Image is from this article, of protestors in Mexico tearing down a steel fence.
While military, economic, and covert pressure on Venezuela and nearby countries in South America proper continues to mount, a similar process is occurring against Mexico, currently under the leadership of the very popular Sheinbaum, who has generally followed the footsteps of AMLO in terms of policies.
While figures in the Trump administration have made statements to the effect of wishing to bomb Mexican territory, internal pressure within Mexico is rather hard to generate when the government is doing generally positive things for people. As such, protests - comically denoted “Gen Z protests” despite young people being a vanishingly small proportion - have arisen in Mexico, very obviously astroturfed by pro-US and anti-Sheinbaum interests. The first protest, on November 15th, gathered less than 20,000 people, while the second, on November 20th, gathered perhaps 200. Article headlines suggesting that Mexico was “on the verge of collapse” have proven rather sensational and wishcast-y.
While it’s easy to poke fun at these farces (I certainly am), it’s important to keep in mind that soft coups have long been part of the American strategy in Latin America, and with unlimited money and many resources to throw at a project, even incompetent forces can eventually create enough chaos that it can make the ruling president or party feel forced to resign. Such eventualities are certainly not inevitable, and even weak states can provide enough resistance to force the US to try a hard coup instead, with outright bombing campaigns and covert military operations. Cuba has provided perhaps the best example in the western hemisphere of how such plots can be subverted with enough national support (e.g. the hundreds of times the CIA tried to kill/maim Castro, plus the Bay of Pigs debacle), but you do have to be willing to take extraordinary measures to do this - the sorts of measures figures like Chile’s Allende did not take in the 1970s, and the measures Venezuela’s Maduro appears to be taking right now. We shall see what path Sheinbaum takes.
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The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. 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.
Mirrors of Telegram channels that have been erased by Zionist censorship.
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 whole “saving HK culture” argument is inherently rooted in bigoted anti-mainlander and/ or anti-communist sentiments (you will never see HK leftists use the culture argument for stuff like this, it’s always a reactionary thing like the ‘culture war’ in the West). Hell, Bamboo scaffolding is not even unique to HK, it was used all over China for thousands of years! However, the real reason people in the industry oppose getting rid of bamboo has nothing to do with culture at all.
As always, follow the money and you will find the (materialist) truth. Who controls the construction industry in HK? One of the major shareholders is the Bamboo scaffolding companies, which effectively holds a monopoly over the scaffolding business and ensures that nobody can ever change this through intense lobbying via industry associations, private donations (i.e. bribes), and even through the unions like the one you quoted, which yes, are deeply corrupted by the companies they negotiate with to the point that they are willing to ignore worker health and safety standards to protect the profits of the owner-class under the most BS pretences like “oh but our traditional sacred craftsmanship will be destroyed and we’ll lose these precious skills, nevermind the fact that we’ll still keep our current jobs and just learn new skills because people still need scaffolding to build stuff!!”. In fact, you’ll find that these are usually the same type of unions that supported the 2019 HK protests (which happened to be backed or at least implicitly favoured by many HK big capitalists), even though the protests had nothing to do with improving worker’s rights or working conditions at all.
This may change soon though, as the Tai Po apartment fire (which will almost certainly be attributed to the bamboo scaffolding as the cause or at least a major contributor to the severity of it) has caught the attention of the central government and Xi Jinping has personally commented on the event, which may give the HK government a lot more confidence in their ongoing efforts to phase out bamboo.
HK has such a strong reactionary element in the culture it’s awful. Especially among like young boomers/Gen X/millennials (not sure what the zoomers are like). An ingrained sense of superiority over the mainland because they used to be more developed due to imperialist investment, but being overtaken by the mainland in development terms hasn’t provoked them to reexamine their mindset, only become more rabidly racist.
The difference in attitude I’m met with when I speak Mandarin and British-accented English there is seriously disheartening.
It’s really the end result of British colonization of the city, and the continued maintenance of its foundations via the SAR and the Basic Law which the PRC willingly signed into reality as part of Britain’s prerequisite for giving HK back to China.
