A reminder that as the US continues to threaten countries around the world, fedposting is to be very much avoided (even with qualifiers like "in Minecraft") and comments containing it will be removed.

Image depicts a destroyed Saudi pipeline pumping station.


My weekly preamble is in spoiler tags below.

preambleIf last week has had a geopolitical main character, it was Ansarallah in Yemen. In under 24 hours, they managed to seize a very large amount of territory to their west from Saudi-backed mercenary groups. Tens of thousands of enemy soldiers fled, thousands more were captured, and hundreds of combat vehicles and all sorts of military equipment and ammunition are now in Ansarallah's hands. The entire Red Sea coast of Yemen is now under their control, as well as some of the islands in and around the Bab el-Mandab, which is the narrow strait connecting the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden, which then goes on to connect to the Arabian Sea.

While Ansarallah had a pretty good grip on the Red Sea beforehand and could blockade it to the extent that traffic through the Red Sea plummeted in 2024 and 2025 and remain subdued to this day, it is now capable of much more direct control. And the strait is considerably narrower than Hormuz, meaning there is little hope for any covert operations like those of which the US regularly tries and fails to do over there. The only alternatives for the enemies of Ansarallah both now and in the future are the route all the way around Africa, which becomes even less attractive than usual as fuel prices rise into daily record highs, or the newly inaugurated Northern Sea Route under the firm control of Russia.

While Ansarallah is likely to continue their territorial acquisitions to an extent - with Marib looking like an obvious target - how things will continue from this point seems likely to be increasingly diplomatic. Yemen was once divided between North Yemen (which is, really, western Yemen) and South Yemen (which is, really, eastern Yemen), and this division reflects several genuine historical differences between the populations. Ansarallah has repeatedly stated that they have no intention to militarily occupy the south, and indeed, they ended this most recent offensive at approximately the historical border. Nonetheless, the government in once-South Yemen's capital of Aden is considered the sole internationally recognized government of Yemen, which doesn't sound sustainable for the future, so we'll just have to see how the situation develops geopolitically from here, even if it's unlikely to be militarily in the case of the southern and eastern territories.

While all this has been going on, Ansarallah was additionally applying major pressure on Saudi Arabia itself, by bombing their military airfields and, even more critically, their oil transportation and production facilities. These strikes were mostly limited to the port facilities in e.g. Yanbu and Jazan, and the Western air interceptor famine has meant that these strikes were mostly unopposed and caused substantial losses. However, Ansarallah has now destroyed some pumping stations for the East-West pipeline that spans Saudi Arabia, bypassing Hormuz for some (but not all) of Saudi Arabia's oil production to the tune of around 4 million barrels per day, which is, in a happy numerical coincidence, about 4% of pre-2026 oil production. I've seen several wildly varying estimates for how long it might take to repair the stations, with some saying a few days and others stating at least a month; the damage does look pretty gnarly on the images. Of course, it might not really matter, because Ansarallah can easily just fire another missile at a station once it's repaired, unless and until the Saudis give in to Ansarallah's demands and end the war.


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.

The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine

If you have evidence of Zionist 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 the temporary Zionist entity. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:

UNRWA reports on the Zionists' 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:

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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[–] 65 points 5 days ago* (50 children)

Polls in Venezuela show Rodriguez and Trump have low favorability ratings and Machado has the highest, although it's declining.

doubt

Edit: The poll they site is here and it honestly reads like a joke- like they just polled a handful of people from the richest neighborhood they could find

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  • [–] 48 points 5 days ago (1 child)

    More than 90% of Venezuelans told Meganálisis in January they were grateful to Trump for sending U.S. special forces into Caracas that month to remove Maduro

    Yeah this polling company is full of shit

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  • [–] 41 points 5 days ago* (38 children)

    It's a telltale sign of the author's slant in favor of the imperialist narrative trying to ultimately sow division within the movement to fabricate a split and weaken chavismo. If this is the angle this writer is coming from (lying because pro machado), we can ask ourselves why would they want people to believe delcy is a puppet other than to fracture the movement so Machado or some other actual comprador can take over? The only way the US actually takes over Venezuela is by an internal coup against chavismo, which is only possible by sowing disunity, as many on hexbear are more in favor of over solidarity.

