Thank you to @carpoftruth@hexbear.net for covering my position as Supreme Dictator of the Goddamn News while I was moving and getting set up in my new home in a top secret Kremlin-funded bunker five hundred feet below the ground. Our regularly scheduled programming returns this week.
On October 9th, Daniel Chapo won the Mozambique general election with about 70% of the vote. Chapo is the head of FRELIMO, the Marxist-Leninist party of Mozambique's liberation, which fought an internal anti-communist resistance called RENAMO which was backed by Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa; Frelimo won in 1975. However, as the USSR fell, Frelimo began to allow elections inside Mozambique, and has ruled the country with significant majorities in each election ever since.
The main opposition party inside Mozambique is Podemos, which is led by Venancio Mondlane, a former member of Renamo and trained inside the USA. He alleges that his polling figures predicted a majority win for him, not Frelimo, and has accused Chapo of electoral fraud. There have been the usual slogans about how they yearn for freedom. The EU, of course, "witnessed irregularities." As @WilsonWilson@hexbear.net has pointed out, Mozambique has massive undeveloped gas fields and is outsourcing the development process to France, Norway, the UK, and the USA, while mysterious Islamist groups have popped up to cause chaos in the exact regions which have the gas, slowing the process of actually developing those gas fields. Overall, it appears to be a cookie-cutter colour revolution attempt by the imperial core designed to install a comprador for cheaper resources. Its proximity to BRICS+ member South Africa may also be significant, noting the colour revolution in Bangladesh earlier this year exerting influence near India and China.
Protestors have been battling against the police and government since late October, resulting in dozens of deaths and injuries as well as massive disruption, as the government has intermittently blocked access to the internet and social media. As of today, calm appears to be returning, with border crossings beginning to reopen.
Please check out the HexAtlas!
The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week's thread is here.
Israel-Palestine Conflict
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.
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thank you very much for your take!
WHY. WHYYYYYYY.
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China cares about China, it doesn't care about saving the global proletariat.
Its not that they absolutely don't care, I'm a big critic and I'd never say say that because its simplistic.
Its more of a failure of the current ideology and possibly the consequences of Dengism successfuly pushing Marxism away from a prominient position back into the classrooms of university courses and low level party meetings instead of a relevant position at the top of the leadership.
All of the CPC decision making is done by consulting (neo)liberal economists, the same people that fully understand and submit to all the current mainstream capitalist "common sense".
Case in point the official rethoric behind the retirement age change. Its entirely a major defeat of the Chinese working class. But the CPC justifies it with common sense capitalist shit.
"Oh its what needs to be done because there is no other alternative". "It is correct because other capitalist countries have done the same." These are just a couple CGTN talking points among others.
They literally tried nothing, its completely unpopular, obviously against any socialist ideal(dengist or not).
The current state of geopolitics necessitates perhaps China to understand their own cultural and historical bias. I think popular opinion is far more anti-US than the CPC leadership even, there are readily available polls proving this.
But alas a common trend seems to be the consequences of the Sino-soviet split and the thought that fighting the US in solidarity with the global south outside Chinese sphere of influence is repeating the same mistakes of the USSR.
Pessimistically there is very little hope this will change except through US burning this bridge themselves.
Post in question I believe https://hexbear.net/comment/5579978
I'm not sure a US recession is as baked in as you say. I appreciate that lowering interest rates will stop or slow the big pump of $ into the US economy and world, but couldn't the trump admin moderate this with deficit spending and stimulus that is targeted to the American economy?
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I’m not sure I understand the details of the “negative list”, but it appears that 2 items from that list have been removed, and either one or both relate to the manufacturing sector? If so, unless each item has a tremendous amount of details, it would seem that not a lot will have changed from the status quo i.e. if there are only one or two items on a list that are restricting the sector, then there couldn’t have been much restrictions in the first place? These are questions, though, not statements.
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This is what most anti-hegemony countries are banking on. All of Biden's administration's planning will go to complete waste if Trump (and Musk lol) fucks it up, and their calculations are that Trump will completely fuck it up.
Can you expand on the monetary policy part with Biden cutting interest rates?
Oh nevermind you did in another thread. ty anyway!
100% yes. I've been responding to liberals' "will they learn?" takes all over
and IRL that, "They need to be DESTROYED, not reformed." Even if they did "learn" a bit and change their policies and/or messaging slightly (and let's be real: it'd just be the messaging), it'd just be temporary and it'd just be a way to preserve their second uni-party ballot line and existence as the "left wing of fascism". We don't want them to learn from it, because that'd just be taping the mask back on for a bit. We want the working-class to recognize what they actually are, instead! Rip the fucking band-aid off! Anything else is just seeking to prolong the inevitable, and cause far more suffering in the end.
I think this is an opportune time to go hard on this messaging. Kick them while they're fucking down!
P.S. - Also, the "ruling by fear" bit is another pretty good symptom of fascism we can point out, I think. Kind of a "meta-politics" bit.
That reminds me, time to buy more doge. It makes just as much sense as wasting a payday on voting for parties that win .005 percent.
The fates of third-parties were sealed in 2004. They did better in raw numbers and percentage of votes in this election than they did in that one. Anyone expecting them to seriously reshape the political landscape was dreaming too hard. Both parties are as strong as ever and the political landscape won’t be changing within any of our lifetimes.
That doesn’t mean I think third-parties won’t occasionally have strong runs. They did consistently worse during the Great Depression and then George Wallace came with an unusually strong run for a third-party candidate. Despite that, people still largely voted for the Dems or Repubs.