Image is from this article, of protestors in Mexico tearing down a steel fence.
While military, economic, and covert pressure on Venezuela and nearby countries in South America proper continues to mount, a similar process is occurring against Mexico, currently under the leadership of the very popular Sheinbaum, who has generally followed the footsteps of AMLO in terms of policies.
While figures in the Trump administration have made statements to the effect of wishing to bomb Mexican territory, internal pressure within Mexico is rather hard to generate when the government is doing generally positive things for people. As such, protests - comically denoted “Gen Z protests” despite young people being a vanishingly small proportion - have arisen in Mexico, very obviously astroturfed by pro-US and anti-Sheinbaum interests. The first protest, on November 15th, gathered less than 20,000 people, while the second, on November 20th, gathered perhaps 200. Article headlines suggesting that Mexico was “on the verge of collapse” have proven rather sensational and wishcast-y.
While it’s easy to poke fun at these farces (I certainly am), it’s important to keep in mind that soft coups have long been part of the American strategy in Latin America, and with unlimited money and many resources to throw at a project, even incompetent forces can eventually create enough chaos that it can make the ruling president or party feel forced to resign. Such eventualities are certainly not inevitable, and even weak states can provide enough resistance to force the US to try a hard coup instead, with outright bombing campaigns and covert military operations. Cuba has provided perhaps the best example in the western hemisphere of how such plots can be subverted with enough national support (e.g. the hundreds of times the CIA tried to kill/maim Castro, plus the Bay of Pigs debacle), but you do have to be willing to take extraordinary measures to do this - the sorts of measures figures like Chile’s Allende did not take in the 1970s, and the measures Venezuela’s Maduro appears to be taking right now. We shall see what path Sheinbaum takes.
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The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. 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.
Mirrors of Telegram channels that have been erased by Zionist censorship.
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.
Trouble in the Balkans, it seems like a potential new source of discord
Bosnia’s defence minister refused to let a military plane carrying Hungary’s foreign minister land in the Bosnian Serb Republic on Wednesday, saying Budapest had supported the Bosnian Serb leader in acts that undermined Bosnia’s sovereignty.
There’s no such thing as “Bosnian sovereignty” given that, under the Dayton Accords, the country is a colony ruled by a viceroy dubbed the “High Representative.” The current viceroy is an ex-CSU Merkel-era cabinet minister from Germany, Christian Schmidt. As is the case with all these washed up political low-rungers across the history of colonialism getting newfound authority under a colonial role, they turn into power-tripping freaks that would make subreddit moderators swoon.
In 2023, Schmidt used the “Bonn powers” proscribed under Dayton to amend the Bosnian criminal code to literally criminalize, in the actual legal header of the new article, the “Failure to Implement Decisions of the High Representative,” which sets out a criminal charge for any “responsible person” that fails to:
The present Republika Srpska issue arises because, in 2023, the autonomous region’s president, Milorad Dodik, (the “Bosnian Serb leader”) issued legislation blocking entry of the colonial viceroy’s decrees into the autonomous region’s gazette recording published acts and passed laws on defamation that had been previously annulled by Schmidt.
The colonial regime’s legal appendage then acted to use the newly amended Criminal Code against Dodik. In February of this year, he was stripped of his presidential office and sentenced to a year in prison and banned from political office for six years. The sentence was appealed to the “Constitutional Court,” a court of final appeal where three of the nine judges are foreigners appointed by the President of the “European Court of Human Rights,” which upheld the sentence for “non-compliance with the decisions of Christian Schmidt” early this month.
