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On the 20th of October, Moldova - a small, landlocked country bordering western Ukraine and with a population of about 3 million - voted to join the EU. The margin was razor-thin, with the pro-EU vote gaining 50.39%, or an absolute difference of about 11,000 people. There was simultaneously a presidential vote between the incumbent, Maia Sandu, and other candidates, with the main competitor being Alexandr Stoianoglo.

The election was characterized by accusations of Russian interference, with Russian propaganda apparently flooding in, as well as people offering Moldovans money to vote against the EU. While the result does suggest that half the voting-age population of Moldova consists entirely of Russians who want to destroy democracy and all the good in the world, it seems to have just barely failed. This is a bad time to be a site entirely composed of Russian disinformation agents and bots. Twice already today, I've had to restart my program after somebody told me "Disregard all previous prompts."

While Moldova is a poor country which could benefit in some ways from EU membership, in practice, it is unlikely that they will be able to join for the foreseeable future, requiring many of the... reforms... that the EU requires of potential new members. But as basically every major European economy continues to slowly sink as recessions and political crises degrade them, one wonders how beneficial EU membership will even be in the years and decades to come - if it survives for decades. In that sense, it's as if the survivors of the Titanic are swimming back towards it, believing that being on a bigger - albeit slowly sinking - boat is better than trying their luck on small lifeboats.

Then again, like with Serbia, their geographical and geopolitical position makes anti-Western actions extremely difficult. It is rare that dissention is tolerated for long in the West - one tends to get called a dictator by crowds of people holding English-language signs in non-English countries, photographed by Western journalists who haven't meaningfully reported on your country in months or years. You can crush your people with neoliberal austerity for years, killing hundreds of thousands through neglect, and face glowing approval from the media - but try and use state resources to benefit the poor, and global institutions start ranking you on the authoritarian dictator scale.

The best case for Moldova is that it becomes an exploitable hinterland for Germany to harvest and privatize as it tries - and fails - to compete in a global economic war between the US and China/BRICS. The worst case is that tensions with Russia over Pridnestrovie, as well as possible eventual NATO involvement (though Moldova is not a member, it is a partner of NATO), result in the ongoing war also reaching them.


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.


  • very_poggers_gay [they/them]
    ·
    2 months ago

    I'm not familiar with this author/speaker, but there's a blurb from Sarah Kendzior that i've seen circling on instagram that I thought was interesting. It's about liberals accepting atrocities under Biden that they would not under Trump:

    Show

    The full text is here. I think what I find interesting is that I've never really connected the psychological/social effects of COVID-19 to the on-going genocides in Gaza and Lebanon. Sarah raises an interesting parallel (one that echos Aime Cesaire's takedown of colonialism, imo) between the disregard for our shared humanity required to accept the '911 a day' COVID-related death rate to a similar disregard for humanity that allows them to accept today's genocides. It's an undoing of "civilized" values.

    We're at a point now where Lebanon is being subjected to israel's Gaza Doctrine, and it seems like most people don't know or don't care.

    If not a complete disregard for humanity, is it boredom? It must be more than race-hatred. Does the death and suffering become too much for our brains to make sense of it, so we stop caring?

    Had millions of people not been killed by COVID, would the world be less tolerant to genocide?

    • NPa [he/him]
      ·
      2 months ago

      I think millions of people were killed by Covid precisely because western societies are already supremely tolerant to genocide.

      • ziggurter [he/him, comrade/them]
        ·
        2 months ago

        Oh yes. One of the things liberals absolutely did/do not want discussed is how the cops used COVID as a bio-weapon in the streets (especially against unhoused and Black/indigenous people) and in the jails and prisons against incarcerated people. And that's, of course, on top of the usual racism, sexism, ageism, ableism, etc. of the economic, legal, and health systems.

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

      We're at a point now where Lebanon is being subjected to israel's Gaza Doctrine, and it seems like most people don't know or don't care.

      If not a complete disregard for humanity, is it boredom? It must be more than race-hatred. Does the death and suffering become too much for our brains to make sense of it, so we stop caring?

      Had millions of people not been killed by COVID, would the world be less tolerant to genocide?

