Analysis and images of the parades is all over the internet and in the last megathread; for the China-India stuff I recommend this article, as well as the Tricontinental in general.
Image is from @xiaohongshu@hexbear.net’s comment in the last megathread.
Last week was the 80th anniversary of the end of World War 2, and on such an occasion, China put on quite an impressive military parade, especially in comparison to the rather drab and corporate parade that the USA recently had. In attendance were many world leaders, including Putin, Kim Jong Un, and a very happy-looking Lukashenko.
This took place shortly after the SCO summit in Tianjin, in which Modi was notably in attendance. That one of the world’s most powerful fascists was in attendance in China near the anniversary of the World Antifascist War is obviously pretty ironic. Regardless, the mood was still relatively positive; for example, Xi announced the acceleration of the creation of the SCO development bank, and Indian-Chinese relations are once again in the thaw cycle of their long-term cyclical pattern, with direct flights resumed and links expanded. The fact that there is this much projected optimism from China about a Global South which is being increasingly tariffed, infiltrated, starved, looted, bombed, invaded, and massacred in the hundreds of thousands by rabid imperialist dogs is perhaps a little tone-deaf, but buoying up the SCO is better than doing nothing at all, I suppose.
Any astute Geopolitics Understander can tell you that this is certainly not India joining the side of the Global South, but instead a move somewhat forced upon them as they seek to balance both sides for their own gain. As Trump amps up pressure on India via tariffs, it is natural that India would seek leverage, and there is much that India gains: industrial development, increased intra-regional trade, and scientific knowledge from a China which has, in numerous fields, now pulled ahead of the USA. India is also facing numerous internal crises, ranging from run-of-the-mill capitalist incompetence and corruption, to worsening conditions for farmers, to the ravaging impacts of climate change, and increasing their links with China is a way to vent off a little of that pressure and protect Modi’s regime.
Last week’s thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
Please check out the RedAtlas!
The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
Israel'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.
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.
There is a large new propaganda effort developing against China involving a leak of 500gb of data from 2 organisations MESA Labs and Geedge Networks. The primary source is: https://archive.ph/0ZHKt
The framing is essentially “China is exporting the Great Firewall to other countries they’re ebil blah blah blah”.
Expecting to see this everywhere shortly. They’re going to have to take some time trawling through the data to find things to do propaganda with though, and it’s all in Chinese obviously which slows them down.
EDIT: The companies involved look like private companies to me, so if I had to guess this would be more to do with private competition between surveillance companies. Someone like Peter Thiel being mad that Palantir has international competition from a Chinese company perhaps? Speculating.
The fact that they’re private companies does not stop the propaganda effort pinning this on the Chinese state, as usual.
What exactly am I supposed to be outraged about here?
Anyway I can’t wait for libs to clap like seals as anyone who looks even vaguely Asian is sent to the camps for being a sissypee agent
Presumably that the evil chinese great firewall that prevents the chinese from knowing all the stuff we know is also being exported by the evil chinese to other countries.
I think this propaganda has a poor shelf life, in part because people are getting more connected with China and don’t think the Chinese are being sheltered from information as much as people previously believed, it’s getting hard to convince people this shit is real anymore when they can speak to actual Chinese people on rednote and see it’s not really very different to anywhere else.
It’s not going to stop them from trying to push it though. I think what’s particularly noticeable about this is that their complaint are all about neighbouring countries. Particularly Myanmar due to its unstable political situation that could go in favour of either China or the west.
Are these liberals aware that those governments can still control their own internet infrastructure?
And Chinese people have access to the same information everyone on the west does. I mean sure you can’t post State Department propaganda on the Chinese web, but if you really wanted to see it you can always use a VPN. And yeah posting about party history specifically as well as other sensitive topics is going to be tightly controlled, but that doesn’t mean they don’t know anything. Things that can’t be discussed online are discussed in private. It’s a game everyone plays and knows the rules to.
The alternative is to open the floodgates and allow your population to have their brains cooked by internet brain poison, and then you’ll have antivaxxers and Chinese QAnon. Oh and of course that would involve surrendering your online sovereignty to Google and the western intelligence agencies they work with. If China were to do this they might as well ask the CIA directly how they can help them destabilize the country.
I can’t imagine looking at the state of the western web in 2025 and its consequences and going “I want that”.
The speed at which mass unfiltered internet usage has degraded the West’s capacity for rational thought and communication is honestly astounding.
