Image is from this Black Agenda Report article by the Communist Party of Kenya.
In June, large anti-government protests shook Kenya. President Ruto and his parliament were attempting to pass the new Finance Bill 2024, which, among other things, would have hiked taxes on the population, with a 16% sales tax on bread and a 25% duty on cooking oil, as well as new taxes on financial transanctions and vehicle ownership. There would also have been levies on women’s sanitary products and digital goods such as phones, among other measures affecting hospitals.
Hundreds of protestors stormed the parliament building and began to tear the place apart. Shortly afterwards, on June 26th, Ruto announced that he was withdrawing the bill, calling the tens of deaths and hundreds of injuries “unfortunate”. A couple weeks later, Ruto then fired his entire cabinet (aside from his foreign minister) and communicated his wish to the nation to form a “broad-based government”. Funnily enough, in July, it was announced that the majority of positions were to be filled by members of the old cabinet, while other positions were taken by members of the opposition. This has prompted scepticism among the population, including calls to resign, but there haven’t (yet) been any major anti-government events to pressure this outcome. The Communist Party of Kenya has been working to get some of their comrades back after they were abducted by the police during the protest period, and have otherwise supported the protests against Ruto.
The measures in the bill were strongly encouraged by the IMF. Kenya’s debt is currently around $80 billion, of which about 10% is owed to China for infrastructure projects (such as a railway linking the capital, Nairobi, to the port city of Mombasa, as well as 11,000 kilometers of road throughout the country). The rest is owed to a combination of the US, IMF, World Bank, and Saudi Arabia. More than half of government revenue is going towards repaying the debt - but despite these massive payments, it has only grown. The most recent round of IMF plundering (and the impetus for current events) began in 2021, when they offered a 38-month programme to “help” Kenya, which would involve the usual warfare on the poor and the dismemberment of any useful societal institutions.
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 Kenya! 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.
Can anyone name any examples of terrible people in the world who actually got what was coming to them?
Come on like, being a fucking soulless husk shouldn’t make you immune to consequences should it?
Famously, Stalin reduced Hitler to an anxious shivering wreck whose final days (including birthday and wedding) were spent in an underground concrete sarcophagus in fear of the walls bursting in with water and drowning him alive, ears ringing from endless shelling. Hitler’s terror of being marched through Moscow and skinned alive was so great that he killed himself. Same with a lot of other Nazis. Also Mussolini, who was hanged by Italian communists. Also all of the yankee soldiers who went off to invade communist Korea and Viet Nam, of whom nothing was left for their families to bury.
This victory is somewhat lessened by Hitler’s survival by the cycle of Samsara, who has reincarnated as Benjamin Netanyahu. Jury is still out on whether the irony of being born Jewish is karmic justice or a buff to his credibility.
oceangate submarine
There’s Louis XVI who got his head chopped off. Heydrich was denazified by the Czechoslovak resistance. There’s all the Nazis who froze and starved to death in Stalingrad. And there’s the story of that SS guard who got burned alive in a crematoria oven.
There world is not entirely without justice and kindness.
Off the top of my head, Mussolini, Custer, those Nazis who the hangman “accidentally” botched their hangings so they died slow excruciating deaths, everyone pushed into the cuck pit, slaveowners in Haiti, slaveowners in the US Civil War. There’s also Andrew Myrick, whose death ignited the Dakota War of 1862:
I sometimes use the story of John C. Woods as a sort of IRL litmus test. If someone is horrified by what he did, I know they’re sus. But if they think it’s hilarious and/or fully justified, I know they’re probably ok.
“Eat shit ya fuckin Nazis”
Pretty sure every coloniser who died fighting against indigenous populations in the US deserved it
Dan Mitrione was an intelligence officer who provided training for torturers in Latin America. He was kidnapped by communists and executed. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Mitrione
In 2004, Iraqis dragged, killed, then burned Blackwater mercenaries and hanged them on a bridge https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Fallujah_ambush
Mir Kansi killed two CIA officers in Langley then went to McDonalds for a burger https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_headquarters_shooting
The kind of brutality I can get behind.
