Image is of Azerbaijan's President, Aliyev (left) and Armenia's President, Pashinyan (right) in a meeting a month or two after Azerbaijan took Nagorno-Karabakh.
- Never go to a second location.
- Always get the interior ministry post.
- Never get in a helicopter or any small aircraft.
- If someone with a gun enters your car, they’re gonna kill you.
- If someone tells you they’re not going to kill you, they’re calming you down to kill you later.
- Never give up your nukes.
- Never release the opposition's political prisoners.
- Never let the opposition delay elections.
- If someone starts to get into German runes, drop them.
- Never trust a South American with a German name.
- Never move anywhere for a religion.
- Never go into the sewers unless you’re a sewer guy.
- If someone’s trying to get you to commit a crime, they're FBI (sometimes CIA or military intelligence).
- Never become an FBI informant.
- If you do become an FBI informant, record everything.
- Never relinquish your arms.
- Always get it in writing.
- If you keep gambling, you’ll eventually win.
- Never talk to cops without a lawyer.
- Always pay your mercenaries.
- Don’t let anyone take your passport.
To add an addendum to rule 3, never put your President and Foreign Minister in the same helicopter or small aircraft. Especially if doing so in bad weather conditions. Especially if you're already under threat from a hostile nuclear power in the region with a proclivity for terrorism (though this probably isn't Israel's doing, in this particular case).
Anyway, Azerbaijan. Not a great country, I think. Did some genocides. They're a petrostate that is hosting Cop29, which I suppose is a way for the bourgeoisie to implicitly convey their contempt for the green movement. They got weapons from Israel, too.
Just for the record, there's an Iranian province called East Azerbaijan, which is not the same as Azerbaijan.
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 Azerbaijan! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
Please check out the HexAtlas!
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.
holy fuck is it exhausting to talk to redditbrained liberals IRL
I made the mistake to actually engage in a discussion about politics, and all the greatest hits came out -- and the worst, most frustating thing about this that I was treated like the weirdo, and I didn't even get into the "more controversial" topics
They were literally propped up by the USA/CIA it's not even controversial at this point. [then they looked at me like I said grey aliens killed Princess Diana]
... Israel killed literally 100x as many civilians
Well, USA also invaded sovereign countries, and almost nobody gave a shit
The US war criminals are literally golfing as we speak
wellll, except UKR did shell civilians in Donbass
What? THe USSR wasn't even a Russian ethnostate? what the fuck are you talking about?
... Not even Western liberal historians (with a few neocon exceptions) believe that there was a genocide there
As I said, not even Western liberal historians (with a few neocon exceptions) believe that there was a genocide there, unlike what Churchill did to starve Bangladesh, that is actually well documented
Yet you curiously never bring it up, but if someone mentions anything remotely Russian you start harping about the "Holodomor", and "Soviet-Russian imperialism"....
You see the GULAG was not a unique phenomenon, at the same time Africa was full of concentration camps run by the Fr*nch and the Bri'ish
I give up, I'm afraid it's a terminal case of brainworms
i was discussing politics with a group of people i thought would be cool and then a cuban guy goes "if communism was good for the economy then the americans would be doing it" and my head just about exploded from the amount of different insanely stupid ideas contained in one single statement
Death to America
-Red Scare
-Violent repression of worker uprisings and revolutionary movements
-Constantly bombarding the population with anti-communist propaganda
Conclusion: "if communism was good for the economy then the americans would be doing it"
when they did the smallest amount of "communism" possible they became the most powerful state in history, the second most powerful nation being the USSR
the americans said, like two weeks ago, that the chinese system is better and instead of adopting it we're going to turn the war dial to the right.
Of course a Cuban says that lmao
America has the most prisoners on earth.
they are also saying that basically putting africans in camps is a forgivable crime, because they are not european
They also, noticeably, have more prisoners per capita than the USSR ever had.
I actually mentioned that, but it did not register
It was hopeless
First off, comparing the soviey penal system, known as the gulag system, to concentration camps is like comparing acorns to a burning pile of shit in the fact you can make pancakes out of them. By which you can shape a burning pile of shit into a pancake but it's still a disk shaped burning shit-coaster, whereas an acorn can be ground and turned into acorn flour and later acorn pancakes.
Of course, you're right
I didn't even want to get into the soviet penal system and that most of gulag prisoners were regular criminals and the average gulag prisoner got out after 5 years
I tried to point out the shameless double standards in the syllogism that
I would've absolutely gone down the rabbit hole of semantics and outright told 'em the Soviet penal system was more humane than the American prison-industrial complex and any actual provable overreach of the gulag system not only occurs in the u.s but is amplified.
I was exhausted at that point.
It's the usual thing: when you're a socialist you have to be an expert on 1000 different things, while a liberal just has to recite a propagandistic op-ed they half-remember
And even if you cite mainstream sources they just don't care, like they did not hear it
As I said it was a mistake even discussing this, I didn't go there to debate but to relax... aaand this is what happened
You just call them ignorant dumbasses that haven't cracked open any books since high school then shut off your critical thinking parts of your brain and either 1) excuse yourself, walk off, and do something else worthwhile, or 2) really start winding their asses up until they either storm off or burst a blood vessel because they're literally not worth your time talking to in ernest and deserve every bit of venomous scorn you got in ya.
Disrespect deserves disrespect, and ignorant phrasemongering deserves gish-gallop offensives.
when I heard that the October Revolution was a ploy for ethnic Russian world domination, because Petersburg is in Russia
That's just so incredibly stupid I couldn't even answer except to say that's incredibly stupid hahaha
I guess i'll become the joker
Unleash whats inside and embrace it
What is so funny is "Petersburg" is a fucking German spelling. The Revolution occurred in Petrograd which was a change made by the Tsar at the start of WW1 because Petersburg was German. So their ignorance leads them to miss an actual case of something approaching Russian supremacism. They cannot and will not learn basic fucking history
Damn i always thought it was "oiltown"
who RUNS OILTOWN?!?
Even though i know better it always shocks me that prison sentences were so short before the us/eu imposed the global drug war regime. Like prior to the war on drugs/war on the poor american prison sentences were so short ti just doesn't sound real.
Like this https://youtu.be/x4-F5N63Cdo?si=npJYHVFIdMPFqiCf
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Yeah, didn't the vast majority of deaths in the gulag system happen during the worst parts of the nazi invasion? Like prisoners starved to death because there was no food?
Reminds me of a common set of beliefs held by most westoids:
Have you considered that the communist secret police is evil and dictatorial 1984
and the FBI is just a bunch of kooky detectives looking for UFOs and hunting serial killers?
I read somewhere that when the fourth reich finally got it's bloodstained paws on the Stasi's records they found seven extrajudicial murders in the stasi's entire existence, and then went mildly berserk trying to find more because the stasi must have murdered at least 300 times the population of the gdr!
I sincerely do not understand the "there own people!" Thing. Must be some weird nationalism thing.
But Stalin wasn't even Russian, so this brainrot doesn't even ave internal consistency
And all the countries the US has invaded and massacred were direct threats to the US?