Image is of German farmers blocking the road near the Brandenburg Gate in early January 2024.
The ruling German coalition - the FDP, the SPD, and the Greens - has been in dire straits since the war in Ukraine began due to their steadfast commitment to destroying their country as much as possible in solidarity with Ukraine destroying themselves too. Scholz is deeply unpopular, with a record low approval of 20%, and his party's approval is even lower.
The German left has been entirely unable to take advantage of this situation, with Die Linke fragmenting due to split opinions on what position they should hold on Ukraine, among other issues. As a result, the major conservative party, the CDU, has gained a lot of voters over the past couple years. Most worrying, however, is the gains that the fascist party, the AfD, has made - from 10% in 2021 all the way to ~20% today. A significant chunk of the vote is likely protest votes due to the lack of an alternative, but a vote for fascists makes you a fascist nonetheless.
Recent controversies with the AfD - including an allegation that they held a secret meeting discussing a plan to mass-deport millions of migrants in an obvious parallel to Nazi meetings planning to remove all Jews from the country - has recently slightly damped approval for the AfD. This meeting generated counter-protests and condemnation from many Germans. It was later revealed that the meeting might not really have happened as alleged, but it doesn't actually matter, because the AfD's stance is being increasingly reflected by the ruling coalition, who recently introduced a bill allowing faster deportations of rejected asylum seekers and significant new powers for authorities in that regard, including potentially the criminalization of sea rescue organizations and imprisonment for aid workers.
The German government is increasingly considering banning the AfD, with their anxiety and motivation to do so rising as the AfD maintains and improves its position as Germany heads towards elections in late 2025. There are intermediate steps that could be done, such as revoking state funding, but if that doesn't work, then the party might well be banned. While I will never argue with fascist parties being banned, this probably won't fix anything, as the underlying economic and social conditions that are fueling these electoral shifts in the first place are not improving. Germany, the largest industrial power in Europe, is mired in a recession, particularly a manufacturing recession, from which there appears to be no escape. It has so far carefully shepherded its natural gas resources to keep the population as mollified as possible, but this has come at the expense of industry. In a trend starting from July 2022, manufacturing PMIs are still well below 50, reaching 45.5 in January 2024, which indicates decline. I suppose if you wanted to look on the bright side, it's better than it was in July 2023, where it was a whopping 38.8, so the rate of decline is becoming a little slower.
And this is just the domestic stuff. Germany has also famously sided with Israel to support them during the ICJ genocide case, has kowtowed to Netanyahu as they bond over being Genocide Experts, and maintains its support of Ukraine, continuing to send military gear and money to be converted to scrap metal by Russian artillery - rather than spending money on doing anything about the cost of living. In the face of a historic economic downturn, it has only more fervently stated its desire to remain militarily opposed to Russia for decades.
The Country of the Week is Germany! 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.
https://nitter.cz/TuckerCarlson/status/1754939251257475555#m
Tucker Carlson has officially announced that he will be interviewing Putin.
He said he will be releasing the entire unedited interview with no paywall, and that Elon Musk agreed not to suppress the video on Twitter.
Lmao π€£. Of all the people to interview Putin...
Wonder what the chud reaction will be to this honestly.
I hope Putin announces swift support for the Peoples Republic of Texas
Free Texas! Revolution of our times!
Slava Texas! Glory to the Confederacy!
Holy shit that felt gross to type out. Honestly not sure if these slogans are more or less racist than the originals.
Well there's a fun thought-experiment: which is worse? Fascists or Slavers?
No you can't tap out with a lazy adorno "everything is fascism" cop out, actually try giving a substantive statement - maybe like at least three sentences.
That extends to a further question though, because the slave trade was only made possible by colonialism in West Africa, and settler colonialism in North America. So in essence the question becomes weather colonialism or fascism is worse. And as we all know, Fanon argued that fascism is the methods of colonial control turned in on itself/inwards. Thus instead of using the "everything is fascism" cop out, I will use the "everything is colonialism" cop out.
In all seriousness, I am deeply unqualified to answer that question, and I honestly don't think it needs answering. Both are so beyond the pale and brutal that it doesn't matter. Both are off of the scale.
This would be a fun tag that. Good answering.
The nazis were slavers. Mass work camps where they worked people literally to their death.
I'm going with nazis are worse tbh. The slavers of america sucked ass but they generally didn't want their product to work to death and die because the labour is worth something. The nazis simultaneously wanted their slave labour to die and to produce while doing it.
I agree on the grounds that fascists are the ideological logical conclusion to Americanized slavery to a significant degree, an evolution per say.
Trick question for the US because if you read what the latter slave apologists wrote, they pretty much sound like proto-fascists and I don't just mean fascist in a general reactionary sense. Take a gander at this proto-fascist's Wikipedia article:
Literally indistinguishable from some anti-Communist rant. The first and last sentence is basically what some anti-Black reactionary would say about prison abolition.
Just typical fascist word salad, malicious misinterpretation, and appropriation of socialist critiques of capitalism.