It’s not hyperbole to suggest it may end up being one of the terminal nails in the coffin of the West’s decline.
I’d say its less a mass unfiltered usage problem and the fact that we’ve all been psyopped to death by a whole litany of bourgeois organs including three letter agencies, advertisers, and big tech. The western internet is a fucking digital shithole designed by the bourgeois to fry the brains of its users so that we are more easily manipulated into consoooooooooooming hours of slop content, being ragebaited into bumping such slop content, buying shit based on what we see on the slop content, and hating any nation or people the imperialists want to victimize. The internet isn’t unfiltered for the masses, the very proof is that we’re posting here instead of on preddit because they, like many popular sites, ban anything that offends or threatens the western bourgeois.
Our internet can be considered a cognitohazard and the CPC have made an excellent decision to ban their citizens from interacting with it.
That’s not what the West is experiencing.
It’s actually massively filtered through market forces, so people tend to only see content if it’s making someone money. The West has a “great firewall” made up of algorithms and platforms and paywalls.
honestly with the way the internet has turned out to be an absolute cesspit, most libs I know have come around on the great firewall thing. Average people hate meta, google et al for ruining the internet and even those I know who think see see pee bad are like “but they were cooking with that great firewall thing”
The problem with the great firewall is that it isn’t great enough and some imported brainworms still find their way through
Not really a firewall if you can bypass it by going to Taiwan province or Hong Kong, or pay for a VPN.
But I hope we see more of the global south adopt stronger internet laws, China got to this early before the tech imperialists were able to encircle the world.
Collectively owned computing is the future and we need people to develop it.
Well Hong Kong is going to be exempted from internet restrictions at least until the “50 years with no change” guarantee period is up, in 2047. And going by comments from Chinese officials, it’s very likely that the “two systems” model is extended indefinitely beyond that. The Chinese commentariat lists this as one of the many factors that fueled the US-backed riots in 2019, in addition to the fact that Hong Kong uses completely separate educational materials from the mainland which is apparently so loosely supervised that a question asking students how China benefited from Japanese imperialism made it into the HK university entrance exam a few years ago. There’s anecdotes on Chinese social media of mainland tourists being maltreated for speaking Mandarin and complaining that HKers have a superiority complex. If the culture and zeitgeist of HK in 2047 is anything remotely like what it is today then full integration with the mainland will be an impossibility. In any case, I don’t think that kind of integration is on the menu. Again, Chinese officials praised the two systems model and have repeatedly says there is no reason to interfere with something that works, in response to questions posed about the formal 2047 end date.
And with Taiwan, I don’t think we’ll see a change in the status quo in the foreseeable future. IMO the “will-they-won’t-they” is going to continue until the heat death of the universe. The government’s condemnations of the monthly US incursions into the Taiwan strait have become a joke on Chinese social media and the key words, “强烈谴责”, have become shorthand roughly equivalent to our “strongly worded letter”.
Also I don’t think anyone is going to HK or Taiwan just to bypass the firewall, especially when you can just use a VPN. Especially Taiwan, since it’s impossible for a mainland Chinese citizen to visit without transiting through another country, except in extremely limited circumstances.
Absolutely true
Already saw it on Mastodon moments ago, passed on by an insufferable local tech lib. Some counters to this will hopefully pop up soon.
My first thoughts are “GFW” is not a real acronym for anything real that exists. “Great Firewall” is not an organisation it’s an umbrella term the western propaganda sphere uses to refer to a bunch of laws that say what is and is not allowed online, along with mixed enforcement across a broad range of things. None of this is one thing. The west also has laws that determine what is allowed and what is not allowed online and different countries block different things. None of that is called the “Great Western Firewall” as a propaganda term because it’s absurd and no such thing actually exists.
The two companies above are private companies. When private companies in the west do something nobody says “evil american government overreach”, it’s private companies. But when literally anyone in China does anything at all it’s immediately attributed to a dastardly Chinese government plot.
They will be trawling this data for absolutely any tidbit they can find to frame it that way though. Even if they find very little of use in the data they will still vaguely use the size of the leak as a big WOW factor to imply the sheer size of ebil Chinese surveillance efforts. Absolutely nobody will compare this to what Palantir is doing exporting surveillance and “security” to the UK or elsewhere though. Nor will anyone compare to 5eyes etc.