Bulletins and News Discussion from November 20th to November 26th, 2023 - Let Sleeping Dogs Milei - COTW: Argentina
Image: the last sight of many a commie.
Please pronounce his name wrong to make the title pun work better.
Anyway - Javier Milei, a caricature of a libertarian invented deep in the Hexbear Bit Factory, has won the Argentinian general election; and with a 12 point lead over Massa, it wasn't even particularly close. There are several analogies for this situation - Trump beating Hillary, Bolsonaro winning in 2018, or the alternate universe where Le Pen beat Macron. Massa is not a great guy. The last couple years have been difficult for Argentina, facing massive inflation and the same general economic downturns that are happening everywhere.
Milei is an... interesting person. To name just a couple things going on in his deeply bizarre life, he has a very special relationship with his sister, and an even more special relationship with his mastiff, Conan. When Conan died in 2017, he was so utterly distraught that he had him cloned into four new dogs, named Murray, Milton, Robert, and Lucas, for his economist idols. And he uses mediums to speak to his dead dog. This is probably the closest we're ever going to get to having a dog be president of a country.
Milei wants to essentially collapse the economy even harder. Playing off the general public sentiment of "dollar = good, peso = bad", he has vowed to make the national currency of Argentina the US dollar, thus eagerly giving a massive amount of control over the Argentinian economy directly to America. He wants to take a chainsaw to the status quo, cut off trade with communist countries like China, and demolish the Central Bank. Will Argentinian capitalists and the Senate let him do this? Probably not. What happens with their membership in BRICS+? Who knows. Where does Peronism go from here? Who can say.
But he still won, and will now be president. I suppose that every dog has its day.
Friendly reminder: when commenting about a news event, especially something that just happened, please provide a source of some kind. While ideally this would be on nitter or archived, any source is preferable to none at all given.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
The Country of the Week is Argentina! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
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.
Telegram Channels
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
Pro-Russian
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/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/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.
I'm unsure if this goes as far as soft Holocaust denial (somebody who is Jewish would have to give that verdict) but it gives me bad vibes either way, similar to double genocide theory.
I really dont think that you need to have someone who is Jewish make that verdict, its simply and obviously soft holocaust denial, if not even broader than that, but I dont know that we have a good term for "soft nazi denial."
Holocaust denial is a spectrum. On its most extreme end is the argument that it never happened. If we limited Holocaust denial to this category, it would be quite rare. Very few people seriously take this position. What is far more common is to muddy the waters. To argue on the margins. To revise history. To misattribute circumstances and events. To stretch the scale in one way or another. To shift responsibility this way or that way. This is the kind of Holocaust denial which happens every single goddamn day.
There are published Jewish authors who claim the Double Genocide theory is Holocaust denial (example). It makes sense. To compare one of the most meticulously documented atrocities in world history to a yellow journalism anticommunist smear campaign is an insult. It takes a piss on our collective understanding about the gravity of what took place, as well as the causes. To call Hamas worse than the Nazis is no different.
So, just as an FYI, Bibi is a holocaust revisionist. He claims the Palestinian Grand Mufti (I believe kind of like a religious leader but with greater power, not sure what the equivalent is, maybe a Bishop, but not really sure?) is the one who told Hitler to hurt and gas the Jews.
This Israeli professor of Holocaust and genocide studies certainly seems to have an extremely poor opinion of this kind of language, although he does the usual equivocation of calling it a "horrendous mass murder", a "war crime", and a "crime against humanity": https://nitter.net/OwenJones84/status/1726948242531782961?s=20
Starting at timestamp 6:39:
We also have Israeli state leaders and senior army officers and politicians describing Palestinians in Gaza as Nazis, and basically placing the Hamas attack on 7 October in the frame of the Holocaust. U.S. President Biden did this as well, and actually senior politicians in Europe have also done this in reinforcing this demonizing and dehumanizing language of portraying Palestinians as Nazis. It's important to say the Hamas attack on 7 October was an act of horrendous mass murder. It's without a doubt a case of war crime, and there are also crimes against humanity when you think about acts of torture, hostage taking which is actually an ongoing crime. But it's not a crime related to the Holocaust in any way.
And it's important to stress this. This idea of blurring completely different contexts. Of powerless Jews during World War II, facing one of the most powerful states and armies, Nazi Germany, and its allies. And here we have a very powerful state, Israel, with a powerful army, a nuclear power, backed by all the Western countries, and we have Palestinians who are for decades under Israeli settler-colonial rule, Israeli military occupation, siege, decades of documented crimes against them. Very, very different context.
None of this takes away from the horrific nature of the Hamas attack on 7 October, but the portrayal of the Hamas, and then by extension Palestinians—and in some cases just explicit, "all Palestinians are Nazis"—and again this is something that is reproduced by politicians in the U.S. and the European Union, that's a dehumanizing element. That also, then, of course, if you're fighting Nazis—as former Israel Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said in his tantrum on Sky News on 12 October, we're fighting Nazis—then no law applies. Everything is permissible. And, of course, the legitimate aim of destroying everyone and everything in Gaza becomes clear. That is, indeed, genocidal.
So, basically, he recognizes it as an integral tactic of Israel's own genocide.