...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.
I wish US unions would actually do something. the USPS union came out with a statement, but imagine if they'd decided to strike - the country would basically shut down and they'd have to declare a ceasefire within a few days.
I am very pessimistic about the labor strike situation in the US.
For transportation and logistics, the railroad strike was immediately crushed by Biden. The UPS strike didn’t even happen, the union simply accepted what the company offered.
The auto industry got better results from their strikes, but the general trend of de-industrialization in America means that there is going to be more job losses over the next decade than the gains they managed to get from the renegotiated contracts.
The entertainment industry strike was the most revealing. First, WGA (writers guild) started their strike and then SAG-AFTRA joined in (actors guild), and the Hollywood studios saw the opportunity to fry the bigger fish - the capitalists simply waited out until the film industry workers (who are not writers and actors) feel enough pain to sow a division among the working class. SAG didn’t even get what they wanted with the streaming residues - started with a $1B ask, then lowered to $500M, they eventually got a $40M deal. (I’ve said early that the biggest mistake was not to turn the writers and actors strikes into an industry-wide strike.)
It seems that in America, the smart unions would just try to negotiate a relatively decent offer and spin it as a “historic” deal, whereas the more headstrong ones (like SAG-AFTRA) would simply get worse and worse offers as time goes on until they are forced to concede.
There really isn’t any way forward when you have Biden as one of the most anti-labor president in the US history.
I am becoming a third worldist
I think the problem is the lack of a left wing movement that can channel all these energy into direct political action.
You have all these disparate protest movements but nothing to consolidate their strength against the capitalist machine, like organizing a general strike.
Bernie’s movement was truly a huge waste. Imagine turning that million strong movement into something else. I’m starting to think that his role was to absorb all that energy and dissipate them into the wind to protect the capitalist class.
To cut these orgs a little slack, the intelligence and surveillance networks we're facing are truly incredible. Not omniscient, far from it, but it's very challenging. And even if that could be mitigated somehow, the general task of making class conscious the average Westerner, even the average poor Westerner, is also a huge task that no movement inside a financialized capitalist country has yet achieved.
Nonetheless, seeing the Zionists crawl out of their cysts inside ostensibly left-wing organizations does suggest that there's still a lot of work to be done even among the people who have the political awareness and ability to join these kinds of organizations. Like, hearing that the DSA explicitly forbids democratic centralism both surprised and didn't surprise me. Not that the organization is hopeless or anything, just that they have to shake off the Bernie-era libs or radicalize/educate them. And that's not even getting into the shambles the Left is here in the UK.
Even if that wasn't his intention it was ultimately the effect, so it's a distinction without a difference I guess.
Yeah I agree, I don’t have to cut them any slack, I simply have no confidence in them to do revolutionary defeatism at all.
When I looked at history, and saw how the Chinese communists were massacred and driven down to around 1000 party cadres during the Long March, it’s incredible how they managed to survive and turn the entire situation into a win at the end. Granted, the Japanese invasion played a huge role in this process. Sometimes I wonder if you really need a huge crisis inside the imperial core for radical changes to happen?
I think this is without a doub,t yes. When has it ever not?
One can dream about revolution without violence, can’t we?
This is a joke right?
The bourgeoise will never give up their power and wealth willingly and they will employ violence to keep it even against the non-violent. There will always be plenty of (cops) fools who will fight against their own class and their own interests to defend the bourgeoise out of ignorance or delusion. The only way to end capitalism is by forcing the bourgeoise and their supporters to give up or die. Even then many who surrender will never truly give up and as such will still need to die in order to protect the revolution.
If you haven't already I suggest you read What Is To Be Done by Lenin.
they've slaughtered us every time we've tried (chile, PKI, etc.) it's less than a dream it's a dangerous delusion at this point
This would never happen because the US political system is domestic counterinsurgency. Sanders would've never even walked the halls of the capitol if he didn't serve a counterinsurgency role. People need to move beyond "both parties serve the bourgeoisie" or "the parties represent different factions of the bourgeoisie" and actually analyze the political parties for what they really are: a form of domestic counterinsurgency designed to defend the state from any potential insurgent (ie revolutionary) action. The George Floyd uprising was the real eye-opener that I think not enough people have a good grasp of.