    Trump seaks the same way about Kim jung un as he does delcy here, is that evidence that the dprk is a puppet of the US?

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  • [–] 15 points 5 days ago (10 children)

    how much space is chavismo supposed to give to any form of delcy's cooperation before it becomes functionally indistinguishable from a comprador government? i'm really asking because there is a limit to what a double agent can do

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  • [–] 14 points 5 days ago (1 child)

    It's up to the masses but considering the communes are directly receiving money to expand and deepen their work from delcy's government due to this type of maneuvering, I don't see why they would decide to stop their ongoing sustainability and economic projects to enter guerilla warfare with their own party and government. Even to colombianlenin's point that there is a growing amount of discontent within chavismo, most of them are writing about how fucked the situation is and making it a point to say it isn't delcy's fault and that she personally hasn't done anything amounting to betrayal, she is just in an impossible situation because of external factors.

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  • [–] 6 points 5 days ago (7 children)

    What is it you propose the communes, or Delcy, should do?

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  • [–] 5 points 5 days ago (6 children)

    if it's not going to be refusing to cooperate, then the times she's buying for the communes to do whatever it is they intend to do is probably less than it would take for the us to collapse and by extension not consolidate an annexation. i don't know what it's like there it's true, so all i can do is look at these alignment activities and hope the communes aren't standing idle. did they purge any element that failed to stop the abduction or do i have the wrong narrative about how that happened?

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  • [–] 9 points 5 days ago* (1 child)

    she's buying for the communes to do whatever it is they intend to do is probably less than it would take for the us to collapse

    It's just cope to say the US will collapse any time soon. There's no real reason (propaganda circlejerks on this website don't count) that the US should experience a collapse in the coming decades. If anything it may at most have to pull back a bit but it will have its trained champion climate change gut-punching the global south with no mercy for it in the coming decades while it rides it out in an unusually comfortable spot in terms of impacts. And one should never base choices off the idea that maybe hopefully the most powerful capitalist hegemon in history will near term collapse and you can just sit back and compromise yourself as they infect you with tendrils of influence and control and it'll all work out fine.

    There were real signs of stress in the US for example in the late 80s and some were saying by the turn of the millennium that the USSR would surpass the US and well look what happened. Communists have long had a problem of being drunk with "world revolution right around the corner!" and even the more sober like Lenin can take pessimism in the wrong direction as well. Which just goes to show predicting things like this with any real certainty to any small time scale less than a century is very, very, very hard due to so many moving parts.

    Intellectually including in our decisions we must be pessimists. We must keep an optimistic will to continue to fight but we must be more sober in our actual thinking and planning and decisions on the ground.

    At best an argument could be made for waiting out Trump but there's zero sensible reason to suspect a Democrat like Kamala or Newsom would let up the chokehold on Venezuela, would lengthen the leash, or would seriously allow a change to the relationship besides being hesitant to engage in more kidnapping and direct bombing or military action (though the military may very well convince them of the necessity of military action as we know Democrats are not doves). Trump at least will be out in a reasonable 2 years. The US will still be around and able to exert influence in this hemisphere in 20 and Venezuela is not going to wait out the US in this kind of position.

    It may be the US has changed and they don't actually care about a full overthrow of the revolution, that the fail-sons are in control and they really only want power over the oil as part of some grand strategy for destroying China and gaining leverage over the world. If so (big if) then this isn't a bad strategy on Venezuela's part though in an internationalist sense it's very problematic. But if it's not or that strategy starts not working and the US starts thinking about smaller wins like complete overthrow of Venezuela and a puppet regime then these decisions not to resist but to cooperate and compromise themselves with the US infection will look very bad.

    Time will tell but tendrils of US influence are hard to get out. Once they burrow in they won't be excised except with violent force.

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  • [–] 10 points 5 days ago (3 children)

    I don't think anybody really has a solid narrative about how it happened. All I come back to is, fighting the US in its own hemisphere, without the military developments necessary, is just consigning millions to death. Playing the long game is the less bloody choice. Maybe it's the wrong choice but at this juncture it's ridiculous to claim to know whether it is or isn't.

