Thank you to @carpoftruth@hexbear.net for covering my position as Supreme Dictator of the Goddamn News while I was moving and getting set up in my new home in a top secret Kremlin-funded bunker five hundred feet below the ground. Our regularly scheduled programming returns this week.
On October 9th, Daniel Chapo won the Mozambique general election with about 70% of the vote. Chapo is the head of FRELIMO, the Marxist-Leninist party of Mozambique's liberation, which fought an internal anti-communist resistance called RENAMO which was backed by Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa; Frelimo won in 1975. However, as the USSR fell, Frelimo began to allow elections inside Mozambique, and has ruled the country with significant majorities in each election ever since.
The main opposition party inside Mozambique is Podemos, which is led by Venancio Mondlane, a former member of Renamo and trained inside the USA. He alleges that his polling figures predicted a majority win for him, not Frelimo, and has accused Chapo of electoral fraud. There have been the usual slogans about how they yearn for freedom. The EU, of course, "witnessed irregularities." As @WilsonWilson@hexbear.net has pointed out, Mozambique has massive undeveloped gas fields and is outsourcing the development process to France, Norway, the UK, and the USA, while mysterious Islamist groups have popped up to cause chaos in the exact regions which have the gas, slowing the process of actually developing those gas fields. Overall, it appears to be a cookie-cutter colour revolution attempt by the imperial core designed to install a comprador for cheaper resources. Its proximity to BRICS+ member South Africa may also be significant, noting the colour revolution in Bangladesh earlier this year exerting influence near India and China.
Protestors have been battling against the police and government since late October, resulting in dozens of deaths and injuries as well as massive disruption, as the government has intermittently blocked access to the internet and social media. As of today, calm appears to be returning, with border crossings beginning to reopen.
Please check out the HexAtlas!
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 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.
Is there any reason to believe the entirety of the "west" isn't just a massive engulfing black hole of evil that was created as part of a thousand-year conspiracy to ruin and enslave the world? I've seen literally no evidence of them ever doing anything good, in fact, I don't even think they're capable of any sort of good or decency. This is a belief that came about from the constant string of the "west" consistently making the most evil fucking choices possible, so if you want to convince me otherwise better show me something that suggests otherwise lol.
I think this is one of those sentiments that is theoretically wrong but practically right. Kinda like how if you just take the exact opposite position that America does in every single situation domestic and foreign, which, being a simple if/then statement, is far easier than following an ideology with a bunch of axioms and arguments that require hundreds of pages of reading to internalize, you'll actually end up 95% correct anyway and just need a few things corrected and ironed out.
If you're putting "the west" in quotes like that then yes it's evil, but it also seems like you're defining "the west" in ideological terms that shift, so not a very useful descriptor compared to "capitalism" or "imperialism" or what have you.
Ultimately, the origins of the West lie in the Carolingian empire. A lot of justification for the Crusades is almost identical to modern Western imperialism. The crusades had to happen because the savage Mohammedans do not respect pilgrims just like invasions had to happen because the savage Muslims do not respect women. The crusader states were just the medieval version of the mandates where a bunch of Western Europeans rampaged through the Levant as if they owned the fucking place. There's also typical Western hypocrisy where the nascent West styled itself as Christendom even though Christendom never was applied to the Orthodox East, culminating in the sack of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade.
I suspect the inability to politically unify Europe also played a role since a lot of the tribalism that exists in European society is a consequence of this. You're not going to have a European polity like the Song dynasty that focused less on the military and focused more on the economy and culture as part of regional hegemony. This focus less on the military, intentionally done to not repeat the mistakes of the Tang dynasty like the An Lushan rebellion, was how they eventually got rolled by the Mongols. But because European history is just the warring states period except if it lasted for more than 1500 years, its history is nothing more than state and statelets constantly warring with one another. Europe has never been at peace because there's always at least one statelet that had beef with another statelet. It also doesn't help that those European states had weak central governments too. So, it's not just statelet vs statelet, but statelet who can barely control their rampaging feudal warlords vs statelet who also can barely control their rampaging feudal warlords. It's somewhat unusual that Western Europe didn't have eunuchs while the Byzantines and Chinese dynasties did. It's because while the Byzantines and Chinese dynasties had strong central authorities which necessitated an imperial bureaucracy staffed by eunuchs, you don't need an army of eunuchs to administer the Duchy of Burgundy or the Duchy of Benevento.
