SeventyTwoTrillion

Image is of a colectivo: an armed group, usually operating in impoverished areas, which act to support and defend the socialist government of Venezuela. They are often derided as vigilante terrorist groups which prop up the government, because cops are only bad when they are socialist and not murdering minorities, I suppose.

Maduro's party, the PSUV, has won the election after a staggering amount of propaganda by the opposition, who said their polls suggested they were going to win and that Maduro's loss was inevitable. The reaction across Latin America is what one would expect. Left-leaning leaders are generally respecting the results and congratulating Maduro, while those on the right and/or are US puppets (such as in semirecently-couped Peru) are calling for recounts, or even that the election was illegitimate. The US itself is also unhappy about the results. We shall soon see if their unhappiness boils over into yet another coup attempt.

Personally, I think they should have ran Guaido again.

Thank you to @[email protected] for the election coverage here, and everything else they do in the news megathread.

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 Venezuela! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.

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Image is of Bolivian President Luis Arce (center, with glasses) face-to-face with General Zuñiga (in camouflage) during the coup attempt.

On the 26th of June, while Hexbear was in an 8-hour hibernation, General Juan José Zuñiga marched 200 troops and some armored vehicles on the government palace in an attempt to overthrow the democratically elected government of Luis Arce. This is somewhat reminiscent of Jeanine Anez's coup in November 2019 where she overthrew the socialist president Evo Morales, but while that coup was due to a colour revolution likely orchestrated by the United States and had at least a tiny amount of political/public legitimacy and "followed the rules" in a certain sense (as Morales was trying to abolish presidential term limits, which is only evil if a socialist is doing it), this was a much more naked attempted seizure of power by a military general.

This coup was quickly terminated without even a momentary transfer of power. Democracy was saved.

Despite being in the same party, Morales and Arce have increasingly been in opposition. Morales champions anti-imperialism, rights for indigneous people, and poverty reduction. This last one especially has been threatened by Arce, though it's not entirely his fault, as the Bolivian economy is threatened by the same crisis affecting so many developing economies around the world right now - say it with me now - a lack of dollars and mounting debt. The US Federal Reserve is carrying out a bloody offensive against the world's poor, and this has combined nastily with a rather uninspiring "post"-coronavirus economic recovery in Bolivia, as well as diminishing natural gas production (and thus less exports with which to earn dollars).

While the coup was ongoing, Morales banded behind the government. Afterwards, however, Morales expressed his skepticism about whether the coup was, in fact, genuine, calling for an independent investigation into it, and saying that Arce “disrespected the truth, deceived us, lied, not only to the Bolivian people but to the whole world." This is because General Zuñiga made a series of very interesting statements to his family and colleagues, saying that Arce had "betrayed" him, and saying that Arce had told him “‘The situation is very screwed up, very critical. It is necessary to prepare something to raise my popularity.'" This does check out on the surface level, at least: Arce has suffered increasing unpopularity as the economy has suffered.

Interestingly, Morales' narrative has been supported by the anarchocapitalist leader of Argentina, Javier Milei, who is currently busy completely destroying his own country and stripping the copper out of the walls to give to American capitalists. Milei said that the coup attempt was "fraudulent". Meanwhile, those inside MAS opposed to Morales' accusations of a false coup have accused him of allying with the fascist right and becoming an instrument of imperialism.

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 Bolivia! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.

Please check out the HexAtlas!

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Image is of fires in northern Israel set off by Hezbollah, to force settlers to retreat from their occupied areas, in response to attacks on civilians in Lebanon.

I'm not gonna lie to you - I thought Israel would have started shit with Hezbollah by now which would have derailed whatever megathread theme I had planned, so I didn't bother planning one.

If you want a decent couple pieces going over what Hezbollah has done to Israel, then have a look at How 'Israel' Has Lost The North and Hezbollah's Quarterly Report. It's not exactly the most professional analysis, as you'll see if you read it, but it gets the point across and relies on evidence. In essence, Hezbollah has pushed the Israelis back tens of kilometers and decimated their border infrastructure, all while unveiling anti-aircraft missiles that have forced Israel to reconsider bombing runs. They still probably have the ability to turn various towns and cities in Lebanon to rubble, but Hezbollah can do massive damage back to Israel in turn. This has gone on so long with so little meaningful opposition by Israel that border settlements are going a little haywire and tentatively declaring independence from Israel and saying they don't want IDF troops there anymore. I don't take these terribly seriously from a military standpoint but it is indicative of the Zionist settler mindset crumbling over the last 9 months.

