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.

guaido-despair guaido

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

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 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.

  • Redcuban1959 [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    107·
    5 months ago

    "Different parts of the IDF are fighting each other, IDF can’t coordinate w/ the police, lawmakers are fighting the army & each other, there is attempted violent takeover of military property underway & big (select) groups of citizens are armed.

    Closest i’ve ever experienced to state breakdown. It has all the ingredients for the gov’t to try & justify imposing martial law on citizens - unprecedented

    Hamas, Hezbollah could never have imagined how much they would succeed. This is better than they even dreamed."

    • very_poggers_gay [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      68·
      5 months ago

      [W]e must resign ourselves to the inevitable… that the bourgeoisie is condemned to become every day more snarling, more openly ferocious, more shameless, more summarily barbarous; that it is an implacable law that every decadent class finds itself turned into a receptacle into which flow all the dirty waters of history; that it is a universal law that before it disappears, every class must first disgrace itself completely, on all fronts, and that it is with their heads buried in the dunghill that dying societies utter their swan songs.

      — Aimé Césaire sicko-charging

      • miz [any, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
        21·
        5 months ago

        great comment. you inspired me to read more from Discourse on Colonialism and I already found this banger in the leadup to the above quote:

        “It is not by losing itself in the human universe, with its blood and its spirit, that France will be universal, it is by remaining itself.” That is what the French bourgeoisie has come to, five years after the defeat of Hitler! And it is precisely in that that its historic punishment lies: to be condemned, returning to it as though driven by a vice, to chew over Hitler’s vomit.

          • miz [any, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
            3·
            5 months ago

            I know that some of you, disgusted with Europe, with all that hideous mess which you did not witness by choice, are turning— oh! in no great numbers— toward America and getting used to looking upon that country as a possible liberator.
            “What a godsend!” you think.
            “The bulldozers! The massive investments of capital! The roads! The ports!”
            “But American racism!”
            “So what? European racism in the colonies has inured us to it!”
            And there we are, ready to run the great Yankee risk.
            So, once again, be careful!
            American domination— the only domination from which one never recovers. I mean from which one never recovers unscarred.
            And since you are talking about factories and industries, do you not see the tremendous factory hysterically spitting out its cinders in the heart of our forests or deep in the bush, the factory for the production of lackeys; do you not see the prodigious mechanization, the mechanization of man; the gigantic rape of everything intimate, undamaged, undefiled that, despoiled as we are, our human spirit has still managed to preserve; the machine, yes, have you never seen it, the machine for crushing, for grinding, for degrading peoples?
            So that the danger is immense.

            damn that goes hard

    • SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      64·
      5 months ago

      anybody know of any historical precedents to this sort of thing? as in, settlers go “no! you’re not doing fascism hard enough! we must take over the bases and force them to do genocide EVEN HARDER!”

      the closest thing I can think of is American settlers marching into Native American territory and settling there under the belief that the American government would protect them, which would sometimes happen and sometimes not, but that’s not so much infighting as what’s increasingly going on in Israel.

      I’m curious to see if this sort of infighting could plausibly go somewhere or if every Zionist will circle the wagons once the war with Hezbollah begins

      • Greenleaf [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        39·
        5 months ago

        I have read accounts of white settlers in North America in the 19th century. They were every bit as deranged as Israeli settlers. There was frequent conflict with the US Army but that was only because settlers always have a reach that exceeds the grasp of what the military can support. But I suspect white settlers in North America were far more reliant on support from the military than Israeli settlers are with the IOF due to the distances involved, so perhaps that allows Israeli settlers to be even more hostile to the military. Also, Palestinians are forcibly kept more defenseless than Native Americans were, at least so it seems to me.

      • Dolores [love/loves]@hexbear.netEnglish
        38·
        5 months ago

        it’s kind of unimaginable at this scale, but settlers given the slimmest autonomy & obligations to a distant government pretty much always have an impulse to take affairs into their own hands. Mormons, Martin Cortez & the encomienderos, Revolt of San Tito on Krete—but these motherfuckers are like, right next to the ‘proper’ state and have everything provided to them by that state. they aren’t responsible for getting the grain for the metropole or getting unfavorably taxed to my knowledge.

        this could really be a new leaf in settler derangement and entitlement tbh

      • ziggurter [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        32·
        5 months ago

        anybody know of any historical precedents to this sort of thing? as in, settlers go “no! you’re not doing fascism hard enough! we must take over the bases and force them to do genocide EVEN HARDER!”

        the closest thing I can think of is American settlers marching into Native American territory and settling there under the belief that the American government would protect them…

        I mean, you could also say it’s essentially one of the major reasons for the U.S. War of Independence (that and preserving slavery; also somewhat related).

      • thelastaxolotl [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        30·
        5 months ago

        Maybe a good example could be the US independence, one big turning point was Britain banned the settler from expanding into native territories that were allied to london, which made the US landlord class angry with the crown

    • mkultrawide [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      60·
      5 months ago

      Man, 10 months ago, I thought Israel was going to head towards a civil war, but it would have to do with a mix of failure and tensions over Haredi being forced to serve in the military, not doing Jan 6th for actual rapists.