All this paint a picture of Western Europe being the land of warlordism. Outside of inheritance, you basically can only acquire land through direct conquest or service to your feudal liege. Or in other words, either by being a feudal warlord or service to a feudal warlord. At a certain point, it just becomes part of European culture. This is why Zheng He showered gifts to the local while Christopher Columbus immediately started butchering and enslaving the first Indigenous person he saw. One was acting as an emissary of a prosperous empire while the other was some rampaging bandit who borderline grifted a pair of warlords whose kingdom was facing financial collapse after spending decades warring against the remnants of Muslim rule. Columbus's so-called discovery of the Americas of course snowballed from there with the genocide of the Indigenous and the slave trade and so on.
tl;dr The savage occidental knows nothing of peace and must be rescued from barbarism by their civilized superiors.
I hate the west but let's not pretend that all Zheng He did was give people gifts. He sailed around with an armada, demanded tribute, and intervened in local affairs with said armada. Not genocidal like the Euroids but let's not pretend he was Picard.
yakub except it's not a joke
I have a speculative, probably bs theory that the rise of Abrahamic religions with their emphasis on patriarchy, erasure of female deities, and “man has dominion over the land and other species” is directly responsible for the way Western cultures have treated the planet and other civilisations
Exactly. Those are all different forms of property, manifesting according to the surrounding conditions. Someone should write a book on that!
we angered the goddess
Read this piece by Michael Hudson: The End of Western Civilization – Why It Lacks Resilience, and What Will Take Its Place
A materialist take on the subject.
Interesting. Hudson has always struck me as very... I'm struggling to think of a good term. Strength-focussed? Pessimistic? As in, there are scholars who take every new piece of information and go "Here's why this means the US will fall soon," interpreting US failures as total and victories as pyrrhic, and I've always felt like Hudson is the opposite. So it's weird to see him say that Western civilization is definitely going out, when he's always been so focussed on how the US has craftily and cunningly developed a geopolitical environment where even when they're losing, they're winning because the dollar is doing well or something.
To be fair this has always been the line that Hudson maintained and even I say he’s rather on the side of too much optimism.
Hudson is different from other multipolar commentators in that he truly understands how the monetary system works, so while others are saying the US will collapse because the government debt is too high, Hudson said that government debt is not an issue at all, it is the skyrocketing private debt is going to be the cause of decline for Western neoliberal economies.
From a 30,000 ft view, this is absolutely correct. Hudson says that the Global Majority now has a real shot of decoupling themselves from the West that is experiencing through a decline. But the real question is whether these Global Majority countries can come up with an alternative that fully enable them to escape the next economic crisis spurred by the internal contradictions of Western neoliberal capitalism?
So far, the movement has been slow - it appeared as if everyone is dragging their feet and still under the illusion that normalcy will somehow return. This is where I mostly disagree with Hudson’s optimism about the Global South (although he is not wrong in that if all the countries understood and did what he suggested, there is a real potential for decoupling).
I think it would take something truly dramatic like a significant war between the US and China (unlikely) or increasing devastation from climate change (locked in RCP8.5 baby
)
Europe was pretty much a backwater until the late 1400s* and England had the unique conditions to develop agrarian capitalism and later industrial capitalism.
While the general impression for the last 500 years is mostly correct, it is pretty anti-materialist.
Settler colonialism in the new world for the first few years, for example, was not radically different to the "settler colonialism" that occurred numerous times prior (e.g. Anatolian stone builders colonising Britain displacing the original inhabitants, then being replaced by Britons, then occupied and integrated with Germanic Anglos and then Normans if I recall correctly).
