Image is of China's ambassador to Afghanistan, Zhao Sheng, meeting Taliban Prime Minister Hasan Akhund in September 2023.

I know the Rambo title card is a hoax.

The COTW was chosen in the wake of the aborted sequel to the attempted assassination of Trump being performed by a guy who is VERY enthusiastic about Ukraine, to the point of trying to sneak Afghan soldiers into Ukraine by setting up a house in Pakistan to house them and then further transport them. He also apparently offered to send thousands of Afghan soldiers to Haiti to help them combat gang violence. Whomst among us doesn't have the numbers of thousands of Afghan soldiers on speed-dial. Do you reckon there's a group chat?

Anyway, while there is still no official recognition of the Taliban's government by any country, China has taken a different course than the late USSR and the US - forming economic in-roads, rather than trying their own invasion. This has been a big boon for the struggling country, with various mines and oil and agriculture deals helping keep things barely afloat. A total disintegration of the social fabric of Afghanistan is not in the interest of any of the powers that border it - China, Pakistan, and Iran, with Russia not too far away - so an interesting dynamic of helping-without-official-recognition has been established. I wonder who will be the first country to fully recognize them?


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 Afghanistan! 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 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.
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.

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.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
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.


  • Barx [none/use name]
    ·
    3 months ago

    the left wing parties are correct in their critiques about capitalism and corporations but seem to have a blind spot against their own imperialism on the Global South and even keen on perpetuating anti-China propaganda.

    What left wing parties are these? There are certainly no major ones in the US. The two largest formations that actually criticize capitalism are PSL and a few caucuses in DSA. PSL is anti-imperialist and defends against imperialist attacks on China. Red Star caucus in DSA does as well. There are DSA caucuses that criticize capitalism and are still imperialism. These are either Trot or are Bernie liberals that retain substantial reactionary sentiment and are quite ignorant.

    In the US, liberalism and imperialist apologetics are the baseline. Most people are politically illiterate in a deep sense and have nobody around to explain why they are exploited or how it is connected to exported violence. Most don't even know about the exported violence. When they are informed they often recede and become defensive, having been raised in a culture where not knowing something is an unforgivable weakness and politics is about being in camp A or B where the camps differentiate themselves by how explicit their racism is.

    Really, your question is asking why there are no popular and proper socialist parties in the imperial core.

    First, it is very difficult to have non-socialist anti-imperialist parties in the imperial core because they are in the oppressor country and have no framework by which to accidentally become anti-imperialist - and their entire state apparatus is set up around imperial extraction. You can see some legacy anti-imperialism in e.g. Ireland due to their recent history of resisting colonization, though their best anti-imperialists are still socialist. The closest that non-socialist parties come to anti-imperialist stances is through anti-warism. They don't know what imperialism is, how it ties to the economic system, etc. They draw on a simple moralism of seeing war and being against it. They might say "no wars for oil" and be accidentally correct due to the petrodollar and a need to control trade and use energy as a weapon. But they are easily coopted because they don't understand power or build out orgs realistically. The idea of building and using leverage never enters the equation. They are fundamentally idealists and there are large propaganda apparatuses that reaffirm their ineffectual idealism.

    So then the question vis why aren't there major socialist parties in the West? Why are they all liberal parties that want social programs, labor imperialists, and reactionary legacy parties? That would take a long time to properly answer. It is many things. Propaganda. Gladio. Red scare. The education system. Bad organizing. Being "bought off" with treats and/or free equity.

    To me, the question should be what success looks like, what you hope to achieve, and how to realistically work towards that goal given a historical education in failures. Look to what is currently deficient and ask how to change it and see who stands in your path. Becoming familiar with real OTG failures, if stagnating organizations, of anti-imperialist work that accomplishes nothing, these are the important questions. And they should be inverted: how do you grow your org? How do you set real and material goals and achieve them? Who do you work with? How do you educate? How will you protect yourself?