We're now at the point where Israel kinda has to go to war against Hezbollah or the entire Zionist ideology of military deterrence and expansion via illegal settlements simply no longer functions, but that war will also lead to massive destruction for military and civilian facilities (ports, power stations, war factories, etc) which is a massive problem for Israel's continued existence. Hamas continues to function inside Gaza despite the surface occupation of significant areas, including the Gaza-Egypt border, and attrition there is leading to big materiel and psychological losses for Israel too. And Yemen has, for all intents and purposes, prevailed against America's failed attempt to thwart their blockade - with some in the army claiming it's the most intense naval battle America has faced since WW2 - and missile strikes are tentatively beginning to hit or at least threaten ships in the Mediterranean Sea.

Nukes are still lurking quietly in the background, of course, but the Resistance is perfectly aware of that and still seems confident to go ahead with operations, so I can't really do anything but shrug and say that I trust them to do what's right.

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 Lebanon! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.

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Image is of the leaders of various parties making up the French left coalition in the coming parliamentary elections, from this article.

Macron has recently called a snap parliamentary election in the aftermath of the far-right getting a large proportion of the votes in the EU elections. Why exactly he called an election at a point of profound weakness is a little beyond me. Explanations that I've seen range from "He thinks the element of surprise will benefit his party and not others," to "WW3 is about to start and he doesn't want to be leader for it," (which, like, isn't true - Macron is the President of France, not Prime Minister, he won't be unseated by this election and he has said he will not stand down regardless of result), to "He doesn't want to swim in the shit-filled Seine."

While we still have a couple weeks to go, the polling I've seen generally puts the far-right in first place with the left-wing coalition slightly behind, with Macron's party all the way back in third place. Anybody who knows anything about French politics knows that while France does actually have something of a left opposition in aggregate (in contrast to the two wings of the Capitalist Party in the UK and the US, for example), French left coalitions are profoundly unstable and this one will inevitably split - perhaps even before the voting begins - meaning they aren't nearly as useful as they otherwise could be.

Living in a France governed by far right parties would be awful, but maybe they might at least be against the carnage in Ukraine, and sue for peace with Russia? Well, possibly not, if the example of Meloni in Italy is anything to go by. It seems that the differences between the "centrist" parties and the fascist ones truly are not that great, beholden to the exact same set of capitalists regardless of which party wins, and will likely bend the knee to NATO, though they may grumble a lot. Would a left coalition be better on Russia/NATO? They have already helpfully told us that they won't (only opposing sending French troops to Ukraine but otherwise being full steam ahead), and additionally are genocidal Zionists. Western leftists have long been hampered by a dramatically faulty misunderstanding of how geopolitics works, with many seemingly believing "imperialism is when countries interact with other countries" and "democracy is when you can vote between two parties even if widely popular policies aren't at all represented by either of them, and if those popular policies are enacted but it's by a one-party state then that's authoritarian evil" and other such strange ideas, making them terminally useless on foreign issues and pretty unremarkable on domestic issues too. France is no exception.

And just to top it all off, this is coming in a period of further imperial decline for the tattered remains of the French empire, with West Africa rebelling and Kanaky (New Caledonia) deeply unhappy with recent French decisions.

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 France! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.

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Image is of Cuba's National People's Power Assembly.

The most recent geopolitical news around Cuba is the arrival this week of four Russian vessels, including a nuclear submarine - not carrying any nukes, (un)fortunately - to Havana. This will, in Putin's words, merely be a visit celebrating historical ties and no laws are being broken. Nonetheless, it's not hard to imagine how American politicians and analysts are taking the news, especially as it comes shortly after Russia promised an "asymmetrical" response to further NATO involvement in Ukraine (notably, officially allowing the use of US weapons such as missiles in Russia, albeit in a small part of Russian territory, near the border).

