One year on. Hundreds of thousands are dying or dead, millions are displaced, the Middle East is undergoing its greatest changes in a generation, Iran has directly attacked Israel twice in one year, and Yemen has proven that the US Navy ain’t worth shit. We are the closest we have been to nuclear war (discounting accidents) in decades, but also the fall of Israel.
Because one day, the prisoners of a concentration camp paraglided over a wall.
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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 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.
Oops sorry for the repost, but topic got locked. Could someone please help me analyze this Foreign Policy article about China allegedly occupying a significant part of Bhutan? There’s a lot of stones thrown in this article at China, I can’t even find on usually anti-Chinese Wikipedia. Article once misleadingly mentions “Tibetans” but it seems it’s talking about the few percent of “free-Tibet” crowd. China and Bhutan don’t even have their borders defined, but article suggest that China is invading Bhutan, etc… Thanks.
If you look up ‘beyul khenpajong’ on yandex or duckduckgo, you get almost exclusively articles about Chinese aggression and some tourism stuff. Most of them came out between March and August 2021, and the original source in English appears to be a Foreign Policy article from February 2021. That same article is what they are following up on, here. They also all use some variation of a phrase about the valley (which is what ‘beyul’ means) being sacred to Buddhism or important to the royal family of Bhutan. The smug phrasing about how awful and aggressive China is sets my teeth on edge.
Reading between the lines of this article, China and Bhutan have had a number of territorial disputes since the 80s, running down from the PRC liberating Tibet. In the FP article, they even quote a Tibetan exile slaver who refuses to comment on whether Tibet has a right to the lands in question even though he says China does not. The point of these articles is to create a unfalsifiable sense of truth. If there are ten articles, all saying more or less the same thing, from different sources, across months or years, then they must be on to something. It hardly matters if it’s the same three claims from the same source, repackaged over and over.
It looks like China is building up in two valleys or villages in the hopes of switching them for the ones they actually want. i do not know what areas, specifically, they want or why they want them. Taking over an important valley and giving it infrastructure improvements in hopes of a swap seems to reflect a rational negotiating strategy. Any and all mention of fortifying the border with India or provoking India is journalistic malpractice if they do not mention that this is the border where members of the Chinese and Indian army cannot have guns, and beat each other with pole arms. This region is rough terrain, to put it mildly, so there is no risk of an army from either side sneaking in via a handful of extra runways and helicopter pads. If China was actually the devil, they would take the land they wanted by force of arms or they would offer some BRI project or debt relief plan that Bhutan couldn’t refuse
Oops I didn’t see you reposted here so I’ll post my response here as well.
I can think of a a few reasons they would do this. Bhutan is an Indian vassal (although less so now than in the past) so this could put pressure on India to resolve their (China’s and India’s) border dispute. India has repeatedly refused very advantageous (for India) solutions like the Package Deal, proposed by China multiple times since 1960, where China gets Aksai Chin (with a civilian population of 0 and an area of 38,000 km2) and India gets Arunachal Pradesh (with a population of 1.4 million and an area of 83,743 km2).
Another reason could be to pressure Bhutan directly for a number of reasons. It could be to get Bhutan to recognize China as a country, which it hasn’t done since the founding of the PRC (it doesn’t recognize the RoC either). It could be to get Bhutan to stop dragging it’s feet (in general it seems that feet-dragging is the default mode of operation of the Bhutanese government) with actually settling the border, which it has also never done. It could also be to get Bhutan to officially give up their claims on their former enclaves inside China, of which there are many, mostly in Tibet but iirc there are a few in other provinces (India also has at least one that it hasn’t given up claims on).
I wrote most of this from memory and I’m not super well read on the topic so there are probably some inaccuracies.