This goes beyond being a slave apologist and goes towards being a fascist. From the article, he completely rejects the basic tenets of liberalism even to the point of advocating for enslaving white people as well.
If the slavers traveled forward in time to the 1890s and became acquainted with about socialism and Marx, they would've almost certainly embraced a form of proto-fascism in reaction against socialism.
Achtchully
everything is slavery because capitalism. So imma go with fascism is worse because does kinda stand out. Somewhat.
The kind Abraham Lincoln would have hanged everyone.
Tucker is trying harder to be a journalist than most mainstream western outlets lol
I mean he's not going to do any actual journalism, it will all be softball questions that Putin will be allowed to view in advance, prepare his answers for, and potentially veto. This is all about Carlson positioning himself and his ego.
I hope he asks Putin if he is a communist
We all know Putin will say no or something along those lines, maybe with some weak support for state planning and industrialisation, didn't he start out as a rebellious KGB officer in East Germany?
He will say no for sure he has mention he was never a believer in it, but the fact tucker has to ask for his US audience is funny to me
Damn we about to get some whining about cancelling from
I'll wonder if he'll ask him about ugly dollar store architecture being the cause of decline of tHe WeSt and how we all need big beautiful buildings to save our minds lmao
βMr Putin do you think that this war would end if we stopped allowing men in womenβs bathrooms.β
looking forward to this tbh
I hope he asks Putin to bring back the hot green M&M as part of an effort to make men hornier and get that population growth rate up
Honestly kinda looking forward to it. I think Tucker said a lot of good things about the Ukraine war, at least what I got into my X feed from the pro-Russia crowd seemed better than 85% of western journos with an audience.
(feel free to lecture me why I'm wrong, happy to learn)
A transcript for people who don't want to watch the video:
transcript
We're in Moscow tonight. We're here to interview the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin. We'll be doing that soon. There are risks to conducting an interview like this, obviously, so we've thought about it carefully over many months. Here's why we're doing it.First, because it's our job. We're in journalism. Our duty is to inform people. Two years into a war that's reshaping the entire world, most Americans are not informed. They have no real idea what's happening in this region, here in Russia or 600 miles away in Ukraine. But they should know. They're paying for much of it in ways they might not fully yet perceive.
The war in Ukraine is a human disaster. It's left hundreds of thousands of people dead, an entire generation of young Ukrainians. And it's depopulated the largest country in Europe. But the long-term effects are even more profound. This war has utterly reshaped the global military and trade alliances. And the sanctions that followed have as well. And in total, they have upended the world economy. The post-World War II economic order, the system that guaranteed prosperity in the West for more than 80 years, is coming apart very fast and along with it the dominance of the U.S. dollar.
These are not small changes. They are history-altering developments. They will define the lives of our grandchildren. Most of the world understands this perfectly well. They can see it. Ask anyone in Asia or the Middle East what the future looks like. And yet the populations of the English-speaking countries seem mostly unaware. They think that nothing has really changed. And they think that because no one has told them the truth. Their media outlets are corrupt. They lie to their readers and viewers. And they do that mostly by omission.
For example, since the day the war in Ukraine began, American media outlets have spoken to scores of people from Ukraine and they have done scores of interviews with Ukrainian President Zelensky. We ourselves have put in a request for an interview with Zelensky. We hope he accepts. But the interviews he's already done in the United States are not traditional interviews. They are fawning pep sessions specifically designed to amplify Zelensky's demand that the U.S. enter more deeply into a war in Eastern Europe and pay for it. That is not journalism. It is government propaganda. Propaganda of the ugliest kind. The kind that kills people. At the same time our politicians and media outlets have been doing this, promoting a foreign leader like he's a new consumer brand, not a single Western journalist has bothered to interview the president of the other country involved in this conflict. Vladimir Putin. Most Americans have no idea why Putin invaded Ukraine or what his goals are now. They've never heard his voice.
That's wrong. Americans have a right to know all they can about a war they're implicated in. And we have the right to tell them about it because we are Americans too. Freedom of speech is our birthright. We were born with the right to say what we believe. That right cannot be taken away no matter who is in the White House. But they're trying anyway. Almost three years ago the Biden administration illegally spied on our text messages and then leaked the contents to their servants in the news media. They did this in order to stop a Putin interview that we were planning. Last month we're pretty certain they did exactly the same thing once again. But this time we came to Moscow anyway.
We are not here because we love Vladimir Putin. We are here because we love the United States. We want it to remain prosperous and free. We paid for this trip ourselves. We took no money from any government or group. Nor are we charging people to see the interview. It is not behind a paywall. Anyone can watch the entire thing shot live to tape and unedited on our website tuckercarlson.com. Elon Musk to his great credit has promised not to suppress or block this interview once we post it on his platform X. And we're grateful for that.
Western governments by contrast will certainly do their best to censor this video on other less principled platforms because that's what they do. They are afraid of information they can't control. But you have no reason to be afraid of it. We are not encouraging you to agree with what Putin may say in this interview but we are urging you to watch it. You should know as much as you can and then like a free citizen and not a slave you can decide for yourself. Thanks.