Bulletins and News Discussion from May 20th to May 26th, 2024 - Never Break TrueAnon's Rules For Life - COTW: Azerbaijan
Bulletins and News Discussion from May 20th to May 26th, 2024 - Never Break TrueAnon's Rules For Life - COTW: Azerbaijan
Image is of Azerbaijan's President, Aliyev (left) and Armenia's President, Pashinyan (right) in a meeting a month or two after Azerbaijan took Nagorno-Karabakh.
- Never go to a second location.
- Always get the interior ministry post.
- Never get in a helicopter or any small aircraft.
- If someone with a gun enters your car, they’re gonna kill you.
- If someone tells you they’re not going to kill you, they’re calming you down to kill you later.
- Never give up your nukes.
- Never release the opposition's political prisoners.
- Never let the opposition delay elections.
- If someone starts to get into German runes, drop them.
- Never trust a South American with a German name.
- Never move anywhere for a religion.
- Never go into the sewers unless you’re a sewer guy.
- If someone’s trying to get you to commit a crime, they're FBI (sometimes CIA or military intelligence).
- Never become an FBI informant.
- If you do become an FBI informant, record everything.
- Never relinquish your arms.
- Always get it in writing.
- If you keep gambling, you’ll eventually win.
- Never talk to cops without a lawyer.
- Always pay your mercenaries.
- Don’t let anyone take your passport.
To add an addendum to rule 3, never put your President and Foreign Minister in the same helicopter or small aircraft. Especially if doing so in bad weather conditions. Especially if you're already under threat from a hostile nuclear power in the region with a proclivity for terrorism (though this probably isn't Israel's doing, in this particular case).
Anyway, Azerbaijan. Not a great country, I think. Did some genocides. They're a petrostate that is hosting Cop29, which I suppose is a way for the bourgeoisie to implicitly convey their contempt for the green movement. They got weapons from Israel, too.
Just for the record, there's an Iranian province called East Azerbaijan, which is not the same as Azerbaijan.
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 Azerbaijan! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
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The bulletins site is 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.
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Israel really just cannot help themselves, can they? They're magnetically drawn to their own destruction. They are begging on their hands and knees for the swift end of an apocalypse.
The Resistance's strategy is clear:
- Hamas draws Israeli troops deep into Gaza, where their tunnel networks and guerrilla warfare tactics are at their greatest possible effect, causing thousands of casualties+deaths and destroying hundreds of vehicles.
- Hezbollah draws Israeli troops to the border and kills them gradully using attritional warfare.
- Yemen maintains an economic blockade of Israel and simultaneously forces imperialists to maintain a naval presence which then cannot be used elsewhere
- Iran provides weaponry for the whole resistance and maintains several trump cards (blocking the Strait of Hormuz; thousands of missiles that can be used on Israel)
Israel has so far proved unable to meaningfully respond to any of this militarily. The Resistance knows that this is the case. They are aware that Israel will, in their rage and impotence, instead target civilians en masse in an attempt to buoy up morale inside their country.
The problem is that killing civilians:
a) doesn't solve a single problem for Israel. Bombing civilians is not even slightly productive for them. It doesn't even reduce civilian morale; survivors are more likely to join Hamas to resist Israel than turn against the people who are fighting the people bombing your children.
b) creates entirely new problems for Israel, because these bombings aren't obscure like in the past, but captured in videos and photos that then reach the rest of the world, prompting protestors to go out and take new action against Israel.So they're stuck in this neverending cycle. They send a new batch of troops into Gaza. Those troops get killed and/or captured by Hamas. In revenge, Israel bombs civilians. This is captured and anti-Israel sentiment around the world escalates and BDS is strengthened. This weakens Israel further. To try and look stronger, they end a new batch of troops into Gaza. Repeat until collapse. So long as Zionism is and remains the dominant ideology in Israel, there is no way out of the death spiral. Tens of billions of dollars worth of weaponry funneled into them has done nothing except kill more civilians. They're in a weaker place every single time that the US sends another package. Even the US admits that Hamas is still perfectly intact.
This is unbelievable. After 8 months of this, there hasn't been the slightest shift in strategy. They are the closest to collapse that they've been in their history, politicians and officials are threatening to leave the war-time government, the north is still depopulated of settlers and that's causing all sorts of societal mayhem, and they still aren't even attempting to get out of the death spiral. Even West-friendly global institutions are turning against them now. The Resistance really couldn't have asked for a less competent regime. You take the sense of military superiority and deterrence away from Israel on October 7th and it turns out that it was actually the singular load-bearing column of their entire society, and there's nothing else keeping it up.
Bombing civilians is not even slightly productive for them
ukraine_and_belgorod.jpg