Image is of the American military during their occupation of Haiti at the beginning of the 20th century, taken from this NYT article from 2022: Invade Haiti, Wall Street Urged. The U.S. Obliged.
In the aftermath of the assassination of Jovenel Moïse in 2021 and his replacement by Western comprador Ariel Henry, the situation in Haiti is the most dire it has been in decades - by some metrics, even worse than the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake (CW: rape, violence including against children). Millions do not have enough food. Outbreaks of disease are rampant. The government - such that it still exists, which is becoming increasingly debatable - has only a minority control over the capital city, with some estimates putting the influence of armed groups at 80%.
America’s search for somebody, anybody, to intervene in Haiti has ended, with Kenya answering the call. President Ruto has announced that he will send 1000 police officers to Haiti. Kenya’s Foreign Minister has tried to sell this intervention as pan-Africanism. Other Caribbean states, like the Bahamas and Antigua and Barbuda, have offered to send police officers too.
I can’t really say it any better than the Black Alliance for Peace’s own statement:
Kenya has offered to deploy a contingent of 1,000 police officers to help train and assist Haitian police, ostensibly to “restore order” in the Caribbean republic. Yet, their proposal is nothing more than military occupation by another name; an occupation of Haiti by an African country is not Pan-Africanism, but Western imperialism in Black face. By agreeing to send troops into Haiti, the Kenyan government is assisting in undermining the sovereignty and self-determination of Haitian people, while serving the neocolonial interests of the United States, the Core Group, and the United Nations.
There is an urgent need for clarity on the issue of occupation in Haiti. As described in a recent statement on Haiti and Colonialism, Haiti is under ongoing occupation. No call for foreign intervention into Haiti from the administration of appointed Prime Minister Ariel Henry can be considered legitimate, because the Henry administration itself is illegitimate. BAP has repeatedly pointed out that Haiti’s crisis is a crisis of imperialism. Haiti’s current unpopular and unelected government is propped up only by Haiti’s de facto imperial rulers: the unseemly confederacy of the Core Group countries and organizations, as well as BINUH (the United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti), and a loose alliance of foreign corporations and local elites.
Henry and the UN have made a mockery of sovereignty by mouthing the slogan “Haitian solutions to Haitian problems,” yet finding the only solution in violence through foreign military intervention. After repeated failed attempts to organize an occupying force to protect their interests and impose their will on the Haitian people (including appeals to the multinational organization, the Caribbean Community [CARICOM] for troops), they have now found a willing accomplice in Kenya, an east African country with its own set of internal problems.
Indeed, what’s in it for Kenya? An opportunity to both train and enhance the salaries of local police forces and garner a patina of prestige, or at least bootlicking approval, from the West. And for Haiti? White blows from a Black hand and a further erosion of their sovereignty.
And, by the way, here’s the Black Alliance for Peace’s statement calling for no intervention by ECOWAS in Niger, calling the organization a Western comprador organization similar to CARICOM’s role in Haiti.
Welcome to our friends throughout the Lemmyverse!
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
This week’s first update is here in the comments.
This week’s second update is here in the comments.
This week’s third update might not happen because I’m busy dunking.
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.
> looking for a new source on China
> ask the liberal if their source is CIA or Zenz
> they don’t understand
> pull out illustrated diagram explaining what is CIA and what is Zenz
> they laugh and say, “It’s a good source sir”
> click the link
> its Zenz
Rule of thumb for all hexbearian comrades: You see a hexbear post, you upvote it because you like it! Get it to the top of the lemmyverse charts so everyone can appreciate our big beautiful posters!
I’d like to thank federation for reminding me that liberalism is a festering husk kept afloat solely by the collection of literal compound interest on 500 years of genocidal plunder.
The liberal mind is where critical thinking skills go to lay down and die. Lemmy and the anglosphere writ large is a space of pure mental atrophy where you can see reflected the decline of the Western bloc in real time. No one left to fill critical roles, every administrative organ just exposed to open air, infected and dying.
