military equipment in Ukraine, one wonders why they're even bothering. RAND has advocated for a balancing act; America should, in their eyes, realize that they can't entirely remove Russia's influence but nonetheless should make inroads to protect Armenia from Azerbaijan (which is an interesting position given that Israel provided arms to Azerbaijan to help them take Nagorno-Karabakh).

A quick look at Armenia's geographical position reveals the folly of trying to create some kind of Western outpost. With a hostile Azerbaijan to their east, a very unfriendly (albeit NATO member) Turkiye to their west, an ascendant Iran to their south, and Russia not far from the action, there is little hope of doing much more than causing a little chaos in the hopes it'll momentarily distract Russia while it makes inroads most everywhere else on the planet. The political situation appears miserable for Pashinyan, but there isn't really a popular alternative to take the reins. A truly cursed situation.


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 Armenia! 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.


  • bbnh69420 [she/her, they/them]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 months ago

    I’m going crazy, god bless the Resistance. Folks, what’s your opinion on Islam? Is it, as all religion, spiritual cope for material harm?

    Show

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

      Every single left-wing movement that has ever and will ever exist is approaching liberation via a set of ideas that was created, developed, and modified by generations of people who lived before them, and sometimes formed even under the conditions of the system that they are rebelling against. Whether that's organized religion, or a vague sense of spirituality, or a belief in freedom, or human/labor rights for the 99%, etc. This includes every single person on this website, including obviously myself. Nobody on earth is 100% rational and objective, all the time (and what "objective" and "rational" even means is itself dependent on the conditions and ideology under which those concepts are described, because objectivity implies something to maximize, like efficiency, or an output - but why should we subscribe to those kinds of Taylorist notions instead of, like, maximizing happiness and chilling out?). I find that many people who describe themselves as "objective" or "rational" tend to be the most ideological and idealistic.

      So I guess it's cope all the way down - but that doesn't mean that cope isn't useful. Opium for the masses is very useful when they're in intense pain to keep them trucking towards a better future, and isn't useful when it just leads to hedonistic addiction to treats that prevents them acting towards a better future. Systems can be progressive in some contexts and reactionary in others, they don't exist in eternal stasis.

    • mkultrawide [any]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 months ago

      I'm spiritually agnostic. I think any organized religion can and likely will become reactionary given enough time, although there can be progressive elements, too. However, organized religion can also offer a lot of material and especially social benefits to people that marxists have historically overlooked because those benefits can be hard to quantify.

    • skeletorsass [she/her]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 months ago

      وًا وٌ فؤِ جُو وْ يوْ جٍ جوْ مُو هًا مْ دْ شِ جٍ جْو دْ شِ جْ

      万物非主唯有真主,穆罕默德是真主的使者

      أشهد أن لا إله إلا الله وأشهد أن محمدًا رسول الله

      goku-halal

    • Neptium [comrade/them]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 months ago

      I’ll just leave this comment I made a few months back when both Lemmygrad and Hexbear had a cross-instance struggle session about this topic.

      There are things that I could have phrased more elegantly, but I think overall the meaning still carries through.

    • Eldungeon2 [he/him]
      ·
      2 months ago

      They do have a strong point that there's no God but God. May the Green pill prove Nitzche wrong

    • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]
      ·
      2 months ago

      It's probably the least bad of the major Abrahamic religions if only because it hasn't been completely subsumed by liberalism. Whether the religion is feudal or not is not detrimental since feudal ideologies/religions like Confucianism can be weaponized to serve anti-capitalist ends. Those feudal ideologies, by virtue of being feudal ideologies, ideologically oppose all non-feudal modes of production, which includes capitalism and socialism. People mostly focus on how feudal ideologies are reactionary because of the anti-socialist parts, but they have anti-capitalist parts as well. One good example is that all feudal ideologies, whether it's Confucianism or Catholicism, see individualism as something anathema to being a good person. They oppose individualism for mostly shitty feudal reasons and recommend shitty feudal solutions, but that opposition towards individualism can be weaponized by savvy socialists without merely repackaging the feudal ideology in socialist jargon. Ho Chi Minh adopted the feudal Confucian concept of filial piety but modified it so that it's the Communist party that has to practice piety to the masses of people. He didn't just say that children had to practice filial piety with social characteristics to their parents.

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]
      ·
      2 months ago

      It's a religion. It has reactionaries and progressives. It has great revolutionary potential, but also serious problems and limits. Lots of extremely sharp muslim comrades out there doing good work.

      Keep in mind there isn't one Islam any more than there's one Christianity or one Buddhism. It runs a wild gamut from hard core liberatory communists to the reactionary innovator Salafists. It's over a billion people and you can't make generalizations about it.