Bulletins and News Discussion for December 11th to December 17th, 2023 - What's Yours is Mine - COTW: Canada
Bulletins and News Discussion for December 11th to December 17th, 2023 - What's Yours is Mine - COTW: Canada
Image is of the Cobre Panama open-pit copper mine, located 120 kilometers west of Panama City.
Canada is a prolific mining country, hosting many of the world's top mining corporations. Some of its extraction is local - for example, Saskatchewan is the world's largest producer of potash, a critical agricultural nutrient. Much of the extraction is abroad. Naturally, this means that Canada has cut a bloody, but often ignored, path through the global periphery, extracting minerals and causing environmental degradation.
A notable recent example is that of the Cobre Panama copper mine, which is owned by First Quantum Minerals, one of the largest mining companies in Canada. The company earned $10 billion in revenue in 2022, of which the Cobre Panama mine generated $1 billion. Protests in Panama about this mine have gone on for over a decade, urging for a greater share of the profits, protection of indigenous people, and stronger environmental protections. Canada has maintained a stoney silence (pun somewhat intended) on these movements.
On October 20th, the president of Panama, Cortizo, renewed the company's mining concession for 20 years, after a halt in production since the end of 2022 due to negotiations and reform. Everybody hated this. In October, protestors took to the streets in sufficient numbers that Cortizo was forced to halt new mining approvals, and announced a public referendum on whether the contract with First Quantum should be repealed. This was immediately cut down, but the government decided to invalidate the new concession anyway in late November, calling it unconstitutional, and closing down the mine.
First Quantum Minerals has lost about half its market value since October. Various international banks have said that Panama could lose its investment-grade credit rating next year due to the income hit - the mine generated 5% of its GDP. The international arbitration process which First Quantum has initiated against Panama could last years.
The book Canada in the World: Settler Capitalism and the Colonial Imagination handles Canada's role as an imperialist, anti-indigenous, extractive state throughout its history, and is on our geopolitical reading list.
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The Country of the Week is Canada! 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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Does anyone have a concise explanation of Israel Palestine that I can send to a lib I know? All I'm getting is: "give me an article" and I'm getting annoyed when they refuse to accept what's happened/happening
There's no article on earth that will convince a liberal that doesn't already "get it" at this late date
Which is why I stick with the most visceral videos of dead and dying children, a child slowly dying because there's a hole where their face should be has in my experience this kind of disorienting effect on people, they tend to drop the subject or stop responding when I show them this shit, I wonder why?
Liberals are slimy cowardly creatures, which is why they're helpless when someone hits them with a firm and brutal hand, it's why they bend the knee to fascists everytime they show up, spare not the rod with these people otherwise they'll always wiggle out and hide in faux-nuance rhetoric
Nah don't be defeatist. People don't spring from the womb understanding history, rather they have to swim upstream against a torrent of propaganda to learn anything. If someone is good faith asking you a communist about something, they are as receptive as they'll ever be, and you, a communist, are better equipped to answer than 10000 other people. Don't throw away opportunities like that. Never stop explaining,
You misunderstand me, I'm not throwing away people who want to learn, I simply believe a shock therapy approach is more effective than a 5,000 word essay, especially when the subject is about genocide
I firmly believe in the aphorism "a picture speaks a thousand words" whether they're good or bad faith actors, they're both forced out of their shells when presented with blood and guts reality, it cuts thru the noise and bullshit
For the bad faith scum I do it to disconcert and off balance them, for good faith folks, witnessing atrocity can lay the seeds of cognitive dissonance, potentially anytime they're bombarded by mainstream propaganda they see a child without a face, it's much more visceral than reading dry facts on a monitor
Basically some people are visual learners and we have to accommodate them
I agree with you. After WWII the Americans rounded up German soldiers and civilians and had them go inside the concentration camps to either look at the bodies and/or carry them away for burying. Germany is still a fascist piece of shit country, but they’re scared to shit of being called that. I attribute a big chunk of that mindset to the imagery passed down through multiple generations in a way that textbooks and essays simply cannot.
I still think a similar policy should be in place in the US when mass shootings happen. Force every government official to go inside the building and look upon their works. Short of their own children being shot, nothing will change otherwise.
I still think a similar policy should be in place in the US when mass shootings happen. Force every government official to go inside the building and look upon their works. Short of their own children being shot, nothing will change otherwise.
Adam Johnson's recent piece in the nation is good. I suggest this one because it makes it clear that this is a campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing, not a war against Hamas. That said, there's really no history to it. I think the history associated with pre-47 Zionism and the nakba is important because it shows how morally bankrupt the Zionist political project is since its inception.
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/hunt-hamas-narrative-gaza-israel-palestine/
Ideally going back to the nakba, when I bring that up they instinctively go "nu uh" and I just don't have the sources to dunk hard enough
This seems like a decent bullet point history, but it doesn't cover the last two months:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/9/whats-the-israel-palestine-conflict-about-a-simple-guide
The American prestige episodes with Rashid Khalidi are good but are not articles. Here is the first - https://pca.st/episode/4e1844e9-950f-48a1-ac16-04dd07962a00
He explains in a very personal way through his family's connection to gaza
The jabotinsky essay "the Iron Wall" from 1917 isn't a history article but it shows the awful ideology of Zionism in its naked aggression.
Norman Finklestein wrote his doctoral thesis debunking somebody who tried to “nu uh” the Nakba. It’s his critique of a book called “From Time Immemorial”.
Others of Finklesteins writings and lectures would be a great source I’d think. Or works like On Palestine by Chomsky and Pappe. Anything written or spoken by Chomsky about Israel is actually probably pretty good and lib-friendly. He has a way of cutting through bullshit and propaganda.
This is a good one, if you ask me. Posted here earlier by someone. https://orinocotribune.com/an-extension-of-nazism-how-did-zionism-collaborate-with-hitler-to-establish-israel/