State of Siege, about Mitrione’s death, is a great film. Strongly recommended.
Kind of crazy that their torture and riot control expert was literally just a small-medium size town chief of police. Tells you a lot about american piggies I guess. And the town he worked in in the US is described as the “cradle of recorded jazz”, so it might have been a
situation
deleted by creator
What about Spain’s first astronaut, Luis Carrero Blanco?
On 20 December at 9:36 am, a three-man ETA commando unit disguised as electricians detonated the explosives by command wire as Blanco’s Dodge Dart passed.[2] The blast sent Blanco and his car 20 metres (66 ft) into the air and over the five-story church, landing on the second-floor terrace of the opposite side.[3] Blanco survived the blast but died at 10:15 am in hospital.[2] His bodyguard and driver died shortly afterwards.[2] The “electricians” shouted to stunned passers-by that there had been a gas explosion, and then fled in the confusion. ETA claimed responsibility on 22 January 1974.
(Absolutely wild story, ya love to see it folks. )
Similarly, the IRA managed to assassinate Lord Mountbatten on his boat
“13 gone and not forgotten. We got 18 and Mountbatten”
They got a Dodge, too. Two birds with one stone, and all that.
Do Chinese billionaires, Jenine Añez, and Shinzo Abe count?
There was that one hedge fund guy who bought the Wu Tang album…can’t remember his name
Martin Shkreli
Montel Shakralli
what happened to him?
He has to give back the album lmao
Whoever gets their hands on it HAS to pirate it as revenge for whatever the fuck was going on with Wu-Tang: Shaolin Style
Apparently he did that himself when he owned it. And in the process, he basically fucked over some NFT-bro who paid almost $5 million USD for it. Shkreli has been trolling him about it, talking about how he still listens to it all the time, and how he’s got copies stashed away in various places.
Of course under no circumstances does one ever have to hand it to Martin Shkreli, but it’s all hilarious to read about.
Thomas Midgley Jr. He was an early 20th century chemist. He’s been described by many as the most destructive individual organism in the history of planet Earth.
His infamy started with his invention of leaded gasoline. The tetraethyl lead additive was intended as an anti-engine-knock measure. It ended up being spewed from engine exhausts for most of the 20th century, becoming what is arguably one of the most widespread toxins on the planet. He defended it his entire life despite knowing what lead does to the nervous system.
But for this man, a single planetary-scale environmental disaster wasn’t enough. He followed up that with his invention of Freon, one of that lovely class of chlorofluorocarbons that wreaks havoc on the ozone layer. He intended it as a safer refrigerant for home food refrigerators, but of course it ended up going dreadfully wrong as well.
Fortunately, his death was very fitting for this one-man environmental tragedy. He contracted polio in 1940, and he applied his intelligence towards developing a system of ropes and pulleys so that he could get in and out of bed by himself despite his weakened state. One day in 1944, he got himself entangled in his contraption, and died of strangulation.
Unless
gives her the Herman Cain, she still hasn’t gotten what’s coming yet
deleted by creator
Andrew Myrick
The end of the last tsar never fails to bring a smile to my face. The passing of SS Untersturmfuhrer Schleyer is quite wholesome too (albeit somewhat late).
Jeaninez Anez and Bolivian Neo-Nazi Camacho are currently in jail for the coup in 2019. Former dictator and promoted of the native genocide in Peru, Alberto Fujimori, was in jail until recently, only getting out because he has both lung and tongue cancer which is slowly and painfully killing him. Anastasio Somoza, former brutal dictator of Nicaragua, was shot dead in Paraguay and his car blown up by Left-Wing Peronist Guerrilas. Bolsonaro didn’t die, by the stabbing made him unable to shit properly and he has to go to the hospital multiple times to avoid dying of shit overloads.
My sister in law. heh heh heh.
John Lennon lol