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!
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.
In addition to the strike authorization vote we’re having next week, for UAW 4811 (the UC grad worker union), we’re having leadership voting right now. Since our pay negotiation strike last year, and the spectacular displays of worker betrayal we’ve seen, we’ve been working on cutting out the more corrupt/collaborationist caucus in the union, but we only like halfway seized power in the aftermath. I’m really hoping they don’t gain ground back, especially right before this potentially huge vote next week.
Got an email from my union president a few minutes ago. UAW 4811, the union of academic workers in the UC system, “voted to hold a strike authorization vote as early as next week to give the Executive Board authority to call a strike.”
This is obviously in regards to the attack at the UCLA encampments. My opinion of the highest level of my union leadership is kinda bad, there’s still a decent bit of corruption that hasn’t been stamped out, but I think this might have been egregious enough for the other organs of the union below to push for this. This could be pretty huge if it goes through, there’s 48000 people in the union altogether. This would be a massive amount of economic pressure, so I can only hope.
The strike authorization vote will be across the entire union membership, which is good. The membership is consistently better about things than the highest leadership levels.
slava youcrane
What should we think of the reports of a possible ceasefire in Gaza? It seems like the zionists have softened their demands somewhat.
Good morning to every university student currently protesting against the Netanyahu and Biden regimes, both carrying out a genocide in Palestine while having a stand off with the little pigs armed with military grade weapons and armor, I have nothing to offer to you but my sincere solidarity. I’d also like to extend a wish for a good morning to those members of the Resistence who are currently face to face with the genocidal beast itself in the city of Gaza, godspeed, may your next ambush be a huge success. And finally I don’t want to forget about our friends in Yemen who scrambled their limited resources in an act of self-sacrifice to help their brothers and sisters in need during their darkest times, good luck, may your ballistic missiles and drones hit many US and “israeli” targets, as well as their proxies the “United Kingdom” and other despicable genocidal monsters. Good morning to you all.
Ah but pigs are quick and brutal when dealing with a bunch of peaceful students protesting against a genocide. But when it comes to saving kids from a mass shooter? Hold it there chief, they ain’t going in. There are kids in Uvalde whose lives were cut short because the pigs never cared for them.
Never trust a pig, never. Pathetic losers and cowards too mediocre to choose an actual career that does something positive for society.
And as always, death to ameriKKKa.
Biden sleeps while entire blocks and hospitals are blown up in Gaza
Biden wakes up when a college kid breaks a window with a hammer.
Hope you die soon, Joe.
Liberal whining about getting banned from /r/BreadTube because they’re repeating Zionist talking points about Palestinian resistance being “terrorists”, blah, blah, blah.
I guess I’m the most “tankie” anarchist you know. Despite Palestine not being a state, Al-Qassam Brigades having zero authority and pretty popular support among Palestinians, acting in horizontal coalition with other resistance groups, etc. shrug
BTW, here’s a nice little extra tidbit. LMAO.
I don’t really care if “leftist” spaces on
lose participation and die after every Zionist and faux-leftist gets banned, TBH. It’s better than maintaining another liberal shithole helping to manufacture consent for genocide and repressive state violence.Biden is so fucking done lmao. All Trump has to do now is sit back and watch it all burn, not that he will gain a lot of votes out of this scenario but Biden will bleed voters left and right.
And excuse me but I think this was probably one of the “easiest” presidencies one can hope for. Trump was so fucking bad all you had to do was not screw up, but this old fuck did just that. Serves them right, death to the DemoKKKratiKKK Party and JoSSeph Biden.
Tony Blair and His Associates Are Waiting in the Wings to Take Back Power in UK
Blair will probably have no official role in the resulting Starmer government, but he will wield plenty of power from behind the scenes. The beauty of such an arrangement (for Blair) is that he will have zero public accountability or responsibility while at the same time being able to continue serving his corporate clients and expanding his global political consulting empire.
COTW: United States
What’s that, North American Israel or something? On a more serious note, I’ve been reading a lot about the “discovery” of the Americas recently and it’s just crazy how random British, French and Spanish guys just got given ships and some money and were told to like fuck off and find something useful out west. Imagine being some loser smelly French guy and stumbling upon something as majestic as the Mississippi River. Or imagine being the Spanish dude that found Florida and suddenly saw the wildest swamps possible. Or the Brits that sailed into the most frozen fucked up parts of Canada and only found some delicious fish types that didn’t exist anywhere. What an insane time for humanity. Yeah I know that those explorer guys were mostly bootlickers and had awful intentions, but the timeline of these “accomplishments” by the European explorers is astonishing. 30 years between Columbus first voyage and the fall of Tenochtitlan feels unreal.
Debated whether I should post this here or in /c/the_dunk_tank.
From crisis to prosperity: Netanyahu’s vision for Gaza 2035 revealed online
This post is dedicated to the brave students protesting against the genocide in Palestine.
Americans who get their news primarily from cable are the only people who believe that Israel is not committing a genocide in Gaza, according to according to a new survey that examined the relationship between attitudes toward the war and news consumption habits.
https://theintercept.com/2024/04/30/gaza-israel-palestine-cable-news-poll/
