Bulletins and News Discussion for May 26th to June 1st, 2025 - Sanctions Continue To Fail, More At 11
Image is of a solar park in Cuba, donated last year by China, sourced from this article.
To be honest, I don't have much to say about ongoing geopolitical events that hasn't already been said in previous threads (e.g. with India/Pakistan, Trump/Putin, and of course occupied Palestine), so this is more of a "news roundup" preamble for this week.
As we all know, the US (and the imperial core generally) has only three permitted international actions: sanctions, color revolution, and war. None of these have been going well lately, but sanctions are in particularly dire straits right now. Three examples from the last week or so:
The EU is on its 17th sanctions package, apparently, which is surprising, as I thought they were on their 76th or something. It apparently targets Russia's shadow fleet of oil tankers, but I don't think anybody actually gives a shit because we all know it won't achieve anything, so, moving on...
The head of Nvidia (as well as many others) have come out and said that the US chip export controls on China have failed, remarking that China's internal motivations to develop alternatives are strong and proceeding rapidly, especially as China's number of skilled scientists is only growing. Nvidia has said that they had a 95% share of China's AI chip market in 2020 or so, but now they only have 50%.
Lastly, an interesting one: Iran has received its first set of railway shipment of solar panels from China, and there is hope for accelerating shipments of even more products. Myself and many others have predicted a decoupling of Iran from the West and towards China and Russia (especially if any Western-built product could have Israeli devices implanted into them, such as with the pager terrorist attack on Lebanon's doctors), and having a strong link with China will be a necessary step for Iran and their allies to continue their offensives against Israel.
Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance has called Israel’s actions in Gaza a “genocide” - the first German party to do so
The Good Germans??
Nah sadly not, her party is more Nazbol/Patsoc. While commendable that finally a party with some relevancy calls it a genocide, their other positions are kinda dogshit. They split from the (socdem) Die Linke, because they were socially too 'woke'. Wagenkencht's party is against LGBTQ rights, because they are not relevant to working people. They are close to the bad parts of Russia, though this led to a more nuanced approach to the current conflict. They are also iffy on climate change because acting on it costs jobs/reduces industrial capacity
Critical support I guess?
she's finally knechting the dots
BSW is co-chaired by an arab woman. And Sahra Wagenknecht (and her fraction in general) were misliked by mainstream for being "anti-semitic"/pro-russia for a while now. This isnt a new position.
Yeah, BSW is definitely the best German party on both economics and foreign policy that can win seats at the regional level at least. However, it is my understanding that they are more conservative on a few issues (such as LGBT). However, on the whole, they are still very left-wing by US standards. Culturally, they are also very different from say, a US Republican, because BSW is primarily based in former east Germany, which is one of the most secular parts of Europe.
This is why I'm not all that excited that Die Linke is doing well right now, it seems to be off the basis of "normalizing" somewhat, BSW are the only semi-relevant german party taking anti-imperialist positions and I think because of how the seat distribution works the fact that they didn't make it into parliament I think was the reason the CDU could form a majority with just the SPD, instead of needing to bring in the Greens, which is a real shame because letting the Greens also hold ball of what's likely to be an unpopular government (especially with their electorate) down the line is a real shame