On the one hand, you could argue it was a masterful compromise orchestrated by Margaret Thatcher (who initially wanted the UK to continue controlling all of HK and eventually giving only the New Territories back to China…after an extension of the Qing-era 99-year lease lol) as way of giving away sovereignty but still being able to maintain British/ Western political and social power over HK through the liberal capitalist system. This was largely achieved through two vectors: one, by how all the HK tycoons who got super rich post-WW2 still control large swaths of property today and have many pro-business friends in the legislative council (formerly these were the British colonial administrators, now it’s HK Chinese fulfilling the same role), and two, with all the ‘grassroots’ parties and movements that constantly agitate the capitalist government for more “civil rights and democracy” that just all happen to pop up out of nowhere in the 2000’s and didn’t exist before the handover, all be pro-UK/ pro-US, and all hate Communism.
The latter vector was eventually eliminated when the National Security Law was signed in 2020, but the economic structure which was set up by the British and continued through the tycoons and the legislative council, remains.
On the other hand, you can also argue that the PRC itself is to blame for why HK is the way it is today. The CPC made great compromises themselves just to get HK back, and despite Deng Xiaoping once boasting to Thatcher that he “could walk in and take the whole lot this afternoon” they allowed HK to be handed over largely on Thatcher’s terms. Not only that, the CPC also agreed to maintain the SAR for at least 50 years after handover (the reason why I highlighted “at least” is because Xi Jinping has made this an open interpretation by making comments in recent years hinting the SAR status can be extended, which is another compromise in itself) and greatly tolerated the ability for pretty much anyone to engage in its liberal “democracy”. And by anyone, I mean anyone: for example, some of the most anti-communist groups out there like Falun Gong were allowed to organize in HK despite being banned in mainland China (I personally remember being in a taxi and driving past a Falun Gong protest in Kowloon back in 2017).
The final straw ofc was the 2019 mass protests which featured the most blatant US/ western subversion in post-handover HK yet: you literally had student leaders waving and screaming for America to liberate the city, and there were US politicians IN HK MEETING THE PROTEST LEADERS. This was why the central government finally had enough and clamped down on HK’s “democracy” the following year with the National Security Law, much to the West’s derision despite many western countries having very similar laws and clauses in their constitutions already. Ironically, there was a similar mass protest in 1967 (which were called the 1967 HK “riots”) but instead of pro-West petit bourgeois groups leading it, it was pro-CPC groups lead by unionized workers. The 1967 riots led to the British government clamping down hard on left wing organizations and banning communist publications (so much for the Brits caring about HK “democracy” right?).
However, even with the National Security clamp down, 5 years later you still have a lot of HK reactionaries who hate Communist China. Why? Because the other problem still remains: HK’s socioeconomics which provides the main undercurrent for reactionary elements in their society. You essentially have a massive hub of financial capital run by oligarchs, backed by pro-business politicians, and upheld by the petit bourgeoisie and labour aristocracy that treat said oligarchs as idols to aspire to. And this is all tolerated, hell even celebrated sometimes by the CPC because they are “Chinese patriots”.
Gone are the days of the Mao-era where the party encouraged working class solidarity and class struggle in the last colonial holdouts of Asia. Now it’s about “national rejuvenation” and “common prosperity”, terms that hardly have anything to do with orthodox Marxist thought and allow plenty of room for HK capital to exploit the workers as long as they remain subservient to the party. On top of that, you also have mainland Chinese capital who constantly come down south to engage in property speculation and drive-up housing prices to NYC levels of scarcity. This swarth of contradictions is how we end up with Hong Kongers hating mainlanders while still thinking they’re an Asian Tiger.
Can this still be changed? I believe it eventually can, but it requires a big step-up in the efforts of the central government to remove the last vestiges of the British colonial/ capitalist system. Starting with ending the SAR status, which was only ever meant to be a temporary phase to allow China to catch up economically.