Image is of Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, the leader of Ansarallah.
The death of Zionism has just massively accelerated.
previous preamble
BRICS has expanded to include Ethiopia, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Argentina is currently experiencing technical difficulties due to the election of the ancap clown Milei - once he's out of office, maybe they can try again.
I don't really have much to say about this one way or another. BRICS has, so far, made only nervous and small steps towards challenging US hegemony. This isn't really that unexpected, as only China and Russia are the real "true believers" in ending US hegemony (and even then, China's government either believes, or is pretending to believe, that reconciliation is still possible). Brazil, India, and South Africa are less enthralled by the concept of dethroning the US, most especially India, who had to make a firm decision in 2023 whether they were going to be on the side of America, or on the side of the Global South, and chose the former, strengthening their military relationship. They're still best of friends with Russia, but they are very obviously the sussy imposter of the BRICS group.
The prospects of BRICS are only really loosely correlated with the prospects of multipolarism, though. It's not a process that hinges on BRICS's successes or failures. It is coming because the contender states (in Desai's terminology) are irreversibly rising, and the US is irreversibly falling. If it will not be BRICS that leads, it will be a different organization. A better world is not only possible, but inevitable - unfortunately for the US.
I'm taking a week off the updates because I've been swamped lately, and also feel the need to reconfigure (and find new) sources. Needless to say that I've grown tired of Financial Times headlines, even if they do represent the actual views of the bourgeoisie.
The Country of the Week is Ethiopia! 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.
![](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/943d2d01-ee77-42de-ba9f-54aa3fa182a6.jpeg)
My Reddit account had to be manually approved today because I got mass reported by Israeli bots for posting the legal testimony of Vaughan Lowe for South Africa at ICJ yesterday. I just copy pasted exactly what he said, and that was too much for the Zionists apparently. It's actually really interesting how he breaks it down. Even by the "rules based world order" Israel is committing genocide. Well worth reading, if you didn't watch South Africa's case yesterday.
https://www.timeslive.co.za/politics/2024-01-11-in-full-vaughan-lowe-kc/
what got me mass reported
I bet a lot of people's world-views are getting rattled by this and
is running out of talking points.
Hopefully it's a watershed moment for liberals. Hopefully.
I got permabanned for calling people on World News genocidal freaks. Godspeed warrior.
/r/worldnews instills an intense existential dread in me.
I got perma'd after like 2 pretty mild criticisms of israel back in October, yet it still comes in to my feed. i used to cope by reporting the obviously TOS-violating comments that are widely accepted and shared on that subreddit, because i often got notified by reddit admins that they were suspended or banned...
Really, every thread is a just a racist, zionist, mass murder normalizing, genocide denying circlejerk. And I wonder: How many comments are from real people expressing their actual views? How much of it are paid comments (is that even a thing)? How much of the comments are AI generated? Regardless, it's scary to think how effective of a tool an online forum like that can be for propaganda.
I remember first going on world news in 2016 and they were trying to justify the Iraq war after Trump said it was a mistake during his first presidential campaign. They were actually arguing that the WMDs existed. The levels of delusion were incredible.
Thankfully I only stick to sports discussion and local subreddits on Reddit. Maybe some niche video game and entertainment ones too. I haven't been on any other subreddits in years. I have no idea what the world news idiots are saying.
South Africa is on a roll at the ICJ. This statement is what you give when you know that you've already won the genocide claim. That's taken as a precondition for this statement.
My goto Spitting Image is reserved for the paypal mafia now. These are nice South Africans. Mandela would be proud.
You can save Spitting Image's song for all the Zionist/apartheid supporting South Africans lol. They are a tiny minority of the country thankfully.
Yeah, if you read the introduction to this statement, Lowe outlines that the previous advocates for South Africa already gave conclusive evidence of genocide. So his part was to argue that there can be no justification for it.
I will respect South Africa for a long time after this.![emoji fidel-salute fidel-salute](https://www.hexbear.net/pictrs/image/9a5763af-1614-43e4-ac08-6099f40c0c55.png)
It's one of the very rare occasions that I'm proud to be South African, when we do stuff like this.