After 15 months of genocide - and resistance to it - the Israeli regime realized that they could not win a military victory against Hamas, and were forced to sign a humiliating ceasefire in order to get their hostages returned.
With much of Syria under the control of Al-Qaeda, and an increasing level of covert infiltration into Lebanon, the crisis in the Middle East is not over, and we may still be in its beginning stages, as the center of hegemony continues its gradual shift away from the United States. Their navy, once considered the best in the world, is likely also not very happy about their ships and aircraft carriers being forced to retreat by Yemen, one of the poorest countries; and all eyes are on Iran, who has, over the last year and a half, demonstrated a newfound confidence and strength to directly strike Israel.
The recovery for Gaza will take, at a minimum, decades; it could indeed never fully recovery to even how it was before, considering it is not in Israel's interests to see their concentration camps recover. But Hamas has proven to be steadfast and the tunnel network has proven its resilience, despite facing some of the most powerful conventional bombing in history. This shows that Palestine's liberation is a when, not an if; and hopefully a much sooner "when" than expected before October 7th.
Last week's thread is here. The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
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The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
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.
Keynes’s bancor idea back in 1944 is still the most sound proposal and to my knowledge, nobody has yet to come up with anything better than that (although I am always willing to learn).
If BRICS were to create a currency, then it has to operate in a bancor-like mechanism. Which is not a currency that anyone can use, but an accounting unit used to clear international trade settlements between central banks.
Basically, there is a limit on how much bancor each country’s central bank can accumulate, proportional to its share in the global trade. If a country runs a persistent trade deficit (like the US being a super importer), then they would run out of bancor quickly and their currency will depreciate, making their goods cheaper. On the other hand, if a country runs a persistent trade surplus (like China being a super exporter), then they’d reach the limit on the amount of bancor they can accumulate and their currency will appreciate, which makes their goods more expensive.
As such, this automatic balancing mechanism removes the incentives for countries to run huge trade imbalances, and if it had been adopted back in 1944 instead of Bretton Woods, we would never have seen the situation we have today with the US and China being the two major players massively benefiting from this global trade arrangement (even in the post-Bretton Woods era).
Obviously the US is not going to like this idea, but the question is how can we get China on board? This will require them to redistribute their huge industrial capacities to the other Global South countries, who have been robbed of their industries and deliberately concentrated by the US in China over the decades, in order to make them vulnerable to US imperialism.
It’s not without reason that I keep saying that the only way for China (and the world) to go is for it to transition away from an export economy into a domestic consumption led economy. This will require China to raise the wages of its workers - it will make their goods and services more expensive to export, but that’s fine, because why should China compete with other Global South countries to export cheap low/intermediate value added goods to Western countries? China should be focusing on giving free healthcare, free childcare, free tertiary education and all sorts of social welfare to its people while concentrating on high tech sector development.
In this way, China no longer has to run a persistent trade surplus, and its people will have the money to on importing goods from the other Global South countries, and this redistribution of industrial capacity to the Global South will also ease China into getting on board with a bancor system. And only then, we can seriously talk about dedollarization and true decoupling from the Washington led neoliberal consensus.
In other words, China has to take up the role in absorbing the global exports and take that role away from the US. Simply doing so will sharply reduce China’s trade surplus and automatically makes the bancor a much more attractive idea - a built-in incentive, if you will.
Conversely, as long as the world cannot come together, the dollar will reign supreme and the US will continue to retain its ability to abuse the power of the dollar to fuel its imperialist ambitions and wreak havoc on the Global South countries.
In other words, the U.S. needs to be punished for stealing the Global South's wealth, rather than it punishing others for not being good enough thieves. LOL.
And the Global South needs to build enough political power to be able to force that kind of situation, because otherwise it's just a "macro" example of how workers are punished everyday in capitalism for not having the might to be able to own and defend the means of production without being destroyed by the state for non-compliance with corporate profit demands. As goes the capitalist-worker relation, so goes the empire-nation relation, and through it just a larger scale, global capitalist-worker relation. Global institutions like the IMF, the U.N., etc.—and also national governments—act toward global workers as the cops and domestic courts and agencies (IRS, etc.) act toward "domestic" workers.