Bosnia is a good case example of the Western liberal “rules-based order’s” depravity, its utter moral bankruptcy and its innate talent for projection. On the one hand, you have them screaming bloody murder every time they see Chinese takeout food as “Chinese foreign interference” or “Beijing’s growing influence,” on the other hand, framing any resistance to literal modern day colonial projects as “Dodik’s defiance, echoed by Serbia, Hungary, and Russia, reveals an illiberal axis wielding sovereignty rhetoric to undercut EU authority”. Incidentally, on the exact same day as this judgment, the European Council for Foreign Relations published an article about “Reading China’s Playbook in the Western Balkans” where they congratulate themselves for rescuing “Montenegro from falling into debt bondage with China” and “raising fears that new member states could act as promoters of Chinese interests” in the region, which reads as satire when juxtaposed with what they’ve been doing with their actual colonial fiefdom in Bosnia.
If you remove the context, the legal argument Dodik used in his appeal, which was that “Schmidt had no authority to intervene in the criminal code, saying only the national parliament was empowered to do so,” could easily be mistaken for one of those Western international law journal editorials railing against the “erosion of democracy” by strongmen in designated adversary countries like Venezuela. In case anyone feels an excess of individual sympathy for Dodik, he’s one of those generic right-wing Eastern European Orban clones, down to his Israeli sycophancy, visiting the site of the October 7 “Nova Music Festival Massacre” to try to drum up support, so this is moreso one of those “worst person you know just made a great point” situations.
The case of Bosnia today really drives home that there’s no meaningful difference between the openly imperialist depravity of the West a century ago and the West today. The only real change since then is that, externally as a limiting factor, a few other nations nowadays have the military capabilities to deter Western expressions of our sociopathy from being directed them, because it really is just like Fanon said: “colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.”
I think someone on here recently said that if you wanted to create a system to maximize ethnic strife and virtually guarantee future genocides, you couldn’t do a better job than Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Or Lebanon for that matter.
jfc, thanks for this write up
Absolutely bonkers how open the colonization of former socialist states is
I mean Bosnia, Montenegro & Kosovo all use the euro/dmark. Its like obvious obvious.
Yeah, It’s a huge problem here in Serbia, since everything from real estate to wages is listed in euros. People just don’t have faith in the domestic economy, not after the sanction triggered hyperinflation of the 90’s, not the mention the Jezda and Dafiment bank scams during the times of Milosevic. Even saw an article yesterday that our fixed exchange rate with the euro, where the national bank is overall selling off their euro reserves to shore up the dinar, is actually great because it’s “popular” (god forbid the country has any kind of industrial strategy). People don’t have trust in the dinar, and with the way Vucic has been handling the economic front, where foreign direct investment is not only a tool, but the end goal in itself, since he’s not competent enough to run these enterprises into anything other than being the state apparatus for blackmailing people that work in there to vote for him every election cycle. It’s much easier for him to just skirt a little off their profit via income tax and VAT, whilst privatizing literally every single previously state-owned industry, which is especially troublesome when it comes to critical resources. Rio Tinto in particular being a western company with a colorful history of environmental devastation, now mining the critical lithium resource used in manufacturing batteries. Now, Vucic could actually have a state company made to mine these resources, which could in relation to Germany actually give us some leverage, especially if the US forces the EU to cut it’s dependence from China on that front. But of course, being the puppet that he is, that is simply not going to happen, and they even introduced a law recently where any public space can apparently be privatized, that being the cherry on top of his neoliberal shitcake.
Montenegro just accepted the reality of the situation with the euro being the only currency, despite them not being in the EU. They didn’t even pretend to make a move for any kind of monetary sovereignty, although with the kind of mountainous terrain there, they don’t have much prospects for developing into anything other than a tourist resort independently.
And people call Serbia a pro-russian puppet state resistant to western empire smh
Yup, which is why I don’t understand people here that post some of the shit he says, guy is literally the biggest opportunist alive. In the west, he sucks off Trump and Charlie Kirk (he even had his supporters wave a flag with his fucking face recently and paint a mural of him), whereas on the east he always stresses the “brotherly” relations with Russia and our historic friendship. Literally don’t take anything from him at face value, the guy says anything that appeals to whoever he’s talking to. The best you can do is take account of the material conditions on the ground, which indicate that Vucic has simply continued the policies of further integration with Europe from the previous government, even though you would swear based off what he says that they are sworn enemies, considering he likes to evoke them any time there is anything unpopular that he has to do.
