…one has to wonder what the latest Blinken round of visits to the Middle East was supposed to accomplish, since all it did was expose our impotence. Even the Financial Times could not hide that the meetings with Netanyahu and then Arab leaders were a train wreck. Netanyahu rejected even any itty bitty ceasefire, branded a humanitarian pause, to get relief in, demanding that Hamas release all hostages first. The fact that Israel has welched or underperformed on its past begrudging promises to let trucks from Egypt in, would make that a non-starter even before getting to Hamas being sure to stick to its position of wanting to trade hostages for Palestinian prisoners. And of course the Arab states are not about to budge. Blinken got a more pointed version of what he was told before.
Antony Blinken faced intense pressure from regional allies to facilitate an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, laying bare the stark gap between US support for Israel and the outrage in Arab capitals over the siege and bombardment of the strip….
Sameh Shoukry, the Egyptian foreign minister, demanded an unconditional ceasefire, a commitment that Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu bluntly rejected after meeting Blinken on Friday.
Blinken had been expected to “brainstorm” with Arab diplomats the future of Gaza, home to 2.3mn Palestinians, after the war ends. Safadi bluntly rejected those talks as premature. “How can we even entertain what will happen in Gaza when we do not know how Gaza will be left?” he asked Blinken. “Are we going to be talking about a wasteland? Are we talking about a whole population reduced to refugees?”
This comes off as the sort of thing someone who had just read classic texts on negotiating trying to put in practice: “Gee, let’s get a dialogue going! Let’s get to ‘Yes’ on some less fraught issues to pave the way for further agreement!” In addition, “brainstorming” is cringemakingly American. You don’t do that with people who are mad at you. You don’t do that in a crisis. Between independent entities, you do not do that at the top level. You have low level people or emissaries float ideas. So why this exercise? The worst is that Biden and Blinken come off as so disconnected from reality that they though they might get someone to accommodate US needs.
Friendly reminder: when commenting about a news event, especially something that just happened, please provide a source of some kind. While ideally this would be on nitter or archived, any source is preferable to none at all given.
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.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis.
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.
The Country of the Week is still Lebanon! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
You’re going to have to (hex)bear with me on the update this week. Have you been feeling generally pretty terrible this last month or so? So have I, and doomscrolling and archiving it all is my quasi-job at this point. Not good, folks, more and more people are saying it. I’ll get over it eventually.
Links and Stuff
The bulletins site is down.
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can.
Resources For Understanding The War
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.
Telegram Channels
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
Pro-Russian
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
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.
Last week’s discussion post.
My partner and I were talking about the brutality of airstrikes vs other forms of killing people (knives, guns etc) and how airstrikes are depicted as less brutal and personal. I made the point that there is literally no American cultural memory of being bombed under virtually any circumstances.
One movie that I thought did a great job of depicting the terror of airstrikes was the battle of lake changjin, the 2021 Chinese blockbuster about the PLA’s counterattack against American invaders in Korea. American bombers were terrifying in that film.
I think a lot of people in the west instinctively think about being the ones using the weapon, not the ones at the end of it. Airstrikes are no less brutal, but it is less personal for the one perpetrating it.
The greatest example of this suicide bombers, like how am I supposed to believe that a person blowing himself up is somehow worse than an airstrike on a city tf
The difference is that the suicide bomber has more courage.
The chair force is for cowards who don’t have the guts to look the people they are going to kill in the eyes.
Grave of the Fireflies
There’s a passage in one of the Night’s Watch (the Others, not the Guards) books where Anton meets and American light other who is an air force pilot and was bombing Yugoslavia, and Anton is kind of looking at him in discuss wondering how a light other could live with that without their own guilt magically devouring them.
I think about that a lot.
There’s no difference between a school shooter and an air-force pilot except how they’re perceived by society.
I managed to meet 2 retired Air Force pilots much older than me, one that flew for the interceptor squadron in apartheid South Africa and never saw combat (aside from trying to intercept US spy planes), and another who flew ground attack missions for the UK in the Gulf war and Iraq war.
They could not have been more different. The South African that never saw actual combat talked about his time flying the advanced intercept fighter jets with a smile, and joked about how they managed to scare some farmers with a sonic boom, and made light of the fact that they couldn’t keep up with US spyplanes. The Brit that flew combat missions in the middle east looked shell shocked, even though it had been over a decade since he was in the Air Force. He talked about SAM sites with genuine fear, had a holy reverence for the electronic warfare jets that saved him a few times from getting shot down, and seemed to have extreme guilt that was clearly eating him up from the inside.
Fuck him, but honestly, the fact that he feels guilt makes me feel better about humanity. If people can look back and recognize what they did was wrong, maybe they can teach others not to commit the same crimes.
I’ve heard that US drone operators suffer very high rates of trauma and PTSD; Conventional bomber pilots don’t see the aftermath of their violence, whereas drone operators often surveil their targets for a long time, can identify both the targets and their family and neighbors, watch their victims die, and and then see the aftermath. Even US military personnel aren’t free from human frailty and most people cannot inflict violence like that for very long before they start to suffer serious psychological injury.
Isn’t that why the nazis switched from shooting holocaust victims to using poison gas? Like even if you’re a committed fascist killing those you see as inferior, doing mass execution will fuck your head up. Most people just aren’t built to be mass killers.
I think so, yeah. After a while a lot of Wehrmacht soldiers wouldn’t do it anymore. But efficiency was also a factor - Shooting people was time consuming and inefficient. The solution was mobile gas trucks, and later mass deportation to death camps.
Gotta loiter to do the double tap strikes
The contrast for me between the two was quite revealing about the reality of war.
What is a light other??? Am I missing some major context? This comment kinda reads like nonsense and idk what to Google because I’m just seeing Game of Thrones which doesn’t have America, I’m pretty sure
Pretty sure Franks’ talking about the Russian novel series, the Night Watch
Yep never heard of that. First I thought discworld but that didn’t make sense, and googling pretty much only brought up game of thrones. Cool though, might find an audiobook for this
I’ll leave this here. Wikipedia’s phrasing is bad. By “animated war drama” - they mean anime war drama.
I liked it a lot but as you can imagine - it’s enormously depressing.