Image is of President Hakainde Hichilema and President Xi Jinping on September 15th, from this article.
Zambia is a country of 20 million people, located in southern Africa. Breaking free from British rule in the 1960s, the new government was a one party state ruled by the socialist UNIP party with its leader Kenneth Kaunda, who was a strong supporter of the Non-Aligned Movement (and was its chairman from 1970-73). Its economy has been and remains characterised by copper exports - it is the second-largest copper exporter in Africa - and the economy deeply struggled in the 1970s due to the price of copper plunging. After the fall of the USSR, and due to violent protests, Kaunda stepped down and instituted a multiparty democracy, which has been maintained without (successful) coups to this day, though there are warnings by the leader that some are plotting a coup, given the trend right now.AA
Earlier this year, in June, Zambia struck a deal to restructure the $6.3 billion in debt that they are burdened with, of which China is the single largest creditor.Reuters Though he has typically been more West-friendly, last week, President Hichilema traveled to China for two days, meeting with various companies, and Xi Jinping himself. They elevated their relationship to that of a comprehensive strategic cooperative partnership.Xinhua He and Xi have agreed to the increased use of local currencies in trade.BB
Hichilema said Zambia thanks China for supporting the African Union’s entry into the G20 and China’s positive role in resolving the Zambian debt issue. The Zambian side abides by the one-China principle, highly appreciates the guiding philosophy and principles of Chinese modernization, and hopes to learn from China’s development experience.
Hichilema has also said:AN
“We can do more, faster, because the needs are tremendous in Zambia. I heard some of the solutions are here. All we need to do is to combine the two together.”
Check out @Othello@hexbear.net’s discussion of The Wretched of the Earth!
The Country of the Week is Singapore! 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.
The news summary for last week is here!
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.
> I storm into the room, flinging the doors open"The Poles! They've stopped sending weapons to Ukraine because of their stupid little trade war over grain; the cracks are forming, the united coalition is splintering! How long can this last? Once the spigot dries up, how fast will Ukraine fold? What new horrors will be wrought in this new multipolar world?"> my gf turns to me," what the fuck are you talking about, go make some tea"> I go stare at a screen for eight hours pretending to care about "action items" as I mutter on about Lviv/LwówWork Slack Channel: "Has anybody heard about this really old documentary called 'Tiger King'?"Pondering the orb of global misery with y’all is fine but god damn do I sometimes feel insane.
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Brazilian Pres. Lula, a former lathe operator, and former Volkswagen assembly line worker/Labor Minister Luiz Marinho met with UAW leaders in New York yesterday, with a delegation of Brazilian union leaders. There, they announced solidarity actions with striking US autoworkers.
Zelensky Hillary 2024
It’s Zillary’s turn
Communists and conservatives coincidentally not supporting Ukraine (nominally for the latter): proof that communism and fascism are the same
Liberals and conservatives systemically and deliberately supporting and funding every war, invasion, and occupation by domestic forces: mature, bipartisan, proof that democracy works
Good morning everyone from Beirut, Lebanon. I’m taking a car to Damascus today, straight to the land of the Lion. I was coincidentally in Burj Hammoud with my cousin last night, which is an Armenian neighbourhood in the eastern edge of Beirut. Tensions are very high for sure, two older Armenian dudes got into a fist fight in a street cafe while arguing about Pashinyan. Which reminds me, you’re probably getting a cuck n chad ranking next Monday, with Pashinyan and the Armenian diaspora in America competing hard for the cuck spots.
On another note, this whole counter-offensive thing really sucked. Progress is so damn slow that I haven’t even learned new names of random villages in Zaporozhye for weeks now. 100 days in and we’re still talking about Kamianske, Robotyne and Verbove
The Indian government seems very inclined to break down relations with Canada for a pathetic separatist movement which has near zero support in India itself.
Our brick houses and walls are so poorly built in South Africa that just a strong wind was seemingly enough to knock down half of them in the Pretoria area. Okay that’s a exaggeration, but seriously, there is no way a 114kph / 70mph strong wind should cause that much damage. It wasn’t even a rain storm, it was what meteorologists call a “dry microburst”! What the hell is even going on over there in Pretoria? Did they get the three little piggies from the fairytale to build everything?
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/joe-biden-house-weekend_n_650d05abe4b00c6ed61ace41 god I hate instead of doing anything Biden just shoots off a typical lib scold tweet and all the mouth breathers will be “yeah you tell em”
Mini swiss news update:
Swiss central bank is not increasing interest rates and keeps them at 1.75
Swiss government has their fall session and the big topics are:
Insurance premiums, since 2000 they’ve doubled and from 2022 to 2023 they’ve increased by 6.6%
Wasted opportunity by left wing parties for not calling to abolish all the health insurance companies and just having one they just want the state to pay more for relief.
Climate, after this historically warm summer this has become a rather large topic with questions of how can we achieve CO2 neutrality and if it’s even possible, one of the proposals is that every building over 300 square meters has to have solar panels installed.