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  • [–] 8 points 5 days ago* (2 children)

    all i can say is it's exactly where the us wants it to be. i'd agree there wouldn't be much coming out from there if there's a mass sabotage thing going on but the long game is a gamble of long odds. we shouldn't be surprised to see a capitulation

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  • [–] 12 points 5 days ago (1 child)

    We shouldn't be surprised to see a capitulation, but we also shouldn't be surprised to see playing dead and waiting for better circumstances. I should also note Venezuela is not exactly where the US wants it to be. The US wants Venezuela to be developing oil fields at a fevered pace for American profits, and despite all the press releases as far as I know not a single drilling rig has been transported. We also shouldn't be making sweeping declarations without actual information. The American empire is in slow inward collapse and playing the long game may turn out to be the right move. Even if it's not, it doesn't mean the people making the call are compradors.

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  • [–] 13 points 5 days ago (21 children)

    You again. I heard the same kind of discourse (ie like yours) from ex-communists that deserted to neoliberalism in the 90s but had to keep up socialist appearance to not alienate the masses.

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  • [–] 26 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (6 children)

    Even if Delcy is acting as comprador, the point is that this specific article is full of shit and citing bad polling. There is extremely little credible evidence that Machado has any level of relevance within Venezuelan politics, which is why the Trump admin abandoned her immediately.

    The more substantial evidence lies in the kind of agreements that Delcy is making, particularly around the recognition of Israel and the rejection of aid from Cuba. I don't doubt that Delcy is becoming unpopular, but I extremely doubt that Machado is becoming popular.

    The question is can this government create a revolutionary transition out of this position (as it has in the past) or is it simply stuck in a holding pattern of making the best of a worst case scenario, until a full blown neoliberal comprador takes over and really strips the copper wire out of the wall of the state. Ehen Venezuela is literally just an American gas station masquerading as a country, without even a commune system.

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  • [–] 11 points 5 days ago (5 children)

    of course the poll is bunk, but she is meeting with Trump and the imperialists do consider Venezuela a complete and total success, so take of that what you will

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  • [–] 10 points 5 days ago (4 children)

    They consider Iran a complete and total success as well. Hexbear users don't need materialism, trump tells them what is real and they believe it

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  • [–] 6 points 5 days ago (3 children)

    No they do not. They are panicked and flailing on Iran.

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  • [–] 7 points 5 days ago (2 children)

    They say the exact same shit as they are saying about Venezuela, which is all you are going off of, Trump's words

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  • [–] 14 points 5 days ago (13 children)

    I've said it before and I'll say it again, materialist analysis isn't "Venezuela in 2026 is basically the USSR in the 90s"

    Having no understanding of the entirely different material conditions, the economic, historical and cultural context, it is very easy to be confused about these things. I recommend learning about dialectical materialism instead of "vibes" so that you aren't falling prey to headlines.

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  • [–] 14 points 5 days ago* (7 children)

    I've come to the conclusion that it's not even worth responding to these vibes based liberals pretending to be leftists. They'll never read anything and they'll never acknowledge their jump-to-conclusions vibes aren't analysis. I'm just interacting less on Hexbear as a result.

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  • [–] 11 points 5 days ago (1 child)

    Yes I don't think they will change their minds because they have never tried to engage with what I have said. I mostly do it so there is at least one counter argument posted when they come out the woodwork to uncritically push imperialist narratives by machado stans and trump. I don't want the only takes being presented to be the wrong ones

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  • [–] 5 points 4 days ago*

    Thanks for doing it, I agree and it's nice to see your (and others) well thought out responses pushing back on the uninformed dooming.

    I only really have the information posted in the newsmega to go on, but consistently the doomers have less information and report their doom with glee. Even if they were all well informed and correct, their constant fucking tone of "I'm right and happy to be so" in the face of the suffering of the Venezuelan people pisses me off

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  • [–] 6 points 5 days ago (3 children)

    heuristics are important in an information war. it's good to err on the side of skepticism when information is scarce

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  • [–] 10 points 5 days ago (2 children)

    Unfortunately it seems most are skeptical of socialists in other countries and take state department talking points as real.

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  • [–] 8 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 child)

    C'mon, there's no way the alphabet agencies would try to push a narrative of Venezuela's government being a completely placid US puppet, it's not like it would please the hogs at home and help the stock market, nor would it do something like cause rifts in leftist movements within both the US and Venezuela as people are encouraged to take a hardline, entirely vibes based stance on the situation and direct all their ire at Venezuela's government instead of the US, which put them in this spot in the first place. There's just no way!

