Chad, a country in north-central Africa, borders a lot of active geopolitical areas - Niger to the West, Libya to the North, Sudan to the East - but is scarcely discussed itself. I’m not really knowledgable enough to give anything like a decent history, but the recent gist is that the country was ruled for three decades by Idriss Déby until he was killed in battle in 2021 while fighting northern rebels. Idriss was part of a few wars - such as the one against Gaddafi in Libya, and also the Second Congo War. While he was initially elected democratically in 1996 and 2001, he then eliminated term limits and just kept on going.
After his death, Chad has been ruled by his son, Mahamat Idriss Déby. In early May 2024, elections began which were meant to result in the transition from a military-ruled goverment to a civilian-ruled one. Needless to say, Mahamat won the election - with 61% of the vote. Both father and son have been on the side of the French and the US, whereas the opposition is against foreign colonizers and has attempted to put pressure on the government in numerous ways to achieve a more substantial independence. France maintains a troop presence in Chad, and it’s something of a stronghold for them - when French troops were forced out of Niger, they retreated to Chad. However, it’s not clear even to the people inside Chad what precisely the French are doing there. I mean, we know what their presence is really for - imperialism and election rigging - but in an official sense, they don’t seem to be doing much to help the country materially. What is clear is that they like to intervene on behalf of the ruling regime and against rebels a whole lot - the most interventions by France in any African country, in fact.
The United States, so keen on human rights and democracy in so many places around the world like Russia, Iran, and China, have - for some strange reason! - decided for the last 30 years that they can live with a couple dictators and wars in the case of Chad. In fact, various American state propaganda firms like the ISW and Washington Post have warned the current government about the Wagner Group interfering with the country and spreading anti-Western sentiments as in the rest of the Sahel.
Things are very tough for Chad. They are among the poorest countries in Africa and host about one million people fleeing from nearby conflicts, which is a pretty large number when Chad has a population of about 17 million.
With the French Empire fading, they are beginning to run out of places to retreat to in Africa. Macron, in January, said that his defense council had decided to reduce troop presence in Gabon, Senegal, and the Côte d’Ivoire, though has maintained troop levels in Chad and Djibouti. Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet from France, anti-empire sentiments are boiling to the surface in New Caledonia/Kanaky, which is unfortunate for the French military as they really need that island, both for the massive nickel reserves, but also as an unsinkable aircraft carrier in the Pacific just in case a conflict with China pops off.
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 Chad! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
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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.
The funniest part about American tariffs is that they’re actually strengthening Chinese relationships with… Everyone in the world.
What are the tariffs actually achieving? They’re NOT achieving replacement industries. New suppliers aren’t appearing to produce and supply the products that are getting tariff’d away.
What is actually happening is that the products made by China are being sold to Vietnam and then those products are being sold to the US. Or they’re being sold to I dunno, south american countries and so on.
This is strengthening Chinese relations with these countries, which are in turn becoming more reliant on China.
The US is cooked. The only way you’re replacing these supply chains is with some sort of command economy. Even something Keynesian isn’t really going to pull it off. Markets just won’t do what you want them to do in this situation they’re always going to just create more hoops to jump through for Chinese goods instead of creating an entirely new producer.
Obviously the problem with this is that you need to move away from neoliberalism to do this. But they’re ideologically committed to it.
we’re showing China why we don’t have healthcare
—Hillary Clinton
How does this analysis interact with Kaplya/Droplet’s stance that nothing changes until the dollar is removed?
Yeah, I get that many here want to see the collapse of the US empire (which is not going to happen, more likely it will be a slow burn like the fall of the Roman Empire), but we have to be realistic about it.
Came across this Twitter thread (Nitter) from a lib economist who just gave a talk at the Tsinghua/Bretton Woods conference last week in Hangzhou. The conclusions are neoclassical as always, but the data track:
EMDE = emerging market and developing economies
Biden’s interest rate hikes, the fastest since Volcker Shock in 1980, is devastating the developing world. Dollar liquidity is down and more and more countries are on the verge of default. Make no mistake, this is a full blown financial warfare being waged against the rest of the world:
This is why I said Biden was playing with fire. It was a double-edged sword for the US to hike the interest rates in 2022. It was a self-preservation strategy in dealing with the acute inflation that came from the blowbacks of sanctioning Russia (exacerbated by the Covid supply chain issues that immediately preceded it).
