Image is of a protest in Pakistan after the attempted assassination of Imran Khan in November 2022.
What a clusterfuck of an election.
Imran Khan, the previous official Prime Minister of Pakistan, was removed by the command of the United States in April 2022 in a no confidence motion. This made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. Imran Khan and his supporters have protested since then against the Pakistani state, which is more-or-less governed by the military despite the furnishings of civilian rule. This has ranged from largely peaceful protests to trying to burn down and occupy houses and headquarters.
It was assumed by the Pakistani elite that they could make the problem go away by arresting Imran Khan and effectively forcing many PTI candidates to run as independents while hounding them with police raids and stopping them from campaigning - and adding salt on the wound by disabling social media access and mobile services on the day of the election to make it more difficult to co-ordinate. Fortunately, these people don’t seem to quite understand how the internet works in the current day, and so Khan’s supporters started up WhatsApp groups and improvised websites and apps to spread the word about which candidates to vote for, leading to Khan’s party getting the plurality, though not the majority, of votes in the election.
This has created a rather depressed mood in the Pakistani elite. A coalition of eight parties joined together, obviously excluding the PTI, but this coalition is shaky and lacks much legitimacy, with two major parties inside it, the PML-N and PPP, being ideologically opposed on several issues. It has been regarded as “the coalition of losers” by Khan’s supporters. The new Prime Minister is Shehbaz Sharif, who also ruled from April 2022 until August 2023 and is the younger brother of Nawaz Sharif, who served as Prime Minister three times before in the last few decades. With inflation at 30% and the economy greatly struggling, there are fears that things may only stay together for months, not years, before the coalition fragments and something else has to be done.
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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.
China drops ‘peaceful reunification’ reference to Taiwan
BEIJING, March 5 (Reuters) - China will boost its defence spending by 7.2% this year, fuelling a military budget that has more than doubled under President Xi Jinping’s 11 years in office as Beijing hardens its stance on Taiwan, according to official reports on Tuesday.
The increase mirrors the rate presented in last year’s budget and again comes in well above the government’s economic growth forecast for this year.
China also officially adopted tougher language against Taiwan as it released the budget figures, dropping the mention of “peaceful reunification” in a government report delivered by Premier Li Qiang at the opening of the National People’s Congress (NPC), China’s rubber-stamp parliament, on Tuesday.
fuelling a military budget that has more than doubled under President Xi Jinping’s 11 years in office
You’re not going to believe what else doubled under Xi Jinping’s administration
(The economy lmao)
“rubber-stamp” is when your legislature isn’t dominated by two bourgeois parties doing a puppet show
yo what blogs/sites do you all read about international affairs and foreign policy? not like just straight news reporting but more opinion/analysis type of stuff. i’ve been trawling through the sources that 72T (
) uses to put together the briefings but the only one that scratches the itch is naked capitalism and i’m not tryna read the dang Ec*nomist or FT. y’all got anything else like NC? i’m especially interested in materialist analysis of geopolitical strategy. also any podcast recommendations would be welcome as wellDeath to America
For economics, Michael Roberts is very good. On the Ukraine War, I would go so far as to say he’s anti-Russia but it’s a distinctly different kind to most other people, because he’s both much more serious and also much more able to accept reality. So it’s basically like “Well, I don’t like Putin and have doubts about his commitment to any “multipolar order” but he’s clearly winning and this whole Ukraine thing is a total disaster, so…” He has other Marxist economists that he interacts with and has written books with that are worth exploring.
There’s, of course, Multipolarista/Geopolitical Economy, with Ben Norton making decent videos (though a pretty big chunk of the content will already be known to news mega regulars; it’s a little more geared towards baby leftists but I still learn a lot of new things from his videos). Radhika Desai and Michael Hudson are unfortunately too boomerish and busy with other things to make content all day but their Geopolitical Economy Hours are good if you don’t mind being a few weeks to a few months out of date with ongoing events. Hudson seems to have like 50 fucking podcasts and analysis shows that he visits where he basically says the same thing every time, so the Geopolitical Economy Hours are the best way to get new material out of him.
You could do a lot worse than the New Left Review, of course, but that’s even slower than the Geopolitical Economy Hours. If you regard yourself as a Serious Intellectual Marxist, then the Historical Materialism journal is probably the place to be while reclining in your armchair, gazing at obtuse graphs of profitability, but that’s even slower going.
Unfortunately, if you want something that’s a) fast-updating, b) very left-focussed, and c) has relatively high-quality opinions and analysis, then… uhh… Hexbear and Lemmygrad might be one of the only places online in English that would fill that criteria. Just badger somebody smart here until they write an essay in response to you about how, idk, nuclear energy is the future / destined to fail, or that Keynes was the literal devil / an angel / a land of contrasts. I’ll go first: Keynes was actually great and is the continuation of Marx into the 20th century. Hopefully somebody just got very annoyed at me and I will have an essay on Keynes in my inbox within 12 hours because I barely know anything about the guy.
But unironically I think I agree with Keynes’ idea that once worker productivity gets sufficiently high that the government should start reducing the labor supply by shortening the workweek. I think that would actually get us incrementally closer to communism if capital would ever let it happen. (But it won’t, hence revolution)
