Bulletins and News Discussion from March 17th to March 23rd, 2025 - The Kafue River Dies - COTW: Zambia

I have said this before: no country is going to sacrifice 100s of millions of their own citizens to save 2 million Gazan Palestinians.

Hardly what is demanded of them by anyone. Doing to israel half of what they're doing to russia is the least

These geopolitical conflicts aren’t going to be resolved until there is an alternative economic order/vision that emerges, but since that is not coming anytime soon (the entire BRICS dedollarization project that people have been touting since 2022 is essentially dead), every country is now on their own.

My first feeling at reading this paragraph was despair and sadness. But those are just feelings. After that, I tried to think about this statement in the bigger picture.

I’m currently reading Ellen Meiksins Wood’s The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View. I bring that up because Wood will discuss events in one century and then move over one or two more centuries in the next paragraph. And it will highlight how these changes in the economic order move at a truly glacial pace, spanning centuries (and the transition from feudalism to capitalism, in the long arc of human civilization, moved quite rapidly).

I hope and truly believe, in my heart of hearts, that there will be a better future for humanity. If you don’t believe that then there’s no real point in being a communist. It will almost certainly be centuries away, if the past is any guide. There will likely be many millions more babies crushed under rubble and burned alive in the meantime. But that future is at least a possibility, and that’s what we have to fight for and hope in with all we have, even if everyone reading this (and their children’s children’s children) will all be dust by then.

Edit: Or, if you will indulge me in some Disco posting:

I have said this before: no country is going to sacrifice 100s of millions of their own citizens to save 2 million Gazan Palestinians. This is simply the harsh reality of the world.

The only country that has the weight to directly intervene is China, but as a major beneficiary of the dollar hegemony, the Chinese economy is far too intertwined with the US that it would be completely foolish to put the lives of 1.4 billion people in jeopardy for the sake of 2 million Palestinians.

To be absolutely clear though, does this sound like defending millions of Chinese farmers to you?

First, the Red Sea is an important transport corridor of goods and energy products. Since the end of last year, the Houthis have repeatedly attacked commercial ships in the Red Sea and nearby waters, disrupting the normal order of international trade and negatively affecting regional stability. China has on multiple occasions called on the Houthis to respect the right of navigation of merchant vessels in the Red Sea waters under international law, heed the call of the international community, and comply with relevant Security Council resolution by ceasing attacks on civilian vessels and ensuring the safety of the Red Sea shipping lanes.

They're cowards and collaborators, they're not being pragmatic defenders of their millions of workers. Even here a literal token gesture in a meaningless organization like the UN already dispels this narrative, they're not even willing to go that far. Its worse, far worse, they almost took an anti-Houthi stance, I almost think they'd have if not for the complex relations in the region, these cowards pride themselves as standing up for international law, with not a single hint of self-awareness given their own actions in the SCS against the Phillipines. Neoliberal International law for thee not for me should never be confused with defending your own people.

I absolutely agree with you on the rest of the world, overall nobody was expecting most of the third world to do anything, but the criticism was never towards these poorest countries, on the contrary, the criticism is towards the most powerful exactly because they're powerful they can do more without risking millions.

China doesn't have to do it alone either, this is quite literaly the point. Remember the left discourse about how Israel was a pariah and now they're finished etc etc? That was one such opportunity, during the court cases and the protests where these countries could have pushed a harder anti-Israel narrative. China could have taken a leadership role exactly like they tried to do with Ukraine.

Do you remember that whole silly China peace deal in 2022? Tell us why China could try and intervene in Ukraine, in the middle of two nuclear armed forces but for Israel they're busy patting themselves on the back telling the Houthis to eat shit?

China can't propose sanctions on Israel because 1.4 billion Chinese may die is just... very disappointing to keep hearing this shit.

Colombia banned coal exports and is shamefully more relevant than countries 10x their size and 500x their economy realy? I guess they had a collective death wish.

The only country that has the weight to directly intervene is China, but as a major beneficiary of the dollar hegemony, the Chinese economy is far too intertwined with the US that it would be completely foolish to put the lives of 1.4 billion people in jeopardy for the sake of 2 million Palestinians.

Perhaps but China should not be doing any sort of trade with Israel period. A so-called "socialist" country should not be aiding nor trading with a country doing genocide. No, this is not like the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, in that case the USSR shared a border with Germany and was buying time to move its entire manufacturing industry hundreds of miles from the front line. No such comparison exists in modern-day China.

We are not living in a world where the USSR exists anymore, and even the USSR had its restraints, though it would certainly have played a far more active role compared to what we have today.

I think one of the lessons the CPC internalized is that the CPSU is no longer around precisely because it played a more active role. By playing a more active role, it had to devote more of its resources to establishing military parity with the US.

Plus, the Soviet Union wasn't some magical panacea against genocide. You still had genocide in Bangladesh and Cambodia. You still had the complete liquidation of the CPI which led to a genocide of Chinese Indonesians. There was also the devastating civil war in the DRC after Lumumba's assassination.

It's foolish to believe that if the Soviet Union was still around, this genocide wouldn't happen. This counterfactual is easily disproven by the fact that the genocide against Palestinians happened anyways while the Soviet Union was still around. Did the Soviet Union even ship a single crate of weapons to the PFLP? And if we are keeping score, there was a certain general secretary of the CPSU who was initially supportive of the Zionist entity before retracting support. At the end of the day, the Soviet Union had a substantial Jewish population which meant that it was not going to be some fiery anti-Zionist player. This is also why the Russian Federation until very recently had a relatively warm relationship with the Zionist entity.

People essentially want a PRC that has a more assertive foreign policy like the SU but without the complicated baggage the actual SU had with the Zionist entity. "We want a PRC that tells the Zionists to eat shit like our fanfic version of the Soviet Union we made up in our heads would say." In other words, it's just cope.

Yemen is.