Meanwhile, China has been increasingly co-operating with Cuba to overcome the economic hardship created by American sanctions. China has recently re-allowed direct flights to Cuba and has recently donated some small photovoltaic plants as part of an initiative to eventually boost the Cuban energy grid by 1000 MW - and any electrical expansion helps as Cuba is plagued by blackouts which last most of the day. Additionally, the EU has made meaningful contributions to Cuba's energy situation too, with large solar installations. Hopefully, the Belt and Road Initiative will help preserve the Cuban revolution against reactionary forces as the power of US sanctions wanes. The proximity of Cuba to the United States makes this much more challenging than it would be for countries elsewhere, however. Similarly to the situation in Mexico, it seems unlikely that the US's influence over Cuba will massively diminish for decades to come unless there is a catastrophic internal collapse in the American authoritarian regime.

The Havana Syndrome will continue until American morale declines.

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 Cuba! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.

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An image of a Central Committee meeting in Hanoi. Image taken from this article.

General Secretary Nguyễn Phú Trọng implemented an anti-corruption campaign in 2016 called "blazing furnace" in shorthand. Since then, the fire has ripped through both politicians and businesses, up to even the Presidency. Nearly 200,000 party members, 36 Central Committee members, and 50 police/military generals have been disciplined since the initiative began. In 2018, Dinh La Thang, the former party chief of Ho Chi Minh City, became the first sitting Politburo member to be criminally charged, and was sentenced to 30 years in prison. In 2023, President Nguyễn Xuân Phúc was implicated in a corruption scandal and resigned. He was replaced by Võ Văn Thưởng, who was then also caught in a corruption scandal a year later in March 2024, making him the shortest serving President in Vietnamese history. The Presidency is current headed by Võ Thị Ánh Xuân while they find a new President; she also took that role in 2023.

The ousted leaders tend to also be part of the more West-friendly, technocratic faction inside Vietnam, either reflecting how these people also tend to be more easily corrupted, or how the Communist Party is slowly moving away from a foreign policy which allies itself with the West (as Vietnam has comprehensive strategic partnerships with several Western countries), or some combination. Of course, this shouldn't be overstated - Vietnam has maintained a close friendship with China for years, and both incumbent leaders are intimately familiar with anti-corruption campaigns and how and why they must be conducted in order to deliver maximum public benefit.

America clearly desires Vietnam to pick their side, because America strongly desires another vassal state in East Asia like the Philippines, South Korea, and Japan to further encircle and isolate China. And so the headlines and commentary of Western state propaganda like Radio Free Asia, the BBC, WaPo, Business Insider, etc reveal their increasing annoyance with Vietnam's government. They often couch this in the standard "objective" economics language); about how removing leaders who foreign investors were reassured by might mean economic pain for Vietnam ahead. As Bhadrakumar noted in 2023, perhaps the BBC revealed their intentions the best:

Reading Vietnamese politics is always difficult — the Communist Party makes its decisions behind closed doors. But hard-line General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong, who was given an unprecedented third term at last year’s party congress, appears to be consolidating his authority by ousting senior officials seen as more pro-Western and pro-business. Officially this is all happening in the name of fighting corruption,.. but it’s indicative of a power struggle at the top of the party… the likely rise now of more security-focused officials to the top of the party will be bad news.

Even a quick google search right now will show a bunch of articles by clearly nervous Westerners: Why Vietnam’s Escalating Anti-Corruption Campaign Might Backfire because, as we all know, only authoritarian regimes are vulnerable to things like public opinion and discontent, while Western "democracies" are insulated from such petty phenomena. Leaders here can have disapproval ratings of 60-70% and not even the slightest consequence will happen to them - a real sign of democratic freedom and justice over those primitive regimes in the East! Or, take: ‘Blazing Furnace’ Turns Vietnam Into Another Chinese Province; China turning both Russia and Vietnam into their provinces in just two years was a real diplomatic masterclass. Or, back in 2022: Vietnam's 'blazing furnace' crackdown burns $40 bln off stocks. Not the stocks! Anything but the stocks!

If your actions as a leader are pissing off Bloomberg, you are going in the right direction.

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 Vietnam! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.

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Image is of Stepanakert, essentially the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh. It is now a ghost city, and Azerbaijan has recently torn down the parliament building and various other important places. Sourced from this article.

