Image is of Venezuela's Maduro and Colombia's Petro walking together at the Miraflores Palace in Caracas in 2022, sourced from this article.
Ordinarily, I avoid straying into the American domestic situation, but the government shutdown appears to be continuing into increasingly harmful territory. If the situation is not resolved, soon tens of millions of Americans will lose food assistance, and already millions of federal employees are furloughed or are working without pay. To those not in the know, this situation has essentially stemmed from the Democrats refusing to sign off on the Republicans' plan to substantially shrink Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, which would eventually result in tens of millions losing healthcare coverage and tens if not hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths.
To be clear, though, the Democrats have not exactly been paragons of healthcare: they not only oppose plans to make affordable healthcare a right (in defiance of wide popular opinion), but also do their part to maximize suffering. Biden's policies during the pandemic ensured at least one million people died, and millions of children lost public healthcare coverage. We may never know the true toll, as the US decided that simply ceasing to report on a problem means that the problem no longer exists.
In other news, over the last couple weeks, the US has expanded their hostility against Venezuela by also including Colombia in their ire, and particularly the left-leaning leader, Petro. Both countries are now experiencing major economic and covert pressure by the US to try and cause regime change. The US has deployed an aircraft carrier to the waters near Venezuela and is conducting a military training operation with Trinidad and Tobago, which Venezuela has warned may be the prelude to the long-awaited attack.
Additionally, the US is attempting to combat Chinese geopolitical interest in central America and the Caribbean by carrying out digital attacks and launching pressure campaigns against Chinese and pro-Chinese countries and organizations. Given China's enormous economic weight, if central America were to break all ties with China, it would be a catastrophe for them; such decisions would only be made by outright compradors, and the resulting economic problems would make their reigns unpopular and, hopefully, brief.
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The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. 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.
Cry-Bullies On Parade: Danish Political Elite Has Crashout Over Zionism Poster
The small pro-democratic opposition party "Free Greens" that is running for Denmark's upcoming local elections, has suddenly become the target of a coordinated pile-on from the Nordic hermit kingdom's political establishment for speaking out against racism. A lynch-mob of reactionary ghouls with connections to the Social Democrat-led right-wing regime is descending on the small party that represents ethnic minorities and who has made the fight against the pervasive racism in Danish politics one of their main priorities.
Read more...
The cause of the ire is a poster by the Free Greens for the upcoming local elections saying "Liberate Copenhagen From Zionism". The party seeks to end the city of Copenhagen's complicity in the genocide against Palestine by ending the city's political, economic and cultural collaboration with the zionist apartheid regime in occupied Palestine.
This has caused some of the worst people in Denmark to spew their performance outrage all over the media. Patient zero is Frederik Vad, the Social Democrat MP who started the debacle by posting a picture of the poster on Twitter, whining and moaning and calling for people to "remember who knew what they were doing, even if they claimed that it was just about a foreign radicalised government. Remember who sent an invisible threat in the lamp posts to a very small group of citizens who are already afraid".
One must admire the flexibility of a mind that can see an invisible threat. It’s a sort of political clairvoyance, I suppose, albeit one that requires you to want to see the threat for the magic to work.
Vad is a notorious islamophobic hardliner, infamous for peddling conspiracy theories about a fifth column of "seemingly well-integrated" Muslims scheming to undermine Danish society. Vad's Social Democratic party is infamous for its Zionism and islamophobia.
In his statements to the press Frederik Vad denounces Free Green leader Sikandar Siddique as "a dangerous man" and claims the poster is "a barely concealed threat" against Danish Jews and claims that the word "liberate" is the same kind of rhetoric that resistance movements use. This is somehow bad.
He then goes on to bloviate about some kind of imaginary twee Zionism that doesn't support any of the bad unsightly stuff that needs to happen to get the sausage made but only wish for there to be a "Jewish homeland". Vad conveniently fails to address how all forms of Zionism, including the most liberal small-bean ones, are predicated on the brutal subjugation and forcible removal of the indigenous population of Palestine.
When questioned whether criticism of Zionist ideology is permissible, Vad magnanimously allowed it, "but just not in the way the Free Greens do it." He declared that the statement "we have nothing against Jews, we just don't like Zionists" represents "a classic antisemitic trait." Apparently, one is only permitted to criticize Zionism provided one doesn't actually dislike it
Ever the islamophobic firebrand, Vad claimed that the Free Green's message is equal to Hamas terminology. Vad knows very well that to the average Dane, Hamas simply means "scary angry Muslims", a dog whistle that Bad has no problem blowing to smear his Muslim political opponents.
