Image is of the Power of Siberia natural gas pipeline, which transports gas from Russia to China. This isn't an oil pipeline (such as the ESPO) but I thought it looked cool. Source here.
Trump has recently proposed a 500% tariff on goods from countries that trade with Russia, including India and China (who buy ~70% of Russia's oil output), as well as a 10% additional tariff on goods from countries that "align themselves with BRICS." Considering that China is the largest trading partner of most of the countries on the planet at this point, and India and Brazil are reasonably strong regional players, I'm not sure what exactly "alignment" means, but it could be pretty bad.
Sanctions and tariffs on Russian products have been difficult to achieve in practice. It's easy to write an order to sanction Russia, but much harder to actually enforce these sorts of things because of, for example, the Russian shadow oil fleet, or countries like Kazakhstan acting as covert middlemen (well, as covert as a very sudden oil export boom can be).
Considering that China was pretty soundly victorious last time around, I'm cautiously optimistic, especially because China and India just outright cutting off their supply of energy and fuel would be catastrophic to them (and if Iran and Israel go to war again any time in the near future, it'll only be more disastrous). Barring China and India kowtowing to Trump and copying Europe vis-a-vis Nordstream 2 (which isn't impossible, I suppose), the question is whether China and India will appear to accede to these commands while secretly continuing trade with Russia through middlemen, or if they will be more defiant in the face of American pressure.
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.
From today’s Naked Capitalism links:
At the Rio Summit, signs of BRICS in retreat – just when we need serious anti-imperial muscle CADTM
article is very long and detailed (recommend reading the full article), but here are the 10 “pessimistic” summary points from the author:
An organization with founding members who hate eachother, no ideological cohesion, accepting members with no real conditions, even members that hate eachother has no concret plan to oppose their perceived "common enemy".
This is the same as when in late USSR, the monarchists, fascists, communist, national liberals and Orthodox zealot stormed the Russian white House to depose Yeltsin and not knowing what to do after they managed to get in.
The absence of Xi Jinping is probably an reorientation of China's strategy from ''BRICS'' to make a stronger trading bloc with the ASEAN countries
I wonder if a BRICS 2 will work better with lessons learned form the first one. Like League of Nations to UN, or Articles of Confederation to Constitution.
BRICS is a step-up from the non-alignment movement, which didn't even have a nominal common enemy. To join the non-alignment movement, you just had to be a non-superpower, non-Asian US vassal, non-Western European country. Non-alignment movement chairs range from Tito and Castro to Suharto and Aliyev. The non-alignment movement didn't stop any wars between members like wars between India and Pakistan or how Iran flew jets into Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war so the 7th summit wouldn't take place in Baghdad. The non-alignment movement technically still exists with a summit held in Uganda in 2024, but I seriously doubt anyone here cares.
BRICS is better because there's some semblance of cohesion alongside great powers/superpowers not being barred from joining it.
BRICS needs to propose a new economic framework beyond multipolar neoliberalism, and only then could we take them seriously.
They’ve had three years to come together and draft something together, and yet in the end it seems that Russia is the only country who is interested in forging a new path. The very modest Kazan proposal last year really shows how much BRICS has squandered the golden opportunity (changes not seen in a hundred years) afforded by the Biden administration.
100%. I wonder if they were too loose with which states could join? And also the goal was too vague. They need member states ideologically committed to an alternate economic framework from the get go, instead of just a vague framework for trade deals. I'd like to think Russia could probably spearhead something new with the most tariffed countries or the ones who have pissed off the US the most recently, so like Iran, Yemen, North Korea, South Africa since they started that ICJ case, Cuba, those 3 AES in Africa, Vietnam, Venezuela, uh... Maybe Mexico since they seem pretty based recently.
I know they're poorer and less of the population than current BRICS, but that doesn't seem to have been super helpful for getting anything done and avoiding the financial domination of the US. Instead, maybe if they go into it with that goal from the get-go, work on it immediately with more ideological and committed anti-imperialist states, they could. China and Brazil joining would be great goals but only if they seemed interested in a move away from SWIFT and the dollar and could commit to through Presidential elections and such.
This is the issue I see from BRICS, it's basically reheating neoliberalism and slapping the multipolar word onto it.
If you are a country that partake into a global trade system, you don't want a multipolar world where there are no enforcer of "fair trade". You would prefer the current system that might penalize the whole country but not the bank account of the country's ruling class.
In the event, that you want to maintain neoliberalism but without challenging the US and cry about the unfair treatment, the next step is to create a trading bloc which you have certain advantages in it, but this is not a challenge to the system, it's carving a fiefdom for yourself
I'm not sure how the UN was an "improvement" from the LoN.
Unless you mean maintaining the dominance of strong nations over the weak via the Security Council.
"BRICS" needs to figure out what concretely they want to accomplish first that is not already facilitated by the current economic system dominated by the US
Isn't the whole point to create an alternative system altogether?
I think they originally just wanted to make an economic alliance, like just a vehicle for some trade deals. But it should be pretty obvious by now that the US won't abide even that. If you want something like that to work, you need to go into it with the plan to work on a full alternative system to the US finance-dominated world economic order. You need an alternative to the swift and to the dollar, and you need member states ideologically committed to this goal and opposed to imperialism. Otherwise, at least to me, it seems too vulnerable.
This is why i still don't understand US foreign policy establishment, you can easily normalize in earnest with Iran and Russia (if they have to choose between China or US, they would choose the latter 9 out of 10) and carve out piece by piece Chinese global asset and starve it onto the table since there are no cohesion between Brics member states.
I think that the BRICS countries seem to be realising this, if not too slowly. For example, the BRICS currency proposal that was laid out in Kazan last year, is something they should have been working on from the very beginning.
India definitely appears to be the weakest link in the whole ordeal, what with them trying to play both sides.
Only time will tell if they'll all be able to set aside their differences.
That's my worry. Well, both that they're starting too late and 2) that BRICS wasn't really made for this, so I'm not sure the systems are in place to make these plans, develop them, and enforce them. Maybe they could transform it in that direction, but hopefully that doesn't take too long.
Signing new free trade deals in a convention every 4 years is not "an alternative system".
Especially if the member states do it everyday under the current system