Bulletins and News Discussion from March 4th to March 10th, 2024 - The Coalition of Losers - COTW: Pakistan
Bulletins and News Discussion from March 4th to March 10th, 2024 - The Coalition of Losers - COTW: Pakistan
Image is of a protest in Pakistan after the attempted assassination of Imran Khan in November 2022.
What a clusterfuck of an election.
Imran Khan, the previous official Prime Minister of Pakistan, was removed by the command of the United States in April 2022 in a no confidence motion. This made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. Imran Khan and his supporters have protested since then against the Pakistani state, which is more-or-less governed by the military despite the furnishings of civilian rule. This has ranged from largely peaceful protests to trying to burn down and occupy houses and headquarters.
It was assumed by the Pakistani elite that they could make the problem go away by arresting Imran Khan and effectively forcing many PTI candidates to run as independents while hounding them with police raids and stopping them from campaigning - and adding salt on the wound by disabling social media access and mobile services on the day of the election to make it more difficult to co-ordinate. Fortunately, these people don't seem to quite understand how the internet works in the current day, and so Khan's supporters started up WhatsApp groups and improvised websites and apps to spread the word about which candidates to vote for, leading to Khan's party getting the plurality, though not the majority, of votes in the election.
This has created a rather depressed mood in the Pakistani elite. A coalition of eight parties joined together, obviously excluding the PTI, but this coalition is shaky and lacks much legitimacy, with two major parties inside it, the PML-N and PPP, being ideologically opposed on several issues. It has been regarded as "the coalition of losers" by Khan's supporters. The new Prime Minister is Shehbaz Sharif, who also ruled from April 2022 until August 2023 and is the younger brother of Nawaz Sharif, who served as Prime Minister three times before in the last few decades. With inflation at 30% and the economy greatly struggling, there are fears that things may only stay together for months, not years, before the coalition fragments and something else has to be done.
Your Monday briefing is here in the comments and here on the website. Your Thursday briefing is here in the comments and here on the website. Your Sundary briefing is here in the comments and here on the website.
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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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Elections in portugal tomorrow, lots of my comrades are optimistic but personally I'm bracing for impact, the communist party has been hammered for 2 years for its anti-nato position on russia-ukraine and for opposing arms shipments, even now the media doesn't shut up about that even though the general secretary has been campaigning hard on wage increases and the cost of inflation all over the country. Plus the socialist party has been in power for 9 years so there's a lot of tiredness with the left, also there's a new eurocuck green party that certainly is going to take a chunk from the anti-EU left (BE and PCP). The far right will surely get 3th place with at least 10-12%, and the center right social democratic party made a coalition with the very right wing christian democrats which is not even in parliament anymore and also with, incredibly funnily, the monarchist party in a coalition called "Democratic Aliance" which is a rehash of an 80s coalition with the same name and parties, so far they say that they won't make a deal with the far right to govern but it's hard to see how there can be a right wing majority without the far right. The market radical liberals are probably going to maintain their 5%
The socialist party's leader has the reputation of being in the left wing of the party (and he was caught on hot mic during the debt crisis saying "I don't give a fuck about our creditors we can drop the atomic bomb and say let's not pay") but he's made the whole party support him by talking to the right and center while also saying he wants a left majority and make a deal with the left parties like in 2015-2019 with the "geringonça". If that happens so be it, it would be better than a right wing government, but I'm skeptical that the left parties can get the major parts of their program done though a socialist party government, like housing, wages and especially important for the communist party union laws.
Polls have the right and left very close but polling has failed bigly in the last elections not predicting the socialist party absolute majority.
the communist party has been hammered for 2 years for its anti-nato position on russia-ukraine and for opposing arms shipments
I strongly suspect this position will end up paying off in the future, if not in the present. There is no possible way for NATO to win this war outside of kicking off WW3. It’s over. Unfortunately for most of Europe, it’s the right that will benefit because they seemingly are the only ones critical of NATO (in countries like Germany I mean).
I think so too (also imho anti-militarism is mandatory for a communist in the west even if it's politically unviable), in fact some of the media discourse about the war is different now than 2 years ago, still very pro-war though no doubt.
I don’t think the media narratives on Ukraine in Europe will ever change. The population will just become more and more opposed to it while the neoliberal parties and the media dig their heels in. This will lead to any political parties speaking out against it to gain in popularity, I think.
Out of curiosity what are some of the agenda/strategy/goals divergencies between the socialist and communist parties in Portugal?
The "socialist" party is just your average third way center-left social democrats, more center than left these days and the party that has governed portugal the longer.
The communist party is the oldest party in the country, used to be illegal during the dictatorship and acted clandestinely, it's an unreconstructed official communist party so it was on the side of the USSR until it ceased to exist and currently attends the IMCWP conference with AES and other worker's parties.
The party's program ultimately aims for a different political/economic system (which is kinda like the dotp but without saying it obviously, because of the d word) called "advanced democracy" that while retaining private enterprise for, say, restaurants and small businesses, does aim for a much larger role of the state in the economy based on democratic planning, there's more so here's a link if you wanna run it through a translator. However that's obviously not what's at stake in elections these days since our vote share isn't high enough to actually make that a reality, so in the electoral program you'll find stuff about inflation (big issue rn), housing (big issue rn), health care (big issue rn), lots of worker's rights stuff such as repealing current laws which constrain unions (the refusal of the socialist party to do this is what caused the communists to take down the 2021 government, we got punished for it but nevertheless), anti-imperialism, opposing the constraints of the euro and the EU, regional issues (the party has a good base in the Alentejo region and even leads some local governments), nationalizations, and so on and so on, all good things. Obviously all that is difficult to do with the EU breathing down our necks, but the party makes it clear pretty often that the EU is a problem and that leftists politics aren't viable if you're not willing to go against european institutions but the approval for the EU here is INSANELY HIGH.
Because the media always gave us little to no space to propagate our policies (even back when we got above 10% they ignored us and nowadays they even give a party that got 1 MP last election more space than us) the way we get more people on our side is by directly going to workplaces and talking directly to workers since that's our voting base (and when there's an agent on the inside trying to unionize the place) and places where people gather, which is how communists are supposed to do it but it's limited when most people get politics from the TV where we're constantly shit talked.
Ultimately, it's possible to converge with the socialist party in certain issues, for example minimum wage I think the party did some calculation where it's possible to set it at 1000€ by this year whereas the socialists say 1000€ is possible...in 2028, so how it worked in 2015-2019 was trying to find the highest value the socialists could agree with.