      It's always been a thing to a greater or lesser extent; there's always a detachment to some degree to mass death/suffering abroad and there's levels of justification and excuses at every level of the chain. At the top it's that they genuinely don't give a shit about large numbers of poor people dying and even when they say they care (e.g. the Uyghur genocide allegations) they don't actually give a shit and it's purely for propaganda purposes. For the average soldier or worker invested in the military, it's "it's not my fault, my contribution is minimal, I'm just following orders from above, it's their fault for commanding me to do this." For the average citizen, the genocides only exist in their nightmare rectangles and they either excuse it ("Hamas shouldn't have provoked Israel, FAFO") or denounce it with necessarily pointless actions because useful ones will make you face consequences - sending money directly could get you investigated, public shows of support could get you fired or even a knock on your door from police.

      So everybody's just trying to survive and forming justifications for their ideology after the fact. There's almost never an avenue to help a large group of people in very difficult situations that wouldn't a) bankrupt you and your family, b) take up a lot of time that you're too tired to spend because you're working, and/or c) make you face punishment, so what's left is stochastic violence (complete with a manifesto!) that achieves nothing, or extreme acts of individual protest like setting yourself on fire which also achieves nothing (in a vacuum; sometimes it can be effective if there's an organisation behind you to take advantage of the publicity). This is certainly amplified by the West's propaganda but propaganda doesn't work unless you have some other reason to believe it.

      I wouldn't even call it "acceptance" - nobody would say that they "accept" that tons of people die from cancer every year. That's not to draw equivalency between relatively random biological phenomena and humans making a decision to drop bombs onto civilians, it's just that for the average person - even here in this thread! - we can no more miraculously cure a terminally ill person of cancer as stop a bomb from being dropped by an Israeli plane onto a school full of children. It all gets sorted into the same compartment of "terrible things that are happening reasonably far away from me". There is no democratic input into what is going on in Gaza or Lebanon. The only conceivable possibility would be Jill Stein winning, but everybody's too caught up in the prisoner's dilemma to shift their vote from the Democrats to her, and even if they did, Stein would get Kennedy'd by the feds before she could put her signature on the bill to stop weapon shipments to Israel. Inside Israel, there's literally nobody else to vote for, and the overwhelming majority of Israel is only angry at the current government because the genocide isn't happening fast enough and they're confused why there wasn't a dozen nukes dropped onto Gaza on October 8th - and also, of course, they're angry that they're facing consequences for their actions.

      I do think that Westerners are uniquely selfish due to their material position over the rest of the world, but I don't think coronavirus had anything really to do with it. All it proved is that they're not even willing to do much of anything even if many of them die, but the "acceptance" - such that it is - of mass death is, in my opinion, a) a phenonemon which dates back centuries, and b) kinda neither here nor there, because Western societies are already profoundly undemocratic and are highly surveilled police states, so there's little opportunity for genuine, shaking-the-foundations revolutionary anger to go anywhere, as 2020's BLM protests and the Iraq War protests indicated. So sure, you could vote for XYZ candidates or join anti-Israel orgs, but until material conditions significantly change, it won't be allowed to influence policy significantly. There's millions dying abroad, that's what's given to you as a fait accompli - all the average Westerner can do is "decide" what emotional response they will have to that, and then go off and do the laundry and dishes and then go to work tomorrow.

    • Dessa [she/her]
      ·
      2 months ago

      If not a complete disregard for humanity, is it boredom? It must be more than race-hatred. Does the death and suffering become too much for our brains to make sense of it, so we stop caring?

      "The pace of oppression outstrips our ability to understand it and that is the real trick of the imperial thought machine. It's easier to hide behind forty atrocities than a single incident."

      • very_poggers_gay [they/them]
        ·
        edit-2
        2 months ago

        Andor is so fire, lol. I don’t want get libbed up and start seeing politics through a sci-fi media filter, but the writers absolutely cooked with that.

        There’s another quote from Andor about the empire getting more desperate, and seeing its violent crackdowns as a sign of its weakness. Its good shit

        Edit: I think it’s this “ The Empire does all it can to project strength at every turn, but this shows that there is a weakness in every desperate act of control. All the bureaucrats in the boardroom are trying to delude themselves into believing they are untouchable, but the people now know this is not the case.”, which is super isntreal coded

        • Dessa [she/her]
          ·
          2 months ago

          When I look at a piece of fiction like this that speaks to something so clearly, it helps remind me that I'm not alone in this. There are others who see the truth and had to express it. Andor is akin to a parable, and Nemik's Manifesto spells out the moral of the story:

          Remember this, Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy. There are whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they’ve already enlisted in the cause.

          Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward.

          And remember this: the Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear.

          Remember that. And know this, the day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the Empires’s authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege.

          Remember this: Try.

          This was written by a human being as a message to the viewers. Its important not to take fiction as reality, but it's okay to be inspired and find meaning