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Bulletins and News Discussion from February 17th to February 23rd, 2025 - The Sankara Renaissance - COTW: Burkina Faso

Image is of the Memorial of the Martyrs (or, the Monument of National Heroes), conceived of by Thomas Sankara and constructed in the early 2000s, honouring those who died in the revolution.

The government of Burkina Faso has done that thing that imperialist nations most dread - land reform.

The Council of Ministers has adopted a bill which means that the nation's land now belongs to the state, in order to regulate land use and make it more sustainable, as well as to solve land conflicts. It's important to note that they are respecting the importance of customary rights in rural land for Burkina Faso nationals. Meanwhile, foreigners can no longer acquire titles of property on rural land.

This new law is part of a series of improvements to Burkina Faso implemented by the country under Traore (who, of course, faces assassination attempts on a regular basis). For example, the state has recently recognized the status of chiefs through the country, putting them under a clearer legal framework and involving them more in public affairs. Late last year, Burkina Faso also nationalized two gold mines, Boungou and Wahgnion, owned by foreign corporations. Burkina Faso is the 13th largest gold producer in the world despite its relatively small size, and yet most of the wealth produced is - or, was - siphoned off to the imperialist core. And, after years of research and development, they've made a new electric car - the Itaoua - which can travel up to 330 kilometers after only 30 minutes of charging.

Socialism cannot be stopped - only delayed.

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560 comments

  • Zelensky-bros is it over?

    • It's so fucking funny how trump, who judging from amlo and sheinbaum's relationship with him can't be THAT hard of a guy to deal with, completely destroys any notion of Zelenskyy being this great statesmen and diplomat, because as soon as he was faced with a world leader that doesn't mindlessly revere him the only thing he can do is pull out the "russian disinfo" card and immediately poisons the relationship, like, this is Trump not Hasan Piker, you can't just call him a russian bot and not expect consequences. Yeah mooching billions of dollars from a sundowning biden and a bunch of breathless eurocrats is easy, doing that with someone who doesn't take your "fight for democracy" seriously? Not so much.

      • Even Keith

        seems to be getting along with him. That being said it might be the Mandleson/Epstein connection at work

        • Mandleson/Epstein connection

          Definitely, but it's the CIA with an unhealthy dose of Mossad all the way down when you look at who actually run's Starmer's campaign & government.

          Effort post, old man activist storytime, & recent Westminster gossip incoming…

          Wielding Excalibur

          Morgan McSweeney is the man behind the throne and the architect of the anti-Corybyn purge followed by Starmer's placement in power. McSweeney's always been decidedly spooky, spent time supposedly living in kibbutzim in Israel, and got his early taste of power in the Labour party by working for none other than Peter Mandleson (close Epstein friend even post-conviction & now Ambassador to the US after Epstein’s death), where his job in 2001 was to input sensitive information into and help manage Mandleson's infamous 'Excalibur' database of blackmail material on party (and other) figures.

          This wasn't just known dirt and gossip either, it also included extremely detailed tracking of their movements that was not available public information. It was routinely used to attack Labour politicians publicly in the press, where the Mandleson network could hide behind client journos refusing to give up 'their sources' to avoid being investigated for breaches of data privacy or possible use of (UK/US/Israeli/private?) intelligence service surveillance. Labour MEP Hugh Kerr alluded to this in this letter to the Guardian in 2001:

          Ed Harriman's article on Labour's supercomputer, Excalibur, was very interesting, but what he failed to mention is its use in tracking the activities of Labour members: particularly MPs and MEPs (Putting the dirt back into politics, May 31).

          When I was a Labour MEP, Millbank got some wrong information that I was about to join the Socialist Labour party. In true Millbank style they decided to attack me in advance: they passed my Excalibur records to selected journalists. One told me it contained detailed records of private Labour meetings where I had dared to challenge Blair, as well as all my public activities.

