Bulletins and News Discussion for February 19th to February 25th, 2023 - The Shadow of Suharto - COTW: Indonesia
Bulletins and News Discussion for February 19th to February 25th, 2023 - The Shadow of Suharto - COTW: Indonesia
Image is of Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia and the fastest sinking city in the world. A new capital is being built elsewhere in Indonesia.
I was going to make Indonesia the COTW anyway (unless something really massive happened somewhere else) due to the elections that might really designate the end of an era in Indonesian politics. Michael Roberts wrote up a big piece on Indonesia about a week ago, one day before the election began, so a lot of this information is coming from him.
Indonesia has been ruled by President Joko Widodo for 10 years, but is now barred from a third term constitutionally. Under his presidency, the Indonesian economy has seen fairly good GDP growth overall - about 5% per year, or an average of 4% per capita - and is broadly popular with the electorate. The biggest problems are the common ones, such as a lack of jobs and a high cost of living. Widodo's successors have naturally promised more jobs and an economic plan that clearly draws at least some inspiration from China's rise from the periphery to the heights of the world economy and manufacturing, but this seems pretty unlikely for Indonesia because, well, Indonesia is ruled by capitalist bourgeoisie parties and China is not. Indonesia's main gigs are palm oil, nickel ore, and oil, with internal manufacturing of these primary commodities only slowly growing and reliant on foreign labour.
Indonesia has a rather big employment problem. On the face of it, things don't seem bad, with an unemployment rate of only 5% - but this is only because it counts anybody who works even a couple hours per week. 60% of the workers in Indonesia are in the informal sector, with no real labour rights, sick pay, or guaranteed wages. And half of the ~8 million unemployed are young people. Indonesia is the sixth most unequal country on the planet, with at least 36% of the population in poverty, and the four richest men own as much as the bottom 100 million. This was a natural consequence of the policies of the dictator Suharto, who came to power in a coup overthrowing the communist nationalist leader Sukarno and killing one million communists, a period covered by Bevin's The Jakarta Method. At a fundamental level, not that much has changed since Suharto, and the country seems doomed to a path of slowing economic growth and massive amounts of environmental degradation under a plundering elite who will presumably fly off to New Zealand with the rest of them once the seas swallow the country, unless a communist movement can be rebuilt from ashes and can learn the lessons of 1965-66.
Though results have yet to be officially announced, it seems that 72-year-old Prabowo Subianto is overwhelmingly likely to have handily won the election. Once banned from the United States for human rights violations - a truly phenomenal feat - he has been the Minister of Defense since 2019, was an army lieutenant under Suharto and was his son-in-law. While this is obviously a particularly bad outcome, none of the other candidates seemed likely to fundamentally alter the trajectory of Indonesia, so the game was rigged from the start.
The Country of the Week is Indonesia! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week's thread is here.
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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I think a good way of re-framing the global multipolar conflict happening for scared left-liberals is to show that the multipolar bloc is not a red-brown alliance, it is in fact a red-blue alliance (the national bourgeois of Russia and China and Iran with the proletarian CPC, DPRK, Cuba, pink tide leftish Latin American nations, African de-colonial forces, the axis of Resistance). Putin is not a fascist, he's a Liberal like Merkel or AMLO. Iran, Syria and Hamas are not fascist, they are secular and progressive relative to the area they're in and the western-backed fascist opponents they face in their homelands - they fight to liberate oppressed people internationally despite having domestic issues they need to address.
The west is a blue-brown alliance, NATO is a blue-brown alliance, the anti-communist cold war system is a blue-brown alliance. They cheer for Nazis in Canadian parliaments, they send weapons and money to Azov, they back fascism worldwide, they promote ISIS and jihadist scum & now they are exterminating the Palestinian people. What squishy libs should hate most is their own governments if they truly hate fascism.
Red-brown fears is overblown crap from scared Liberals who called me Assadist for years while quoting bellingcat and Jacobin at me. There is no global red-brown alliance of note, nothing significant. The Trumpists weird fixation of going slightly against the imperialist grain will be corrected soon, they will never go anti-America and pro-global South so their current quirky position is not of consequence. If they are so corrupt Putin and Xi bought them out then cool, I think that's rad. Better than whatever the GOP were doing before, maybe they'll be the American comprador class and fifth column to sell us out if we're lucky, but more likely they'll just stay being neocon chauvinists like always.
While I do believe that Putin is just a liberal with like 5% of the fat, I'm not sure how you're gonna sell that to western liberals lol.
Calling Hamas and Iran secular even for the region is a bit nah, they're not like ISIS or other saudi funded groups not because they're not religious, but because they're actually following islam instead of making up verses to justify boy concubines.
key word is relative. compared to the things they fight, the things that would replace their systems, they are practically liberal bastions. Iran is a republic, with an entirely secular wing of parliament, at least in theory. ISIS would never tolerate such systems.
that the multipolar bloc
Here's the thing: it's not a bloc.