*Even at 1500 CE, China and India's estimated domestic production massively outstripped Europe and it wasn't until industrial capitalism kicked into gear that this changed
Settler colonialism in the New World was absolutely different than the migration of people's prior. Never before did a people come to a land and entirely exterminate a populace through mass slave labour and disease within a single generation (see the Taino genocide).
Half a century to entirely destroy a people. That's unprecedented. Usually there's intermarriage, intermingling, etc. Briton is a mix of all those peoples, the Anatolians didn't wipe out the original Britons but intermarried and stuff. Not so with New World settler colonialism.
EDIT: Agreed with your overall point about West Eurasian backwater though. A great book that covers this reality is The Great Divergence by Pomeranz. His conclusions aren't great, but demonstrates that the conditions of European industrialism were also present in (for example) Song dynasty China.
I don't believe there's any genetic evidence for the Anatolian or prior populations surviving.
It happened again in Australia, which despite massacres and genocidal actions similar to the Americas (e.g. destroying sources of food, water and shelter, poisoning water holes and so forth) the overwhelming majority of death was from disease, which would be an inevitability in any large scale contact scenario.
We don't have much evidence of the extent to which disease transmission impacted other migration events because the old world was very quickly connected by trade.
Slave labour was not a uniquely European tradition (the large scale industrialisation of it certainly was, don't get me wrong on this point) and I think without the rapid development of agrarian and industrial capitalism the population of the Americas would have largely rebounded from the apocalypse that was European contact. Like we don't generally look at Carthage or Mongol-conquered places as subject to genocide because the local population eventually rebounded even where a huge number of people were killed.
I'll have to read it, it sounds interesting
Edit: of course we also don't consider those genocides because the modern conception of race hadn't developed by that point, itself driven by the need to justify the European brutality in the Americas
There are actually, just in small numbers, and again any "replacement" of prior Britons was not done by conquering and genocide it was just population migration after the current population was already experiencing demographic stress. See https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-43115485
Also I can't speak to Carthage but Mongol conquests were not "genocides" in any real sense. The Mongols destroyed cities that resisted, let cities live if they paid tribute. There was no concept of "race" or things like that to motivate destruction, and no entire peoples were wiped off the face of the Earth by Mongol conquest. They absolutely killed millions but it was in no way comparable to New World style colonial genocide.
Re: Australia I haven't actually read much about it, are you talking about the European conquest of the aboriginal Australians? Any book recs or something? Yeah I imagine it's very similar to New World colonialism.
The first major work was The Other Side of the Frontier in the 1980s, with a follow up published in the 2000s "Forgotten War".
The history of the frontier wars and genocide has been largely hidden by mainstream academia - Aileen Moreton-Robertson (feminist Aboriginal woman who has some great work on Black epistemology and current issues in Australia) noted that:
There are ongoing debates as to whether Aboriginal Australia suffering a loss of 95-99 percent of the population in the hundred years following colonisation can even be classified as a genocide, with new massacre sites being identified every year.
The government only withdrew the military from Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory last decade, so it's understandable why the scholarship is not as advanced as it is for the Americas.
The usual sterotype of nineteenth-century economic history is that Asia stood still while the Industrial Revolution propelled the West forward. That's only true in a superficial sense for one asia lost it much later, around 1850s, and it was not because one region industrialized while the other didnt but that there was a deliberate attempt at deindustrialization of Asia through policy. The looms of India and China weren't defeated by 'the market' but they were forcibly and violently dismantled through wars, invasion, opium and one-way tariffs.
Bairoch
"It is very likely that, in the middle of the eighteenth century, the average standard of living in Europe was a little bit lower than that of the rest of the world. When the sans culottes strormed the Bastille, the largest manufacturing districts in the world were still the Yangzi Delta and Bengal, with Lingan (Modern Guandong and Guangxi) and coastal Madras not far behind. India along produced one-quarter of world manufactures and while its 'pre-capitalist agrarian labour' productivity' was probably less than the Japanese-Chinese level, its commercial capital surpassed that of the chinese."
