Image is of a protest in San Diego against ICE.
On January 7th, 37-year-old Renee Good was murdered by an ICE agent in Minneapolis. While a considerable amount of the discussion online has been about the direction her wheels were turning and things like that, truthfully, I think it’s just fundamentally bad to shoot a person to death with a gun if you happen to be a state mercenary enforcing an incredibly racist federal policy, regardless of the circumstances.
The murder has since prompted a wave of vigils and protests, not only in Minneapolis, but also in virtually every major city in the country. The demands are justice for Good in particular, and the abolition of ICE in general, to avenge its many victims. The Trump administration has done all they can to inflame the situation, designating Good a “domestic terrorist” and saying that the agent who shot her will be immune from prosecution.
Protests and resistance to this administration’s policies have, encouragingly, had an element of international solidarity - not only are flags from countries throughout Latin America (and also Palestine) present, but speakers in protests have even been actively condemning the recent imperialist actions against Venezuela. For it is, of course, one joint struggle. The imperial boomerang always returns - and in the modern day, it returns rapidly.
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.
Greenland on the chessboard of US imperialism
spoiler
The colonial era formally ended in 1953, but political equality with Denmark did not follow. Following a referendum, so-called home rule was introduced in 1979, which was replaced in June 2009 by the current status of self-government. Under self-government, Greenlanders hold the rights to the island’s subsoil and the minerals found there. However, foreign and security policies remain decided in Denmark, which is why Greenland is considered NATO territory.
Greenland is not a member of the European Union. In a 1982 referendum, 53% of the Greenlandic people voted to leave the European Economic Community, now the EU. Today, Greenland is classified as one of the EU’s Overseas Countries and Territories.
In 1951, a secret agreement between the US government and Denmark’s envoy to the United States granted US military involvement in Greenland. The agreement was highly controversial and in detriment to official Danish policies at the time. Nevertheless, it remains in force today and has been repeatedly confirmed. In practice, it grants unlimited US military rights over Greenland.
Thus, for decades, the US has maintained several military facilities in Greenland. The history of these facilities includes forced evictions of Inuit families in 1953, the crash of an American B-52 plane carrying four atomic bombs in 1968, and other harms inflicted on the local population.
The Danish government repeatedly states that Greenland belongs to the Greenlanders and is not for sale. But in reality, Denmark has been selling off Greenland to the US for decades. “We already have a defense agreement between the Kingdom and the United States today, which gives the United States wide access to Greenland,” the Danish Prime Minister stated in an official statement earlier this week.
This raises the question: Why does the Trump Administration seek an annexation of Greenland, when the US empire already holds extensive rights over Greenland? The answer lies in a new security strategy and the demand for unquestioned and unlimited control over oil, control over minerals, and military dominance.
Greenland possesses at least 25 of the 34 minerals designated as “critical raw materials” by the European Commission. Greenland has significant deposits of rare earths, copper, nickel, zinc, gold, diamonds, iron ore, titanium, tungsten and uranium. Trump wants US companies, many of which have invested heavily in his re-election, to have unfettered access to Greenland’s mineral deposit resources.
Moreover, Greenland’s geographic position near the Arctic is important. Control over northern sea routes, such as the Northeast Passage, is becoming increasingly important as climate change advances. A fully controlled, militarized and rearmed Greenland is also intended to serve as an advanced base against both Russia and China. Beyond the prospect of super-profits, keeping socialist China far away from Greenland is a strategic goal for both the US and Denmark.
None of this answers the issue that the US already has all of this whether they formally own Greenland or not.
I’m of the opinion that they don’t want any of this, but instead they want to break a norm of the modern world and re-establish a new precedent for the sale of the 50,000 human beings that live there within western culture. This then sets them up for breaking other norms.
In order to exercise control over those resources, they need to build an enormous amount of infrastructure that necessarily tramples Greenlandic autonomy. There is no existing legal mechanism for that without the consent of Greenlanders. Seizing the island through military or other means is how they do that.
You think they need to establish a precedent of norm-breaking to justify future norm-breaking, but if they “already have all of that” as you said above, why do they need to break the norms at all?
Or to be more blunt, the enormous amount of infrastructure cannot be build without the genocide of Greenlanders happening first, the exact reason why you have to completely cut down trees and bulldoze a field of wild plants before laying down concrete. I suspect this is the real reason why the annexation has to happen (assuming it actually happens). The US can more or less do everything already except for the genocide of Greenlanders because I don’t think even a vassal as servile as Denmark will look the other way while Danish citizens are being exterminated. But if those Danish citizens either de jure or de facto cease to hold Danish citizenship, then the US gets what it wants (extractive infrastructure/penal colony being build without an Indigenous population to fight back) and Denmark gets what it wants (saving face by having an excuse to avoid directly confronting the US ethnically cleansing a people holding Danish passports).
The British did something similar to Chagos. The Indigenous Chagossians inhabited those islands, but the US wanted a naval base in the Indian Ocean, so what did the British do? They deported every single Chagossian from their native land, thereby ethnically cleansing those islands of their Indigenous population. All for the sake of building a naval base at Diego Garcia for the USians so that they can project power in the Indian Ocean.
They have the ability to do that already. There are no barriers beyond the cost to construct the infrastructure to do it. Companies have attempted to do this and then backed out after realising they do not want to build all the up front infrastructure. It’s a very high cost up front before any of it can work, there are no roads, there are no ports, there is no rail, there is only harsh cold weather conditions.
The government of Greenland and Greenlanders themselves do not oppose exploiting these resources. The only thing they’ve got restrictions on is Uranium mining for pollution reasons. Everything else is open to any private company that wants to come do it. They don’t want to build the up front infrastructure.
Salami slicing culture and norms rightwards has been the fascist strategy for decades now. You must have noticed. Once they’ve broken down a barrier with liberals and normalised something they can then go on to do it without resistance afterwards.
Because he’s old school and is mad that the sun is setting on the US empire