Image is of General Abdourahamane Tiani, leader of Niger (left) and Ibrahim Traoré, leader of Burkina Faso (right).
The Alliance of Sahel States (ASS) formed on September 16th in the wake of the coup in Niger in late July, in which Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso created a military and increasingly economic alliance in which attacking one would result in the other two joining. This was initially most relevant militarily, as ECOWAS was threatening an invasion of Niger if they did not restore civilian rule. Nonetheless, due to a mixture of a lack of real strength in ECOWAS due to Nigeria’s internal problems, and the influence of Algeria, a very strong regional military power who negotiated against a war which could further destabilise an already destabilised region, and the vague promises of future civilian rule, the external military threat seems to have mostly dissipated.
However, internal threats remain. Burkina Faso is fighting against ISIS and al-Qaeda, which commit regular massacres of civilians; the government controls only 60% of the country. In Mali, the government is fighting against similar groups as well as the Tuareg, which inhabit the more sparsely populated north of the country - the government is in the process of kicking out the UN mission to Mali, and in the process retaking rebel stronghold cities like Kidal, which is raising some eyebrows as to what exactly the UN was doing all this time; and Niger is fighting against similar Islamic groups too, and is kicking out the French for being exploitative motherfuckers. Combine this with the sanctions against Niger which are crippling the country, disease outbreaks in Burkina Faso, and just the general shitty state of the world economy, and the situation is not looking very good currently.
That all being said, economy and trade ministers from all three countries have met this past weekend in Bamako, the capital of Mali. There, they recommended that the countries: improve the free movement of people inside the ASS (don’t laugh!); construct and strengthen infrastructure like dams and roads; construct a food safety system; establish a stabilization fund and investment bank; and even create a common airline. This is all attracting foreign attention too - Russia has signed a deal to build Africa’s largest gold refinery in Mali, and China is the second largest investor into Niger after France, ploughing money into the gold and uranium industries there. And, of course, the Wagner group is in the region - though I’m unsure if they’re having a major or minor impact on events there.
The weekly update is here on the website.
Your Monday Briefing is here in the comments and here on the website.
Your Tuesday Briefing is here in the comments and here on the website.
Your Wednesday Briefing is here in the comments and here on the website.
Your Thursday Briefing is here in the comments and here on the website.
The Country of the Week is Burkina Faso! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
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. Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
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.
Stalin undid Bolshevik reforms and re-criminalized homosexuality, and the last of that change wasn’t undone until the late 90s. The heart of social reaction in Russia are people who were adults well before the Soviet Union collapsed. This social conservatism isn’t something for which the West is solely responsible. It doesn’t erase any of the other things that the Soviets were progressive on, like racism, nor does it mean the USSR was somehow less than the West, which had many (if not all) of the same anti-LGBT issues, but this isn’t something that just popped up out of nowhere after the fall of the USSR. It’s a longstanding facet of Russia’s cultural ties to Orthodox Christianity. It has certainly gotten worse post Soviet collapse, and that is due in no small part to Western influence, whether from a reaction to pink imperialism or from funding from Western Christian groups, but it was still there, even before that outside influence.
Idk if you can chalk up Soviet systemic homophobia to ‘cultural orthodox Christianity’ as much as just reflexive secular xenophobia and after the 70s a reaction to advances in lgbt rights in the west, maybe afraid that it was a recruitment vector or smth.
also to be fair the Soviets were kinda hypocritical on racism too, you can see this in the rise of ethnic tensions that started years before the fall of the union
Of course, but your argument would also imply that progress would have stopped at 1990 and that the socialist state, which had been kept under constant threat by foreign imperialist powers, had no more room to grow. For one, history is not static even though it might appear as though nothing had changed in decades.
Taken to its extreme, your argument actually points to the notion that LGBTQ+ progressive movement can only grow out of Western capitalist culture because the socialist progress will always been held back by the backwardness of Russian culture. This is both ahistorical and non-materialist view of the world.
My argument doesn’t imply any of that. My argument states that Russian culture has a strain of social conservatism that predates socialism entirely, and that there were both gains and setbacks for LGBT rights under both socialism and capitalism. What would be ahistorical and non-materialist would be to deny the reality that the Soviet Union and it’s predecessor state exist within that culture and its history.
I think you misunderstood my point.
My earlier comment was that social conservatism thrived when US imperialism had destroyed progressive movements outside of the imperial core.
You responded saying that social conservatism has always been part of the USSR (Russian culture) and that it had nothing to do with US imperialism.
I’m not disagreeing with this part, my point was that socialism would have continued to progress if the USSR didn’t fall, it would not have stopped in 1990 just because that was the last snapshot you saw of the USSR before it fell.
History does not stop marching, and I have seen so many leftists fell into the trap of adopting the neoliberal “end of history” lens of the world, as if everything is now the end state of the world, and nothing will ever change from what they understood of the world that they presently live in.
I am not talking about “the end of history”. In my prior comment, I stated that LGBT rights experienced gains under the early Bolsheviks and then setbacks under Stalin. US imperialism didn’t make Stalin re-criminalize homosexuality. That strain of homophobia was already present in Russia culture, even before 1917. That change is no different from where LGBT rights in the US finds itself now, with attacks on trans rights, “Don’t Say Gay” laws, and witch hunts against LGBT people a decade after gay marriage became legal. These cultural strains do not just disappear overnight, even under socialism. They take decades, maybe even centuries, to fully disappear, and constantly swing back and forth between action and reaction.
Would LGBT rights have improved under the Soviet Union if it continued to exist? Maybe? Probably? They had improved a bit post-Stalin, but homosexuals were still being prosecuted in Russia in 1991. Countries like Cuba give a possible glimpse of what might have happened, but also it might have gone in the other direction entirely, as it did a century ago under Stalin. That’s all speculation on our parts.
What I can definitively say is that homosexuality was decriminalized under Yeltsin, a man propped up by a US president who was either too homophobic or too cowardly to push for LGBT rights in his own country and passed Dont Ask Don’t Tell and the Defense of Marriage Act, instead. It wasn’t declassified as a mental illness in Russia until Putin was PM, the man most responsible for this current wave of social reaction. Those are the just the contradictions of how culture changes. It’s not an indictment of Russians as some permanently backwards people, it’s just a description of the current situation in Russia.