          This was a clear breach of the Data Protection Act and I referred it to the data protection registrar, who agreed there was a case to investigate and put a senior officer on to it. Labour of course denied it and gave an abbreviated account of my computer data, including only my public utterances. My case could not be proved as the journalists concerned would not reveal their sources publicly. This was all confirmed by Derek Draper who wrote a book on Labour's first 100 days and explained gleefully how Millbank used Excalibur to rubbish me to the press.

          Also, several Labour MPs told me how Mandelson had shown them their Excalibur printouts and threatened them with action if they stepped out of line. Hugh Kerr, Labour MEP 1994-98 (expelled)

          It was also pretty openly used to track, manage, and 'weed out' non-client journalists, as alluded to in this BBC article about Mandleson's reign over the new LabourHQ Millbank or 'Mandy Towers' as it became known, as well as the fact that the system "rivalled MI5".

          This was where the teenage "Millbank tendency" presided over the rapid rebuttal unit, designed to nuke Tory propaganda before it left the launch pad and the infamous Excalibur computer which rivalled MI5 in the information it held on anybody and everybody, friend or foe.

          Once Mandelson moved in to Millbank the building took on 'a slightly darker' image When hacks turned up for press conferences during the 1997 election campaign, for example, they were issued with electronic press passes that were swiped through a card reader before they were allowed entry.

          The rumour was that these security posts were linked to Excalibur which would flash back messages like "troublemaker with known anti-New Labour views, do not trust" or "on side, seat at the front".

          BICOM, LabourTogether, & US spies

          One of McSweeney's biggest public supportes and bankrollers for both himself back then and his future political projects - like his Labour Together group that made it its mission to destroy Corbyn and purge the left from the party afterward - was Trevor Chinn. Chinn is a (now almost 90 year old) ultra-pro-Israel multi-millionaire businessman with myriad connections to spooky US/Israel factions, including BICOM (Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre). That particular loosely defined NGO/think tank with a small published journal attached for show was started, along with many others, just after McSweeney's time working with Excalibur.

          In 2005 BICOM made Ruth Smeeth director of public affairs and campaigns. Smeeth would go on to be a major MsSweeney/Starmer ally and a prominent figure in the 'anti-semitism' campaign against the Corybn admin, including becoming the vice-chair and eventually parlimentary chair of the JLM (Jewish Labour Movement) who were caught working with Isreali spies via the Israeli embassy during the Corbyn years.. Why is that relevant? Because Ruth Smeeth is also spy. Or more accurately, a US intelligence asset. She's was first outed as such in a US state department cable released by Wikileaks from 2009 in which she's assigned the direction (Strictly Protect):

          1. (C/NF) Perhaps most damaging of all, however, Smeargate effectively ended what may have been Brown's plan to call a general election this spring, based on the rise in the polls he received following his solid performance at the G-20. Labour Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for Burton Ruth Smeeth (strictly protect) told us April 20 that Brown had intended to announce the elections on May 12, and hold them after a very short (matter of weeks) campaign season.

          She now chairs the Index On Censorship group, which was originally an anti-Soviet publication for the writings of Sovient Dissenters and later other censored writers from around the world, but has increasingly morphed into a 'free speech monitoring' group that weighs in on allegations of disinfo and promotes US-friendly narratives against 'authoritarian' governments abroad. If there was any room for doubt in it's true contemporary purpose, this transformation from 2016 was funded by CIA cutout NED (National Endowment for Democracy) to the tune of over £600,000.

          People on the 'unacceptable left' of the Labour movement have tried to make a point of this in recent years (too little, too late), but also focusing so specifically on Ruth Smeeth is missing the forest for the tree.

          (continued...)

          • BAP, the CIA, & CND

            But Ruth Smeeth isn't even the spookiest Smeeth in McSweeney's political project and personal orbit. Her husband Michael Smeeth, a wealthy businessman focussing on the push for UK private healthcare as well as various greenwashing companies for fossil fuel aviation, has long been a central member of the British-American Project (BAP). It presents itself a pro-business network of influential US-UK figures, but barely even bothers disguising its true role as a mechanism to assist and elevate US assets in the British political establishment. Michael Smeeth has not only repeatedly been the chair of the organisation, but also one of its three directors from as early as 2011.