Philip Huang
"The overall economic development of the Yangzi Delta in the Qing exceeded that of 'early modern' England"
Bin Wong
"Specific conditions associated with european proto-industrialization - expansion of seasonal crafts, shrinking farm size, and good marketing systems - may have been even more widespread in China [and India] than in Europe.
Pomeranz:
"The lower Yangui appear to have produced roughly as much cotton cloth per capita in 1750 as the UK did cotton, wool, linen and silk cloth combined in 1800 - plus an enourmous quantity of silk."
Maddison
"The Chinese GDP in absoulte terms grew faster than that of Europe throughout the eighteenth century, dramatically enlarging its share of world income by 1820 (32.4% vs 26.6% of europe)
Shit even Marx pointed out that the brits liked to hide their incredibly bloody business when it came to capitalism so I don't know how yours is like materialist. If you are going to correct someone try to be correct I guess?
I don't understand what in my post you're disagreeing with?
I mention China once, here:
I don't see how that's incompatible with your view and quotes, and I agree with them.
Yes, industrial capitalism. You can't carve out and divorce the trade and market aspects of industrial capitalism from colonialism, mass expropriation, industrialised slavery and invasion (among others) any more than you can carve out kids in England getting their limbs wrecked in machines or workhouses.
That's not to say you can't ever have an industrialised capitalist society without those aspects, but when we're talking about the specific historic form and character of industrial capitalism and why Europe and it's colonial satellites subjugated, at one point or another, most of the people in the world over the last 500 years, that's absolutely part of it.
There's a limit to how much capital accumulation you can achieve in one country compared to sailing around the world and stealing labour, land and resources from everyone you can.
I'm saying it's much much later and it wasn't industrial capitalism kicked into high gear that did it this is just you going. "The British woke up one day and found themselves at the helm of an empire." You now saying.... "Well of course I also was saying all those other things."
But here's the kicker you said and I'm going to quote you
You are quite literally off by more than 300 years giving people just like wrong timeframes and you haven't adressed the main point which is this:
The usual sterotype of nineteenth-century economic history is that Asia stood still while the Industrial Revolution propelled the West forward. That's only true in a superficial sense for one asia lost it much later, around 1850s, and it was not because one region industrialized while the other didnt but that there was a deliberate attempt at deindustrialization of Asia through policy.
Again you can say all you want about what you meant or intended but that isn't how it's read how it's read is
'A short time after 1500 Europe started to do capitalism with manufacturies and then industries while asia stood still.' When again Asia didn't which I pointed out like sorry you weren't saying that in your initial post and are just now retroactively saying that 'Obviously this is what I meant' when you simply didn't write it out and it read exactly like 'The West industrialized while Asia stood still.' which is doubly ironic because it is something I hear libs say so many times why the third world exists, it just happened. When the reality is that the third world was made.
Regardless if anyone does read my comment the same way you did, then fortunately they can read down and have it clarified.
So in my post, I directly claim two things - the first is that China and India has much higher GDP in 1500, and that some time later, when industrial capitalism kicked into gear (i.e. not just commenced but was in full swing), this changed.
Do you see how you had to rewrite what I said to get the reading you thought was there?
Yes, I didn't debunk a lot of things in the post of a couple paragraphs of a broad stroke of 500 years of history, particularly misconceptions that I wouldn't expect on Hexbear.
The only reason I made a comment is because you got shit wrong before I do not believe you when I correct you and you go "Ah yes that's actually what I meant I just assumed everyone knew" stop this like weird 'marxist intellectual' aesthetic and either make better posts or stop being a little weirdo throwing materialist around.
The only good "The West" has ever produced is Bach, and I would kill Bach a trillion times if that was the sacrifice required for "The West" to be destroyed.