An image of the wildfires in Rhodes, taken on July 23rd, showing the flames and the plume of smoke.
Greece, in late July, faced a heatwave in which over 8 million people experienced temperatures about 41C, with some areas reaching above 45C - all in all, both the longest heatwave in Greek history, as well as some of the highest temperatures on record.
Due to these high temperatures, Greece was then struck by hundreds of wildfires this summer, affecting nearly 200,000 hectares. About half of the total burned area was in the north-east of Greece, in the Dadia national park near the city of Alexandropoulis - the single largest blaze that the EU has recorded. Other parts of the country were also struck, such as Attica, Magnesia, and islands like Corfu and particularly Rhodes; the last one prompted an evacuation of 20,000 people, the largest evacuation operation the island had ever seen. Of course, this is just one country of many that have been caught in the European wildfires this year, of which the total burned area approached 500,000 hectares - the only consolation is that this was less than last year.
Greece, Bulgaria, and Turkiye were impacted in early September by flooding caused by massive storms bringing a deluge of water - in Greece, this mainly impacted Thessaly, in the centre of Greece.
Luckily for Greece, despite being a very earthquake-prone country, they have experienced no significant quakes lately to round out the four (I hope I haven't jinxed it) - though, of course, earlier this year, a major earthquake struck nearby Turkiye, killing 60,000 people and injuring 120,000.
The Country of the Week is Greece! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
This week's update is here!
Links and Stuff
The bulletins site is down.
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can.
Resources For Understanding The War
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.
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.
Telegram Channels
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
Pro-Russian
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
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.
Last week's discussion post.
If there's a nazi in your parliament and 338 members give a standing ovation to them there's 339 nazis in your parliament.
There were more than just the 338 MPs there too
I missed the senators!
Motherfuckers like yesterday that call themselves MLs that were telling me the US is technically just a neoliberal democracy and not fascist lol.
Have they not heard the scratchy quote?
I think there’s a tendency to have material differences between bourgeois democracy and fascism, even if the fascism has democratic constructs in their political system. I think the US’s democratic machinery was still working quite well for the bourgeoisie up until recently. To them, they did indeed have a democratic say in how the government operates. If fascism maintains the facade of democracy, it does so while applying the elements of disenfranchisement to bourgeois factions that are currently applied to the working class. So the bourgeois factionalism is a major feature there. When the state fails to do its job of resolving factional disputes among the bourgeoisie (think labor boards being established to stop unions from playing smaller capitalists off of bigger ones), it’s usually caused by the same crisis that spurs the embrace of fascism.
All that said, I read the same comments and I don’t think any of what I just said was the point those people were trying to make. I just don’t think American fascism has reached maturity.
What I am saying is that it has reached maturity and it did so back during the Civil War when it became an entrenched fascism.
We had our Lebensraum and it was successful and then we had that bourgeois factionalism as you say between the north and south, and that was resolved in another violent conflict, wherein some enslaved people seized the opportunity to liberate themselves amidst the chaos.
All the while both sides still found time to keep slaughtering indigenous people.
Rather than being in the infant stages of fascism, I am saying that the US is in its most advanced stage.
Huh. I’ve always thought of that as advanced colonialism. But it’s no secret that Hitler was inspired by many aspects of American society, so whether manifest destiny was proto-fascist or just flat out fascist is an interesting question. Maybe that’s overintellectualizing? The connection is there either way.
Maybe I don’t have enough context about the precursors to Italian fascism because that’s the missing link there in my head. Jakarta-style fascism has plenty of clear context, as does Nazi-style fascism. But I was under the impression that Mussolini’s fascism was the result of him becoming disillusioned with labor organizing and trying to resolve class conflict via collaborationism instead of class war. Maybe I took the fact that was previously a socialist at face value and there’s more connective tissue there.
A friend told me that a big problem with westerners is that we make up too many words for the same thing.
Fascism, capitalism, colonialism, it is all the same from the perspective of someone whos people had an entirely different relationship to the land for tens of thousands of years, than did the europeans pre-contact
People greatly overcomplicate things. The US is a police state where all the police are fascist.
American fascism hasn’t hit maturity because America is still in boon times. It’s economy is purring with MIC contracts and new gas deals with Europe and capital flight from Europe. They are cannibalizing their allies and it will run out eventually, and when crisis hits that’s when explicit fascism emerges. Fascism is gonna hit Germany a lot sooner than it will hit the US basically.
Exactly this, I think there's a good chance that once it starts happening most of the NATO countries will turn in lockstep, thanks to the influences of each country's intelligence apparatus being able to get the far right of their neighbors in power.
The line between neoliberal state and fascist state is quite thin and thins further over time as the austerity wears away any nice cushy liberal social padding