Image is of German farmers blocking the road near the Brandenburg Gate in early January 2024.
The ruling German coalition - the FDP, the SPD, and the Greens - has been in dire straits since the war in Ukraine began due to their steadfast commitment to destroying their country as much as possible in solidarity with Ukraine destroying themselves too. Scholz is deeply unpopular, with a record low approval of 20%, and his party's approval is even lower.
The German left has been entirely unable to take advantage of this situation, with Die Linke fragmenting due to split opinions on what position they should hold on Ukraine, among other issues. As a result, the major conservative party, the CDU, has gained a lot of voters over the past couple years. Most worrying, however, is the gains that the fascist party, the AfD, has made - from 10% in 2021 all the way to ~20% today. A significant chunk of the vote is likely protest votes due to the lack of an alternative, but a vote for fascists makes you a fascist nonetheless.
Recent controversies with the AfD - including an allegation that they held a secret meeting discussing a plan to mass-deport millions of migrants in an obvious parallel to Nazi meetings planning to remove all Jews from the country - has recently slightly damped approval for the AfD. This meeting generated counter-protests and condemnation from many Germans. It was later revealed that the meeting might not really have happened as alleged, but it doesn't actually matter, because the AfD's stance is being increasingly reflected by the ruling coalition, who recently introduced a bill allowing faster deportations of rejected asylum seekers and significant new powers for authorities in that regard, including potentially the criminalization of sea rescue organizations and imprisonment for aid workers.
The German government is increasingly considering banning the AfD, with their anxiety and motivation to do so rising as the AfD maintains and improves its position as Germany heads towards elections in late 2025. There are intermediate steps that could be done, such as revoking state funding, but if that doesn't work, then the party might well be banned. While I will never argue with fascist parties being banned, this probably won't fix anything, as the underlying economic and social conditions that are fueling these electoral shifts in the first place are not improving. Germany, the largest industrial power in Europe, is mired in a recession, particularly a manufacturing recession, from which there appears to be no escape. It has so far carefully shepherded its natural gas resources to keep the population as mollified as possible, but this has come at the expense of industry. In a trend starting from July 2022, manufacturing PMIs are still well below 50, reaching 45.5 in January 2024, which indicates decline. I suppose if you wanted to look on the bright side, it's better than it was in July 2023, where it was a whopping 38.8, so the rate of decline is becoming a little slower.
And this is just the domestic stuff. Germany has also famously sided with Israel to support them during the ICJ genocide case, has kowtowed to Netanyahu as they bond over being Genocide Experts, and maintains its support of Ukraine, continuing to send military gear and money to be converted to scrap metal by Russian artillery - rather than spending money on doing anything about the cost of living. In the face of a historic economic downturn, it has only more fervently stated its desire to remain militarily opposed to Russia for decades.
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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 daily-ish 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 (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
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.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
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.
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.
Interesting take about Andropov:
I need to learn more about this part of the Soviet history. It seems that the earliest generation of liberal reformist gang (Chubais/Gaidar/Aven/Berezovsky) was formed under the auspices of Andropov as the chief of the KGB, and through the establishment of institutions like the Institute for Systems Analysis (VNIISI) and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), served as breeding grounds for neoliberal reformers in the Soviet Union that immediately preceded Gorbachev’s liberalization.
How does the US keep the CIA ideologically consistent? At least, whether it’s neoliberal or neoconservative or fascist (
), the agenda is the defense of the USA as an institution.
Is it because the US is older than the USSR and thus molded it’s own history and refined it’s propaganda over the centuries whereas the USSR only had less than 100 years?
Or is it because it’s governments consistently saw itself as superior compared to all nations, and the only conflict is how to best impose they superiority on others, whereas the USSR flirted with capitalist markets near the end and had to be flexible with communist ideology throughout its existence? But even then, China is flexible in its communist agenda and definitions and flirts with capitalism more than the USSR ever did, but we’ve only seen instances of traditional politicians having a liberal face underneath the red mask, but the military and its security establishment seems untouched by liberal brainworms. At least to the public eye.
