At the start of last week concluded the Summit of the Alliance of Sahel States (AES in French), in which, among other significant news, was the announcement of the creation of a unified military force for the alliance - called, rather straightforwardly, the Unified Force - which currently consists of about 5000 soldiers. Strictly speaking, joint military operations between the three countries had already been taking place for over a year before this point, but I imagine this organization streamlines the internal processes and makes it truly official.
Mali's Goïta delivered a speech during the summit in which he stated there were three main threats to the alliance: military, economic, and media. While this new military force is a major effort to combat military threats, the three countries have also mutually launched television, radio, and print media organizations to combat disinformation and psychological warfare. The economic aspect is the most tricky aspect of all, as (albeit decaying) American hegemony is not friendly to states which seek an independent economic path, most especially if that path does not directly benefit Western international corporations. Nonetheless, the three countries are doing what they can; they mutually launched an AES passport earlier in 2025, and this month, Mali has taken a bold move, recovering $1.2 billion after renegotiating mining deals with mining corporations after a comprehensive audit. Gold mining in Mali is a major sector of the economy, comprising about 20% of annual government revenue.
The three countries have also withdrawn from ECOWAS. The remaining countries consist of a small collection of West African countries, most significantly among them Nigeria and Côte d’Ivoire. ECOWAS is increasingly seen by the AES leadership - quite rightfully - as an organization which seeks to contain the radical shift in West Africa and return the region to the neocolonial French-governed status quo. As I talked about in a semi-recent news megathread, Nigeria is experiencing its own suite of internal problems, so perhaps in the coming years, ECOWAS will crumble from within and the AES can push back the terrorist organizations threatening them.
Last week's thread is here. The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
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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.
Mirrors of Telegram channels that have been erased by Zionist censorship.
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.
We need to start naming Hexbear's weaknesses if we are going to have a chance at correcting them:
*this list is incomplete.....
I think we have an opportunity to build a stronger community if we begin to correct these behaviors.
Agreed. I do think these have mostly been improving lately, though, especially the last one.
There's doomerism yes but the flip side is people who stick their heads in the sand and make socialists look like detached from reality deniers by saying nonsense like the US and Trump would make up kidnapping Maduro.
That kind of thing drives people away from us. Being consistently correct will get people interested in how we think and entertaining our propositions but denying easily provable reality because we don't like it when it's actually provable makes our denials of their fabrications less convincing because we come off as sore losers. Sober analysis isn't some exact center between doomerism and cope and denial but it definitely incorporates an understanding of things being bad without tipping over into woe-filled proclamations of how the world is hopeless and doomed and we'll never escape capitalism and we need to nuke it all. That kind of emotional outburst isn't great even if I understand it. We need to have the strength to admit defeats and failures and not retreat into cope and wishful thinking about "here's how Bernie can still win" but applied to an anti-imperialist situation as well as to try and avoid maximizing doom by extending a regional defeat to the complete loss of hope for the world forever and other absolutist antics of despair.
There's also the kind of doomer who just parrots suspicious statements and accusations and probable disinfo that aren't penultimate proclamations of doom but empire narratives that are considerably more in doubt than things like claims of capturing someone which historically are not lies. Such as the one about Maduro agreeing to this and this being an arranged exit which is interesting to report on but shouldn't be seen as anything but odd fiction or disinfo to dispirit the bolivarian revolution until solid proof or reliable sources of some sort arises.
I think the phenomenon you are describing is a behavior that's particularly encouraged by Twitter (which is part of Hexbear's genes), but is rooted in some of us testing our predictive power we get from a materialist worldview. I think this is understandable as an impulse or tendency, but we need to moderate the feeling of trying to drop a "take", so we can get some clout/confidence/credibility later when the take is proven correct. Twitter has the best returns on this due to the way it's designed, but it doesn't transfer well to Lemmy.
We should be patient and trust that the story will tell itself, our community should value accuracy and limit spreading rumors among ourselves. I think the meme culture on the site has at least a handful of "untruths" built in to the canon.
I think it would be good to name it and add it to the list. In some ways it could fit in to "left-signalling" because I think we do it because "lefter == corrected" (not true!). Probably would be better to have a standalone term for it, though.
Edit: this also has a scoop of "contrarianism" mixed in, but yeah it definitely is its own thing, of we could get a name on it.
Edit2: maybe call it "rumormongering/premature takes and predictions"?