It was a huge gamble, to say the least: by driving the developing world into a dollar liquidity crisis, it might just tilt the balance over to countries defaulting en masse and leaving the dollar system altogether. In fact, there was a good chance it could have happened back in the fall of 2022 (at least, I was hoping for it). BRICS even talked about dedollarization during their summit that year. All eyes were on China and Russia and BRICS then.
But then, it turns out that nobody (especially China) really wanted to challenge the dollar. Without an alternative, all these developing countries simply have no choice but to keep relying on the dollar to survive. If you can’t pay back your dollar debt, you get cut off from global financial institutions and trade markets controlled by the US, and your public utilities get privatized and sold off to foreign capitalists. If you don’t accumulate dollars, you can’t import food and fuel which intensifies domestic unrest.
So, at the end of the day, the US gets what it wants (which includes perpetuating genocide across the world) simply because there is no alternative to the economic and financial system that remains firmly dominated by the empire itself. This is why after draining the world of dollars, the Biden administration is starting to introduce capital outflows to the foreign sector again (among others, they just printed $100 billion for Ukraine and Israel and Taiwan). This will ensure that the developing countries will have some dollars to earn and they will compete with one another to sell their goods and services to the US. The US economy itself has been doing really well - the bourgeoisie are now swimming in record profits, at the expense of the working class taking the brunt of the inflation and suffering from declining wages.
But there is a further looming threat. The US is rebuilding the supply chain, but not within the US itself, and not by the US itself. In fact, China is going to help the US rebuild its supply chain by investing in the Belt and Road countries, of which the majority of its infrastructure loans were denominated in US dollars.
The reason China did this was because they realized that US treasury bonds are simply junk papers, so they sold the bonds, and spent the dollars as loans to the BRI. As a result, this simply kicks the can down the road - now the BRI countries have to find dollars to repay their Chinese creditors, and how do they do that? By selling their goods and services (built with the help of China) to the US!
As such, only a serious attempt at de-dollarization can end US imperialism. Michael Hudson has said that the biggest clash of the decade (century?) is going to be between industrial capitalism vs finance capitalism. We simply don’t know who will win out in the end. And so far, it looks like finance capitalism has the upper hand.
The US isn’t going to survive climate change based on how it has completely dropped the ball with Covid. And by the US, I’m not only taking about the government, federal, state, county, and so on, but also US society as well. The federal government had a quarter-ass lockdown while packs of red MAGA thought you could cure Covid by injecting yourself with horse vaccines. In a world where the entire global population has to become vegan at bare minimum in order to not get completely fucked by climate change, can you imagine selfish pampered Burgerlanders even doing 0.01% of what needs to be done?
Mother Nature does not give two shits about the US dollar, and no amount of financial trickery and sleigh of hand will stop nature. Now if your point is that anti-imperialist forces aren’t going to be sufficiently strong enough to counter the US before the US goes under due to climate change and takes the rest of the world with them (ie the common ruin of the contending classes), then that’s different. But the US empire isn’t inevitable. It probably isn’t going to last a century even under ideal conditions (it will not withstand the stress of climate change plus the inherent contradictions of a settler colonial state.)
The point is that the empire has the capacity to export a lot of the suffering (from climate change, etc.) to the rest of the world before it has to finally bear the suffering itself. This is what it can and what it will do. No question about it. In fact, the data from my comment above showed exactly that - the developing world is now suffering for America’s inflation.
The rest of the world has to escape from this torturous prison (the Vampire Castle) before it is too late, or else everyone will have to be forced to suffer for the empire. America will be the last one to go down if we keep the system intact.
Genuine questions, I’m still a baby Marxist.
… which flood american markets with cheap, quality products and drowns America’s own productive capacity, right? Isn’t that precisely how america lost its means of production? American capital is even trying to prevent this on the electric vehicle sphere.
I understand that production and consumption are moments of a whole, so the dependence goes both ways - you can’t keep producing unless someone is buying. I also understand that all this is somewhat secondary to the problem underlying the whole thing:
Do the major food/fuel-producing countries have dominance over their own production and commerce? Where do their dollars go next?