The image is of Russians in Rostov climbing up a Wagner tank.
New thread's preamble:
What a mess. The amount of information going around is hard to determine, but we know with relative certainty:
- Wagner forces are in Rostov near the Defence Ministry building and are fortifying it; the Russian army and Chechens are en route
- A/several Wagner column is moving from Rostov to Moscow, and along the way Russia is setting up barriers and blocking roads, but it seems like Wagner is spreading out through western Russia wherever they can go.
- Prigozhin has no support from any internal force that we currently know of.
update: Lukashenko has saved Putin's ass. At least, that's the current narrative I'm going with - further analysis will probably change perceptions of the situation.
Old thread's preamble:
Mali's military government - which overthrew the old military government last year - has called on the UN to withdraw its peacekeeping forces in the MINUSMA program (the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali), which is the third largest peacekeeping force in the world. It was established in 2012 in the wake of the Tuareg Rebellion, in which the northern half the country, calling itself Azawad, began a fight for independence from the southern side.
The "official" fighting was over relatively quickly - the Malian military, with the help of France, retook most of the country in a year or two. But insurgencies continue to plague the region, with local militias and Islamic State jihadists taking advantage of the chaos. The idea behind the UN mission is to stabilize the situation and patrol the area - this has made it the second deadliest mission so far.
After a decade of not much progress being made, first the French pulled out in August 2022 after anti-French protests inside the country, and now the MINUSMA force is being asked to pull out after similar protests. The Russian UN ambassador has said:
“The real issue is not the number of peacekeepers but the functions, and one of the key tasks for the government of Mali is fighting terrorism, which is not provided for in the mandate of the blue helmets,”
Additionally, MINUSMA released a report last year stating that the Malian government (with the help of "foreign military elements" of which the implication is the Wagner Group) has accelerated civilian killings and human rights abuses, which hasn't made the mission more likeable to the government, I would imagine.
Update on the situation in Mali:
The rebel coalition in the north, the CSP-PSD (Permanent Strategic Framework for Peace, Security and Development - man, this sounds like it was named in a Washington DC office), has said that if the UN mission is pulled out as the military government is demanding, then this would be a "fatal blow" to the peace accord and threaten regional stability. The coalition previously withdrew from the negotiating table back in December as they grew impatient with the two successive military governments, and it's possible that more active fighting will continue in Mali soon. MINUSMA's mandate runs out on June 30th and if it isn't renewed by then, we may see an orderly withdrawal of UN forces taking about a year, leaving Mali by itself (and, I suppose, the Wagner Group).
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
Here is the archive of important pieces of analysis from throughout the war that we've collected.
This week's first update is here in the comments.
This week's second update is [here[(https://hexbear.net/comment/3553612) in the comments.
This week's third update is here in the comments.
Links and Stuff
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can, thank you.
Resources For Understanding The War Beyond The Bulletins
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. I recommend their map more than the channel at this point, as an increasing subscriber count has greatly diminished their quality.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have decent analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: neo-conservative sources but their reporting of the war (so far) seems to line up with reality better than most liberal sources. Beware of chuddery.
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 journalist reporting in the warzone.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Telegram Channels
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
Pro-Russian
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 still quite reactionary in terms of gender and sexuality and race, so beware). 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 ~ Another 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's army.
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
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.
Last week's discussion post.
I find it funny when terminally online liberals LARPing as leftists project their onlineness onto others. No, my hatred and apathy against rich people won’t disappear because I “log off.” It’s not some quirky online personality. It’s called having a firm and consistent stance.
It's also very funny when those kinds of people have weird exceptions in their principles, like "Oh yeah, I hate all billionaires and we should eat the rich, but man, you just can't deny that Bill Gates/Elon Musk/whoever really has had a positive influence on the world", or "American presidents are all bad people and war criminals but you gotta admit, Obama was a pretty nice dude and a competent president"
like, you can really tell when people reach certain views and perspectives and ideologies based on pure cultural osmosis through the internet (memes, articles, and maybe wikipedia pages) and so are just the political equivalent of jellyfish floating along an ocean current, going wherever it takes them without trying to set a course themselves, or even trying to understand where they are in the grand ideological battlefield (sniff). Purely vibe based politics. There is no history of liberalism because liberalism was created at the beginning of the universe and all other positions are perversions. It was right, it is right, and will always be right. History has ended and will never resume (I'm aware that wasn't quite what Fukuyama meant but even so).
