Image is of Joseph Robinette Biden, who has stepped down and will not run against Trump in the 2024 election.
In the aftermath of Trump surviving an assassination attempt, many professional opinion-havers are now talking about the scourge of "political violence" that has overtaken, or will soon overtake America, and how we must not let chaos rule. This is, of course, patently absurd. The American government and its allies have been the greatest force of political violence on the planet since the beginning of colonialism, and the foundations of the country are made of corpses. Today, America commits political violence by forcing Ukrainians into the maw of Russian artillery instead of trying to reach a peaceful settlement, which Russia has repeatedly expressed interest in and offered Ukraine relatively favourable terms. They supply Israel with endless weaponry to destroy entire cities and populations, while Biden supporters insist that somehow things could be worse than daily massacres and mass starvation.
In May 1945, French police fired on protestors, causing retaliatory attacks on French settlers, killing about a hundred. In response, the French murdered 45,000 Algerians in a little under two months, in a frenzy of political violence called the Sétif and Guelma massacre. As the massacre was being completed, the International Court of Justice was established. It goes without saying that Algeria never benefited from the ICJ, and the War of Independence from 1954 to 1962 was made inevitable. Over a million Algerians were killed before France could bear the fighting no longer and gave up, and Algeria won itself a state. Comparisons to the ongoing war of independence and genocide in Palestine are obvious.
While the means of colonial violence have evolved over the centuries, the basic structure of it has not. As in Algeria, Vietnam, and Cuba, resistance groups in and around Palestine are fighting for a world with less political violence. The American government would drown every city in the developing world in blood to prevent peace.
The COTW (Country of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific country every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied nations. If you've wanted to talk about the country or share your experiences, but have never found a relevant place to do so, now is your chance! However, don't worry - this is still a general news megathread where you can post about ongoing events from any country.
The Country of the Week is Algeria! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
Please check out the HexAtlas!
The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
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 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.
Sean O'Brien still has to answer to Teamster members, and frankly, a bunch of Teamsters are chuds. O'Brien is also at least a bit of a shithead in his own right, though.
Yeah this just seems like normal politics to me. You're going to want to try to have a relationship with the administration regardless of which party it is.
Teamsters are a good place for agitation precisely because they aren't partisan Dems. They're far less committed and can be moved towards class consciousness and through this against reactionary sentiments like transphobia (explaining it as a false consciousness). Teamsters' kneejerk solidarity with other unions' strikes helps with this.
It's true they have more openly reactionary members. Other unions often deride them internally over this. Those unions have a liberal understanding of identity, however, and usually only pay lip service to the liberation of marginalized communities, collaborating with management who see liberal identity tokenization as a marketing opportunity. They, naturally, work at odds with liberation on a regular basis because of their commitment to the liberal political class. It's nearly impossible to get them to do anything about the US' foreign policy, for example. And they are quitr anti-socialist, internally. They tolerate a socialist or two on staff but constantly work against them.
In my experience it is easier to talk to and radicalize Teamsters than it is to do the same with members of unions like UFCW, SEIU, UAW, AFCSME.
There are lots of good people in the Teamsters, don't get me wrong. A lot of those people helped get O'Brien elected. However, I have family in Local 25 that I know voted for/support Trump, and I have met some of their friends/colleagues who are also at least kinda chuds. I still think the Teamsters are one of the better/best unions in the US, and I agree they shouldn't have blind loyalty to the Dems. The flip side is just that they do also have quite a few chuds. It is what it is, and I am sure my family members are probably thrilled he spoke at the RNC if I were to ask them about it.
What I really mean to convey is that if any commies here were interested in embedding in union work as class struggle work, don't write off the Teamsters as it is just as fertile of ground as anywhere else, and in my experience even more than other unions. This is both because they are incoherent in their own way but also because it is easy to miss how reactionary and intransigent other unions are if you don't pay attention to their liberalism.
We should of course be incredibly critical of reactionaries and their elements in unions and strategic and principled in how we do our work (e.g. not just good vibes support of imperialist and reactionary unions). But we should also recognize the long history of lefties writing off unions as a place to foment aware class struggle because they are dominated by our enemies, co-opted by them, etc - and that those who disagree and say to engage in the struggle while adhering to principle have been those most successful in their own impact.
Or, put very simply, I'm trying to relate this to the (old) idea of sectarianism, the version that is about self-isolation rather than strategic struggle among the wider working class in all their goodness and ugliness.