Image is of a colectivo: an armed group, usually operating in impoverished areas, which act to support and defend the socialist government of Venezuela. They are often derided as vigilante terrorist groups which prop up the government, because cops are only bad when they are socialist and not murdering minorities, I suppose.
Maduro's party, the PSUV, has won the election after a staggering amount of propaganda by the opposition, who said their polls suggested they were going to win and that Maduro's loss was inevitable. The reaction across Latin America is what one would expect. Left-leaning leaders are generally respecting the results and congratulating Maduro, while those on the right and/or are US puppets (such as in semirecently-couped Peru) are calling for recounts, or even that the election was illegitimate. The US itself is also unhappy about the results. We shall soon see if their unhappiness boils over into yet another coup attempt.
Personally, I think they should have ran Guaido again.
Thank you to @Redcuban1959@hexbear.net for the election coverage here, and everything else they do in the news megathread.
The COTW (Country of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific country every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied nations. If you've wanted to talk about the country or share your experiences, but have never found a relevant place to do so, now is your chance! However, don't worry - this is still a general news megathread where you can post about ongoing events from any country.
The Country of the Week is Venezuela! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
Please check out the HexAtlas!
The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week's thread is 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.
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.
I wanted to respond to @zed_proclaimer@hexbear.net and @shipwreck@hexbear.net but the previous thread got locked. https://hexbear.net/comment/5186705
In regard to Putin. Putin wasn't put in this position from his own will. He was forced into it.
Up until 2007-2008 he was the golden boy for the West(TM).
Putin though they were gonna let him (and Russia) in the club. He was gonna be one of the (imperialist) boys.
But West(TM) had other plans. The USA is not gonna let a country with 20k nuclear warheads become a member.
What if Russia starts having demands? USA can handle their little lapdogs (Germany, UK etc.) but a power like Russia?
So they played good old mediocre liberal boy Vlad like a fiddle all these years (he even admitted it in an interview, it was the one of the 4 hour long interview-address to the nation, last question from the audience for those that want to see it).
They were putting CIA NGOs all over the former USSR and its' satellites, they openly bribed politicians, they brought Poland into NATO, Czechia into NATO, Hungary, Slovenia, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Croatia even the freaking Baltics right next to his border. They started shit in Georgia, they staged a coup in Ukraine that brought literal Nazis into the front that were killing ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine for years and it took an open and direct threat of turning the Black Sea into NATO sea to finally get him to do anything. And even after that, it took him 8 years to realize that they played him about the Minsk agreement too! Then it dawned on him that maybe they don't like him that much...
He keeps criticizing Lenin and Stalin but he is not good enough to clean their boots, while at the same time he has to draw from the legacy of USSR in order to keep the ship together because deep down he knows that was the best period in Russian history.
If today's Russian movements wants to win, they need to follow this line of thinking instead of tailing the liberals.
What I'm still afraid of is if USA does a U turn and starts shaking its' tail and playing friends to Russia, the liberal elite in Russia might still fall for it. There are still voices inside Russia that think friendship with USA is possible...
You are talking about the past and not about the present. I’m not really interested in these moralisms, you are not being a serious geopolitical analyst of present reality when you couch things in this Manichean way. I have to say to people again and again and again here, moralism is a poor lens of analysis and intent is irrelevant. I see it a lot from baby leftist idealists in the west who are framing every situation into one where they can have perceived moral superiority. This includes inventing hypotheticals to get mad at instead of looking at reality occurring in front of you.
Look at actions and results, that is all that matters. Putin has gone to war with the west and dealt the empire a major blow, making him the anti-imperialist de facto champion. China has sat around indecisively doing nothing.
There was a point in time where Hamas was the pro-Israel comprador faction that opposed actual Palestinian revolutionaries. That time is past and not really worth mentioning when we critically support their modern struggle.
Factions shift and change, and if you are unwilling to shift with them you will get buried in the sands of time and made irrelevant. Geopolitics is a game and you need to learn the rules instead of getting mad about someone else’s play.
It is true that russia and putin are causing damage to the empire and they deserve all the credit for it.
But it is also true that they were forced into this situation and used to prefer being friends with the great satan. Past matters. I'm not moralising, I'm just saying that someone who has been fooled 50 times might get fooled again. But I hope not. inb4 minsk 3
Harden your heart oh putin
My point is that them “being forced into it” is literally irrelevant and based on moralist intention reading. Who the fuck cares? They are doing it. That’s all that matters
What the hell are you even talking about?
The results are that since Putin took office almost all of the former USSR and ex-socialists countries became NATO countries.
China doesn't have to do anything because they put out the fire before it spreads through the forest. Xinjiang, Tibet, HK, Taiwan. You hardly hear any news about them. Why? Because China takes care of the problem. They don't let US spread its' poison. If Germanophile Vlad was the leader and his liberal friends were running things in China we'll be in the second Xinjiang war by now.
OK Sun Zhu.
Succession to the Russian presidency does matter and there is a chance that a liberal would be comprador gets in after Putin dies but I feel that the material conditions wouldn't really allow one to take power or exercise a program of subservience easily. Russia has returned as a global power and has the strength to where it doesn't need to kowtow to the west and they know it. A would be compressor would probably just follow that same path as Putin and abandon it like Putin did. The Russian Federation also isn't the USSR with a repressed capitalist class willing to sell out the entire country. The Russian capitalists have seen their assets being stolen by the EU and US and the national bourgeoisie have a reasonable say in the government.
Things have definitively changed and I don't think the great Satan will be able to properly triangulate anything super productive in Russia for at least a decade. Especially so since Russia and NATO are in a proxy war right now.