There's way too much going on right now for me to really focus on any one country this week. The aftermath of the fall of the Nepal government has, somewhat surprisingly, reverberated around the world, and not only in countries that are enemies to the West as you'd expect; for example, Morocco's government battle fiercely with Egypt's and Jordan's to be first in line to lick the dogshit off the boots of Zionists, and yet Morocco is currently embroiled in a large protest wave based primarily around a youth unemployment crisis (though their population is also remarkably pro-Palestinian, which generates additional friction). We're also seeing similar protests in Madagascar, Peru, and Paraguay, and perhaps more will come. I'm personally fairly doubtful in the potential for meaningful economic results from these protests (the current imperialist system seems too deeply embedded for a movement that isn't explicitly communist and anti-imperialist to alter conditions), but it is quite possible for new political results at least.
Outside of the developing world, it appears that the unpopularity of western leaders, such as in the UK, France, and Italy, is creating new levels of unrest. In Britain, the political system has become so utterly moribund that even the artificial democracy of a two-party system (more-or-less; the Lib Dems do exist I suppose) no longer suffices, with both Conservatives and Labour gradually sinking. The Reform party appears like it may become the new standard-bearer of the capitalists and petit-bourgeois - that is, the historical wellspring of fascism - and the Left Party (whatever name they eventually choose) may or may not rise to meet the occasion. In France, they're on their fifth Prime Minister in two years, after Lecornu lasted about a month, attempting the liberal classic: promising change, and then appointing the exact same people who have ruled for the last few decades. And pro-Palestinian protests and general strikes have erupted in Italy, in defiance of their rightwing government under Meloni.
While there's plenty of other events (e.g. continuing aggression against Venezuela that might soon erupt into a war) it would be remise of me not to mention the very much ongoing events vis-a-vis Palestine and a potential peace deal there, seemingly supported to some degree by Trump. It could be legitimate, and it could be some big act (very likely the latter, IMO). Both Trump and Netanyahu seem to believe that they're very talented political masterminds, producing manoeuvres and feints that would make Machiavelli blush. Nothing could be further from the truth, and I trust the militant organizations inside Palestine to outplay these American failsons. Hamas and similar groups are not nearly as gullible as the Iranian reformist faction - though few people are!
Last week's thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
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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.
So, I see the following possibilities in Venezuela:
Trump invades and has to wage a tough and arduous war and then a guerrilla war against the Venezuelan army and patriots (Bolivarian militia and colectivos). Public opinion turns against him and he has to withdraw his troops and pretend he won the war, but that the Venezuelan right-wingers were too "lazy" to do anything "right" (as happened in South Vietnam and Afghanistan).
Trump invades, establishes a puppet regime that fights for decades against Bolivarian loyalists and does not have the support of the army or population.
Trump kills Maduro with drones and he is replaced by some general or Bolivarian revolutionary, maintaining the status quo.
Trump launches a drone attack against some random Venezuelan general and says he has won because he is tough on drug trafficking or whatever. Maduro makes a public show of the general's death and gains some support.
Trump launches a drone attack on some fishing boats, gets bored, says he has won, and withdraws from South America.
Trump decides to shift his focus from Venezuela to Ecuador or Peru to prevent those puppet regimes from collapsing.
Mexico/Brazil convinces Trump and Maduro to sign some diplomatic treaty and the war is somehow avoided.
This has been roughly my prediction all along
Decapitating strike is highly likely in the cards given their great man focus on him and ire at him stymieing their previous attempts at regime change, it's a gangster tier revenge thing really for thugs like Marco Rubio. A way to say "even if you resist at first and seem to win, if you humiliate us we'll get you sooner or later".
I'd say either they do just that, probably try to kill some other top loyalist generals and officials too as one guy is kind of a waste (this may take place over weeks of time or months of strikes to accomplish this) then declare that mission was accomplished bad dude is gone, drug trafficking stopped and Trump parades around.
OR they do the decapitation followed by an invasion with US troops and special forces, they push the Venezuelan army out of a given city perhaps the capital, hand power to say the peace prize winner who's been set up perfectly for it, then start arming the reactionary elements in Venezuela and doing kill squad stuff against anyone a bit too socialist or at least allowing the local reactionaries to do that with some encouragement and preventing any retaliation. You then have a kind of Yemen or Afghanistan situation. You keep a minimal force, continue doing some air-strikes and such and let a war burn for years where you have the international community [tm] recognized government in the capital run by imperialist reactionary pawns who is given the money, the embassies, the UN seat, etc and then you have the rest of the country holding out but the US in no real rush to take it, just happy to deny China and Russia trade and military deals and secure the legal rights to the oil and make any oil from rebel areas illegal and subject to consideration as funding "narco-terrorists".
Of course this all could just be bullying pressure tactics with Trump making some demand for control of oil and/or tribute after killing some people of various ranks and threatening worse and Venezuela say agreeing to not do military treaties or purchases from China or Russia, agreeing to some US economic/oil demands, and so on.
