this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2025
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Bulletins and News Discussion from April 28th to May 4th, 2025 - Competent Fascism? - COTW: El Salvador
(hexbear.net)
Image is from the Britannica article on CECOT, known as the Terrorism Confinement Center in English.
This megathread's topic is inspired by our lovely news regular, @Frogmanfromlake@hexbear.net, who talks often about the conditions inside El Salvador and gives nuanced and informative takes.
As the Trump administration continues to make foreign policy blunders that would make even the staunchest anti-imperialist accelerationist blush - and we are barely three months in! - it's interesting to compare and contrast his policies of incompetent imperialist and domestic management to the dictators in other countries.
Bukele is somewhat unique among fascists, in that he seems to not hide - and seems to even admit to - his evil, self-describing as the world's "coolest dictator". El Salvador has no particular shortage of prominent fascists in their history, but one major example is Maximiliano Martínez, who led the country over much of the 1930s and the early 1940s. He was responsible the deaths of many thousands of communists and indigneous people, and yet joined World War 2 on the side of the Allies and against the Nazis.
The comparisons between Martínez and Bukele - and, indeed, between Bukele and Trump - in terms of their impact on minority groups are slowly growing as world attention is being drawn to the country. The recent meeting between Bukele and Trump has shifted a spotlight onto El Salvador's crime policy; the internal conditions of El Salvador's prisons are genuinely monstrous. One gets a similar feeling as when reading descriptions of the conditions of Holocaust victims in German concentration camps. Trump has made statements to the effect that he want a similar crime crackdown inside the United States, and I certainly believe that he wants this (ICE is already just kidnapping people off the streets into vans), but his administration has been so chaotic and mismanaged that it's difficult to determine whether this will be an interest he rapidly drops in favor of some other hair-brained scheme.
Last week's thread is here. The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
Please check out the RedAtlas!
The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
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 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.
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.
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.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
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.
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Is there anything definitive about the Bucha massacre?
Obviously I am very sceptical about atrocity propaganda from the West, but it's not like Russian soldiers are above killing civilians... (still, the war in Ukraine seems like a different kind of war than Gaza which is purely oppressive ethnic cleansing)
I remember couple months after the news came out Seth Harp said that all the Western journalists reporting on the Bucha massacre got a curated picture of it (as in it was not some kind of investigative journalism that uncovered it, but the Ukrainian National News Agency put them on the bus like a group of tourists and led them to the [purported] scene of the massacre and Azov corralled them around the village.)
The Botsman video here on telegram.
https://t.me/rwapodcast/69
random YT link
https://youtu.be/24m1U8sbKA4
They approached Bucha, the same major street with the wrecks etc and clearly say
"There are guys without blue armbands, can I shoot them?"
"Fuck yeah"
Nice. Thanks.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
It is not unlikely that some Russian soldiers did something they were not supposed to be doing. These things happens during wars. But I skal find it extremely likely that the Ukrainians were inflating the atrocities.
More knowledgeable people than me have pointed out some very suspect circumstances shown in the reporting on the alleged massacre. This includes the bodies were showing signs of having been moved and the Ukrainian mayor of Bucha made several public statements without mentioning any atrocities until one or two days after returning.
My best guess is that the Ukrainians wanted some atrocity propaganda to drum up support. When Russia left Bucha the Ukrainians moved in, dumped some bodies - maybe they came from war crimes done by Russian troops, maybe the Ukrainians used "collaborators" shot during the reentry, maybe it was just random civilians who got caught in the crossfire - and called in gullible western journalists to show them exactly the kind of story they would love to report.
There is proof of RAF killing at least one civilian. It is drone footage of Russian APC shooting at a man peeking from behind a fence.
But the best theory I've seen is that most of these people were killed by a Ukrainian mortar strike. And the fact that Ukraine hasn't provided drone footage of RAF killing other civilians suggests that it was indeed done by Ukraine (because there is no way they didn't have drones filming that place 24/7)
This report from PBS is what I've seen linked, and this one from Radio Free Europe (
)
In the PBS one they say that Russians gave medical treatment to "civilians who didn't pose a threat". But why would military age civilian men pose a threat to the Russian Army? Maybe because:
Not that you can excuse war crimes, but in the past couple of weeks Bucha is in the news cycle again and shitlibs are literally saying that "denying the Bucha massacre is the same as denying the Holocaust", which pretty weird considering literal Banderists are fighting for Ukraine, and Bandera is being rehabilitated...
What's also weird is if the Bucha massacre is the modus operandi of the Russian Army then there should be dozens of Buchas, while most civilian deaths in the war are from artillery and bombing
I found YouTube links in your comment. Here are links to the same videos on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Link 1:
Link 2:
feel like you could murder some people out of view of a few drones, they're not omnipresent and can't see inside buildings
Yeah, but we are talking about dead people laying outside. There hasn't been any footage of them being killed besides that one drone video that I mentioned
if Ukraine did it why would they leave it in situ before showing it to journalists? the position of bodies, unless the first people there were impartial forensics does not seem very compelling when bodies are quite trivial to relocate
I don't have a link to direct proof, maybe there will never be any the way these things get lost in the fog of war, but I'll copy in a comment from a couple of years ago
spoiler
Bucha was definitely perpetrated by the Ukrainians, specifically the neonazi paramilitary battalions "Tornado" and "Safari" - seriously, "Safari battalion"Many of the bodies in the streets were clearly from Ukrainian mortar impacts, as on satellite photos they appear at the same time as mortar craters while the Russians were still holding the town (the media's only explanation for this is that Russia shelled their own positions because their asiatic brainpan makes them self-destructively evil). The photos of people who were executed show them with white armbands, which the Russians used to mark friendlies, and even with Russian ration packs. Why would the Russian armed forces, at the very edge of a perilously extended advance with incredibly stretched supply lines, give away rations probably worth their weight in gold to people they were then going to kill, and then leave behind the rations? Conversely, to Ukrainian fascists, receiving aid from the enemy obviously makes you a traitor - a position made law by the Kiev regime just a few months later - and for a fascist that means summary execution. There was even a short video from the time, where one soldier clearly asks "can I shoot the ones without blue armbands?" (Ukraine uses blue for friendlies) and someone else just says "yes".
I expect the same killings by the Ukrainians took place in every town the Russians vacated, but it was definitely a concerted intelligence and media effort to specifically pick out the one town whose name in English looks and sounds like the word "Butcher" (this particularly stinks of MI6). The UK even refused Russia's request for a UN security council meeting about it.
Add in the UAF's behavior in Kursk and it's pretty clear which side is the one purposefully killing civilians.
commenting to have link good writeup
I mean, just about right after it happened there was a video posted by the "Botsman Boys" about how they were shooting anyone on the streets who didn't show proper nationalist fervor. Both of these videos have, of course, been since removed by YouTube. But I'll post the links and the bookmark titles I had for them from pre-removal, just in case someone can find some kind of archive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Dt0plkSsf4)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iM9nMvIyT5c)