Despite the predictions and assertions of various NATO-aligned commentators that Russia's influence is waning, the opposite generally appears to be occurring. ASEAN has become more strongly aligned with Russia despite claims to the contrary. In Central Asia, there has been a propaganda push to declare that countries there are "emerging from Russia's shadow", while in reality, as Bhadrakumar analyzes, Russia's significant economic growth and ongoing march towards victory in Ukraine is creating opportunities for further integration, not separation, and there are no major political shifts there in terms of Russian ties. And in Niger, Russian soldiers have now entered an airbase which once hosted American soldiers, now kicked out, and generally Russia's diplomacy and economic deals (nuclear power plant construction, military equipment, grain shipments, etc) have accelerated in Africa.

Where Russia's influence has actually seemed to decrease (outside of the West, of course) is in Armenia. Nagorno-Karabakh's remarkably rapid collapse in late 2023 demonstrated that Russia was not willing to escalate things in defense of Armenia to fend off Azerbaijan. One hundred thousand Armenians - most but not all of them in the region - fled in advance to avoid mass persecution, which received remarkably little attention by a West which calls itself overwhelmingly concerned with borders changing due to military action as in Ukraine. Since then, Armenia seems to be on some kind of self-annihilating bender, allured by the potential of Western military and economic deals. Armenia froze its membership in the CSTO due to its failure to protect them, and the head of NATO, Stoltenberg, visited the region in March. The West has offered up hundreds of millions of dollars in assistance to Armenia and is helping them "modernize their military"; given the poor track record of Western military equipment in Ukraine, one wonders why they're even bothering. RAND has advocated for a balancing act; America should, in their eyes, realize that they can't entirely remove Russia's influence but nonetheless should make inroads to protect Armenia from Azerbaijan (which is an interesting position given that Israel provided arms to Azerbaijan to help them take Nagorno-Karabakh).

A quick look at Armenia's geographical position reveals the folly of trying to create some kind of Western outpost. With a hostile Azerbaijan to their east, a very unfriendly (albeit NATO member) Turkiye to their west, an ascendant Iran to their south, and Russia not far from the action, there is little hope of doing much more than causing a little chaos in the hopes it'll momentarily distract Russia while it makes inroads most everywhere else on the planet. The political situation appears miserable for Pashinyan, but there isn't really a popular alternative to take the reins. A truly cursed situation.

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 Armenia! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.

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Also known as "Foucault's boomerang" or the "imperial boomerang".

Image is of a sniper on the roof of the Indiana Memorial Union at Indiana State University, overlooking a student protest.

The Imperial Boomerang is the observation that the tactics of mass oppression and totalitarianism used by Western countries in their colonies and neocolonies will, sooner or later, return home to be used against the citizens of those Western countries. While the people living at the time of WW2 were, rightfully, in deep shock of the concentration camps used by Nazi Germany, those paying attention to what was occurring in Africa would not have been terribly surprised. Concentration camps were used in several countries in order to separate out ethnic groups and place them in more easily controlled environments which aimed to prevent them from rising up and fighting back against the Western governments which exploited them. There is the additional factor of governments taking notes from each other - Hitler was inspired by America's racial segregation and genocide of indigenous groups, which author Carroll Kakel among others have written books on.

Today, the totalitarian strategies used by the Zionist entity in occupied Palestine are being brought home to Western countries as the American Reich and its global influence accelerate in their decline. Gaza was and is a cyber-concentration camp, with digital surveillance taking place alongside old-fashioned techniques of paying informants. Aside from being an unsinkable aircraft carrier and disrupting the entire Middle East, Israel's primary role appears to be to generate new ways to monitor entire populations. Propaganda about China being an authoritarian police state with social credit scores and AI which knows where everybody is at all times was probably created, at least in part, to deflect attention from Israel doing those exact things. The paranoid and flimsy American regime with its gerontocratic upper circles now use these tactics at home: cracking down on any and all protestors with political views left of Mussolini; placing snipers on roofs ready to fire at the slightest provocation; and arresting organization leaders. Pegasus has wormed its way around the world, with a notable recent example in Poland, in which the previous conservative government used the spyware to monitor the current liberal ruling party. The Israeli military, experts only in killing children and not actual warfare, have trained the police of other nations.