Colonisers were never supposed to believe the words they were saying.
I like to imagine people stomping in here from the fucking 900 comment thread going on right now, taking off their blood-stained helmets, laying down their gore-dipped swords against the wall, taking off their ragged armor
this really has be the funniest week on this site in a while, federation was a great idea. just imagining the typical reddit liberal who has experienced no pushback whatsoever on any take on China or Taiwan or Russia for years and getting ready to bask in the upvotes again by saying “China bad, everybody is a slave” and then being attacked by a hive of hornets
the communists remaining on lemmy trying to keep the liberals out like at Helm’s Deep and then Hexbear arrives. “at dawn, look to the east.”
There’s some unironic NAFO fella in one of the China threads. Bonus is they’re from the Canadian instance lmao
I like how libs come from other instances to say this place is an echo chamber, when like half of our news stories in the socialist news mega come from the FT, WSJ, and other Western business press.
Extremely sad that I was able to find actual conscription/draft defenders in the year 2023. Liberals on the lemmyverse have gotten really scratched lately.
Imagine defending military conscription for the Ukraine war. Seriously. Absolute ghoul behaviour.
Also, meeting some Cuban communists in a few hours.
Be sure to introduce them to Hexbear.
Dope. Say hola to them for us!
Cuban communists
Oh wow! they are some of my favorite kind!
Given how Cuba has combined socialism, anti-imperialism, and enlightened LGBT+ values, I’d argue that they’re absolutely my favourite kind. No “some of” qualifier needed.
It’s so frustrating seeing so many countries that get one of those things right, but then completely shit the bed on one of the others. Russia, for example. Anti-imperialist? Definitely. Socialist? Well, a return to a national economy is a good start. But they’re horrific on the LGBT+ front.
Or my home country Canada. Socialism? Well, there’s a kinda-sorta functioning social safety net. LGBT+ rights? Probably as good as there is in the world today. But anti-imperialist? Definitely not, we’re obedient lapdogs for the US government.
You can’t really compare them like that. Cuba had the “luxury” of resisting Western/US influence for more than half a century. This allowed progressive movement to grow from within in relative isolation.
The price for Cuba to pay? Being sanctioned by much of the rest of the world, with a living standards that are barely adequate compared even to many developing countries. (Honestly most Western leftists who fetishize Cuba probably won’t like living there because it means giving up a lot of their treats that are ubiquitous in where they come from)
The rest of the world can’t really afford that, unless they are absolutely prepared to embrace becoming Cuba, Venezuela and the DPRK. You only have to count how many progressive movements across the world that had been silenced, neutered and brutally crushed by Western-backed operations to know how difficult it is to decouple yourself from the Western world.
I’m having difficulty following your thought process.
Let me explain - let say you are a newly elected leftist government in a third world country. You have campaigned on nationalizing your country’s natural resources, advancing women’s rights and reforms that promise a more egalitarian distribution of wealth to the people.
What’s your first major challenge? It’s not the local right wing oppositions, it’s the support behind them. Your government is now a threat to Western imperialists who have long cultivated a close relationship with right wing dictators in the region to ensure their economic interests are well preserved even after your country had achieved independence in the 20th century.
Now, because you are a threat to “democracy” and “freedom”, your government’s first major challenge will come from foreign capital investors, who threaten to withdraw their investments in your country. This means job losses, reduced revenues in exports, fall in industrial production, and ultimately recession and popular unrests, which will be cleverly exploited by the right wing oppositions.
Secondly, as the economy begins to take a toll, you will need loans. The State Department will pressure through diplomatic channels and global financial institutions to cut you off access to much needed credit unless you promise to do what is called “structural adjustments” by the IMF, i.e. austerity. Cut healthcare, social spending, education, privatize your public sectors, let the foreign capitalists come in and take control. This will lead to even more unrest and right wing oppositions gaining ammunitions to use against your government as you fail to implement your campaign promises.
