this post was submitted on 19 May 2025
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Or perhaps the end of the beginning, if you're a little more pessimistic.


Image is from this Bloomberg article, from which I also gathered some of the information used in the preamble.


While Trump was off in the Middle East in an incompetent attempt to solve a geopolitical and humanitarian crisis, China has been doing something much more productive.

Chinese officials, including Xi Jinping, had a summit with CELAC (a community of 33 Latin American and Caribbean countries). There, he promised investment, various declarations of friendship, and visa-free entry for 30 days for citizens of Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru and Uruguay. Lula signed over 30 agreements with China. Colombia is joining the New Development Bank and hopes to gain the money for a 120-kilometer railway connecting the Atlantic and Pacific coasts as an alternative route to the Panama Canal. Even Argentina, ruled by arch-libertarian and arch-dipshit (but I repeat myself) Milei, was uncharacteristically polite with China as he secured a currency swap renewal to shore up their international reserves.

It wouldn't really be correct to say that Latin America is "siding with China over the US" - leaders in the region will continue to make many deals with America for the foreseeable future, and even Trump's bizarre economic strongman routine won't make them break off economic and diplomatic relations. What's significant here is that despite increasing American pressure for those leaders to break off all ties with China, few appear to be listening - and given that China is perhaps the most important economy on the planet right now, that is a very predictable outcome.

As the current American empire takes actions to try and avoid their doom, those very actions only guarantee it. As Latin America grows ever more interconnected with China and continues to develop, America will grow ever more panicked and demanding, and this feedback loop will - eventually - result in the death of the Monroe Doctrine.


Last week's thread is here. The Imperialism Reading Group is here.

Please check out the RedAtlas!

The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.

Israel-Palestine Conflict

If you have evidence of Israeli crimes and atrocities that you wish to preserve, there is a thread here in which to do so.

Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. 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.


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[–] ColombianLenin@hexbear.net 50 points 3 days ago (12 children)

Ok I need to know, why does pretty much every country go out their way to kiss zionist ass? From the gulf states to Vietnam and China, why is international politics so weak to try to do anything to barely slap "Israel"s hand? Serious, not shitposts.

Its mind baffling, it goes outside any logic or reason and I would even consider it against materialism. It's like giving reason to all right wing talks about zionist control over the world lmfao.

[–] hello_hello@hexbear.net 26 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (3 children)

I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're refering to as Israel, is in fact, USA/Israel, or as I've recently taken to calling it, USA plus Israel. Israel is not a country unto itself, but rather another illegal occupaton of a fully functioning USA empire made useful by the US Armed Forces, the Central Intelligence Agency and vital imperial components comprising a full empire as defined by any competent dictionary.

Many Palestinians get murdered by the USA empire every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the illegal occupation which is widely used for murdering Palestinians today is often called Israel, and many of its victims are not aware that it is basically the USA empire, developed by the colonizers who genocided almost all of the Native Americans a few centuries ago.

There really is an Israel, and these people are getting murdered by it, but it is just a part of the empire they are victims of. Israel is the illegal occupation: a part of the empire which resides on land that belongs to someone else who did not consent to getting murdered or having their land taken away. The illegal occupation is an essential part of the empire, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete empire. Israel is normally used in combination with the USA empire: the whole empire is basically USA with Israel added, or USA/Israel. All the so-called Israel distributions are really distributions of USA/Israel!


copypasta bit aside, it would be a blunder to openly state your hostility to Israel because it will only make you the next target of the US sanctions regime (a sanctions war is already being doled out to the entire world). The US would most likely use any Chinese sanction of Israel as the excuse for all out war which neither side would be able to control not to mention what the stage would be like for smaller AES/Global South nations like Vietnam.

The WPK in the DPRK having the most consistent position on Israel (does not exist has never existed) stems from them already being made into a global pariah for decades by the US (which has led to millions of deaths). Many capitalist Global South countries with centrist or socdem governments have so much more to lose.

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[–] xiaohongshu@hexbear.net 27 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (14 children)

Honestly, it probably came down to economics.

Everyone seems to have forgotten that there is still a 10% global tariffs on every country other than China, and Trump has made it clear that support for Israel is non-negotiable, not only for their foreign “partners”, but also for domestic US citizens.

This is one place where I think the US ruling imperialist class really leaned in on Trump’s pompous performance to psychologically manipulate the world’s reception towards US policies.

If Trump had just announced a 10% global tariffs, there would have been huge public outcry across the world.

