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Analysis and images of the parades is all over the internet and in the last megathread; for the China-India stuff I recommend this article, as well as the Tricontinental in general.
Image is from @xiaohongshu@hexbear.net's comment in the last megathread.
Last week was the 80th anniversary of the end of World War 2, and on such an occasion, China put on quite an impressive military parade, especially in comparison to the rather drab and corporate parade that the USA recently had. In attendance were many world leaders, including Putin, Kim Jong Un, and a very happy-looking Lukashenko.
This took place shortly after the SCO summit in Tianjin, in which Modi was notably in attendance. That one of the world's most powerful fascists was in attendance in China near the anniversary of the World Antifascist War is obviously pretty ironic. Regardless, the mood was still relatively positive; for example, Xi announced the acceleration of the creation of the SCO development bank, and Indian-Chinese relations are once again in the thaw cycle of their long-term cyclical pattern, with direct flights resumed and links expanded. The fact that there is this much projected optimism from China about a Global South which is being increasingly tariffed, infiltrated, starved, looted, bombed, invaded, and massacred in the hundreds of thousands by rabid imperialist dogs is perhaps a little tone-deaf, but buoying up the SCO is better than doing nothing at all, I suppose.
Any astute Geopolitics Understander can tell you that this is certainly not India joining the side of the Global South, but instead a move somewhat forced upon them as they seek to balance both sides for their own gain. As Trump amps up pressure on India via tariffs, it is natural that India would seek leverage, and there is much that India gains: industrial development, increased intra-regional trade, and scientific knowledge from a China which has, in numerous fields, now pulled ahead of the USA. India is also facing numerous internal crises, ranging from run-of-the-mill capitalist incompetence and corruption, to worsening conditions for farmers, to the ravaging impacts of climate change, and increasing their links with China is a way to vent off a little of that pressure and protect Modi's regime.
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.
Israel'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.
BLS revises job growth between April ’24 and March ’25.
911 thousand fewer jobs were created than previously believed, average job gains before revision =147,000 per month, average job gains after revision = 71,000/month
This confirms what we've all been saying, that the Biden admin was lying about job creation in 2024 in order to help out Biden/Kamala in an election year. Maybe the only competent thing they did that year!
Im more inclined to believe there are giant problems in data collection with the changing landscape of us employment, gig and contract jobs or w/e. U3 vs u6 unemployment rates have always been a bit weird but the differenced are even worse post covid.
Idk on the hard data stuff I do think it's more a failure in execution rather than malicious intent.
911 thousand fewer jobs
This is probably true, but all the political firings at the BLS by Trump are going to cast doubt over if this actually true or not.
The previous revision was done under the now fired boss and it was a similarly big downward revision as well. It covered the 6 months before this revision.
Stronger job numbers would have hurt them, since it would have kept the Fed from lowering rates and boosting the economy
Al-Mayadeen is reporting that all Hamas representatives survived the attack in Qatar.
Sometimes, I wonder what anti-tankie Reddit libs would say about Allende being overthrown in Chile if they were around then.
You know that he's working for Brezhnev and Castro, right? Tankies are so fucking stupid thinking that every third world dictator is some perfect communist hero who can't be criticized or it's a "CIA plot". Sometimes people just want to be free, did you ever think about that?
"The elections were rigged, he wasn't even democratically elected."
Probably the same thing what the AFL-CIO used to say about Allende. IIRC there where AFL-CIO rep going to Chile to train the Trucker union that is against Allende.
Keep in mind that AFL-CIO and other western non socialist unions are basically based on Liberalism (Center-Left) and on Christian Democracy (Center-Right). IIRC quebec's biggest union (CSN) is based on Christians Catholic ideals and the head literally said it's a way to counter Soviet influenced union and AFL-CIO is probably the same flavour of anti-sovietism
the courts(tm), the constitution (tm), freedom of enterprise (tm), corruption (tm)
If I was flying around in a plane that another country gave me, I personally wouldn't go ahead and authorize a strike on that country. But then again, that assumes they aren't subservient dogs.
Given that Nepal is in the Western news, as can be expected, the kind of media coverage and narratives they'll proliferate will be likely near entirely socialist-agnostic, with all the leftist elements of the given country's historical background stripped out. So here's a primer I wrote with some readings on the background of the Communist Parties in Nepal:
The entryist nature of the major Communist Parties in Nepal aside, the rarity of new leftist successes beyond AES following the end of the Cold War means that the condition of Nepal shouldn't be entirely dismissed out of hand outright, despite their lack of significant achievements following the dissolution of the armed struggle.