Third, scandals will begin to emerge among the ranks of your government and the news will be circulated to the media, cleverly devised to damage the reputation of your government and whatever trust the public has left in you.
As you begin to face popular unrest, all the campaign promises are now being thrown out of the window. You have two options here: yield to the pressure exerted upon you by the imperialists, or double down by cracking down dissent i.e. go full “authoritarian” mode like in Cuba, Venezuela and North Korea.
If you choose the former, then you have already lost. No reform is ever going to take place in your country. You will lose the next election if you refuse to collaborate with foreign imperialists, and the right wing parties will take over.
If you choose the latter, a coup will be engineered against your government in the name of “human rights abuses” and “authoritarian crack down on democratic voices of dissent”. If you’re unlucky, you’re immediately executed by right wing death squads. If you’re lucky enough to resist against all pressures (which means doubling down more on suppressing dissent), then a military operation might be mounted against your government to “liberate the people from oppressive government.” Worst case scenario, you get bombed to hell like Libya and Iraq.
Best case scenario though, you manage to survive through all the economic sanctions, political blackmails, foreign interventions and military conflicts, all of which requiring rule of extreme iron-fist to weed out provocateurs, saboteurs and foreign agents within your country. This means you have practically turned your country into Cuba, isolated from much of the rest of the world, and surviving mostly through means of subsistence (and worse, because the USSR no longer exists, nobody could sustain your country with large sums of financial aid).
It is only under such environment of extreme isolation that you’ll finally be able to implement the reforms you first promised in your electoral campaign, many many crises ago. Progressive movements will finally be able to grow from within this society promising more equality and egalitarianism. The cost to such progress? Pretty much everything else.
This is why Mao made it very clear that the principal contradiction of the developing countries is Western imperialism, not local class conflicts even though they do exist at every level.
Lmao Canada is in no way socialist
very cool
say hello to justin for me
Lukashenko boots Wagner out of Belarus
Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko has reportedly kicked the Wagner PMC out of Belarus, after refusing to finance the Russian mercenaries.
Wagner forces left Russia for Belarus as part of a settlement deal brokered by Lukashenko following the armed mutiny on June 24 that saw Wagner’s leader Yevgeny Prigozhin turn on his boss, Russian President Vladimir Putin.
But reports have now emerged suggesting Lukashenko has refused to finance their stay in the country and the mercenaries are being “bussed” back to Russia for a “vacation.” According to the VChK-OGPU Telegram channel, operations to remove all Wagner Group men began earlier in the month, with a second phase to remove the rest going into effect this weekend.
Wagner’s services don’t come cheap. Putin recently admitted that the Kremlin has spent around $1bn on the private military company last year, using state budget funds. Previously the Kremlin denied all knowledge of Wagner.
VChK-OGPU said the men headed for Russia are mercenaries that rejected re-assignment to Libya, where the Group has been operating for years.
“A source of the Cheka-OGPU said that after the meeting of PMC Wagner, everyone who did not sign up for a business trip to Libya was urgently sent on vacation to Russia,” VChK-OGPU posted on its channel. “Right now, mercenaries in Belarus are packing their bags and going back to Russia on vacation. At the same time, everyone was asked to stay in touch with PMCs, since at any moment a certain command from above could follow.” Earlier Lukashenko said that the Wagner forces would be used to train the Belarusian army.
lmfao
“nah, actually, get out of my country, freeloaders!”
It’s so funny how libs stumble in here peddling their tired bullshit that they’re used to getting absolutely zero pushback on and then going “I can’t believe the Hexbear fascists don’t Slava their Ukrainis, my word!” and running off to their home instance bitch and cry about it while their fellow cretins pat each other on the back for how brave they are for standing up to Hexbearian fascism and how they’re never wrong and always right
The offensive failed
So it’s time for peace talks then?
It’s time for peace talks, right?
How can you enter peace talks with an invader??