Thank you for this write-up, I honestly mostly refrain from trying to understand what is happening in Bosnia since everyone, including Bosnians, just rightfully assume it’s a shitshow not worth wasting your braincells over. There is certainly no love for any politicians here, not either from the conservative of liberal camps, although you will see plenty of boomers falling for the endless fearmongering of new wars with old combatants. But it’s not too difficult to convince most people of the west’s failing in every aspect.
What is very difficult is to get them to a proper materialist understanding of the world, since plenty of people here love to be “autochauvinists” as we call them and just assume the reason why all of our countries are shitty is because of some great intellectual and/or moral failing compared to the west. That the west is apparently not subservient to the laws of the same system as we, and that this generalized mass of people is just shitty because we are lazy, stupid, capricious, jealous or all of those things at once.
Or there are people on the other side who just give up and say that it’s all some western “globohomo” conspiracy that aims to destroy the cradle of an ancient balkan civilization lmao. Some of these people do realize the general system of imperialism, but are often caught up in these moronic reactionary conspiracy theories that instead divert them from the real cause of the problem.
For example, as I said in another comment, lithium is a very important critical resource that we posses, and so as a natural monopoly can be exploited to our benefit to give us some breathing room in terms of our status of servitude with the likes of Germany. But discourse around here has either devolved into a minuscule group around Vucic who support Rio Tinto digging that shit up, or the majority of people that oppose the digging not only because it’s a private company doing it, but on the principle as a whole. So if you actually want to exploit it, you are basically as good as a Vucic supporter. Nevermind you could use the profits to maybe alleviate some of the consequences of pollution in Belgrade, where smog is a regular visitor. Or fix the filtration system in that same city as to not just fucking dump shit in the Danube. Or invest into solar panels, nuclear power plants and other green tech from China. As if all of that wouldn’t benefit the environment of this country tenfold as compared to saving a little land of a village inhabited by like 10 people.
Thanks for sharing your perspective. I wrote a comment a while ago with my own thoughts on this phenomenon.
In a sense, most of it is intentional and every leftist from formerly socialist Europe can attest to the reactionary overcompensation of regional cognition, where the only way to become “white” and “European” and “Western” is to prove one’s anti-communist bona fides with the zeal of a new convert. These are societies where an entire past half century has been completely repudiated and hollowed out in collective memory, leaving a vacuum that people searching for national pride and identity generally fill by looking back to the reactionary, often monarchical or fascist, regimes before socialism. These sentiments are of course encouraged by the political and educational regimes, where communism has been made an illegal thought-crime across most of formerly socialist Europe and it is openly seen as much more preferable for the population to swing towards fascism than socialism.
I think ex-Yugoslavia is pretty peculiar since the collapse of it’s communist party resembled the USSR more than any other. The party got hollowed out via opportunism and revisionism, which you could argue started out under Tito himself via the whole split with the Soviets, although the conflict was more strategical rather than ideological, even though it wasn’t presented as such. Although I don’t think the memory of Yugoslavia is as precious as it of the USSR, plenty of boomers still admire it, with only the younger generations being more right-wing and believing in this silly orthodox church shit.
But a lot of the bad rap tends to be because of Milosevic, and his complete break from any discernible communist ideology, towards a reinvigoration of these stupid national myths which might not have been the underlying cause, but was the alibi used to break up Yugoslavia. If he had pursued a policy of centralization, which was even favored by the poorer republics such as Montenegro, Bosnia and Macedonia, maybe he could have averted the crisis and brought back Croatia and Slovenia back into the fold. Instead, we got the aforementioned young generation celebrating Mladic and Karadzic and painting murals in their name.
Uh oh. Good thing that there’s no history of ethnic strife being aggravated by capitalism and spilling over into disaster in this region of the world!