It would be easy to end the preamble there, on a gloomy note about the brick wall - or, indeed, iron curtain - that upstart left-wing groups are up against. What history has shown is that these regimes are, in fact, beatable. Liberation movements around the world have found ways to counter imperialism, even if they required wars in which millions of their countrymen were murdered. The legacy of Israeli propaganda psyops and digital tracking is not victory, as Hamas demonstrated on October 7th and continues to show with every ambush executed and every Merkava destroyed. The legacy of Western military defence equipment is not success, demonstrated by every missile fired by Hezbollah and Iran which hits Israel. The legacy of the American Navy is not competence, with a naval blockade of the Red Sea still maintained after months by one of the poorest countries on the planet.

The protests of at least the last couple decades have been marked by failure to produce material results: from those against the Iraq War, to Occupy Wall Street, to the BLM protests of 2020. Of course, it would be silly to tell American protestors to start digging tunnels. But sooner or later, the failure of Western protest movements will be overcome, and a more effective strategy will be devised, in order to deflect the boomerang.

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 the United States! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.

Please check out the HexAtlas!

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Image is of the Te Pati Maori (Maori Party) cofounders, Rawiri Waititi and Debbie Ngarewa-Packer. They have 6 of the 123 seats in the New Zealand parliament.

Officially confirming that the Republican primaries were a gigantic waste of time for everybody involved, Trump has massively beat everybody else in Iowa, and will very obviously be the Republican candidate for 2024. Given the abysmal state of the US economy (for everybody who isn't in the top 1-10%, which is mainly what national statistics reflect when they aren't telling blatant falsehoods), it's more plausible than ever that Trump may indeed once again become President - though I personally refuse to predict one way or another due to how volatile politics and geopolitics currently are. Project 2025 is coming, folks - either as the official Republican governance program, or as what the Democrats will do in 2026 after the midterms, stating that they have no other choice and have to reach across the aisle as they are the Adults In The Room™.

In other news...

Late last year, New Zealand voted in a new and very right-wing government, composed of the center-right National Party, the libertarian ACT Party (ACT stands for the "Association of Consumers and Taxpayers", good lord), and the fascist New Zealand First party. By what I can tell, this was the well-trodden path of "Vaguely center-left party does neoliberal austerity and causes a recession and workers fucking hated it and voted in a different party out of desperation," though the flooding and cyclones did add challenges to Chris Hipkins' short reign after Jacinda Ardern resigned.

It's worth noting that Hipkins was at least fairly China-friendly, meeting up with Xi Jinping on a five-day visit in the summer. They still do the whole "We have concerns about human rights" thing, but of all the countries of the imperial core, New Zealand is - or, perhaps, was - one of the most amicable. In 2021, China was New Zealand's single largest trading partner, with a third of exports going to China (more than Australia, the US, Japan, and South Korea combined), and they receive 22% of their imports from China too, more than any other single country.

Christopher Luxon, the new Prime Minister and sentient thumb, has said that he is exploring a closer relationship with AUKUS:

Luxon said New Zealand was interested in becoming involved in AUKUS Pillar 2: a commitment between the three partners to develop and share advanced military capabilities, including artificial intelligence, electronic warfare and hypersonics.

“We’ll work our way through that over the course of next year as we understand it more and think about what the opportunities may be for us,” Luxon said. “AUKUS is a very important element in ensuring we’ve got stability and peace in the region.”

This is not to say that Hipkins wanted nothing to do with AUKUS or Western organizations aimed generally against China - in fact, pre election, "he was open to conversations about joining Pillar II of AUKUS". But the current government is pushing down on the accelerator pedal.

The left-wing Maori party, Te Pati Maori, has stated that they want New Zealand to remain non-aligned, as joining AUKUS would erode the sovereignty of the country:

As Maori we cannot allow our sovereignty to be determined by others, whether they are in Canberra or Washington. Aotearoa should not act as Pacific spy base in the wars of imperial powers. Joining AUKUS will severely undermine our country’s sovereignty, constitution, and ability to remain nuclear free. There is too much at stake for our government to make a commitment of this magnitude without a democratic process.

In general, the party leaders of Te Pati Maori want New Zealand to be the "Switzerland of the Pacific", which is perhaps not the greatest analogy given all the problems Switzerland had and has, but we understand the intended meaning of desiring neutrality.

The Country of the Week is New Zealand! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.

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Image is of legal adviser to Israel's foreign ministry Tal Becker and British jurist Malcolm Shaw at the ICJ hearing.