I wonder if the KGB had 200 years, would the agency be filled with less Putins and more ruthless communist Dulles’s
Also
And the people were not wrong
I’ve given my position on this before: the fall of the USSR was not the failure of socialism. It was a case of the Soviet leadership not being confident about their own unique system, and instead of charting its own course, started to re-introduce liberal capitalist elements to fix its problems, which led to disastrous consequences.
The fall of the USSR was very much the failure of liberal ideology. Gorbachev was simply the one who put the final nail into the coffin, but the precursors that precipitated the downfall of the Union goes all the way back to Khrushchev. When Khrushchev defaulted on the Soviet government bonds, it was a case of liberalism seeped into his communist ideology. When Khrushchev tried to compete with the Western capitalist world on consumerism (treat economy) with state-planned economy, it was already doomed to fail.
The socialist model under Stalin was unique and forged its own path, that’s why it was able to register unprecedented growth that still remained unsurpassed by any other country in history.
China is a different case though. China’s market socialist has never dissociated from the global neoliberal capitalist framework. It is very much an integral part of it, serving to provide cheap goods and services to the world. China’s economy as it is still cannot exist without the US and the Western world.
What China has achieved in socialist terms is its governance that takes the people’s interests and wellbeing as precedence (in a collective manner), and has been able to lift millions upon millions out of poverty. But the Soviet Union was a true alternative to the Western capitalist world, a genuine attempt at creating an alternative order. It was a self-contained economic and political entity that could stand on its own, even when the entire capitalist world goes into deep recession (of course this was no longer the case by the 1970s, for example, when agricultural policy failure in the USSR forced them to import huge quantity of grains from the international market that created food inflation all around the world). This, to me, is a regression.
Why do you think the Soviet’s weren’t confident? You mentioned liberalism creeping it, so was it just them reverting back to capitalist realism and not seeing the bigger picture and falling for American propaganda on what metrics are important i.e. treats and jeans?
If I can jump in with my half-formed notions - from the top level, Krushchev simply was not a Marxist. He had no understanding of Marxist theory, or at least certainly not to the depth Stalin did, so he made decisions on an idealistic basis and not a material one. As Kaplya said, he tried to rush development of a state-planned "treat economy", in the process wrecking the highly advanced economic system set up by Stalin. He also did incalculable damage to confidence in the Soviet system, not just in the USSR but across the world, with his lies about Stalin in his "secret speech" - so secret it was on the front cover of the New York Times just months later - which shamelessly slandered the man who was, for good or ill, the face of socialism at the time. In fact, I read about a speech by Xi Jinping talking about the failures of the USSR where he brings this up, saying that rejecting Stalin shattered the legitimacy of the various organizations of the USSR and, in his words, "scattered them like a flock of wild geese".
From the grassroots level, WW2 simply killed off an enormous amount of the bravest and most committed communists, wiping out a huge swathe from an entire generation of party members. These people would have been organizing, communicating with the people, and challenging the upper party leadership - instead they died fighting the Nazis, leaving those roles unfilled. This is only a personal theory and I haven't looked at any data, but I think this could have been part of why the leadership was so ossified towards the end and became a 'gerontocracy', because of an age gap between the party members too old for the front line in WW2 and those too young: they were missing a 'middle' generation that would have led to a smoother transition of power through the years, and who with greater fervour could have acted as a bulwark against undialectical thinking. A healthier and more confident party could have repudiated Krushchev or even unseated him entirely. I say this because a somewhat similar thing happened in the field of physics right after the discovery of quantum mechanics - an entire generation was wiped out by WW1, leaving a gap between the original discoverers and those too young to feel confident challenging them, who just learned the business by rote, leading to a long term stagnation.
In addition to communists dying in WWII, there were also committed communists who were killed during the purge excesses. Even if it was Yezhov’s orders, it was still irresponsible for Stalin to just let him supposedly supervise the purge with no supervision considering the whole supposed purpose was to be careful of people who could threaten your agenda.