Good. You can’t negotiate with the Great Satan. The Soviet Union became too naive and trusting and its communists had to learn that lesson the hard way. I hope China avoids making the same mistakes. “Detente” doesn’t work when it’s with a country that will always regard it as its holy mission to eradicate you as a state and an economic system.

Up until now i had always operated under the impression that CPUSA is like the unions: bad leadership, good rank and file and worth for revolutionaries to work inside as Lenin advised. But as you point out even unions don’t go this far in enforcing pro-liberal discipline so i’m beginning to question the usefulness of staying in the party if it means you have to bend the knee to these horrendous lines that the party has adopted. At this point why not just go over to PSL or one of the other smaller but more genuinely revolutionary, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist groups.

what’s the artillery ratio between the two sides again?

At least 5 to 1, which is also around the same ratio we see in the casualty numbers. This is completely unsurprising as artillery has always been responsible for most of the casualties in a war of this kind. And on top of that Russia is using a huge amount of glide bombs and cruise/ballistic missiles that Ukraine doesn’t even have. So they can break any fortified position and target logistics and C&C nodes pretty much at will. Hence why the “attacker always suffers more casualties than the defender” cliché does not apply here.

Not to mention that it’s not even that cut and dry who is attacking and who is defending. The Ukrainians take a lot of losses in counter-attacks because they are very unwilling to give up ground (the Kiev regime is very dependent on optics for whenever it goes begging for money and weapons, it has to appear like it’s holding on and that it still has a chance to regain lost territories) and they will often send wave after wave of men trying to regain lost positions even after they have been taken and the Russians have entrenched themselves there.

Zero. I think he has better things to do than watch the political clown show in the US.

That seems unlikely to me. I think they mean well but as usual leftists are prone to splitting off into splinter groups over fairly minor ideological differences when they should be uniting for the sake of the larger struggle.

First impression, they seem like a spoiler party. All they do is take away votes that could go to KPRF while achieving nothing in practice. The Communist movement in Russia can’t afford to be split, it’s hard enough already putting up a substantial opposition to the UR monolith.

I’m not saying that KPRF doesn’t have bad political lines, they do, but these need to be addressed through internal party struggle.

Another banger video. I know The New Atlas isn’t exactly politically aligned with us (sadly he’s not a communist), but i really do appreciate how professional and how well sourced his content is. It makes for great educational and propaganda material when confronting liberals. In that context the fact that he uses almost exclusively Western sources (usually not something i appreciate) becomes quite handy, it makes the arguments much harder to dismiss.

My first instinct was to say it started with McCarthyism when many of the genuine Marxist-Leninists were driven underground, and then over time replaced with COINTELPRO Trotskyists, while at the same time the “Secret Speech” made being a real ML now not just professional suicide due to persecution by the bourgeois state but also social suicide even among most of the “radical” leftist circles, particularly the more academic ones.

But really, the more i think on this the more i realize it goes back much further than that. Already in the 1930s you had a lot of bad takes in what was then the “Western left” on the Soviet Union. You could blame this on Trotsky but again this doesn’t go far enough back, because even as the October revolution was happening there were a lot of social democrat type leftists who denounced Lenin and the Bolsheviks and sided with the Mensheviks instead.

So really for me it goes all the way back to the opportunistic betrayal that happened at the beginning of WWI when so many among the “left” jumped on board the pro-war bandwagon. The “Western left” never got over that split and the pro-war social democrats ended up essentially winning the struggle. Hence the German SPD, the British Labour party, etc. all eventually but inevitably ended up slowly degenerating until their final betrayal in the 1990s when they embraced neoliberalism.

So long as this traitorous social democracy defines the “Western left” all other leftist forces, even many of those who call themselves socialists or communists, end up being just the furthest left part of that same broader social democracy. They may be nominally opposed to the socdems and profess more radical views but they are fundamentally compatible and share many of the same liberal and western chauvinist assumptions about the world and modes of thinking.

As for the driving forces behind these dynamics and behind why opportunism has been so successful, yes i think you are essentially right, it has a lot to do with labor aristocracy and the elevated position that the Western working class enjoyed as a result of imperialism and colonialism. Their material and class interests were not completely but at least partially aligned with the preservation of the imperialist system and hence with the preservation of capitalism, albeit in a milder form with more handouts for them.

At least the Jordanian and UAE regimes don’t even pretend. Everyone knows they are just Anglo-Zionist running dogs.

To be fair, the official “trade ban” wasn’t completely useless. It did reduce the volume, but not to zero unfortunately. But i’m wondering how long they will keep it in place. If i were to bet i’d say probably only until they can memoryhole what is happening in Gaza, or at the most until after the next elections, then they’ll quietly lift it again.

May 5: Turkey reportedly still loading Azerbaijani oil for Israel despite “total trade ban”

May 9: Turkiye renews supply of construction materials to Israel despite trade ban

And i’m sure there’s more that’s happening covertly that we don’t know about.

Instead of appealing to the humanity of those who have none and “urging” a genocidal entity to willingly halt its genocide, how about you, Turkey, stop doing business with the entity? Maybe that would do a little more than just harsh words? Just a thought.

This is probably the least bad outcome so…yay, i guess. It doesn’t solve the systemic problems of French politics that led to the rise of the far right though and next time around they will be even stronger. So long as the left does not present a credible anti-EU, anti-NATO, anti-neoliberal and anti-war alternative, the right will continue to gain ground.

The Saudis really are most two faced regime in the region, even more than Turkey and that’s quite an achievement. They know their population is overwhelmingly pro-Palestine so they have to put on this show every once in a while but they have never stopped being Zionist collaborationists and they don’t give two shits that their fellow Muslims and non-Muslim Arabs are being genocided in Gaza. Just like Turkey they will say one thing openly and continue to make deals with the entity behind the scenes.

Actions speak louder than words. I will believe them when they start to actually do something material to help the Palestinian people and the Palestinian cause.

Well…yes, but this is the language that all the news articles use that i’ve seen on this so far.

Plagiarism! That’s our acronym!

Now I’m worried about the lack of falling dominoes on the continent.

In a way the retreat of European and US troops across the Sahel region are “falling dominos”. Just today we had news that German troops are being pulled out of Niger

And Chad could be the next domino to fall. They’ve had a lot of anti-French protests, they expelled the German ambassador, and the US is probably going to be forced to pull its troops out of there soon as well. Meanwhile they are building closer relations with Russia. I am hopeful that things are moving in the right direction.

Done.

it feels like Niger is going it alone

More states in West Africa going anti-imperialist would be great of course, but they are not alone: Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger have decided to unite into a confederation.

Some more info on this:

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/world/burkina-faso-mali-niger-sign-confederation-treaty-4462201

Are you sure we’re talking about the same Labour party? Cause the Labour party i know is Blairite through and through. It was also under Labour that Britain started to wage ruthless and bloody military campaigns post WW2 in an attempt to cling to its colonial empire, for instance in Malaya. These are their genes, that is their fundamental character: imperialism and neoliberalism. Corbyn was an outlier, a short-lived exception.