Vad, deliberately conflating Zionism and Judaism, claims that antizionism is antisemitic because most Jews allegedly hold zionist beliefs.
The tabloid B.T. wheeled out it's professional hot-take machine Joachim B. Olsen to comment on the matter. In what he probably though was a real "gotcha", he made the bizarre point that calling for the dissolution of "the only Jewish state in the world" is inherently antisemitic because the Free Greens were not opposed to the existence of other countries like Russia and Pakistan. Could it be, Joachim, you absolute imbecile, that neither of those states are, by their very constitutional design, genocidal settler-colonies?
Joachim B. Olsen used to be an MP for the far-right libertarian Liberal Alliance party and has previously made deranged racist claims about Palestinian parents not loving their children the same way Danish parents do. He has previously called for the use of napalm and nuclear weapons on Lebanese civilians and called the genocidal violence in Gaza a "well-deserved lesson".
Olsen, having apparently been kicked in the head by a horse, went on to declare it "antidemocratic" for the Free Greens to call for the city of Copenhagen to cease cooperation with "Israel". Olsen said: "It is authoritarian for authorities to decide who all sorts of people can work together with" and continued "It is an attack on a foundational freedom here in Denmark. Can't you have a friendship city in 'Israel' then?"
The clownery is unbelievable: It is a tyrannical overreach for the city of Copenhagen to decide who the City of Copenhagen has as a friendship city.
The reactionary hissy fit quickly escalated to lawfare. Max Meyer, the leader of the Danish Zionist League, himself a card-carrying Social Democrat and chairman of the extremist social democratic propaganda outlet Piopio, immediately ran to the police to report the poster for somehow being a "hate crime". Meyer made sure to cry the usual zionist crocodile tears to the media about how he fears for his own safety, how the poster makes "all Danish Jews" feel unsafe and whined about how there are no longer room for Zionists in Denmark.
Meyer asked the inane rhetorical question of "what if I said Liberate Denmark From Hamas-Supporters?" to illustrate how "antisemitic" the poster supposedly is.
Yes, Max, what if? What if the city of Copenhagen had official partnerships with the Palestinian resistance? What if expressing support for Hamas was not a literal criminal offense in Denmark? What if Hamas was a fascist movement engaged in an ongoing genocide? What if everything was different from the way it actually is, you absolute nitwit?
Meyer offered this gem of unfalsifiable paranoia: when confronted with the fact that the poster was about Zionist ideology, not Jews, he sniffled, "But they just make that distinction so they can say it has nothing to do with Jews."
Social Democrat-aligned agrobusiness lobbyist Sune Gylling Æbelø took the whining to a new level in a piece headlined "Get that filt down! Immediately!". In a deranged screed that read like the looping scribbles of a madman, he made the utterly unfounded claim that the poster's message was "dripping" with "strong anti-Semitic undertones."
Æbelø even went so far as to claim that the slogan "Liberate Copenhagen from Zionism" is no better than the anti-Semitic graffiti "a Jew swine works here" known from the popular TV series Matador set during WWII.
Opposing a violent and genocidal ideology apparently makes you just as bad as the nazis. The weaponized stupidity and historical illiteracy is of monumental dimensions.
While the far-right Zionists are becoming more and more untethered by reality as they descend into madness over a local election poster, the Free Greens stand firm. They are, and have always been, anti-racists. For instance they have proposed a national plan against antisemitism. Their goal is simple: to ensure the city of Copenhagen is not in partnership with a genocidal apartheid state. As party leader Sikandar Siddique explained to DR: "When we say liberate Copenhagen from Zionism, it is not about citizens or religion. It is about liberating Copenhagen from a political ideology that builds on ethnic dominance, apartheid and oppression".
Sources:
Something similar is happening around the Dutch election campaign where leaders of the governing parties are targeted in posters that say: “they chose genocide, will you?”. The posters are made by an ngo that is very loosely connected to a few parliamentarians of the greenleft party and everyone is losing their shit.
That’s a good slogan
Do you add the words “Nordic Hermit Kingdom” to all of these stories or is it just something the press does in all of them?
That is a SoyViking special (something he adds)
Ok thanks. I noticed the pattern and was wondering if it was the entire press or just our friendly local danish owl.
Consider it a personal signature
We love it, folks