Image is of military and civilian sites across Caracas which were bombed by the United States as of last weekend.
As everybody has already known for a couple days, the US has abducted Maduro and his wife in a massive operation (of which the exact details are not currently known, but involved hundreds of aircraft and at least some bombing of military and civilian targets), and has threatened Venezuela and the socialist party with further abductions and widespread murder if they do not hand over control of the country directly to the United States. In a statement that really says it all, Trump said that Machado is not being considered for the colonial viceroy position due to her sheer unpopularity. Various parties and countries around the world - and inside the US - have expressed their disapproval, which, as we all know, will not shift US foreign policy a single iota.
A few months ago, when the pressure campaign on Venezuela began, I speculated that Maduro was going to be killed or captured eventually. Flagrantly illegal and violent American military campaigns in Latin America are not new. The US has been invading land, looting banks, assassinating democratically elected leaders, and otherwise overthrowing countries in the region for their own economic benefit for the better part of two centuries, under both Democratic and Republican parties. Unfortunately, we all know that Russia and China are unlikely to do anything meaningful to contest the US in their attempt to more violently assert hegemony in Latin America. I doubt very much that the China of today will come out to bat for Venezuela and start meaningfully pressuring the US economically. For better and worse, we are far from the days of the USSR.
However, Latin America has, historically, met the US in its radicalism, committed to wars of anti-colonial nationalism, and carried out successful revolutions against the dictators placed in control from the US. As history continues ever onwards and conditions develop, I can only assume that we shall once again enter that radicalizing cycle. In that vein, the big question on my mind, and everybody else’s, is: what comes next? Does the Venezuelan socialist party have the social and military cohesion to wage a years-long guerilla war against occupying troops? Can they quickly transition from a conventional to guerilla force as their military facilities are bombed, or will it take several years? Can they prevent the theft of their oil resources and make the attempt at foreign occupation more costly in both the manpower and economic costs than what that war will generate? Can Venezuela manufacture weapons for this guerilla war in a state of blockade? Will this military campaign begin immediately upon soldiers landing, or will it take a period of relatively unopposed occupation of months or even years? Will Cuba, Colombia, and even Mexico be in the same situation by the end of the year, with abducted leaders?
Yemen is the very recent proof that seemingly weak countries can force the American military to retreat in defeat. Can Venezuela follow? We shall see what Maduro has done to prepare the country for this war very soon. The only certain thing is that the murderous violence propagated by a trembling and dying empire shall be defeated eventually, whether it takes months, years, or decades, and the end result will be a socialist victory.
Last week’s thread is here. The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
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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.
Mirrors of Telegram channels that have been erased by Zionist censorship.
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.
Like I said in an earlier comment, it’s an economic superpower but a military regional power. Not everything can be solved by wielding economic might. Just ask the Song dynasty. My greatest fears of the PRC is that it’s going to be a replay of the Song dynasty where they had one of the most sophisticated economies and government administration in the world but a lackluster military. And the CPC hyping up Zhu Xi is extraordinarily discouraging in this regard. The US isn’t going to release Maduro no matter what economic tricks the PRC uses. Now if the PLA send a crack team to kidnap the Japanese PM and essentially turn this into a hostage exchange where Maduro gets exchanged for the Japanese PM, maybe. The PRC did this with Meng Wanzhou. They kidnapped a couple of loser Canadian spies and held a hostage exchange.
Ultimately, you strategize and make moves based on probability of winning. There’s a reason why the SU signed that non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany and it’s not because “it’s afraid of losing.” China’s optimal play is to begin building up its military and transitioning it from a purely defensive military to an interventionist one. Once the interventionist military has been build up, the next step would be cleaning up its backyard, the main targets being the Philippines and Japan (making a move on the ROK would require the cooperation of the DPRK) with the goal of regime change to knock them out of the chessboard and break the island chains set up by the US. Once that is accomplished, the PRC can further expand its reach. This is where the military alliances start to make sense because the PLA finally has Ws and has the power projection required to have global military presence instead of just its backyard (we are still operating under the hypothetical of the PLA successfully overthrowing the Philippines and Japan).
A lot of words just to say that you want China to behave exactly as the US does, and do exactly the things that China always criticizes the US for. You are asking China to be a complete hypocrite, to start wars, use threats of force to coerce countries, build bases around the world, and do regime changes, exactly the things they said they would never do.
This is precisely the kind of behavior that has caused countries all across the world to be fed up with the US and to come more and more over to China’s side, precisely because China behaves in a completely different way. Because China does none of those things and offers the world a radically different model that is not based on interventionism, hegemony and “power projection”, but on sovereignty, non-interference and win-win co-operation.
You can of course disagree with that model and think that the US model is the correct one, but it is pretty clear that China is not going to go in that direction, and you will continue to be very disappointed if you keep holding out hope that they do. China has chosen its path, and it is one that does not include China becoming an aggressive global imperialist power.
China is betting that its approach will prove to be the correct one in the long term.
If I wanted the PRC to do exactly what the US does, I would say that they should support Hawaiian and Puerto Rican separatism and build giant naval bases with missiles pointed at the continental US once a Republic of Hawaii/Puerto Rico has been established or try to assassinate US diplomats like how the CIA tried to assassinate Zhou Enlai by blowing up the plane they thought he was on. Not even getting to the part of history where the US got rich off of selling opium during the Qing dynasty. Overthrowing a bunch of US vassals is not even close to what the US has done to China.