Image is a map of the Western Sahara, sourced from this article in the Middle East Eye. Much of the information in the preamble also came from there, as well as this article.
November 6th marked the 50th anniversary of Morocco, under King Hassan II, beginning the invasion and occupation of much of the territory of the Western Sahara. Today, approximately 80% of the territory of the Western Sahara is controlled by Morocco, with the Polisario Front - the government of the Sahrawis - controlling the rest, hugging the border of Mauritania. Between them lies one of the longest walls and one of the largest minefields on the planet, of which construction began in the 1980s.
The legitimacy of Morocco’s control over the Western Sahara is one of those long-lasting diplomatic issues which ultimately doesn’t seem to matter very much in terms of on-the-ground realities, and reveals the eternal uselessness of the United Nations especially in regard to actually helping oppressed people. Up until about 2020, the US and certain other Western countries did not formally recognize Morocco as having sovereignty over the whole territory, but in terms of providing genuine opposition to Morocco, it seems that Algeria is the major player in the region. While American, European, and Moroccan corporations exploit the fisheries and phosphate minerals of the region, protected by their minefields (and claims of merely advancing the cause of renewable energy development, AKA greenwashing), Algeria provides what aid they can to support the displaced Sahrawi people, many of whom have been forced to live in refugee camps.
On October 31st, the US put forward a resolution in the UN Security Council which was adopted (Russia and China abstained) and provided major support to Morocco, urging the Polisario Front to adopt the 2007 “autonomy plan”, which would, despite its name, be synonymous with an end to their independence movement. Such a plan was met with much jubilation in Morocco, with King Mohammed VI remarking "From now on, there will be a before and an after October 31, 2025.” Such a date was also the catalyst for the PF intensifying their guerilla struggle against Morocco, as legal avenues for autonomy and basic human rights are running out as the imperialists grow more desperate.
Last week’s thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
Please check out the RedAtlas!
The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
China is very pragmatic, and if you’ve seen my posts, China is currently going through a phase of economic downturn with prolonged deflation and local government debt crisis, and so without a domestic consumer market, it really cannot afford to let the US screwing up global free trade as Trump has been threatening to do. All the best cards (e.g. rare earth exports) are being used to keep the US from decoupling from China precisely because of this. The two economies are too closely tied to one another that China cannot afford to see prolonged inflation or a recession in the US.
The government has already spent trillions of stimulus to boost domestic consumption and resolving debt issue (化债) but the effects have been marginal at best. All the details that have been released about the 20th Five-Year Plan so far have shown that there will be nothing out of ordinary from its usual policies, except for more focus on high-tech sector and boosting consumption.
Government subsidies and high-tech sectors aren’t going to solve massive wealth inequality, it requires a complete restructuring of how the economy is run. If the government does not want to run a deficit to provide full employment, then it cannot resolve these fundamental issues.
On a side note, I’ve seen an uptick on the left internet lately that have fully bought into the “China is WINNING, the US is COLLAPSING” discourse, which is really just the inverse of “China is going to COLLAPSE any day now!” narrative fueled by right-wing propaganda, neither of which even made an attempt to understand the complexity and the dynamics of global economic, trade and financial systems.
And once you understand these and knowing that China is very pragmatic about saving its own economy, a lot of things will make sense.
Russia is also more or less the same. It has failed to use the opportunity provided by the Ukraine war to achieve an economic transformation under global sanctions, and so will have to continue to play by the rules set by Washington.
Brace Belden always jokes “the dragon rises” in regards to China, but in terms of foreign policy, “the jellyfish floats” seems more applicable.
I have a hypothesis floating around in my head about the US seeking to control/neuter China not by outcompeting it in production but by taking control of enough of its customers that the US has essentially monopsony power over Chinese production, but not enough to put into an effort post.
I also don’t think the US is trying to compete with China on industrial production. Both mainstream and alt media are guilty of perpetuating this narrative.
I mean, did anyone forget that the US could not even compete with Japanese industries back in the 1980s, when the US industrial base was MUCH stronger back then. Who in their right mind would think the US can now compete with China? It would require the entire US establishment to forget the decades-long struggle against Japan’s much more energy and cost efficient industrial base where the lessons were already learned 40 years ago, which is absurd.
The only way out for the US is to go full financialization, using tariffs to exploit China’s industrial power to kill other exporter economies in the Global South (since China refuses to give up its net exporter status), then the US comes in with financial takeover of the failing sectors, which will allow it to reshape the global supply chain.
There is one problem though: how would the US deal with the deteriorating conditions for the working class in the US, which had led to a rise in populist movements? Here’s where Europe comes into play. The US is going to force the EU into switching places with itself, where the US gets partial re-industrialization (with the EU being coerced to import from the US, since the US is not able to compete with China and other exporter economies at much lower cost) while the EU de-industrializes itself.
I haven’t had time to flesh this out, although I have been thinking of making a post, but I think the US, at least the current admin, does intend to compete with China on manufacturing, just not on the “cheap stuff”.
I have been trying to square the circle on how the current immigration enforcement strategy benefits any of the GOP’s monied interests, given that the US economy, at least at the lower levels of service and agriculture, essentially runs on cheap labor, and these policies will interrupt that supply. I was talking with someone who works at a large agricultural co-packer, and they mentioned that the CEO started a project that they spin off into a new company based around a robotic/fully automated harvester. This is a machine that is too expensive relative to migrant labor to be profitable for farmers or agricultural corporations. But if that pool of migrant labor dries up, if the ICE polices essentially act as a tarriff or import ban on cheap labor, then all of these robotic, AI driven machines being built by the tech/VC people that have made an alliance with Trump became much more economically competitive. I suspect the goal, other than to create a new bastardized SA for the American right, is to make cheap labor scarce, and thus not cheap, in the process bolstering American production of new advanced machines that previously were too costly to make sense for most business.
i mean, just generally, good will of populace instead of regimes in muslim countries might be (definitely) worth more than piddly 20 billion in trade with pisrael/usa “goodwill” which they’ll say “fallen for it again, chicoms” anyway. russia is more complicated with pisrael, their own stuff (although its definitely in russia interest to complicate turkey/pisrael bromance, so why not insist on turkey peacekeeping force idfk)
in other words this is a bet on pisrael dominating middle east for 20 years which is very blackpilled and blackpilling
sure it “makes sense”. nobody would say otherwise. there is no economic reason for china to care about palestinians who are like 0.0001% of the earth’s population. they can live or die or something in between and nobody in china must notice.
it shows a lack of principled, moral leadership. that’s something everyone is looking for these days. every nation run by fascists or cowards. anyone who is a (non-anarchist) communist is wanting china to step in because it would be demonstration of communist principals in stark contrast to all capitalist nations. it would show that communism is a better way to be even in the context of global capitalism. that a (even nominally) communistic economic system imposes some intrinsic solidarity which surpasses those craven capitalist nations.
china doesn’t need to attend to the concerns of palestinians or their global supporters. they don’t need us, that’s not the balance of power. their plans suppose a global capitalist system, with which they interact to their benefit. I guess in that way they benefit from all this havoc and evil and don’t have any interest in calming it down at all (??!). but we need them to make good on “the people’s liberation army” and start liberating some people.