Image is of a crowd protesting in Athens.
Last week, on Friday, hundreds of thousands of Greeks poured into the streets to strike and protest on the second anniversary of the deadliest train crash in Greek history, in which 57 people died when a passenger train collided with a freight train. On this February 28th, public transportation was virtually halted, with train drivers, air traffic controllers, and seafarers taking part in a 24 hour strike - alongside other professions like lawyers, teachers, and doctors.
The train crash is emblematic of the decay of state institutions brought about from austerity being forced on Greece in the aftermath of the 2008 Great Recession, in which the IMF and the EU (particularly Germany) plundered the country and forced privatization. While Greece has somewhat recovered from the dire straits it was in during the early 2010s, the consequences of neoliberalism are very clearly ongoing. Mitsotakis' right-wing government has still not even successfully implemented the necessary safety procedures two years on, and so far, nobody has been convicted nor punished for their role in the accident. The austerity measures were deeply unpopular inside Greece and yet the government did not respond to, or ignored, democratic outcry.
Last week's thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
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The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
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 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.
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.
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.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
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.
The probable future coalition partners of the CDU and SPD just announced their basic understanding to proceed with an absolutely INSANE militarization programme.
The outline is at least 500 billion €s for military hardware and investments in military-relevant infrastructure, with no theoretical limit - over the past couple of days, politicians have thrown around numbers like 800 billion and even higher. That's basically the entire Pentagon budget for Germany to spend over like 5 years or so.
Early statements call for "an army of 100,000 drones, 2,000 Patriot missiles, at least 800 tanks and 1,000 Taurus cruise missiles", with more to come.
This gigantic defense programme will be financed entirely by debt, and they plan to suspend the "debt brake" - but just for defense stuff, pointless social spending like schools and hospitals will not be exempt from the austerity program.
Just insane. All the German MSMs I'm looking at are celebrating. It will be interesting if any leftist organization can mobilize against this monstrosity, this really can't be true.
Really feels like Europe is going completely off the rails this week. Maybe I'm a little out of whack too since I've basically listened to 5 hours of Mercouris et al. every day for some days now and this was to be expected, sort of...but I can't see any good come of this.
Oh well, maybe they'll fix some of the shittier roads at least so that tanks can drive over, or they'll run out of money, or they just find that throwing money at a problem doesn't magically create tanks. There's this adage of "Germany is the country that spends the most on its military and basically gets nothing out of it", and that was still very true over the last couple of years. As far as I know, virtually none of the hardware that the first 100 billions dollars were supposed to buy actually arrived in the depots, it's all still mostly on order lol.
Source: The Krautwave
Aside from the fact that Europe is fucking cooked (expert analysis I know) and the US is going to strip it for parts over the next decade, I'm considerably more concerned at the idea of a vastly more armed, increasingly openly fascist Germany than I am a 'victorious' Russia.
Sidenote, there was a big Russian Neo-Nazi military unit (Russian Volunteer Corps) protest in support of Ukraine near the Potsdamer Platz in Berlin earlier this week.
There arent enough young people to do another world war - that is like the only saving grace
Literally building an army just to sit around and do nothing. And they doing MORE austerity when currently the country is going down the drain due to decades of austerity. Too bad too much of the left here has folded into the russia bad narrative entirely.
Can't wait for Trump to decide that, even though he has wailed for years about Europe spending more on military and NATO, actually that's a little too much and it threatens U.S. hegemony.