The country was an absolute monarchy for most of the Cold War. It slowly transitioned into a constitutional monarchy, a deal where the royals could be expected to retreat to their palace and parasitize off the public budget just like their welfare leech counterparts in Europe. Then, in 2001, their crown prince did a Romanov by going on a shooting massacre against his own family and parents in their palace, gunning down his parents, the reigning king and queen. He then shot himself and his uncle became the new king. This uncle then quickly demonstrated an autocratic obsession with reconsolidating the monarchy's institutional power but this attempt to assert monarchical authority stumbled against the shattered prestige of the Nepalese royalty from the self-inflicted extermination of the royal household. This ultimately led to the complete abolition of the monarchy and the establishment of a republic in 2008.
Meanwhile, as this was happening, there was a Maoist People's War conducted through the leadership of the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist, after the government's violent suppression of attempted land reform in the 1990s. This period of armed struggle lasted twenty years from 1996 to 2006. In 2006, the CPN-M conceded to liberal reformers by agreeing to a bourgeois liberal republic and a constituent assembly, when the Maoists had the upper hand through its control of most of the countryside. This broke the party's unity and some of its founding members left afterwards, who saw the party as having betrayed its goal of New Democracy. The armed wing of the Party, the People's Liberation Army of Nepal was also disbanded and eventually integrated with the national army of the new bourgeois republic.
This is the major contradiction between the two major Communist Parties: CPN-UML (Unified Marxist-Leninist) and CPN-MC (Maoist Center). There's also a rather plentiful amount of breakaway and splinter Communist Parties, who saw the 2006-8 establishment of the bourgeois republic as a betrayal of the armed struggle and comprador parliamentarianism.
You could say that the electoralist Communist Parties are merely working within the contradictions of the times. The establishment of a true New Democracy and an official Marxist-Leninist state during the 2000s right as the United States had its full attention on the region during its "War on Terror" nearby in Afghanistan would have been unwise. Nevertheless, despite the suppression of land reform in the 1990s having been the catalyst for the Nepalese People's War, there is still no comprehensive land reform in Nepal to this day. This has been directly attributed to the concessions of the CPN-Maoists. Here is a criticism of the current "Land Bank" system, which is more akin to the liberal land reform of post-WW2 granted to Japan and Taiwan by the US' permission as a concession to co-opt and destroy socialist sentiment (only the redistribution of land) than those of a socialist land reform (which entails a comprehensive breakdown of land relations, destruction of the landlord class and their intergenerational communal ties and power base).
Nevertheless, the difference between the Nepalese electoral entryism and that of the West's leftists is their strong territorial control of the countryside and their military power prior to their swerve towards entryist politics which prevented the liberals in the bourgeois republic from suppressing them like what was done to the CPI in Italy and the KKE in Greece or from outright ignoring and sidelining them like what was recently done to the so-called French left coalition NPF by Macron. As such, the only way to suppress the various leftists by the liberals is through the parliamentary system itself. This original leading position in the parliamentary system has now indeed been slowly eroded with the liberal "soc-dem" Nepali Congress party ending with the most seats in the 2022 election.
As for geopolitics, Nepal is essentially the Mongolia of the Himalayas, a country between two larger ones, but with even worse geographical positioning. The majority of the country is near entirely on the southern side of the Himalayas, which means that it is almost completely dependent on India as a route to the sea and as a conduit for trade. It has been subjected to regular Indian interference, especially in its southern territories which are on the Gangetic plain and whose Madhesi ethnic minority population are said to be aligned more in interests with India than Kathmandu generally. India itself views Nepal as essentially a second Bhutan though slightly more "unruly," the latter being essentially an Indian client monarchy whose foreign affairs are completely dictated by New Delhi. The Indian-manufactured annexation of the independent state of Sikkim right next door in 1973 has Nepal's principal foreign policy objective being to avoid that exact same outcome.
In 2015, the newly elected BJP Modi government of India blockaded Nepal following a constitutional reform that, according to it, disfavored the aforementioned Madhesi ethnic minority. India was outraged because its appropriation of ethnic minority constituencies was how it had been able to historically annex Sikkim and this reform weakened its ability to potentially repeat it in Nepal if it ever wanted to utilize that option. India then froze fuel and goods imports into Nepal, demanding that the constitution include clauses of self-determination and an autonomous territory for the Madhesi. This had the potential of a humanitarian disaster in the making as Nepal had just suffered an earthquake earlier in the year and it relied on fuel imports through India for heating in the winter months. It was at this point that Modi's India outplayed its hand and Nepal reached out to China. Nepal agreed to the construction of a railway linking Kathmandu to China's national rail system with China's rail gauge standard as a result of this blackmail. Nevertheless, a near decade long bureaucratic stalling has delayed the railway negotiations and construction which still continues to the present day. It was only in July of 2024 that an agreement was finally signed. As such, over 64% of Nepalese imports come from India and only 13% from China as of 2022, meaning that Nepal is still deeply dependent on India.