There's only one bloc in the world today and it's the West. Everybody else is just doing diplomacy with each other. India is an outright religious fascist state, it sees itself in competition with China and it is kept at arm's length by both Russia and the United States. China is a market communist society that does business with pretty much everyone, including people who make long speeches about how evil it is. Russia is a social conservative state that is pushed into alliances of inconvenience with countries that it used to oppose, like Iran. Brazil is a social democratic country that until recently was under a pseudo fascist government, and even so it wouldn't break relations with it's trade partners out of the bare minimum of pragmatism. BRICS recently welcomed all sorts, from the Egyptian junta to the Saudi Monarchy and the theocracy in Iran.
The world at large is made up of a large plurality of political and economic systems. That things like the ongoing genocide in Gaza makes that same world coalesce in a consensus that goes against the agenda of the Western Bloc doesn't mean that the multipolar world is a Bloc. The fact that the world at large agrees with and supports South Africa's efforts against israeli apartheid and the ongoing genocide, but the West's elites and boomers refuse to even entertain the notion means that it is the West that is an anomaly. Everything it does, from it's support for the Palestinian Genocide to it's uncanny ability to elevate insane, genocidal figures like Navalny and Lai as Liberal Heroes, points to that.
This is why the 'New Cold War' is against China. Because there's no Chinese Bloc like the old Communist Bloc. The only Bloc in the world today is the United States and it's vassals.
Yeah Putin and Xi just had a huge meeting before the SMO where they declared the multipolar world and eternal friendship of their brotherly nations and full scale military alliance but there’s no bloc
I really don't think it's a bloc. Because that's not really how things are formulated down here or elsewhere in BRICS or the SCO. Even if you ignore most of the 'multipolar world' and focus entirely on Rus-China relations, you'll see that, if anything China goes out of it's way to treat Russia as the polar opposite of a bloc member. The Chinese will emphasize at every turn that Russia is a sovereign, self interested nation with whom they have common interests and symbiotic spheres of influence. The Chinese aren't interested in, say, running security guarantees in Central Asia while the Russians very much are. Nor are the Russians interested in being the pre-eminent industrial power, even as local investment in manufacturing increases. Nobody is trying to impose bloc politics in the way that lead to the Sino-Soviet split, or in the way that the US imposes policy on NATO+ members. If you open your analysis further and start talking about countries like Iran, India, KSA and so on, you have both moments of cooperation and competition. As well as unilateral talks with the US.
The multipolar world outside of NATO is, by definition, not a bloc. And it couldn't be a bloc even if the members of BRICS+ tried to become one. It's too early and the status of the organization is still under discussion.
Seems like your issue is mostly pedantic and having to do with the specific word “bloc” which I’m using more loosely and colloquially. Would you prefer if I used the words “military alliance” or “axis”? Russia, DPRK, Iran and China specifically have joined at the hip and are ready to ride or die for each other when WW3 begins. They are a de facto military alliance, they are the champions of the multipolar world that will bring it about and oppose the west. They are all providing economic, diplomatic, military support for each other currently.
Western leftists seem to be slow to pick up on this obvious trend, perhaps because they’ve built up an allergy to such “axis of evil” claims from neocons, but there is in fact an axis formed. Instead they just doom and whinge and support local imperialist succs. I noticed Felix and Chapo are years behind on this and still act like Russia and Israel are aligned and the same, stuck in 2016. Russia is providing a lot of the tech and equipment to Iran that the Axis of Resistance is using, Russia supporting Iran and Syria is a burning of the bridge with Israel
Seems like your issue is mostly pedantic and having to do with the specific word “bloc” which I’m using more loosely and colloquially. Would you prefer if I used the words “military alliance” or “axis”?
No, because the policies don't pan that out either. The actual material reality of being in a military alliance is absolutely not the same as being part of a bloc. Russia and China are allied, but they don't form a bloc, and the rest of the multipolar world is absolutely not in a bloc under either of them. The simple existence of countries like Brazil, Iran and India disprove that idea. Furthermore, the blanket assertion of bloc politics is underestimating the agency of even smaller, weaker actors in Kenya, Vietnam, South Africa and so on. Countries which are not, by default, anti US or part of a bloc competition against the US.
I think you are deluded frankly and there’s a reason I blocked your alt before you made another account to dodge bans or whatever
I think you are deluded frankly
That's alright, I don't think you're deluded I just think you're wrong.
dodge bans or whatever
That's cute and all, but no I didn't dodge a ban. I just lost my password.
Feel free to block me again, though.
Putin is not a fascist, he's a Liberal like Merkel or AMLO
There's no way, Putin is the ur-baddy, a Northstar by which libs construct their constellation of ethical commitments.
The blue-brown alliance is how you get " social issues" being framed as under attack by savages and in need of benevolent neocon foreign policy to set the ship right.
First it was "women's rights" for a long time now it's LGBT people after some of the neocons "evolved" on the issue after 2015. It's like a sick joke but they use a faux concern for the exact groups they're most guilty of persecuting internally as a shield to do worse crimes abroad. It's maddening.
I think that's mostly right for the West. Some good points in the comments but yeah. Problem is we are largely in a post ideological era so these terms, red, blue and brown (neolibs across the board, fingers crossed for 2050 though) aren't the same as they were historically. But I agree in the parlance of our time that is a fair summation even with the contradictions within these groups and relationships amongst one another