Thank you to @carpoftruth@hexbear.net for covering my position as Supreme Dictator of the Goddamn News while I was moving and getting set up in my new home in a top secret Kremlin-funded bunker five hundred feet below the ground. Our regularly scheduled programming returns this week.
On October 9th, Daniel Chapo won the Mozambique general election with about 70% of the vote. Chapo is the head of FRELIMO, the Marxist-Leninist party of Mozambique's liberation, which fought an internal anti-communist resistance called RENAMO which was backed by Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa; Frelimo won in 1975. However, as the USSR fell, Frelimo began to allow elections inside Mozambique, and has ruled the country with significant majorities in each election ever since.
The main opposition party inside Mozambique is Podemos, which is led by Venancio Mondlane, a former member of Renamo and trained inside the USA. He alleges that his polling figures predicted a majority win for him, not Frelimo, and has accused Chapo of electoral fraud. There have been the usual slogans about how they yearn for freedom. The EU, of course, "witnessed irregularities." As @WilsonWilson@hexbear.net has pointed out, Mozambique has massive undeveloped gas fields and is outsourcing the development process to France, Norway, the UK, and the USA, while mysterious Islamist groups have popped up to cause chaos in the exact regions which have the gas, slowing the process of actually developing those gas fields. Overall, it appears to be a cookie-cutter colour revolution attempt by the imperial core designed to install a comprador for cheaper resources. Its proximity to BRICS+ member South Africa may also be significant, noting the colour revolution in Bangladesh earlier this year exerting influence near India and China.
Protestors have been battling against the police and government since late October, resulting in dozens of deaths and injuries as well as massive disruption, as the government has intermittently blocked access to the internet and social media. As of today, calm appears to be returning, with border crossings beginning to reopen.
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.
German leader Olaf Scholz made a phone call to Putin on Friday. He's still nowhere near to abandoning the west's delusional demands of Russian surrender but at least he's opening up to the general concept of diplomacy.
This has made Zelensky and all the NATO ghouls very mad. One of these ghouls is noted war criminal Anders Fogh Rasmussen, formerly the head of NATO, and before that a catastrophic Liberal Party leader of Denmark. Currently he is an asset for American imperialism, providing shady "consultancy" services to some of Washington's most distasteful puppet regimes and businesses connected to American spy agencies.
It is completely unacceptable if Putin should get anything at all out of his adventure. Because then Xi Jinping (China's president, red.) will conclude: "If Putin can take the Crimean peninsula then I can take Taiwan". That is why we must make sure Putin is not successful in Ukraine.
This is what passes for serious statesman-like analysis in the west. Rasmussen did not mention how the American Bush regime's illegal and unprovoked full-scale invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, that Rasmussen himself was an accessory to as Danish PM, has helped create a precedence for unilateral military involvement in other countries.
Rejecting the idea of further diplomacy with Russia, Rasmussen goes on to say:
I think the most important thing we can do to m make peace in Ukraine is to deliver even more weapons to Ukraine and remove all restrictions on the weapons we give.
I am too lazy to look up whether he is in the pocket of the American military industrial complex but I would be more surprised to learn that he's not than to learn that he is. Anyways these are the kind of madmen they put in charge of western military bureaucracies.
It is completely unacceptable if Putin should get anything at all out of his adventure. Because then Xi Jinping (China's president, red.) will conclude: "If Putin can take the Crimean peninsula then I can take Taiwan". That is why we must make sure Putin is not successful in Ukraine.
I assume that Rasmussen has spoken at length about how Israel must be prevented from trying to annex Gaza, the West Bank, and Southern Lebanon, for the exact same reason as above?
Crazy how when Trump enters office, Europe will be more pro Ukrainian then they were when Biden was in office. (The SPD are uber cooked, the conservatives in Germany are going to push for partial mobilization)
I don't really read enough German internal politics, I heard something about their coalition government collapsing? Is there any political change in the country coming? Would it be unfriendly to NATO or even more friendly to NATO?
Yes, their coalition is blowing up and elections in Germany are likely next year. The right wing afd is likely to be a major part of any future government (i.e. Not scholz). The afd is a bunch of chuds that talk a big game about making changes, but similar to trump it's hard to say how much they will really change course from the neoliberal German state.
However, contrary to the American right, there is actual incentive for them to change course - the German economy was shattered by the destruction of Nordstream and ukrainian migrants and refugees directly undermine German labour in a way that does not apply to the US. The afd is similarly nato-skeptical as heterodox republicans, but unlike the Americans, the Germans actually have actually been negatively affected by this war.
All that said, I suspect that the afd will do more bitching and moaning about the war than actually take unilateral action to draw it down, instead focusing their chud ire on their true enemy, brown immigrants and refugees. If the American empire does pull the pin on ukraine though, expect the afd to enthusiastically follow the trump admin's lead.
On the subject of this being a more motivated change than the rhetorical shifting from Trump's people, I think that gets lost in translation frequently across the Atlantic. There's this lingering paranoia that Trump is going to create some kind of unified Hitlerite bloc across the entire first world part of Europe, some of the more peripheral bits, and subvert Russian statehood by getting Putin to warm up to the US and slow the pivot to the east. People are afraid Trump's sway with rightists is going to reverse all of the damage we have done but I don't even think there is a serious plan to do that, it's more like a vibe they are on, and it wouldn't work anyways.
I see him as doing more cooption (cooptation? Whatever not looking that up) of the more rebellious libertarian shitheads, neonazis, and tea party types, giving them bones to chew on and chugging ahead with the neolib agenda like any other neocon. With the Russians, they have learned their lesson too many times with the west now, but I suspect that any rebellious right wingers in Europe would be willing to do stupid shit for Trump. Not sure if the far right taking over in Europe will effect lots of geopolitical change, but it is actually something. Unlike appointing RFK or dumb stuff like that.
Are there any German or Netherlands etc posters here? Euros?
cooption (cooptation? Whatever not looking that up) of the more rebellious libertarian shitheads, neonazis, and tea party types, giving them bones to chew on and chugging ahead with the neolib agenda like any other neocon
100%. The euro right will get to put a based chud coat of paint on the same project, then continue wondering why things keep getting shittier. The idea that another Trump admin is going to willingly de-vassalize europe is just idiotic