…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.
Not germane to the article, but this comment here:
The topic of how living conditions in the UK changed for workers throughout the 19th century is a topic I’m fascinated by but so far have found hardly any solid research or discussion on from Marxists (probably exists but I just haven’t found it yet). I suspect the answer Roberts provides is the correct one, but I have yet to see it really dived into in-depth and researched. As much as Diedre McCloskey’s books on this topic suck, I feel like she represents the view of most bourgeois economists and westerner civilians alike - that the English people were dirt poor in 1800 and by 1900 they experienced the single largest expansion of living standards in human history. Perhaps not an incorrect statement, but it is attributed to the magic and beauty of capitalism. This view - that capitalism is just wonderful and transforms poor societies into wealthy ones just by the inherent nature of it - is so pervasive throughout the world and presents a serious ideological roadblock to socialism for a lot of people. If we can conclusively show it comes down to imperialism, I think that roadblock can be more easily removed. The story of living standards in England in the 19th c. is the best narrative the capitalists have - but it’s bullshit so if we can tear it down I think that would go a long way.
Given that I’m interested in this topic, I might give Milanovic’s book a read. Even if he’s not a Marxist and seems to get some things wrong, he seems to be familiar enough and respectful enough of it, that I feel it might be useful to read and see what makes sense, and see where it’s deficient.
It came of the backs of their colonization efforts in India and other territories.
Settlers by J. Sakai delves into it a little, but it’s much more US focused.
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I haven’t gotten this far in these very long books, but Wallerstein may have addressed this in the world systems book covering that period. It may be in this one: The Modern World-System, vol. IV: Centrist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789–1914 or vol III. Edit: vol III looks like the right one
This is the answer though:
I think even Keynes talked about this.
You could also look at Jason Hickel, as he may have written something on this. There is also Smiths Imperialism in the 21st century, which is great, but about how this functions today.
Smith’s book is on my short list for books to read next.
What I’m especially interested is in how those colonial profits translated into gains for workers. I think the answer is that in the second half of the 19th century, workers fought more intense class struggle and the British bourgeoisie was able to sacrifice more profits to ameliorate them since the super-profits were rolling in from the colonies, but would like to see more inquiry into all that.
Read the first chapter of the Smiths book. The example he gives of a t shirt from Bangladesh and how a single shirt produces more in tax for the German state than the factory and workers get for producing it is a great example and one which applies historically as well (IIRC its from another paper which may go into more detail). The bit on trade unions and how policy which penalizes the production in global south via tarrifs benefits workers in the west is also good.
The rest of the book gets real in the weeds of terminology and structure, but the first chapter is concise and clear.
I’d honestly be surprised if Wallerstein didn’t address this in his books. He is making a similar argument in the first one, which was written on the period before the height of colonial expansion into the west, east and south IIRC. I put it down because it was too detailed lol.