Image is of the Herðubreið tuya in northeast Iceland, formed when ice sheets covered Iceland thousands of years ago. It’s not really relevant to the Grindavik situation but I think they look neat. The title also doesn’t make much sense but I saw the pun and took it.
Off in Iceland, different kinds of tunnels are causing problems. Underneath the town of Grindavik in southwestern Iceland, not far from the capital of Reykjavik, tens of thousands of earthquakes are portending the movement of magma in tunnels underneath the peninsula, which could breach the surface and cause an eruption. The 4000 residents of the town have been evacuated as the magma has risen to less than a kilometer below the surface.TRG
Icelandic volcanism is pretty fascinating, with the country sitting on the mid-Atlantic ridge, the birthing line of new oceanic crustal rock running right down the Atlantic ocean for many thousands of kilometers, as well as a hotspot, an upwelling of mantle material of debated origin which also feeds otherwise-inexplicable volcanism in the middle of tectonic plates, like Yellowstone and Hawaii.
An additional factor here is the presence of glaciers. When a volcano erupts underneath a glacier, the melting water cools the lava rapidly, causing features usually seen in volcanoes that erupt under the sea like pillow basalts, but also unique features like tuyas, which are steep-sided but flat-topped volcanoes. The rapid melting of water can also cause glacial floods called jökulhlaups.
Icelandic volcanoes have had significant regional and even global impacts in the past. In 2010, the volcano Eyjafjallajökull, which was a volcano covered by an ice cap, erupted and the ash cloud spread across Europe, causing airline disruption for about a month which caused nearly $2 billion in total losses for airline companies - though this seems pretty quaint compared to the pandemic’s impact on airlines in retrospect. Back in the 1780s, the Laki volcano killed a quarter of the Icelandic population due to sulphur dioxide causing massive crop failure and cattle death. This eruption’s impacts spread to Europe and beyond, causing notable worldwide temperature drops and thus crop failures and may well have been a contributing factor to the outbreak of the French Revolution, which obviously heralded the death of the feudal order and the eventual primacy of capitalism in its place. That being said, any eruption at Grindavik is very probably not going to have any significant worldwide impacts - there are over a hundred volcanoes already in Iceland, and regular climate change is doing a great job at causing mayhem right now anyway. It’s also still possible that there won’t be an eruption at all, at least not in the short to medium term.
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.
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.
The Country of the Week is Iceland! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
This week’s update is here!
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
Links and Stuff
The bulletins site is down.
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can.
Resources For Understanding The War
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/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
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.
Last week’s discussion post.
Interesting article
"January 27th was also the annual “International Holocaust Remembrance Day”, falling on the day of the Soviet Union’s liberation of the prisoners in the Nazi German slavery and extermination camp Auschwitz. The day is commemorated by a slew of imperialist organizations, from the US-regime controlled United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and NATO to the normalizing Arab regimes. Astonishingly, none of the official observance statements pay tribute to the Soviet Union or its Red Army, who actually liberated the Nazi camps and played the primary role in smashing the German settler project of turning Eastern Europe into a “new West Indies”. Nor do they acknowledge the 27 million soviets who paid their lives in that struggle. Rather, the commemoration, which was only created 60 years after, only references that six million Jews were killed. In 2023, Russia was specifically dis-invited from the commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz—liberation without the liberators; history rewritten.
This is a manipulation of history to separate Nazi Germany from European colonialism and its centuries of extermination campaigns. The narrative of six million “sacred victims” exists ultimately to justify the imperialist’s endless wars of aggression, now marketed under the catchphrase of “stopping genocide”. The Zionist entity is but one front of this.
The same year that the US-led UN created “International Holocaust Remembrance Day” the UN also formalized the policy of “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P). R2P is the idea that the UN and the imperialist powers of the West have a “responsibility” to wage war in the case of genocide. Genocide of course is defined by them, and its application is always carefully contrived to serve their strategies. This “human rights” justification has been the basis for many crimes against humanity including the destruction of Libya.
R2P, the definition and weaponization of genocide, the Holocaust, and antisemitism are all deeply connected in liberal humanism. The official EU and liberal humanist position—codified in the “Prague declaration”–promotes the myth of “double genocide” that equates Nazism with Communism. It is a revisionism in defense of “the good Nazis” who fought against communism to create a Zionism for Ukraine. This lineage explains the Western defense of Ukrainian Nationalists who follow Nazi-collaborator Stepan Bandera whose OUN-B organization killed hundreds of thousands of Poles and Soviets and specifically targeted Jews. In 2022, both the United States and ‘israel’ hosted delegations from the Nazi Azov regiment, who are known to use ‘Israeli’ weapons.
This is not new. The Zionists also engaged in many economic, security, and migration agreements with Nazi Germany such as the 1933 Haavara (Transfer) Agreement between the “Father of Zionism” Ben-Gurion & Adolf Hitler.
We can conclude that “combating antisemitism” is a meaningless concept today. Its contemporary articulation has been shaped solely for the purposes of imperialist domination.
It’s time to stop saying “Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism”. This empty statement is repeated time and time again in the circles of Zionist ‘anti-Zionists’. The implication is that “anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, but yes, armed struggle against Jewish occupiers is reprehensible”. This narrative is an attempt to make the Palestinian liberation movement another toothless ‘anti-racist’ cause for Western liberal sponsors.
Palestinian Liberation will require the elimination of many Jewish occupiers in Palestine—that is an indisputable fact. Who cares if that fact is considered ‘antisemitic’ by imperialists?"
Not me, but I care if it’s considered that in the eyes of current or potential comrades of Jewish faith and/or heritage.
One may suggest that if they aren’t already anti-zionist in advance, that they aren’t current or potential comrades though. Idk
This is not what I mean when I say this. I mean that anti-zionism is against the settler occupation by israeli (yes lots of jewish) settlers rather than the general jewish population. I’ll also bring up how zionism is antisemitic itself. I’m not going to do away with it because liberals have co-opted revolutionary language. That is par for the course at this point.
I don’t disagree with most of the article (nor am I sure of how you want us to read this) but I don’t want to have to deal with even more western unprincipled leftists saying that jews deserved the holocaust because of Israel. If only because it comes off as fucking unhinged in most of the west and people won’t listen to them.
If this is meant to dismiss the accusations of Palestinian violence as antisemitic merely because it is directed at a jewish population and that people should push back harder against accusations in general, then there is probably a better way to word this. Liberals in the west also wield lgbt+ rights as an imperial cudgel should we also conclude that combating that homophobia is meaningless?