Bulletins and News Discussion from August 26th to September 1st, 2024 - Ruto Must Go - COTW: Kenya
Bulletins and News Discussion from August 26th to September 1st, 2024 - Ruto Must Go - COTW: Kenya
Image is from this Black Agenda Report article by the Communist Party of Kenya.
In June, large anti-government protests shook Kenya. President Ruto and his parliament were attempting to pass the new Finance Bill 2024, which, among other things, would have hiked taxes on the population, with a 16% sales tax on bread and a 25% duty on cooking oil, as well as new taxes on financial transanctions and vehicle ownership. There would also have been levies on women's sanitary products and digital goods such as phones, among other measures affecting hospitals.
Hundreds of protestors stormed the parliament building and began to tear the place apart. Shortly afterwards, on June 26th, Ruto announced that he was withdrawing the bill, calling the tens of deaths and hundreds of injuries "unfortunate". A couple weeks later, Ruto then fired his entire cabinet (aside from his foreign minister) and communicated his wish to the nation to form a "broad-based government". Funnily enough, in July, it was announced that the majority of positions were to be filled by members of the old cabinet, while other positions were taken by members of the opposition. This has prompted scepticism among the population, including calls to resign, but there haven't (yet) been any major anti-government events to pressure this outcome. The Communist Party of Kenya has been working to get some of their comrades back after they were abducted by the police during the protest period, and have otherwise supported the protests against Ruto.
The measures in the bill were strongly encouraged by the IMF. Kenya's debt is currently around $80 billion, of which about 10% is owed to China for infrastructure projects (such as a railway linking the capital, Nairobi, to the port city of Mombasa, as well as 11,000 kilometers of road throughout the country). The rest is owed to a combination of the US, IMF, World Bank, and Saudi Arabia. More than half of government revenue is going towards repaying the debt - but despite these massive payments, it has only grown. The most recent round of IMF plundering (and the impetus for current events) began in 2021, when they offered a 38-month programme to "help" Kenya, which would involve the usual warfare on the poor and the dismemberment of any useful societal institutions.
The COTW (Country of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific country every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied nations. If you've wanted to talk about the country or share your experiences, but have never found a relevant place to do so, now is your chance! However, don't worry - this is still a general news megathread where you can post about ongoing events from any country.
The Country of the Week is Kenya! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
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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 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. - 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.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
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.
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.
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Images of the Haditha masscare that the US military tried to keep from the public have been released.
[CW Details of massacre]
spoiler
On the morning of November 19, 2005, a squad of Marines was travelling in four Humvees down a road in the town of Haditha, Iraq, when their convoy hit an I.E.D. The blast killed one Marine, Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas, and injured two others. What followed would spark one of the largest war-crime investigations in the history of the United States.
During the next several hours, Marines killed twenty-four Iraqi men, women, and children. Near the site of the explosion, they shot five men who had been driving to a college in Baghdad. They entered three nearby homes and killed nearly everyone inside. The youngest victim was a three-year-old girl. The oldest was a seventy-six-year-old man. The Marines would later claim that they were fighting insurgents that day, but the dead were all civilians.
After the killing was over, two other Marines set off to document the aftermath. Lance Corporal Ryan Briones brought his Olympus digital camera. Lance Corporal Andrew Wright had a red Sharpie marker.
Briones and Wright went from site to site, marking bodies with numbers and then photographing them. Other Marines, including one who worked in intelligence, also photographed the scene. By the time they were done, they had made a collection of photographs that would be the most powerful evidence against their fellow-Marines.
Marine bragging about keeping the photos secret:
spoiler
The impact of an alleged war crime is often directly related to the horror of the images that end up in the hands of the public. The abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison became an international scandal when graphic photos were published. The Haditha killings had no similar moment. A few of the images that the Marines had made ended up in the public domain, but most have never been released.
In an oral-history interview for the Marine Corps, in 2014, General Michael Hagee, who was the commandant of the Marine Corps at the time of the Haditha killings, bragged about keeping the Haditha photos secret.
“The press never got them, unlike Abu Ghraib,” Hagee said.
The interviewer, Fred Allison, a Marine Corps historian, interjected, “The pictures. They got the pictures. That was what was so bad about Abu Ghraib.”
“Yes,” Hagee replied. “And I learned from that.” He said, “Those pictures today have still not been seen. And so, I’m quite proud of that.”
Source [CW Includes selected photos of the massacre at the bottom] https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/in-the-dark/the-haditha-massacre-photos-that-the-military-didnt-want-the-world-to-see?utm_brand=tny&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&mbid=social_twitter&utm_social-type=owned
I don't even know what to feel about this anymore
Twenty years. It's been twenty years. There's not been and will never be justice for this and the countless other murders in Iraq and Afghanistan over the decades
I shouted myself hoarse back then decrying these wars, and now it'll just be a footnote in history. I want to cry. I just might
Learning about the Haditha massacre around the time that anti-cop/George Floyd/Breonna Taylor protests were in full swing off in the US several years back was weird because I'd see a lib argument that "cops are worse than occupying troops because occupying troops at least have discipline and follow rules of engagement/get in trouble when they commit war crimes" and then you read about this and the worst anyone got was a slap on the wrist.
I think I initially came across it because when I pointed out the My Lai Massacre as a counterpoint to that rhetoric I got a response that that was 50 years ago, it's not like that now and I, just assuming that had to be wrong started googling for massacres in recent wars and it came right up on Wikipedia of all places, and I was shocked, if not surprised, by how evil these marines were and especially how little trouble they got in for it.
Don't get me wrong, fuck cops, but the idea that soldiers are morally upright is absurd.
[CW s----- abuse]
Also remember that Obama blocked the release of 2000+ images of s----- abuse/torture in Abu Ghraib for fear that it would shock the public
A woman who was being tortured inside wrote a note begging Iraq to bomb the prison:
spoiler
BAGHDAD, 23 May 2004 — The scandal at Abu Ghraib prison was first exposed not by a digital photograph but by a letter. In December 2003, a woman prisoner inside the jail west of Baghdad managed to smuggle out a note. Its contents were so shocking that, at first, Amal Kadham Swadi and the other Iraqi women lawyers who had been trying to gain access to the US jail found them hard to believe. The note claimed that US guards had been raping women detainees, who were, and are, in a small minority at Abu Ghraib. Several of the women were now pregnant, it added. The women had been forced to strip naked in front of men, it said. The note urged the Iraqi resistance to bomb the jail to spare the women further shame.
Genuinely want to vomit.
I feel you comrade