...one has to wonder what the latest Blinken round of visits to the Middle East was supposed to accomplish, since all it did was expose our impotence. Even the Financial Times could not hide that the meetings with Netanyahu and then Arab leaders were a train wreck. Netanyahu rejected even any itty bitty ceasefire, branded a humanitarian pause, to get relief in, demanding that Hamas release all hostages first. The fact that Israel has welched or underperformed on its past begrudging promises to let trucks from Egypt in, would make that a non-starter even before getting to Hamas being sure to stick to its position of wanting to trade hostages for Palestinian prisoners. And of course the Arab states are not about to budge. Blinken got a more pointed version of what he was told before.
Antony Blinken faced intense pressure from regional allies to facilitate an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, laying bare the stark gap between US support for Israel and the outrage in Arab capitals over the siege and bombardment of the strip….
Sameh Shoukry, the Egyptian foreign minister, demanded an unconditional ceasefire, a commitment that Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu bluntly rejected after meeting Blinken on Friday.
Blinken had been expected to “brainstorm” with Arab diplomats the future of Gaza, home to 2.3mn Palestinians, after the war ends. Safadi bluntly rejected those talks as premature. “How can we even entertain what will happen in Gaza when we do not know how Gaza will be left?” he asked Blinken. “Are we going to be talking about a wasteland? Are we talking about a whole population reduced to refugees?”
This comes off as the sort of thing someone who had just read classic texts on negotiating trying to put in practice: “Gee, let’s get a dialogue going! Let’s get to ‘Yes’ on some less fraught issues to pave the way for further agreement!” In addition, “brainstorming” is cringemakingly American. You don’t do that with people who are mad at you. You don’t do that in a crisis. Between independent entities, you do not do that at the top level. You have low level people or emissaries float ideas. So why this exercise? The worst is that Biden and Blinken come off as so disconnected from reality that they though they might get someone to accommodate US needs.
Friendly reminder: when commenting about a news event, especially something that just happened, please provide a source of some kind. While ideally this would be on nitter or archived, any source is preferable to none at all given.
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.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis.
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.
The Country of the Week is still Lebanon! 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.
You're going to have to (hex)bear with me on the update this week. Have you been feeling generally pretty terrible this last month or so? So have I, and doomscrolling and archiving it all is my quasi-job at this point. Not good, folks, more and more people are saying it. I'll get over it eventually.
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.
Western leaders using "Never Again" Holocaust messaging to justify a ongoing genocide, becoming the equivalent of the Nazi-appeasers before/during WW2 upon who we look back on with such disgust (ignoring that leaders like Churchill were relatively pro-Nazi before it all kicked off, of course) would have shattered my previous liberal brain into a trillion pieces. The whiplash we've experienced in such a relatively short time (over the last 3-4 years or so) between:
From a non-racist liberal point of view (as in, they're still racist but don't think saying slurs is good, etc), this all must seem totally bonkers at least on a subconscious level. All liberal values seem to be currently in this violent political vortex, where sometimes a statement like "killing ethnic minorities is complicated" is not only true in one case (Ukrainian Nazis killing civilians in WW2, killing Palestinians in Gaza, etc) and false in another (Jewish settlers in Israel, who obviously aren't a minority in Israel but are on a global scale; the "Ughyur genocide", etc), but true and false for the exact same conflict. The only way to come out of this chaos with even a vaguely coherent political ideology is to either become a socialist or become an all-out racist and apologist/supporter of imperialism - and we're watching many people become the latter. Otherwise, you're just watching the news on the TV or your phone or your computer with a slack-jawed face while the words enter your brain without the slighest post-processing and then go about your day not ever thinking about how like, Russia killing 500 children in ~2 years is intentional, planned genocide but Israel killing over 4000 in a month is just an unfortunate Thing That Happened.
I don't think that people who do genuinely believe in the rules-based international order ("Yeah, the United States should try and maintain justice and order around the world, we can't let evil forces try and disrupt how great things are for everybody, sucks about the bad side effects but it's better than if Russia or China were in charge, can you imagine?") are like, having mental breakdowns or crises of faith about their ideology or anything, at least partially because they don't even think they have an ideology in which to have a crisis about, but it does express itself in a general kind of malaise or alienation about the world and general events or even everyday life. "There's a sense in which things kinda suck, but maybe it's just because I didn't meditate this morning or take my multivitamin or that my co-worker was being annoying or something, IDK." At least, this is what I observe in my friends and family.
The contradictions have accelerated so rapidly in just a short amount of time that I literally cannot imagine where we'll be in, say, 2030.
Orwell was a rat but he was on to something when he coined the term doublethink to describe the ability to simultaneously hold mutually exclusive beliefs. He was wrong about the double thinkers being the scary cartoon Stalinists of 1984 though, doublethink seems to be a predominant feature of the right, be it succdem, lib, conservative or fash.
I always say it, he literally worked for British propaganda during WW2, the whole of
is both pure projection and an extremely accurate description of the actual imperial thought control machine
the beliefs arent mutually exclusive tho, "killing western allies is genocide" and "killing western enemies and the insuperior race is great" are congruent beliefs
Functionally these are their beliefs. They act as if they believe there is one moral standards for the west and another for "the jungle". But I don't think they actually believe that. If you call them out for their double standards they get upset and find the idea absurd.
It really seems like liberals genuinely believe that killing civilians is wrong and genuinely believe that killing civilians is okay. Which one of these beliefs gets activated differs on the context (the context often being racism).
The west ended up on the wrong ideological side of WWII due to inter-imperialist fighting over turf and they have regretted it ever since.
Americans love their alt history where “what if the Nazis won” and it always assumes a sort of German/Japanese total domination of the world (a la Man in the High Castle) that the “good guys” like the US are resisting. A much more realistic alt history (one that I think a leftist should write sometime) would be one where the US, UK, and Nazi Germany ally against the USSR. And the present day situation is one where bloodthirsty, fascist regimes in Europe, the US, and Japan sit atop the world and dominate it. And it’s up to everyone else in places like China and Latin America to topple it and liberate the world. In other words, not that different from our present world only the contradictions are ramped up much more.
Seventy-two trillion pieces, you might say
Liberalism and it's enlightenments and evolution have been flawed since conception, since Adam Smith was writing about it. I'll just post a paragraph from Samir Amin's Eurocentrism to illustrate this:
If you apply the concept of "endowments" to the four situations you listed, liberals can "solve" the moral contradictions for themselves and continue on.
If Nazis existed before Hitler, He would've called the Czechs Nazis