Instead, what we get was at first, an insane Trump tariff plan where everyone laughed at how stupid it is “haha he’s imposing 150% tariffs on the penguins!!” and then Trump would “walk back” to “only 10%” and the world suddenly breathed a sigh of relief and quietly accepted the rate - for the fear that any noise could irritate a vindictive Trump to raise tariffs against their particular countries again.

A tariff is a tax on US consumers, it would raise the price, but on the flip side, it also means that the exporting countries have to deal with surplus export capacity. Every country now hopes for a deal with Trump because the first countries that manage to bring their tariffs down to 0% would be the winners against their exporting competitors.

Trump’s global tariff is actually threatening to unleash a mercantilistic fight among the exporting countries, and this is very dangerous because you can’t just keep adjusting the prices - at some point, overproduction leads to price collapse, and economic recession.

And while this is all playing out, the US is reshaping the global supply chain to its own interest.

This is happening because the world (many Global South countries) have bought into the “export led growth” model (lie) proposed (imposed) by the IMF. The idea that you have to earn export revenues before you can invest domestically can only work as long as there is a country willing to run a huge trade deficit at all times so you, the exporting country, can accumulate the trade surplus.

This was how Taiwan and South Korea “won” the race back in the 1970s-90s (the Four Asian Dragons), before the rise of China, and every other country has since flocked to emulate that strategy, believing that one day they will also become like Taiwan and South Korea.

Trump is now saying “I’m bored of the old winners, they no longer benefit me, I’m now reshuffling the board to pick a new set of winners. Here is your chance to rise to the top if you stroke my ego enough.” Pure mercantilism.

This is also why you see so many pro-BRICS, pro-China “alt media” people are now going through their cognitive dissonance. “US import only comprises 2% of China’s exports lol! Who cares??” But somehow many countries found themselves unable to just stop exporting to the US and replace their demand somewhere else. Strange.

I know I sound like a broken record at this point, but for the 25th time this week (lol), if there is no country willing to take on the net importer role to replace the US as a net deficit spender, then the US will always have a say on global trade.

That’s simply how the world has been shaped over the past several decades with the US and China enjoying running huge trade imbalances at the expense of the rest of the world. One of these two countries have to decide they no longer want to be part of this cursed marriage, and the shocking revelation is that the US seems to be the one who wants to break off from this marriage, and China doing everything it can to save it.

Also, bonus: there used to be another economic bloc that could challenge US’s dominance, and that is the EU. The euro is a far more acceptable saving currency for the rest of the world compared to yuan - and the real threat to the dollar hegemony in recent years. (If you somehow think I’m a “chauvinist” for China, you’ll see here that this is not the case).

However, very conveniently, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine just had to happen, and with the EU losing their cheap gas supply from Russia, it’s all but over for Europe:

The Russia-Ukraine war killed the euro and subjugated the entire European subcontinent to the US. This is what allowed Trump to advance to the next stages of US imperial strategy.

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[–] LoveYourself@hexbear.net 33 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Almost every nation on earth has an entrenched oligarchy/compradore/capitalist class that massively benefits from continued US Dollar hegemony and therefore the Zionist occupation and extermination campaigns. Whether those oligarchs run the country (the West, India, Gulf countries, etc) or simply hold varying degrees of internal power within the country( Russia, China, Colombia, Brazil, even to a lesser extent Iran & Venezuela) or are running parallel governments (Yemen, South Korea, takfiri proxies in North/West Africa) the issue is pervasive.

We must understand that the fight against Zionism is truly a class-struggle on a global scale (the Palestinian Resistance and Yemeni Government of Change and Construction are the global vanguard.) It is for this reason that the defeat of the zionist colony will transform the world geopolitical and economic landscape in favor of socialism insha'allah. This is, to my understanding, the position held by the Masar Badil organization.

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[–] FALGSConaut@hexbear.net 40 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

LOKOMOTIV BEATS TRAKTOR 2-1 IN OVERTIME AND WINS THE GAGARIN CUP!!! MY BOYS THE RAILWAYMEN LED THE LEAGUE ALL SEASON AND THEIR HARD WORK PAID OFF LETS GOOOOOOO

train-shining УРА ЛОКОМОТИВ train-shining

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[–] edge@hexbear.net 45 points 3 days ago (1 children)

(Supposedly) Russian forces have reached the border of Dnepropetrovsk. https://twitter.com/RWApodcast/status/1925210712009302240

I hope losing another oblast will make Zelenskyy realize he needs to accept Russia's terms or it will just get worse. (It absolutely won't make him realize that.)

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[–] Lovely_sombrero@hexbear.net 58 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Rep. Gerry Connolly dies at 75

Vaxxed?!

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