On Tuesday and Wednesday, this year's NATO summit will take place in Vilnius, Lithuania, in a grand meeting of some of the most awful ghouls currently populating the planet
Despite strong efforts and words from Ukraine, membership is still very unlikely to be forthcoming and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Sweden might not get membership for a while either, as Erdogan continues to play both sides off each other, but who can truly say.
All of this is in the wake of Biden announcing the delivery of cluster bombs to Ukraine, as he admits that they are running out of other munitions to send, ensuring that Ukraine, its people, and its children - the ones that remain, anyway - will continue to suffer for many, many generations to come. Cluster bombs have, I believe, already been used in the conflict, but now will presumably be used at a higher rate. The leader of Cambodia, a country that is a major victim of US cluster bombing, has said:
"It will be the worst danger for the Ukrainians for decades or even centuries if those cluster bombs are used," Hun Sen said.
"I know for sure that Cambodia is small and weak, and our voice is weightless, but with our pity towards the people of Ukraine, I call on the U.S. president, the provider, and the Ukrainian president, the recipient, not to use cluster bombs in this war because the real victims will be civilians, especially the Ukrainian ones," he said.
What a perfect exemplification of the conflict as a whole. Millions of Ukrainians will be thrown into the inferno, entirely disposable in the eyes of the West, so long as we burn some Russians in the fire.
The suffering is the point.
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 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 mean there were plenty of smart adventurists who failed. Like the guy who assassinated Hendrik Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid. He had a solid plan (which only failed in terms of escape), took out the most important person, and yet apartheid still continued for almost 30 years after Verwoerd's assassination
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimitri_Tsafendas
Aww, that story had a sad ending, and not in the average way you'd expect.
They put him on trial, and instead of killing him, hid the political cause of the assassination, and had him declared insane.
CW Prisoner Abuse
Then after he was convicted, they made him a special cell next to the execution chamber to rot in, all the while torturing him the whole time.
Apparently he got some comradely positive reception at the time from various African political leaders, but after apartheid ended, the new government left him to rot in prison. And when he eventually died, he was even more politically ostracized and only ten people attended his funeral.
Well exactly, it failed to stop apartheid because apartheid is a system. If you understand power you don't try to stop a whole system by killing a single guy, you organize and wait for the conditions to align to make change possible.
While true it’s still cool he killed him lol
Absolutely, the guy who killed him was a bit of a nut anyway so it's not like he was going to be organizing.
E: wait sorry my bad, was replying to this from inbox thinking it was about the guy who killed Shinzo Abe, not Verwoerd.
I feel like part of the problem at this point is that they’re wise to it. I feel like adventurism would be most impactful by causing great chaos in the state, but at this point they’ve got redudnant paths of power (eg. president -> vp -> speake -> … in US), that you would need to do like 20, 30 adventures simultaneously and that’s literally impossible
You could literally bomb all of congress and the white house simultaneously and the hydra will just sprout more heads. Adventurism is futile, you gotta completely overthrow the capitalist mode of production; workers taking over their workplaces, loyalty cascades in the armed forces, complete disobedience and disregard for law enforcement. If you don't have the movement that can make that happen, you're not in a position to do any violence. Anything less than that and the state will just perform its function and restore the status quo, and the fascists will imprison or kill everyone involved in the failed uprising. Adventurism is a trap, folks. It's not a coincidence that the FBI actively instigate it, it literally helps them.
I disagree, that would unironically cause enough chaos for months to give signifigant breathing room to socialist movements around the world, but if you had enough organization and mass support to pull that off you could just easily seize power anyways. I’m not arguing for adventurism, it’s a waste of time
Well it might give a little breathing room, but the way I think about it is that the state keeps society in stability, resisting 2 forces: the oppressive, monopolistic tendencies of capital, and the liberatory force of labor organization and socialism. In the US, the former is orders of magnitude more powerful than the second, there is no wide scale organization to speak of. So if the state were to go dark, we'd have a corporatist, fascistic regime up in less than a week that'd be ready to kick the contradictions into high gear. Not a socialist revolution.
Ultimately all of this is just hypothetical and not very fruitful discussion since we agree that adventurism mostly just helps our enemies.
damn, 23 years of torture. poor bastard