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.
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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.
Not only that, but I think this is why Israel's actions are so mind-bogglingly shocking to anybody who actually believed in a sort of psychological or ideological development of the West on human rights issues and white supremacism over the past hundred years. If your conception of history is that the imperial core "decided" to become less brutal in terms of human rights because their own magnanimity and the legacy of Hitler's inhumane actions casting a spotlight on their own actions, then what's going on in Israel just seems completely random and inexplicably evil. Like, where the fuck did all this come from? It has to "logically" be the product of evil people at the top of Israeli society, some weird regression from a period where we cared about human rights.
I genuinely believe, without a hint of irony and glibness, that there has been ZERO development or "healing" of white supremacism in the last hundred years. ALL the gains in that department have been from people violently opposing that system, such as anti-colonial movements and the Soviets helping those. Inside of Europe, the same attitudes have ruled in the halls of power this entire time, they didn't change or become less white supremacist, only the way in which that supremacism was discussed changed. There's that famous quote on the Southern Strategy where explicitly racist rhetoric was phased out in favour of supporting measures that would inconvenience minorities slightly less directly; you don't discriminate based on race, you just make all black people poor and then discriminate based on wealth, which is much more acceptable in America. Nowadays, that violent opposition has declined with the rise of more detached methods of rule (less armies of redcoats invading Zulu territory, more bleak IMF austerity and debt) and the USSR is gone. So the EXACT SAME white supremacism that fueled Churchill and Leopold and Hitler are fueling Israel and the imperial core today.
The scary realization about Israel is that what it's doing isn't new. It's actually very old. The AI and massive bombs and digital surveillance are, in the grand scheme of things, actually not very meaningful developments. If you time travelled back to the 1900s and talked to the rulers of Europe and described to them what Israel was doing, they'd just be like: "Ah, I see our strategies for domination continue well into the future! Verily, what glad tidings you bring me! Now, I must get back to my fox hunt!" Like, here's some examples that people may not know about:
CW for stories of atrocities, murder, genocide, and brutal SA. Seriously, some of this stuff is awful.
spoiler
In 1919, British Brigadier General, Reginald Dyer, purposefully blocked in an Indian protest filled with thousands of civilians and ordered his soldiers to shoot until they ran out of ammunition. Thousands of people were killed and injured.
During the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya in the 1950s, the British interred thousands of Kenyans in concentration camps. Tens of thousands of people died, thousands were tortured and mutilated andremovedd, including children, with heated glass bottles.
In the Congo, Belgian soldiers severed the hands of people who did not bring in enough rubber, mostly from dead slaves but also from living ones. This eventually became an end unto itself, with soldiers given pay raises based on how many severed hands they collected. These soldiers also did inhumane actions like forcing men toremoved their own relatives.
During French rule of Vietnam during WW2 millions of civilians died of starvation despite there being granaries full of rice, while colonists received the best farmland and the natives received the worst.
During the Korean War, virtually every building in the country was destroyed, to the point where they ran out of targets to hit. 25% of the population was killed.
The potential coming world where there's dozens of Gazas created in response to political instability and immigration isn't us advancing into a grim, depressing future - we're actually just going backwards, rEtUrNiNg To TrAdItIoN, to before and during the colonial uprisings of the mid 20th century. Nothing has changed inside Europe since Leopold. Send Scholz back in time to 1940 and he'd be goose-stepping within the hour.
This is one of the most illuminating posts I've seen on here. In the bleakest and most terrifying way.
The silver lining to all of this is that the kinds of violent oppression that the imperial core is planning can actually be defeated, we have many case studies of that happening throughout the 20th century and Hamas and Hezbollah and Ansarallah and others are the torchbearers of those liberation movements. Defeating imposed austerity and godawful loans and such seems to be considerably harder to mount resistance against (though Russia and China are vaguely working on it), probably because it's much less destructive outright, but in the long term of decades and centuries, the combined human misery of poverty outweighs the relative quickness of a bitter war, as that famous quote on the French Revolution illustrates. I'm not in any way encouraged by historical trends per se, but I don't really see any other way that an empire can end other than violently, so if we're entering that violent phase now, then let's at least get it over with so our descendants can live in peace rather than this shitty fucking empire lasting another two hundred years.
One thing that modernity is better at is allowing this kind of depravity to be executed at arms length and with plausible deniability to (some) perpetrators and beneficiaries