Image is from this CNN article.
The DPRK’s history has been a rollercoaster, with admirable highs and heartbreaking lows, most notably the Korean War and the fall of the USSR. Its steadfast commitment to Juche, a variant of Marxism-Leninism that focuses on self-sufficiency, has both made the DPRK a target for imperialist genocidal powers, and allowed them to survive these attacks.
Lately, we seem to be seeing a transition from surviving to thriving. China and the DPRK have always had a much more complicated history than Western education and media allows its population to know, with periods of quite strong disagreement - it’s not the case that China is somehow the DPRK’s master. Russia is the DPRK’s other neighour that isn’t US-occupied, and while they obviously differ substantially in ideology since the USSR fell, the tsunami of sanctions on Russia has changed things. The stick has been removed from the equation, with Russia facing no possible punishment from the West because they were unable to enact sanctions effectively and used all their ammunition in the first few barrages rather than turning the screws over time (I don’t care if we’re on the 14th sanctions package, it’s all been meaningless for Russia since the end of 2022).
The carrot is also more visible, with an alliance making a lot of sense for both. Once again, Western education and media would have you believe a Parenti-esque reality in which Korea is a massive and unpredictable danger to the world, but is simultaneously so poor and destitute that their artillery pieces are made of wood and their missiles out of paper-mache. The truth is that Korea has innovated greatly in missile technology, with some of their weapons matching or even exceeding those of the Russians, hence the Russians’ use of them in Ukraine. Russia also finds it advantageous to invest in Korea to strengthen the anti-hegemonic alliance’s presence in the Pacific, countering the US-occupied lower half of the peninsula who has naturally sided with Ukraine. Additionally, Russia is investing deeply in the Arctic sea route. This will open up as climate change continues; is naturally quite defensible for Russia so long as Korea is there to provide further defense at its eastern edge; and is both a faster and safer route for Russia to access China - especially in a world where straits can be blockaded by even impoverished yet determined countries like Yemen. The situation in the Red Sea benefits Russia and China now, but in the coming years, the US may apply the same lesson for their own benefit elsewhere.
It is perhaps this new sense of self-confidence that has let Korea give up on reunification with its lower half via peaceful measures. A new Korean War would be devastating for both sides even if it remained non-nuclear, but with a rising DPRK and with the South falling yet further into hypercapitalist exploitation and misery, and a US that remains non-committal to its “allies” when times get difficult (as in Ukraine and Europe), a reality where Korea may finally hold the upper hand and have the ability to liberate its south may be approaching in the years and decades to come.
The COTW (Country of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific country every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied nations. If you’ve wanted to talk about the country or share your experiences, but have never found a relevant place to do so, now is your chance! However, don’t worry - this is still a general news megathread where you can post about ongoing events from any country.
The Country of the Week is *the DPRK! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
Please check out the HexAtlas!
The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week’s thread is here.
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.
Fast food chains are using algorithms to cooperatively fix prices
Hotel chains are using algorithms to cooperatively fix prices
Meat processors are using algorithms to cooperatively fix prices
Landlords are using algorithms to cooperatively coordinate rent increases
Amazon is using an algorithm to specifically coordinate cooperative price rises with Target
The current era of inflation is due to capitalist GOSPLANning.
cool, there’s like 5 companies that own the entire country and they’re all collaborating with each other to raise prices. who could have seen this coming.
That’s definitely a salient aspect but the new development is the manner in which even archetypically “competitive” and decentralized markets, markets with many “competing” suppliers of largely equivalents goods and services such as hotels and fast food, are now also routinely engaging in cartel behavior.
The other aspect that is new is the way this process is often entirely automated.
It’s an automated solution to the prisoners dilemma of idealized capitalism. Even decentralized and ideally competitive markets are operating as cartels now.
The feds are starting to take notice and the most egregious examples might get fined in a decade, maybe, but it’s hard to think of a way out of this process that isn’t simply centralized price fixing by the government.
It is essentially impossible to put this information genie back in the bottle and capitalism only has administered prices to offer to consumers now.
they could force them to reveal their code, its not that unthinkable. If one vendor for pricing models has input tables from all of the suppliers its trivial to prove what that produces is cartel behavior via ml
and big tech has already demonstrated how they’re very capable of colluding in their collective interest
About 60,000 tech employees filed a class action lawsuit against Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe in 2011 accusing those companies of agreeing not to hire one another’s employees in order to drive down salaries. The plaintiffs cited emails from top executives like the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt in which they discussed an agreement not to poach each others’ workers and thus enter a salary war.
In one particularly damning email, Schmidt tells Jobs that an employee recruited from Apple to Google will be fired per their agreement—an email that Jobs forwarded to an Apple human resources executive with the comment: “:)”
This is happening globally unfortunately. It’s very transparent in South Africa. I’ll explain how it works later.
Jeez I knew about the rent one. I’m not exactly surprised by the rest of these. I am a little surprised how blatant it is now that even the US Gov cannot pretend anymore.
“Can we have gosplan 2.0?”
“okay”“how could you think that’s what I meant?”
