Bulletins and News Discussion from December 4th to December 10th, 2023 - The Legacy of Kissinger - COTW: Laos
Bulletins and News Discussion from December 4th to December 10th, 2023 - The Legacy of Kissinger - COTW: Laos
Due to American cluster bombing campaigns advised by Kissinger during the Vietnam War to damage supply lines, over 2 million tonnes of ordinance were dropped on Laos over about a decade, averaging a planeload of bombs every 8 minutes. Laos is thus the most bombed country on the planet up to this point. 80 million bombs failed to explode - the cleanup operation is expected to take centuries, and 25,000 people have been killed and injured by bombs in the last 50 years. About 50 people are killed or injured every year to this day.
After the United States withdrew from Laos, the Pathet Lao took power and abolished the monarchy. Kaysone Phomvihane became a dominant figure in Laotian politics, keeping the course on Marxism-Leninism and implementing the first Five Year Plan in 1981. The second Five Year Plan in 1986 was modelled on Lenin's NEP, and this doubled rice production and significantly increased sugar production. After the fall of the USSR, Laos allowed a small capitalist class to exist, with similar control over them as in China. Laos maintains a 48-hour work week with paid sick leave, vacation time, and maternity leave, and workers are well-represented in trade unions. They faired relatively well during coronavirus from a social standpoint due to quick and efficient action to lock down the country, experiencing ~750 deaths out of a population of over 7 million.
There is hope even after utter destruction by genocidal oppressors.
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The Country of the Week is Laos! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
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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 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.
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I'm South American and Guyana is like one of these weird dudes in your workplace that is ALWAYS there but never speaks to anybody like, I dunno, they're weird. In our image of South America we kinda don't include them, maybe Brazilians and Venezuelans do because they share borders, but people from Guyana or Suriname are never mentioned like ever, two full countries that don't even participate in discussion with their regional neighbors or anything like that. Yo, they don't even play football in CONMEBOL, what the fuck? Can you imagine Messi shredding Guyana 9-0?
aren't Guyana and Suriname also the only countries in South America without Spanish as an official language? that might be part of the reason (okay I guess Brazil also, but Portuguese is a much closer language)
Yeah, Guyana speaks english and Suriname dutch (along with other languages, like creole, it's mixed). But they live in isolation to the rest of the continent, maybe because their independence process came much later then the rest of South America (XIX Century). I don't know, they're just there and we don't speak about them too much.
Roman numerals? you must have mistaken me for some kind of intellectual
Phew, thank god I got it right. Death to r*man numerals tho.
Ret5rn to trad1t10n
Geographically it makes sense. They have hundreds of miles of dense amazon jungle on all sides of them, their nearest trading partners for most of their colonial history would have been their immediate neighbors in French Guiana and Venezuela, (or their historic counterparts) and the islands in the west indies, many of which were also colonial possessions under the same flags.
I never took the time to think of those three and their relationship to the rest of South America, from an outsider it looked strange too. But materially the cultural divide makes sense.
two full countries that don't even participate in discussion with their regional neighbors or anything like that.
Both are members of Unasur and Celac, the thing is that they consider themselfs more Caribbean than South American.
George from Metal Gear Rising Revengeance is Guyanese, and that's the only thing I know about the place.
I know Guyana because it's the birthplace of Walter Anthony Rodney, a great marxist theorist who studied colonization, slavery and imperialism, a must-read for anybody who is interested in that topic. He was a massive chad, unfortunately, he shares the same fate of many marxists: killed by the authorities at a young age.
That is how I know of Guyana as well. He had a book on Guyanese history, and discusses it briefly in 'Decolonial Marxism'.
How much of George’s accent is Hideo Kojima hallucinating and how much is how people actually sound in Guyana?
Like someone who heard it twice and tried to recreate it from memory. Its pretty bad
The British Empire and its consequences.