Found this on Twitter posted by an Ukraine flag account. And it’s actually perfect, it shows how they prefer victory at the cost of Ukrainian blood over a negotiated peace to save Ukrainian lives.
It’s pretty cool that people are calling anyone who wants an end to the Ukraine war “pro-genocide”. What does victory look like to these people?
Financial Times: Is Britain really as poor as Mississippi?
It was almost nine years ago to the day when the question of where Britain would rank among the US states for economic heft first became “a thing”. In an article for the Spectator, Fraser Nelson calculated that on a gross domestic product per capita basis, and after adjusting for price differences, the UK would sit in 49th place out of the 50 US states, narrowly squeezing in ahead of Mississippi.
As Britain’s economy has half slumbered, half stumbled its way through the nine years since, pausing to commit occasional acts of egregious self-sabotage, the Mississippi Question has only grown more popular. Could this be the year the UK economy is surpassed by that of the US state with America’s highest poverty rate and a life expectancy almost 10 years shorter than Britain’s?
For a fleeting moment recently, it looked like the time had come, but this was due to an erroneous comparison of nominal figures for Mississippi with inflation-adjusted numbers for the UK.
So no, the short answer is that to date, Britain remains free of that one particular ignominy. GDP per capita has remained ahead of Mississippi’s by about 15 per cent over the past two decades, and indeed as recently as 2019 the UK ranked ahead of no fewer than six of America’s poorest and most economically anaemic states. Heady days, indeed.
No, the UK isn’t as poor as Mississippi.
It’s a poor as Alabama. Big difference!
But the focus on one comparison, and one surface-level statistic, masks more interesting — and no less troubling — trends beneath the surface. If we’re going to compare Britain to each of the US states individually, then why not also look at the UK’s constituent parts?
It will surprise nobody that London accounts for an outsized share of Britain’s output, but the magnitude of the UK’s economic monopolarity is remarkable. Removing London’s output and headcount would shave 14 per cent off British living standards, precisely enough to slip behind the last of the US states. Britain in the aggregate may not be as poor as Mississippi, but absent its outlier capital it would be.
Sorry, correction. If you remove the money laundering capital of the world, the UK is in fact as poor as Mississippi.
By comparison, amputating Amsterdam from the Netherlands would shave off 5 per cent, and removing Germany’s most productive city (Munich) would only shave off 1 per cent. Most strikingly, for all of San Francisco’s opulent output, if the whole of the bay area from the Golden Gate to Cupertino seceded tomorrow, US GDP per capita would only dip by 4 per cent.
And the chart they put together:
Britons have mixed feelings about London. It’s the home of the metropolitan elite and sometimes seems more at home with New York than Newcastle, but it keeps Britain economically afloat. Not only in terms of the goods and services it produces but also in its higher tax revenues and fiscal transfers to poorer parts of the country.
As it turns out, letting a psychotic gammon deindustrialize your country so she can one up Reagan was not smart.
There were fears that the capital would suffer more from Brexit than most regions, but thus far the opposite has been true. Exports of services have held up relatively well while trade in goods has cratered, and London’s economy is 4 per cent larger today than it was in 2019, bucking the broader national trend of stagnation or decline. London is the only one of the 10 regions in England and Wales to have grown in every quarter since the nadir of the pandemic recession in the second quarter of 2020, while three others — including the South East — have dipped into regional recessions in the past 12 months.
Money laundering is even easier now that we don’t have the EU regulating us!
This is not to say the capital is in rude health — its status as the pre-eminent global financial hub is slipping away, and its productivity growth has been lagging behind that of the rest of the country for the past 15 years — but merely to highlight the double-edged sword Britain has ended up with.
Its capital is the one thing keeping the UK hanging on in the upper economic echelons, but the decades-long London-centricism of everything from finance and culture to politics has engendered a reluctance to allow any other part of the country to be an agent in its own destiny in the way that London has been.
If Britain is to one day banish the Mississippi Question and return to upward mobility, it will require more than one economic engine.
LOL good luck!
