Bulletins and News Discussion for December 11th to December 17th, 2023 - What's Yours is Mine - COTW: Canada
Bulletins and News Discussion for December 11th to December 17th, 2023 - What's Yours is Mine - COTW: Canada
Image is of the Cobre Panama open-pit copper mine, located 120 kilometers west of Panama City.
Canada is a prolific mining country, hosting many of the world's top mining corporations. Some of its extraction is local - for example, Saskatchewan is the world's largest producer of potash, a critical agricultural nutrient. Much of the extraction is abroad. Naturally, this means that Canada has cut a bloody, but often ignored, path through the global periphery, extracting minerals and causing environmental degradation.
A notable recent example is that of the Cobre Panama copper mine, which is owned by First Quantum Minerals, one of the largest mining companies in Canada. The company earned $10 billion in revenue in 2022, of which the Cobre Panama mine generated $1 billion. Protests in Panama about this mine have gone on for over a decade, urging for a greater share of the profits, protection of indigenous people, and stronger environmental protections. Canada has maintained a stoney silence (pun somewhat intended) on these movements.
On October 20th, the president of Panama, Cortizo, renewed the company's mining concession for 20 years, after a halt in production since the end of 2022 due to negotiations and reform. Everybody hated this. In October, protestors took to the streets in sufficient numbers that Cortizo was forced to halt new mining approvals, and announced a public referendum on whether the contract with First Quantum should be repealed. This was immediately cut down, but the government decided to invalidate the new concession anyway in late November, calling it unconstitutional, and closing down the mine.
First Quantum Minerals has lost about half its market value since October. Various international banks have said that Panama could lose its investment-grade credit rating next year due to the income hit - the mine generated 5% of its GDP. The international arbitration process which First Quantum has initiated against Panama could last years.
The book Canada in the World: Settler Capitalism and the Colonial Imagination handles Canada's role as an imperialist, anti-indigenous, extractive state throughout its history, and is on our geopolitical reading list.
The weekly update is here on the website.
Your Tuesday Briefing is here in the comments and here on the website.
Your Thursday Briefing is here in the comments and here on the website.
Your Friday Briefing is here in the comments and here on the website.
Your Saturday Briefing is here in the comments and here on the website.
The Country of the Week is Canada! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
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.
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so the US is sending a general and his staff to more directly command and control the Ukrainian war effort. this makes me think of gylippus, the spartan general who was sent to sicily to help syracuse against the athenian invasion. he either was integral to syracusean victory, helped, or at least didn't derail their victory. I can't off the top of my head think of high profile examples of individual generals sent to help allies/proxies that have fucked things up or otherwise lost spectacularly. I can think of proxy wars like this like vietnam, afghanistan (soviets and americans), but I don't know of specific generals that were defeated and left with a reputation for failure in the same way that gylippus' place in history is the opposite. Are there any like this?
I was under the impression that NATO and the US essentially were de facto controlling the Ukrainian war effort. Not really sure what a general will achieve in the current state of Ukraine but it does indicate that they foresee this continuing for a good while longer, which is in line with predictions that it'll at least reach 2025 without a meaningful Ukrainian collapse
while I still do believe that 2024 is essentially Russia's best chance to finish the war before it turns into a decade-long horrific grind as Western arms manufacturing becomes somewhat online in 2025 and beyond, I just... don't know if I can really say with any conviction that Russia will actually try and end the war next year. the Russian reaction to Ukraine openly stating that they're going to take a more defensive posture seems to be a resounding "meh". they seem pretty content with the attrition strategy still, and for a good reason, though if Russia is truly going to wait until they've destroyed every last tank and IFV and artillery piece and missile launcher and Ukrainians aged 14-80 and all the mercenaries that the West can buy, etc etc, before they advance in order to minimize Russian casualties, then we really could still be talking about Russia reaching the Dniper any day now until fucking 2029. I mean, Europe's mostly out of stuff, but the US still has hundreds or even thousands of exportable Abrams, and South Korea still has lots of artillery shells last time I checked, and so on.
Russia might be hoping for a collapse in the West's enthusiasm for the war, and that may indeed happen depending on what happens in elections, but even when the enthusiasm is gone, it could still take a year or more to finally reach the bloody conclusion, whether that be a peace deal or a Ukrainian surrender. The US can, AFAIK, fairly easily keep propping up the Ukrainian economy at least until the beginning of 2025 depending on who wins the election (and if Trump decides to revoke funding if he does win, and he obviously might not revoke the funding regardless) and there's probably still enough bits and pieces in the "arsenal of democracy" to throw at Russia until then to still present something of a vaguely threatening force or at least hold back a Russian... not offensive, I guess, but the kind of non-commital pokes and staggering forward a few kilometers that have characterised semi-recent Russian moves at Ugledar, Avdiivka, Kupyansk, etc
If I remember right, last time the US was directly involved in strategy, it failed dramatically and the Ukrainians abandoned the strategy, no? There were a few articles about it in the hexbear bulletins right around the time the 'spring offensive' was kicking off.
That involvement had more to do with TRADOC shit than actually sitting in one of the strategic area headquarters blustering commands to your radio operators to tell your field officers to charge into minefields.
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Yeah you're overthinking my question. ukraine is fucked regardless, I'm asking the question I'm asking because I want more historic references for fail-gylippuses when I do I told you so dunks on libs. In any case I don't think this will be a war that is fast to end for Russia. My guess is 2026.
They would need a Russian/Soviet general. Too bad those have been purged long ago.
I wonder if the old NATO cold war tactics and strategic plans would even work. I have seen many discussions in these news thread that suggest they wouldn't.