            Other prominent members include:

            • UK/US military leaders
            • members of removedoutfit Le Cercle
            • Peter Mandleson himself of course
            • prominant BBC flagship 'journalist' Jeremy Paxman
            • longtime BBC News presenter Jane Hill
            • longtime ITV & now Sky News presenter Trevor Phillips
            • London Mayor Sadiq Khan
            • civil rights lawyer and former Liberty head Shami Chakrabarti
            • former Bilderberg Group chair, Conservative party chair, & General Secretary for NATO Peter Carrington
            • architect of the Iraq war & World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz
            • and rather interestingly, Janet Bloomfield who was installed as the chair of the CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) in the early 90s

            The fact that the BAP was an American intelligence network has been common knowledge for people paying attention since the 1980s. Brilliant investigative journalism and driving force behind the best years of Private Eye, Paul Foot, who equated the BAP to “CIA front organisations” set up in the 1960s “to promote ‘sensible’ elements in British Labour". Infamous journalist John Pilger was also amongst their critics who called them out for being a thinly veiled US intelligence network and was attacked in the press and the press rooms when he tried to warn fellow journalists that they may be being 'led by the nose from Washington or Langley' in dealing with them. In fact, there's multiple reports of members of BAP joking openly about where the money and influence really came from, including when new members asked how BAP events were so lavish by saying variations of 'It's all funded by the CIA of course'.

            So ingrained was the knowledge at the time of what BAP truly represented, that the BAP website to this day includes a PDF about their history which feels the need to have a long section trying to handwave and sneer the allegations away. It's called The False History & you can read it here. It dismisses the likes of Foot and Pilger with 'loony leftie' handwaving and states that no 'direct funding or direction from US intelligence has ever been proven'. The only other journalist they namecheck, in an effort to minimise the accusations, is Tom Easton who wrote an article for a small parapolitics magazine called Lobster back in '97 called The British American Project for the Successor Generation. The original is archived but behind a paywall on the Lobster site, but you can also read it here. Conveniently they don't mention similarly critical reporting from the US from the likes of the LA Times or the fact that respected British journalist & historian Frances Stonor Saunders - who literally wrote the book(s) on the changing nature of CIA cold war networks, including *Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War * - said about the BAP in comparison to earlier CIA cutouts that “All that's changed is that BAP are much more sophisticated.”

            They also ignore the fact that there have been multiple former Labour MPs and journalists who have talked about the true nature of the BAP and the fact that the CIA used it as a recruitment network for British Labour politicians.

            Most prominent is probably Emma Dent Coat, the first ever Labour MP for the rich London neighbourhood of Kensington, who they tried to recruit via BAP during her time in the heavily monitored and infiltrated CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament). Remember Janet Bloomfield on the list above?

            The following is from an excellent longer article on the BAP, which you can read over at Declassified:

            She told Declassified that a friend who was a senior official in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) tried to recruit her to the BAP in the 1980s. Coad later found out this person “worked with the CIA”. At the time, the US government had, according to an official memo leaked to the Washington Post, initiated a “propaganda exercise in Britain, aimed at neutralising the efforts of CND”. “In the late 80s, I was a journalist working in design and architecture and very busy at the time, travelling around a lot and writing for various magazines,” Coad told us. “At the time, a local friend who was senior in CND started talking to me about this project that she was involved in.” “She basically said that if I was able to go to Washington and give a talk about the work I was doing, I’d have a lovely dinner, it would all be paid for, and then I’d be part of this international group who were just trying to improve life,” Coad added. “Then I would be part of that group forever and I’d be invited to things periodically, and it would give me a really good profile.” Coad thought about it and discussed it with her then husband. “But I just felt there was something a bit smelly about it frankly,” she says. “It didn’t ring true, something so generous just for me being there, so I politely declined.” “Later I found out what the British-American Project was all about,” she adds. “Then I found out a couple of years later that this friend – who had by then moved out of the area and I’d lost contact with her – worked with the CIA, and I was absolutely appalled.” Coad says she was good friends with the husband of the alleged CIA operative, and that he told her she was working for the agency as soon as he found out. “There was something not quite right. I was just a jobbing journalist really, in a faintly glamorous environment, why would I be of interest to this international group?” But Coad can understand why she was a target. “I’ve always been a socialist, I always had those values from school,” she says. “I was political at college, at university, I had roles in the unions, I’d always been political. So clearly she knew that.” She adds: “I started writing a book on Spanish design architecture, so I was busy, and I think my stock was rising at the time. The recruiter was very prominent in CND, which I supported.” After Coad was told about the CIA connection “it began to drop into place,” she says. Coad then looked up the recruiter who had moved on from CND to a prominent PR firm. “I thought, ‘that’s interesting, a bit of a leap from what they were doing before’. I thought it was very strange that they would go from CND to working for a right-wing advertising agency, so it rang true, and I believed it.” Coad says she hasn’t given the BAP a moment’s thought for years. “But obviously it’s been working very hard behind the scenes, and of course they would have been very worried about Jeremy Corbyn.” In fact, it’s difficult to find anyone involved in Starmer’s rise to power and the in-Labour project to remove Corbyn and purge the party without a connection to the BAP. Chairs of anti-Corbyn groups, backers and funders of failed Corbyn leadership challengers, “anti-hate” groups that focus exclusively on anti-Israel sentiment, client journalists and so on.

            (continued further...)

            • A Poisoned Chalice?

              McSweeney continues to mobilise his spooky network of contacts both within the Labour right, the establishment press, and beyond. He’s succeeded in purging the left from Labour, although the pressuring out and deselection of anyone except the ultra-US/Israel idealogues rumbles on quietly in the background even this week. Starmer is Prime Minister, with McSweeney successfully pulling the strings.

              Except it’s all going a bit tits-up.

              Labour are less popular than the Tories were when they got kicked out in 2024 and reform is both more popular and projected to beat them in a national election.

              Trump has thrown an enormous wrench into the central project of the UK proving its worth to the US state apparatus by helping to escalate the war in Ukraine, with the Starmer project’s recent militaristic chest thumping going down like a lead balloon, even amongst the Reform voters it’s supposedly designed to target.

              Unsurprisingly, most people who have been living with 15 years of austerity don’t seem to like his plan to cut all government department & services budgets by 11% to fund more military action in Ukraine, or the proposal of a “Freedom Tax” on the public by crackpot Starmer loyalist, wannabe removed & now arms manufacturer lobbyist Paul Mason to fund weapons company scale-ups, or the talk from the right wing press (so basically all of it) about the need to bring in conscription to fight the Russians and put stop to all this ‘woke nonsense’.

              Legal Obstacles & This Week’s Example

              You could read the Starmer project’s absurd quadrupling down on this as pure disconnect and incompetence, against the prevailing winds of US administration intent and public sentiment. Or you can understand it as the actual purpose of McSweeney’s US/UK/Israel deep state backed project to defend and promote their interests at all costs.

              Take McSweeney’s newest Labour target for example: Lord Hermer. A longtime colleague and friend of Starmer from his ‘civil rights lawyer’ days & heading of CPS (Crown Prosecution Service), he was a donor and supporter of Starmer’s campaign. Starmer’s government then made him Attorney General and nominated him for a life peerage. For the first few months his new position seemed relatively quiet, but recently insider talk is that he’s made an enemy of McSweeney for… well, basically doing his job.

              McSweeny turned to his friends at The Times newspaper, amongst others, to run a series of escalating attack pieces on Lord Hermer (a tactic he’s used before to rid himself of Starmer colleagues he didn’t like) non-stop for the past three weeks, as well as working with Tories to resurface their mostly petty complaints from the past about Hermer being ‘associated with terrorists’ and more for representing IRA members and ruling on counter-terrorism in the past.