It also recently signed, during the Trump I period, the US State Department/USAID program, the Millennium Challenge Compact (also the name of that Bush-era wargame against Iran), controversially allowing for US infiltration of Nepal against China in the New Cold War. It was ratified by Nepal’s then-Communist Party coalition led parliament (Maoist-Centre and United-Socialist) in 2022. Here's a piece that the Tricontinental wrote on this: https://thetricontinental.org/asia/ticaa-issue-1-the-millennium-challenge-corporation/
This external dynamic has had a sizeable dampening influence on the internal willingness of Nepal's Communist Parties to pursue more significant socialist reforms such as the comprehensive land reform that the People's War had been fought for in the 1990s to early 2000s.
Good write up.
It was ratified by Nepal’s then-Communist Party coalition led parliament (Maoist-Centre and United-Socialist) in 2022.
thank you for reminding that. I felt some pity on how Sher Bahadur, under whom MCC was accepted, was treated today but damn had forgotten how he fucked over all of us with that MCC. There was a huge protest organized by the left against that but then the government acted like it was not going to rectify that, then started a dance in a parliament and passed it anyway. The history of Nepali government just weathering through public anger but not giving any consideration is long one.
what is the point of having the largest US base in the entire middle east when the americans bomb you themselves? by any measure this is just insane i have no words for it
Qatar is part of the battlefield now, and the Pandora's box opened when Iran bombed said US military base in Qatar, even though the base was evacuated and the US attack on Iran did not take place from there. Now Israel feels as if they can also conduct operations in Qatar against their enemies, and the USA will obviously allow it.
All of Qatar's air defence is US made too, Patriot systems. Either it wasn't switched on, or Israel understands how it works and have the tools to avoid it (stealth aircraft and advanced stand off weapons) thanks to the USA. Qatar doesn't have much ability to stop any strike.
It's pretty clear that effective air defense involves not just having advanced AA systems but also having them in enough numbers to be able to tolerate some level of attrition.
Victims of the USA generally cannot afford more than a few sets of S-300s or similar, so what ends up happening is they either turn on the radars during a strike and get taken out by SEAD since there isn't enough coverage or numbers to really deter them - leaving the entire area vulnerable - or they leave the radars off and systems hidden to preserve them for some perceived future threat, defeating their intended purpose and leaving the entire area vulnerable.
The implication being that being neutral or subservient to the zionists has helped them for shit.
No wonder Qatar signed onto a statement telling Hamas to disarm and abandon governance in Gaza a month ago, and even went further yesterday saying that Hamas must accept the surrender deal. They wanted to prevent this.
They want sweet pisraeli spy tech, they probably gave them address and go ahead themselves. Now they will cosplay outrage and continue doing same shit (financing good islamists, who like usa and entity, instead of bad ones)
My only question is: how has the resistance fallen for the same trick three times in a row? They all meet up together in one relatively unprotected location because of an event that triggers the meeting, and then Israel bombs the single location. Happened to Iran, Yemen and now Hamas in Qatar.
I’ve been wondering this since Nasrallah, is the answer just don’t negotiate? Never meet in person? Zoom negotiations forever? If we take Israeli penetration and civilian targeting as a given, does every country at war with israel need to do the same with their civilian government?
Nasrallah was in a bunker that Israel dropped 150 000lbs of bombs on, and had the pager terror operation happen to Hezbollah, so that's very different from these last three attacks in my opinion. Once those events were in motion, there was little that could be done. Can't build a deeper bunker or undo Mossad infiltration in the pager supply chain in a few days, that would take months or years.
In Iran, the IRGC head leadership apparently all gathered in a basement in one of the aerospace universities because of events with regards to Israeli force buildup, in Yemen the civil leadership all gathered in a villa to watch a pre-recorded speech, and now in Qatar the political leaders gathered in a villa to review the lastest proposal. It's not as if these figures were gathering in secret locations well below ground or in an unknown hideout.
Hezbollah was definitely distinct.
And that’s why I was asking about civilian governments as well, with Yemen. Is war with israel maximum alert all the time for spies and infiltrators and no in person gatherings? Because meeting at hardened locations is fine but if high level politicians can be targeted en route via local informants, I struggle to see a way to maintain face to face contact and not be vulnerable to decapitation
Was this just their negotiating team? Assassinating diplomats? Or were real leadership figures in Doha?
A lot of the political bureau of Hamas was in Qatar. Not the military leaders, but still real leadership figures. With the Yemen assassination strike, that was more against members in the civil government that had no real say in things outside of civil matters.
Difference being that bombing Iran and Yemen is also fair game for "Israel" since they are enemies. But attacking Qatar as a mediating country could damage relations with the GCC, big emphasis on "could" since these are all cucked anyways.
What fucking dogs of empire. Do they have no shame?
Video of an incendiary projectile hitting the boat of the Sumud Flotilla on its way to Gaza. Tunisia said it must have been a malfunction of the boat...
Looks like a flare of some sort. Either dropped by a drone or from somewhere else. The pictures of the damage look quite minor. More of a scare tactic than anything else if done by Israel, trying to scare them from going to Gaza.
The implication obviously being “next time it’s getting sunk,” right?