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  • [–] 12 points 5 days ago (3 children)

    Solidarity with Yeltsin! The imperialists are trying to sow division in the USSR

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  • [–] 10 points 5 days ago (2 children)

    Yes Venezuela in 2026 is the same as the USSR, very materialist, how could I not see that two countries in entirely different parts of the world with different histories are actually the same

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  • [–] 8 points 5 days ago* (1 child)

    The USSR was a much more advanced proletarian state and it fell to revisionism and compromise slowly, and nobody overthrew the government or did anything about it. No revolts from the soviets. Why would a much more bourgeois controlled electoral state not fall to the same pressures just as quietly?

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  • [–] 11 points 5 days ago*

    Because the quality of life for the average Soviet was magnitudes better than the average Venezuelan since they were a much more advanced state, had a much more diverse economy, including cutting edge manufacturing and a direct link to trading with the rest of the world. The situation was entirely different on every level. The remnants of slavery and Spanish colonialism are still reverberating in Venezuelan society, and the armed and politically educated masses who are still living in poverty due to imperialism and neo colonialism are not the people of the USSR in the late eighties. Their movement has been dealing with these types of issues since inception. Maduro would have been dealing with trump to make more money for Venezuela if he had been allowed to. There are almost no similarities between the situations aside from being a left movement that is antagonized by the US. Trying to dogmatically copy and paste things onto each other in a desperate attempt at justifying your preconceived notions is called idealism, it is what liberals do

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  • [–] 28 points 5 days ago* (7 children)

    Maybe, but we can't ignore the schism that is forming in the base of chavismo. There's a real faction that thinks she is a sellout.

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  • [–] 15 points 5 days ago (5 children)

    I mean if she was such a sellout to the extreme and defacto successor to Maduro, then the Venezuelan revolution was already don-zo. One man can’t stand between revolutionary process and instant sellout.

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  • [–] 11 points 5 days ago (1 child)

    Rodriguez is a sellout even though she didn't purge anybody in the cabinet that was handpicked by Maduro and who apparently agreed with everything Rodriguez has done. And if everyone in the cabinet is also a sellout, then you're essentially saying Maduro has surrounded himself with sellouts and was a dumbass who lacked political judgment to not surround himself with sellouts.

    Like I said multiple times, she hasn't done anything that either Maduro didn't do as well or wouldn't implicate Maduro on some level, in which case you can't claim that Rodriguez is a traitor but not say Maduro wasn't a traitor as well. Even the lack of any serious attempt by the communes, armed by Maduro, to liquidate Rodriguez doesn't have a good explanation if you're on the Rodriguez-traitor-Maduro-principled train. There is a good explanation for Rodriguez-principled-Maduro-principled (the communes see Rodriguez as a worthy successor of Maduro and understand that Venezuela is stuck with unequal treaties) and there is a good explanation for Rodriguez-traitor-Maduro-traitor (Maduro lied about arming the communes, so the communes cannot rise up to overthrow Rodriguez because they lack the material means to do so), but there is no good explanation for Rodriguez-traitor-Maduro-principled.

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  • [–] 8 points 4 days ago

    Maduro was both a one man revolution, holding up the entire state of Venezuela by himself, but was also so utterly incompetent that his entire cabinet were backstabbing traitors eager to sell him out to the yanks. And as always happens when evil revisionist rats run socialist states, all the people in these countries are too (insert disparaging term here) to realise that their government is actually secretly capitalist, but a bunch of western armchair leftists have it all figured out.

    Though I expect this narrative to shift as the cognitive dissonance of "Maduro good, Rodriguez bad, but still inexplicably supported by the people of the country" gets too difficult to bear as we go forwards, if the US decides that they'd prefer a fascist puppet and try to install one, I imagine these people will either go for "Good, the traitor deserves it" or they might begin to insist that Venezuela was never truly socialist and it was all smoke and mirrors to trick people while they were secretly an American puppet all along. We'll see how it goes. Honestly just seems like they won't be happy unless Venezuelans are dying in a pointless war at the same rate as Ukrainians.

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  • [–] 9 points 5 days ago (2 children)

    Great man theory is the primary driver of hexbearian analysis

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