This is in comparison to people who actually stick to a set of principles despite whatever narratives are spread via state propaganda or social media campaigns or TV advertisements or streaming services or various other methods. I remember being a political jellyfish up until basically 2018, which was when I truly had it drilled down into me (by both general events and also the chapo subreddit) that the Democrats and western left in general are completely fucking useless and they are leading us towards nothing but doom, and the past five years (and especially last year) has been the process of shaking off the jellyfish ooze, or whatever they're made out of, and actually learning about the world instead of just assuming things about it that might be comforting stories but aren't actually true.
one of my favorite Matt Christmanisms is, to paraphrase, "If you don't stick to your values when they're put under pressure, then those aren't values, they're just affectations."
It's incredibly difficult to express to people in my day to day life that almost 100% of news you hear about foreign countries is propaganda, most of which falls apart upon even a cursory critical lens. Like, I don't want to accuse people of being dumb, but all you have to do is just try to follow and validate the journalism and you just can't. And we know that their reporting is inaccurate because their predictions are horribly incorrect to degrees even worse than ours, random dumbasses on the internet.
So I generally just don't. It's not a lack of principles, it's just I don't find any moral or practical validation in attempting to convince people of the truth without precedence. I know what I believe and why I believe it. I have no need to convince everyone else of that position.
A few things I think are related to this or come to my mind:
-The entire lib media doing a 180 on Trump's missile strike, praising him and calling him "presidential".
-This is an old talking point maybe from cth/Bernie era even but libs want to rehabilitate Bush and the previous GOP era so much. But even worse Trump will be rehabilitated at some point, certainly given the right conditions, if somehow he manages to win again it wouldn't take much(see previous point).
-Civility worship, most exemplified through the reactions to the BLM protests and also Bernie vs Biden infamous friend quote.
this is why ideological work is so important, worldviews must be broad with decent resolution. people aren't stupid, i think most people hold (those that bother, that is) an ultra high res view of their specific situation complete with overfit models on how to resolve their individual issues, but meanwhile the rest of reality for them is just completely gunked up by... i guess capeshit currently.
If the western left is useless (incontrovertible) and I live in the west and I don’t want to be useless, what does it take to become something else? Is it ever possible for an old dog to learn new tricks? Or does this knowledge do nothing except make us very, very sad?
There's the usual things recommended to people ("Organize your community! Engage in local politics! Unionize your workplace! Join a leftist organization! Volunteer in your community! Join protests!") and if you have the time and energy to do those things then you might as well, but in terms of something where, like, you can directly see how doing this will lead to a communist future, I don't really think there's much else to do right now than to just wait around for opportunities to arrive as the empire decays.
That waiting doesn't have to be just laying around playing video games and scrolling through memes though. I think (or at least, I hope) that just using the time we have before the rubber really starts to hit the road to do as much reading as possible to understand the past and particularly the present, as well as getting physically fit, is a perfectly good use of your time if you're already a very busy person who doesn't have leftist organizations around you (or they're just liberals with leftist aesthetics), can't reasonably unionize, quite reasonably fear police reprisal from protesting, etc etc. The ultimate solution will be collective, but you might as well make yourself a strong and disciplined link in the chain both mentally and physically.
I don't really "let" myself fall into despair anymore, if that makes any sense. Like, a couple of years ago, I felt the same kind of existential dread that many people did and do about, well, everything, but nowadays I've just kinda accepted the state of the world. Not in a capitalist realist sense, but more like saying "Okay. We're in this situation now, and whatever got us here has happened and cannot be undone. What do we do now?" and just thinking strategically about how the various forces are arrayed and trying to fully understand how the chess board is arranged. My emotional investment in politics has definitely gone down substantially over the past year, but my overall investment has gone way up. My post-Bernie-era malaise has fully evaporated by now, though that's not to say that American national politics isn't hopeless and a waste of time to even think about, let alone engage and argue with others about (it absolutely still is).
Thank you OP, this was pretty directly helpful. "No way out except through" makes sense to me.
I know I won't be the one leading a revolution because that's not how revolutions work. What I mostly worry about is being suckered into following a dead end or even a counter-revolutionary movement due to a lack of understanding. "Actually read the literature" makes sense, in that case.
me when I log off and everyone around me is still going "lol those morons"
me when I log off and Im still going "lol those morons" about everyone around me