So what are Venezuelan air defences like? Anybody know?
Not up to the task of stopping the US. They have I think at best some variant S-300 systems (the number marmite floated was I think 4?) but only a handful. Truth is the US will use radar seeking munitions, stealth planes to deliver them combined with off-shore missile strikes using like tomahawks to take out the big static ones like those easily just like they did on their run on Iran. Venezuela's are a bit better than what Iran had but there are so few of them they can be overwhelmed and will be. I doubt they take down a single US plane.
If the US wants to go in and decapitating strike Maduro they'll be in, disabling/destroying their AA (including via hacking, comms disruption, jamming) and out within half an hour. They'll do the disabling on the fly with the strike planes for launching the decapitation right behind them. F-35 may be able to evade or at least operate without disabling these systems as well. Not sure.
Fact is if you want to stand up to the US you need numbers. Exactly one unit of the most advanced air defense system in existence won't stop an overwhelming onslaught of off-shore and air-launched missiles and drones converging on it. So you need numbers, defense in depth, and to make it costly and draining enough to US arsenals that they don't think it's worth it. I'd also say if it's actually possible to hide such things from the US (not easy at all) say if you had underground railways you could move them along with multiple stations to pop up out of that would give you a massive advantage as they count on being able to know where they are to fire at and neutralize them and if you can wait until their planes are atop you, wait until they're taking out some of your radars and AA and flying in deeper, then pop up, flip your radar on and fire you could actually make them pay. But the US knows this so goes to great lengths to track surface movements of these units.
Thing is Ukraine has acted as a testing lab for the coming war with China, to get the US/NATO tuned and ready for what to expert in modern warfare, to test their modern systems and see what counters are deployed and come up with their own. So the US knows quite a bit about these types of systems that Venezuela is operating and probably kind of wants a test run using their own command and tactics (as opposed to handed over to Ukrainians) of some of the toys and tactics they've learned of from Ukraine. Not saying the US is going to attack them just to test but it's definitely another weight on the scale in favor of doing it.
Nobody (minus China presumable) has AD capability in quality and quantity to repel the US, correct? It seems like an insurmountable obstacle for non top-3 world economies
It's both a technological problem (Russia, China both have the technical capabilities to build systems capable of detecting and dealing with threats like modern 4/5th gen stealth aircraft and missile interception, not sure if anyone else anywhere other than the US and their puppets have anywhere near that ability, India buys or licenses tech from Russia) AND a problem of resources to build and maintain and stock interceptors for such systems which is a drain on smaller countries and even Russia has issues producing enough of the actual systems themselves at this point due to various bottlenecks.
I'd say China and Russia have the ability to engage the US on a close to even field and repel or inflict horrific damages on the US for an incursion. India might as well from purchased systems but I don't really know. Iran clearly doesn't. So it's definitely a major powers thing.
There's a comment earlier this week about the details of it. TLDR: Similar to Yemen/Iran, not enough to prevent being overwhelmed by stealth aircraft. There's more nuance in the specifics, but the odds are not too favorable.
the detailed info is here: https://hexbear.net/comment/6572522
People here seems really confident that a US invasion would face significant resistance from the people. I don't know enough about Venezuela myself but I would reckon that this would take quite a lot of popular organising and popular support for the state. Venezuela has had it very bad due to western aggression and I would imagine that they have been bombarded with foreign propaganda. How likely is it that they have what it takes to resist an invasion and a regime change?
I can imagine an invasion by the US would quickly confirm all the Venezuelan (true) propaganda of US interference and sabotage of the country and would greatly increase popular support for Maduro. Already there have been news of tens of thousands of militians offering themselves as volunteers.
I think the people of Venezuela will continue to impress me if the reports of protests supporting Palestine are anything to go by
https://red-spark.org/2024/03/05/stop-the-genocide-venezuelan-social-movements-rally-in-solidarity-with-palestine/comment-page-1/
¡Viva Venezuela!
Why waste so much money with the ships then
If a hypothetical conflict does start, I think there will be boots on the ground, at least special forces. Too many close air support assets are mobilised for just an air only campaign. I think the US wants to capture Maduro and humiliate him, not kill him. The Paraguaná Crude Oil Refinery Complex is the second largest in the world according to Wikipedia (poor source, but the general idea is understood) and quite vulnerable to an amphibious assault or paratroopers.
Seems like they are trying to pressure someone in the military to "restore democracy". So a decapitation strike is likely.
The US takes heavy crude from outside the country to refine our gasoline, and it's the type that Venezuela has, and Trump is doubling down on the oil economy. It's probably some evil plan to tap steal that oil to make gas cheaper in the US. They probably don't want an extended boondoggle guerilla war.
How big is the risk of the Venezuelan military betraying the people and doing a coup to install a US puppet comprador regime in the case of American aggression?