Selling Weapons considering the ongoing pressure this is going to be a topic for a long time the newest proposal is to allow the army to sell its 25 decommissioned Leopard-2 tanks back to Germany, who’d immediately send them to Ukraine.
Tobacco ads swiss people voted on no longer allowing any ads for tobacco this spring (56.6% to 43.4%) and now parliament is trying to worm themselves out of it by saying “well the text said it was to protect kids so what if we just ban it all together that’d go too far”
Regulationbrake this is something that’s been again proposed by market liberals, basically if the politicians vote on it companies can chose to ignore regulations and laws, this already came up last summer session and was voted down by every party but the FDP and now during the fall session they are trying to do it again.
The whole session is going to conclude on the 29th so maybe there’ll be some developments.
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Oh I forgot to chime in with this article I read on Singapore in the latest Le Monde Diplomatique. It’s a pretty good overview of Singapore as it currently stands. It’s behind a paywall, so I’ll post it as a reply chain below. Title is “Has the Singapore model lost its shine?: Singaporeans can vote, but the opposition is kept in check. They can strike, but never do. They depend on disenfranchised immigrant labour. But are cracks beginning to show in the ‘Singapore model’?” From: https://mondediplo.com/2023/09/03singapore
Also, interestingly Singapore has an air force. Like, a fairly massive one. Over 100 fighter jets, for a tiny country with 6 million people! Suppose it’s a deterrent thing.
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Ukraine’s worst enemies are those who demand Russia’s strategic defeat
The article covers the counteroffensive and why it failed, which we largely already know about. There’s an interesting section on Ukrainian mobilization that I actually wasn’t aware of, in the spoiler tags below.
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Six weeks after Ukraine launched its counteroffensive, Zelensky extended martial law and general mobilization for three months. Three weeks later, he dismissed all of Ukraine’s regional military commissars and announced that Ukrainian authorities had launched 112 criminal proceedings against 33 regional officials, alleging corruption in the process of military conscription.
Since the beginning of the invasion, Ukrainian authorities have apprehended approximately 20,000 military-aged men who sought to leave the country, either by avoiding border checkpoints or by attempting to pass through them with forged documents. Many other Ukrainian men succeeded in avoiding conscription, often by paying bribes.
Now, a representative of Zelensky’s Servant of the People party has declared that Ukraine expects all Western European countries that have accepted Ukrainian refugees to send men of military age back home so that they can be drafted into the army and sent to the front.
Several days ago, Ukrainian media reported that Poland might extradite Ukrainian ‘draft dodgers’ back to Ukraine, where they could be compelled to participate in near-suicidal assaults on heavily fortified Russian positions.
Austria’s government then rejected extradition, stating “That would be a massive encroachment on our statehood, we would never do that. That would be an attempted intervention in our asylum system and in our statehood, Austria could not entertain that.” Germany followed Austria’s lead, as did Hungary. Zelensky’s plan to reconstitute his army by means of extradition might now be in tatters.
To mitigate the effects of draft evasion, Ukraine’s government has also imposed harsh penalties on conscientious objectors. As the New York Times recently reported: “Conscientious objection to military service is an internationally recognized right, one enshrined in Ukraine’s Constitution. But when Russia invaded Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky instituted martial law. With that, the right to alternative service related to conscientious objection effectively evaporated.”
Not only is conscientious objection a “human right,” said Eli S. McCarthy, a professor of justice and peace studies at Georgetown University, it is “critical to commitments that Ukraine has made” to international bodies and aspirations to join the European Union.
But the main point is here:
Ukraine’s situation has become so dire that former British Army Colonel Richard Kemp—previously one of Ukraine’s most vociferous boosters—recently authored an op-ed in The Telegraph in which he warned that the West “must prepare for humiliation.”
With all due respect to Mr. Kemp, this is not the time for Western leaders to worry about humiliation. Ukrainian solders are dying on an industrial scale. We must do all we can to stop the killing. Western leaders can massage their bruised egos later.
At this stage, the humane and rational thing to do is to oppose the escalation of this war, and to advocate for reasonable, mutual compromises to achieve a lasting peace. This is a war that Ukraine cannot win in any meaningful sense of the word. The best that Ukraine can hope for is a bloody, horrific stalemate that will gradually sap the state’s remaining lifeblood.
With each passing minute, more Ukrainians become permanently disabled. More become displaced. More Ukrainian children become fatherless. More Ukrainian infrastructure is destroyed. More landmines, other unexploded munitions and long-lasting contaminants proliferate among Ukraine’s rich agricultural lands, and more towns and cities become uninhabitable.
The hole out of which Ukraine must eventually dig itself is becoming only deeper. At some point, that hole will become so deep that Ukraine will never come out of it. We are rapidly approaching that point, if we have not passed it already.
By insisting upon Russia’s strategic defeat and excluding any possibility of meaningful compromise with Russia, we doom Ukraine to destruction. To save Ukraine, we must stop this war.
