Image is sourced from this People’s Dispatch article, depicting communists attending the 2023 funeral of Communist Party President Guillermo Teillier, who was tortured for years under Pinochet’s regime and helped rebuild the Communist Party while under a fascist dictatorship.
We had the Six Day War in 1967, we had the Nineteen Day War (Yom Kippur) in 1973, and now we’ve had the Twelve Day War. I wonder how many more very short wars will plague the region until Palestine is freed?
However, moving on from Western Asia from a little while, we have some interesting news from Chile - the former labor minister and communist, Jeannette Jara, has won the primary election for the left-wing bloc in a landslide (~60% of the vote), as the current President, Gabriel Boric, is term-limited. Her achievements include a minimum wage increase and a reduction of the work week to 40 hours.
In November, Jara will face down the contenders from other parties, including José Antonio Kast, who is analogous to Brazil’s Bolsonaro. Unfortunately, Jara is now the lead figure of a party that has been taking quite a few Ls under Boric’s leadership. Ostensibly a Democratic Socialist, he ruled as - you guessed it - a neoliberal, bending the knee to the US and EU. He not only failed to overthrow the Pinochet-era constitution, he actually allowed the right-wing to turn the proposed new constitution into something worse, and had to settle for campaigning against the new one and keeping the old one. And he had very little solidarity with other left-leaning leaders on the continent, like Maduro, Lula, Petro, or Castillo.
With this in mind, I cannot help but look at Argentina’s very recent history and feel a little dread - but if anybody can save Chile at this point, it can only be a communist.
Last week’s thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
Please check out the RedAtlas!
The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
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 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.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
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.
Let’s not pretend like China didn’t open up its market to the Americans in order to kill the Soviet Union, whom they perceive as attempting to encircle China through Vietnam. Both Mao and Deng were fully on board with it.
We only didn’t criticize China because it ends up becoming very successful and reaping quite a lot of benefit out of it (and part of the reason why China isn’t going to give up the status quo anytime soon), but when other countries try to play the same game, they get labeled as compradors.
I’m assuming by “we” you mean Hexbear users because there is no way you’ve never actualy seen left-critique of China in the past 15 years.
With that assumption you should remember that this community is pretty much the same as r/chapo. We already had the 2022 Ukraine war struggle section that pushed away most of them too and now only moretankiechapo types remained. The pro-China “movement” has been since ~2018 borderline unserious for a reason.
You must remember that this was also at the height of the anti-China propaganda on the west. Suddenly the propaganda went from “lol Chinese empty cities” to Xinjiang genocide and HK protests. “Uncritical support” was a natural consequence of having to battle this because seriously, why would you engage in good faith debate about China’s problems with libs thinking the CPC are committing “cultural genocide” by showing google maps false images of supposedly “demolished” Mosques or “concentration camps”.
Even today there is literaly no point argueing with anyone about China’s problems, you step into almost every other lemmy instance and its the same communism = nazi shit. People pre-emptively assume bad faith through experience.
Its not conductive to academic debate, but in case you mean western Marxism as whole though, I mean just look up the debate on Chinese imperialism, it goes back at least 15 years too.
Plenty of people have been critical of modern China, just not on these online spaces.
You misunderstood what I’m saying. I am specifically talking about China opening up its market to foreign capital vs other countries trying to play the same game.
Many of the other problems you are describing were legit Western anti-China propaganda.
As a huge Deng fan, is it not critically different for the second country relative to the first one? The first country to do so was out of necessity, the step backwards to take huge leaps forward which temporarily traded prosperity and socialist ideals in order to achieve a level of production which would grant an ability to gain influence and independence on the global stage in the future. But Vietnam could just turn to China for the same development without capitulating to the US, and it would likely benefit much more. China had no China next to it when Deng made the shifts. Does this not change the action entirely?
I still think that Vietnam likely is making a fine decision, but comparing it to the Opening Up of China feels odd when the circumstances are so different
Vietnam stood on the “wrong” side during the Cold War and paid for it. American capital went into China and not Vietnam, and as a result, China gained access to the US consumer market, while Vietnam went down with the USSR.
They have both listened to the IMF and oriented their economies to rely heavily on export oriented growth, so they are competitors. Who in China is going to buy Vietnam’s surplus goods that it cannot sell to the Americans? And why should the Chinese government favor Vietnamese products over its own domestic products?
When Chinese businesses invest in Vietnam, they want to take advantage of Vietnam’s status to circumvent the US tariffs put up by Trump during his first term. This is why Trump is levying a heavy tariff against Vietnam and several other countries like Mexico that Chinese exporters have used to evade tariffs.
Funnily enough, Vietnam actually has a much more stringent labor law and restricts overtime to less than 200 hours per year (no limit in China). So there have been cases where Chinese businesses only realized they couldn’t exploit the Vietnamese workers as hard after they have set up shop there lol.
Only when China reduces its trade surplus and starts importing from these countries, displacing the role of American consumers, can countries like Vietnam really benefit from China. Otherwise it’s going to be pure mercantilism while the US hides behind tariffs and waiting for these countries to kill off each other’s economies.
Fair
A lot of people here probably did criticize China for that until they got called ultras and/or libs