Cybersyn but terrible
Cyber-sin
“We live in a free country without state planning/control.” Except that we don’t. We live in one large corporate state.
When I’m older and all the corporations have merged together I look forward to being buried in a Ronald McDonald coffin that will take my future children 10 years, at least, to pay off.
GUANGZHOU, China, April 4 (Reuters) - U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen arrived in China’s southern factory hub of Guangzhou on Thursday with a tough message to Chinese officials: you’re producing too much of everything, especially clean energy goods, and the world can’t absorb it.
China is unleashing a flood of electric vehicles (EVs), batteries, solar panels, semiconductors and other manufactured goods into global markets, the result of years of massive government subsidies and weak demand at home. Global prices for many goods are tanking, pressuring producers in other countries.
lmao
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30,000 Palestinians are killed
The West:
a couple white people are killed
The West:
English summary of the Biden-Xi phone call
If the U.S. side is willing to seek mutually beneficial cooperation and share in China’s development dividends, it will always find China’s door open; but if it is adamant on containing China’s hi-tech development and depriving China of its legitimate right to development, China is not going to sit back and watch.
ngl feeling pretty traumatised by 6 months of watching a genocide play out in detail while the entire state and bourgeois ideological apparatus tries to gaslight us into believing literally anything but the truth. nothing compared to what the Palestinian people are going through ofc but it’s really done awful things for me to hear and see dreadful atrocities being perpetrated every single day for months.
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Love too respect the liberal rules-based international order and bomb another country’s consulate
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This was a truly radicalizing moment for me. The news was completely incoherent. The DOD rhetoric was that it was unintentional, but also no mistakes were made.
They just stonewalled any gently probing questions. Were there mistakes on maps? Of course there were no mistakes. But it wasn’t on purpose? That’s what we said!
I was in high school reading this, and learning that even the nice adults around me that I liked could be complete morons.
wtf I’ve never heard of this before
feel like this really forces Iran/Hezbollah’s hand to meet the escalation
they do be wanting daddy usa to start shit with iran, huh
no but Iran is the rogue nation I swear def not the terrorist funding neonazi loving lebensraum enacting pieces of shit
talking about Israel but also applies to the USA
Does the US want this to happen? It really seems like they’re spreading themselves thin by trying to create proxy wars with Iran, North Korea, Russia, and China all at the same time.
US leadership seems to be going sicko mode right now
Blinken says Ukraine will join NATO.
NATO chief says a full NATO-Russia war is ”a real possibility“.
Reading about the JDAM/F-35 sales at the same time reading about what they are uncovering at Al-Shifa.
God damn America. I no longer give a single rip about any domestic policy in this evil country. I don’t care about Trump vs Biden; whatever infinitesimally small advantage Biden may have in domestic policy is completely irrelevant. Saying this as an American with kids.
I hope myself, my family, my comrades, and all marginalized people are spared in the future. But the reality is that America deserves hell on earth. There were many good people, working class people who died in the WTC on 9/11; they did not deserve it but America absolutely deserved it. And 9/11 doesn’t even represent a small down payment on what America actually deserves.
Death to America and death to “israel”.
The details are emerging on the IDF strike that killed the World Central Kitchen aid workers, including American/British/Australian/Polish citizens, and it is (unsurprisingly) extremely clear it was (yet another) very specifically targeted assassination. I’ll post the thread below, but the info comes from Haaretz here.
The IDF’s early explanation re the killing of the World Central Kitchen team is in - per “security sources” speaking to Haaretz. Before we get to the putative pretext for the attack, they also disclose a harrowing detail - the drone bombed the convoy THREE TIMES in succession…
because team survived one hit and tried taking cover in another vehicle, and then survivors moved to a third - and were finished off there. Deliberate, repeated targeting of convoy, making sure no one was left alive. And this actually doesn’t stack up w the alleged pretext:
"According to sources acquainted with the details of the incident, the Operation Room in charge of securing the route identified an armed person on the truck and suspected this was a terrorist. By the time preparations were made for the attack, the truck arrived…
at the warehouse, together with the three WKC vehicles carrying seven volunteers… minutes later, the three vehicles left the warehouse, without the truck on which an armed person was allegedly sighted. The cars traveled on a route already confirmed to WKC by the IDF. The IDF
was also made aware of the timing of this particular convoy. At some point, while convoy was traveling on the authorised route, the Operations Room ordered the drone operator to strike one of the vehicles. Some passengers were seen leaving the stricken vehicle and moving…
to the other two. They had time to alert superiors they had been attacked, but seconds later were struck by a second missile. They began moving wounded to 3rd car, and that’s when the 3rd missile hit. All seven volunteers were killed." This is actually far worse than I imagined.
The first and last vehicle targeted were over 2km apart:
Background info on the Vietnamese president who just recently got purged. The tl;dr is that he’s a liberal worm who tried to undermine Vietnam from within:
https://nitter.poast.org/darrion_nguyen/status/1776809036123672765CW:torture
After clearing them of terrorism charges they’re just dropped back off in Gaza.
Absolutely sick reading this, it’s basically a medical torture camp.