The ICJ case against Israel might not achieve much for the Palestinian cause directly, given that Israeli politicians have explicitly stated that the Hague will not stop them - and I believe them. The Resistance will be what stops them, and they are doing quite well for themselves. Hezbollah has hit highly sensitive and important Israeli military sites over the last couple weeks, and in general persist in several border attacks every day. The battles in Iraq and Syria also continue. Hamas remains largely intact, and is successfully forcing Israeli forces in the northern Gaza Strip to retreat, and other parts of the Gazan Resistance are continuing to battle down in Khan Yunis. And, last but not least, Yemen is firmly dedicated to the blockade, warding off another ship literally minutes before I started writing this paragraph.

What the ICJ is battling over isn't Palestine and Israel - not really - but the legitimacy of international law itself, and to what degree victimized countries can rely on it to solve problems, versus needing to take more militant routes for justice. In a weird sense, it might be an L for Israel either way. If international law sides with Palestine, then when Israel refuses to stop, it will invalidate international law. If international law sides with Israel, then it will invalidate international law. There is no conceivable way for the West to come out of this looking good.

The South African portion detailing Israeli atrocities against Gaza was largely ignored by the western media. They have instead, obviously, decided to focus on the Israeli portion. Their defense appears to amount to "We didn't do it, Hamas did it. And if we did do it, it doesn't matter, because that's just urban warfare for you. Please get this whole thing thrown out on a very dubious technicality so we don't have to advance to the next stage."

From Craig Murray, who has been physically going to the Hague:

It is important to realise this. Israel is hoping to win on their procedural points about existence of dispute, unilateral assurances and jurisdiction. The obvious nonsense they spoke about the damage to homes and infrastructure being caused by Hamas, trucks entering Gaza and casualty figures, was not serious. They did not expect the judges to believe any of this. The procedural points were for the court. The rest was mass propaganda for the media.

...I am sure the judges want to get out of this and they may go for the procedural points. But there is a real problem with Israel’s “no dispute” argument. If accepted, it would mean that a country committing genocide can simply not reply to a challenge, and then legal action will not be possible because no reply means “no dispute”. I hope that absurdity is obvious to the judges. But they may of course wish not to notice it…

What do I think will happen? Some sort of “compromise”. The judges will issue provisional measures different to South Africa’s request, asking Israel to continue to take measures to protect the civilian population, or some such guff. Doubtless the State Department have drafted something like this for President of the court Donoghoe already.

I hope I am wrong. I would hate to give up on international law. One thing I do know for certain. These two days in the Hague were absolutely crucial for deciding if there is any meaning left in notions of international law and human rights. I still believe action by the court could cause the US and UK to back off and provide some measure of relief. For now, let us all pray or wish, each in our way, for the children of Gaza.

The weekly update is here on the website.

The Country of the Week is South Africa! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.

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Image is of President Hakainde Hichilema and President Xi Jinping on September 15th, from this article.

Zambia is a country of 20 million people, located in southern Africa. Breaking free from British rule in the 1960s, the new government was a one party state ruled by the socialist UNIP party with its leader Kenneth Kaunda, who was a strong supporter of the Non-Aligned Movement (and was its chairman from 1970-73). Its economy has been and remains characterised by copper exports - it is the second-largest copper exporter in Africa - and the economy deeply struggled in the 1970s due to the price of copper plunging. After the fall of the USSR, and due to violent protests, Kaunda stepped down and instituted a multiparty democracy, which has been maintained without (successful) coups to this day, though there are warnings by the leader that some are plotting a coup, given the trend right now.^AA^

Earlier this year, in June, Zambia struck a deal to restructure the $6.3 billion in debt that they are burdened with, of which China is the single largest creditor.^Reuters^ Though he has typically been more West-friendly, last week, President Hichilema traveled to China for two days, meeting with various companies, and Xi Jinping himself. They elevated their relationship to that of a comprehensive strategic cooperative partnership.^Xinhua^ He and Xi have agreed to the increased use of local currencies in trade.^BB^

Hichilema said Zambia thanks China for supporting the African Union's entry into the G20 and China's positive role in resolving the Zambian debt issue. The Zambian side abides by the one-China principle, highly appreciates the guiding philosophy and principles of Chinese modernization, and hopes to learn from China's development experience.

Hichilema has also said:^AN^

"We can do more, faster, because the needs are tremendous in Zambia. I heard some of the solutions are here. All we need to do is to combine the two together."

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