Federation is another form of domestic counterinsurgency. Don't you think it's strange how states with large POC populations like Hawaii and California have draconian gun laws while states with white supermajorities like Wyoming have incredibly law gun laws? People too immersed within US politics will try to explain the various party platforms while if you understand the US political system as domestic counterinsurgency, then it makes complete sense. You want the portion of the domestic population that have the most potential to wage insurgent warfare to be disarmed while the portion of the domestic population that have the most potential to be deputized on behalf of the state to be armed. And to put the cherry on top, the police in those blue states (LAPD, NYPD) are super vicious as well, a very strange observation if you take strict gun laws at face value but not strange at all if you see it for what it really is. It doesn't matter if white Hawaiians are getting screwed or if Asian Idahoans get a pass because we're talking aggregates, not individuals. The antics of the parties are just kabuki theater to distract you from what's really going on. This is not a perfect explanation (the South has lax gun laws despite having a large Black population although those states have other means of oppressing Black people), but there are other examples I could go over.
I knew people wouldn't protest over Roe v Wade because federation means states will have inconsistent laws, including abortion laws, so an entire potential movement is completely sunk by "just move to a state where abortion is legal lmao." You can't build a mass movement with "poor women living in red states who can't move to blue states." And I see the same exact playbook with trans rights. There will be states like Massachusetts that have decent laws while the rest of the US becomes genocidal towards trans people. What people see sanctuary states I see state-sized concentration camps. From a counterinsurgency point of view, you want the more misbehaving portion of your population to be cramped into ghettos where they can be more successfully surveilled and controlled. That's literally the function of a concentration camp. Their ideal goal would be for every single demographic that has the potential to be insurgents to be cramped into a single state that can be isolated and brought to its knees through resource denial. I don't think it's a coincidence "Commiefornia" is a thing, a state that has huge issues over where to get water also being a so-called Mecca for progressives. How very convenient that the state that will be smashed by climate change is also where all the progressives are directed to head towards. How doubly convenient that the states that will be relatively okay with climate change are crawling with white supremacist militias.
That’s a very thought provoking take and certainly a terrifying perspective!
GOOOOOD post. Your last point reminds me how I think the layout of the US is such that enacting maoist practices good have decent success internally, if not for the viciously anti-communist rural culture. Makes me curious how it ended up that way.
Most unions have a no-strike clause so they'd have to be wildcat. Most US unions are nowhere near the organizational capacity to do a wildcat over something happening overseas.
What the hell is the point of a union if you can't strike? As if binding arbitration is going to do shit when you give up your only leverage.
To be clear, a no-strike clause is for the duration of the contract. After it expires they can still strike to get a favorable new contract. All of the big recent union strikes have been ones where these clauses are in the contracts.
But it is a sign of union weakness and collaboration with management. Preciously crossing the Ts and dotting the Is according to the playbook handed down by the feds and a collaborationist contract, don't you dare strike when we don't expect it! And if you do, management will sue the union, so the union leadership will often try to quell wildcats.
Getting rid of these clauses is entirely about the strength of organizing that happens within the union. If you can build sufficient strength at the grassroots level and take over leadership, you can hold a hard line against this clause and it will be gone indefinitely. But this isn't easy, it means convincing at least half of membership that this is the hill to die on.
Unfortunately in
some of our unions are "essential services" and literally can't strike ever. Not sure how it works in the US but its completely worthless.
Yeah that's also the case in the US. On the plus side, that tends to end up actually being a bridge too far and they strike anyways and are modestly more militant than the collaborationist unions with these clauses. Because they are forced to be.
I think we will be seeing a lot more of that. The system is turning more and more inwards and will be eliminating legal options for militancy. That's an agitated space for us to work in.
I wish US unions did something