              “He is acting as a blocker on half the legislation emanating from departments across Whitehall, with the objects spanning everything from human rights concerns to lack of parliamentary oversight” one unidentified source said in The Times, amongst all the other controversies suddenly appearing (in fact there’s 2000 words covering maybe a dozen new controversies added to Lord Hermer’s wikipedia page just in the last two-three weeks alone).

              The message in all of these pieces pushed by McSweeney is clear: Starmer cannot afford to keep Hermer in place and needs to cut him loose immediately. McSweeney could have done it himself, except that his puppet Keir is too close with his old colleague and friend.

              To be clear, Lord Hermer is not a force for good, despite having occasionally ruled against massive state overreach on specific issues of human rights. He’s a Starmer and establishment insider that protects and upholds some of the state’s worst excesses, even in ruling against them on the basis that they’re not yet legally sound, and might eventually be struck down.

              But it’s that very instinct to be a stickler for making sure the government has its arse legally covered that seems to be the real reason why he’s drawn McSweeney’s ire. Specifically, in regards to Israel and Palestine. Hermer himself is Jewish and pro-Israel, but is a zionist of the ‘Israel is damaging itself by violently taking the West Bank’ variety. And most importantly, isn’t willing to completely throw out the law on the issue.

              Hermer reportedly first annoyed McSweeney with the early decision that the government was not going to actively pursue legal complaints (that had no basis) against the ICC for its investigation of Israel. And it’s on his insistence that everything from the British state’s ongoing support for Israel to its crackdowns at home are legally sound before committing to them that McSweeney can’t abide any longer.

              Project Before Party

              I’d argue that both McSweeney’s newest factional war against Lord Hermer, and the deeply unpopular quadrupling down on military adventurism in Ukraine funded by stripping the copper out of the walls of the UK, make perfect sense in the context of his project being one of deep state interests rather than party politics.

              The Starmer government is sinking, doomed to economic and popular failure. McSweeney’s turn at the wheel will only last as long as his project remains beneficial to its US/Israeli backers. So why not burn an unpopular government’s last shreds of mainstream support to advance the international project?

              Whether McSweeney thinks he can get his handlers to help bail out the sinking Labour government in the future with enough acts of sacrifice or just sees time running out to achieve the goals of his project isn’t clear. What is clear is that McSweeney’s (and Mandleson’s by extension) project is no more about Labour than it is about British politics.

              They only have one constituency:

              That's it, I'm done for now, I promise.

    • Europeans still think they can win without support from the USA.

      Their minds are truly, completely and utterly 100% broken. A thousand years of re-education couldn't fix this.

    • What the fuck is with boomers and using quotation marks for emphasis

    • Oh damn, maybe it’s finally z-over. On the other hand euros are big mad, so maybe not

      I just want ukranians to bury their nazi collaborators cults of personality, fucks sake, it’s now 50/50 on stabbed in the back (against USA might be somewhat funny) arriving or some other mutated east european ideology.

      (In that ukrainians haven’t made a choice to do anything, they haven’t couped him themselves, they haven’t surrendered themselves, they haven’t had opportunity to show any agency, and thus weird ideological minority might persist and mutate instead of being buried socially, russia can’t do propaganda for shit, and euros are gardeners themselves to see a nazi)

    • I am glad that comrade Trump has set the record straight, that the war was always Ukraine's doing

    • This is essentially a summary of Trump's speech last night. Zelenskyy is pretty much done for, he even had to suspend his game of broken telephone with Saudi Arabia until March 10.

    • Compare this to Bernie Sanders going off about Winston Churchill demanding we fight for democracy against the Trump-Putin autocracy

    • "It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." -

    • Don’t mind me, just casually watching the downfall of zelensky

      when we need fucking trump to state what’s written in the wall. I did love seeing eurobros get mad that they were left out of the talks

    • Which previous US proxy does the zelensky path have the most in common with so far? I'm thinking of the classic "our guys" that turned "bad", like Saddam, Osama, or noriega

560 comments