Macron has recently called a snap parliamentary election in the aftermath of the far-right getting a large proportion of the votes in the EU elections. Why exactly he called an election at a point of profound weakness is a little beyond me. Explanations that I’ve seen range from “He thinks the element of surprise will benefit his party and not others,” to “WW3 is about to start and he doesn’t want to be leader for it,” (which, like, isn’t true - Macron is the President of France, not Prime Minister, he won’t be unseated by this election and he has said he will not stand down regardless of result), to “He doesn’t want to swim in the shit-filled Seine.”
While we still have a couple weeks to go, the polling I’ve seen generally puts the far-right in first place with the left-wing coalition slightly behind, with Macron’s party all the way back in third place. Anybody who knows anything about French politics knows that while France does actually have something of a left opposition in aggregate (in contrast to the two wings of the Capitalist Party in the UK and the US, for example), French left coalitions are profoundly unstable and this one will inevitably split - perhaps even before the voting begins - meaning they aren’t nearly as useful as they otherwise could be.
Living in a France governed by far right parties would be awful, but maybe they might at least be against the carnage in Ukraine, and sue for peace with Russia? Well, possibly not, if the example of Meloni in Italy is anything to go by. It seems that the differences between the “centrist” parties and the fascist ones truly are not that great, beholden to the exact same set of capitalists regardless of which party wins, and will likely bend the knee to NATO, though they may grumble a lot. Would a left coalition be better on Russia/NATO? They have already helpfully told us that they won’t (only opposing sending French troops to Ukraine but otherwise being full steam ahead), and additionally are genocidal Zionists. Western leftists have long been hampered by a dramatically faulty misunderstanding of how geopolitics works, with many seemingly believing “imperialism is when countries interact with other countries” and “democracy is when you can vote between two parties even if widely popular policies aren’t at all represented by either of them, and if those popular policies are enacted but it’s by a one-party state then that’s authoritarian evil” and other such strange ideas, making them terminally useless on foreign issues and pretty unremarkable on domestic issues too. France is no exception.
And just to top it all off, this is coming in a period of further imperial decline for the tattered remains of the French empire, with West Africa rebelling and Kanaky (New Caledonia) deeply unhappy with recent French decisions.
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 France! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
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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.
It still amazes me that the general public/mainstream media just forgot about Nord Stream like nothing happened or it never even existed.
This is like undeniable proof of the invented reality of the western public consciousness.
No real investigation by journalists (apart from Hersh), western state agencies said they’ll drop the case, walk away, nothing happened.
I bet that at least half of liberals never even heard the official cover story and they still think it was Putler.
Mindblowing.
NYT/WaPo determined it was just a group of scrappy Ukrainians who magically obtained the knowledge and equipment to do a covert sabotage mission without the help or knowledge of the west
There were articles recently about who’s to blame for Nord Stream in the German media.
And by that they mean who’s to blame for Nord Stream 2 ever having been created. The real crime was building the damn thing in the first place! I’m not kidding they’re actually hounding politicians for having supported the project like that’s some kind of treason.
On the basis of it being fossil fuel infrastructure, or on the basis of it being Russian?
It being Russian of course. This article seems to have started this recent circus: “The Nord Stream 2 Files.” After this report, the Greens wanted to have a parliamentarian select committee investigate which politicians, behind the scenes, tried to help move NS2 along, even while the US was trying to stop it. The allegation is basically that Merkel, socdems, etc. should have known that Russia is categorically evil (Washington and Kiev tried to warn them!), and that the project
was going to be blown upa bad idea from the start.wow, bizarre article, thanks for sharing
Even if I adopt the lib worldview (Russia = evil, USA=good) — if I build a beach house, but my friends tell me it’s a bad idea to build a beach house, then my friends put military grade explosives in the beach house and blow it up, and they’ll say “see, I told you it was a bad idea” — how is this normal and good?
crazy
puh-leeeeez, how often do they talk about Iraq and Abu Ghraib when they make business deals with USA?! Do they always write a side report on the Khashoggi murder when they buy oil from the Saudis? How can this be written by a serious journalist?
It’s telling how many times “Washington” appears in the article
The envoys of the Germanic satrapy went to visit the hegemon in Washington to ask permission. They didn’t have the Empire’s permission, therefore the project was sabotaged.
Even in articles like this one you can read the truth, you just have to read it critically
Also Soleimani … most
libsAmericans don’t even know his name or remember that it happened… or that like 200 people died on the plane crash days later.I find this not to be the case. Libs—or at least libs of the donkey-fan variety—are more than happy to point at his assassination as being the supposed reason Trump is worse than Biden on foreign relations.
But yes: IMX they will call you insane for thinking the plane going down has anything to do with it.
still have no fucking idea why i should care about any of that at all
Meaning? The US attacking the largest country in the EU, and then it was swept under the rug by the EU and the European media.
I’d say that’s quite… noteworthy.