Image is of Azerbaijan’s President, Aliyev (left) and Armenia’s President, Pashinyan (right) in a meeting a month or two after Azerbaijan took Nagorno-Karabakh.


  1. Never go to a second location.
  2. Always get the interior ministry post.
  3. Never get in a helicopter or any small aircraft.
  4. If someone with a gun enters your car, they’re gonna kill you.
  5. If someone tells you they’re not going to kill you, they’re calming you down to kill you later.
  6. Never give up your nukes.
  7. Never release the opposition’s political prisoners.
  8. Never let the opposition delay elections.
  9. If someone starts to get into German runes, drop them.
  10. Never trust a South American with a German name.
  11. Never move anywhere for a religion.
  12. Never go into the sewers unless you’re a sewer guy.
  13. If someone’s trying to get you to commit a crime, they’re FBI (sometimes CIA or military intelligence).
  14. Never become an FBI informant.
  15. If you do become an FBI informant, record everything.
  16. Never relinquish your arms.
  17. Always get it in writing.
  18. If you keep gambling, you’ll eventually win.
  19. Never talk to cops without a lawyer.
  20. Always pay your mercenaries.
  21. Don’t let anyone take your passport.

To add an addendum to rule 3, never put your President and Foreign Minister in the same helicopter or small aircraft. Especially if doing so in bad weather conditions. Especially if you’re already under threat from a hostile nuclear power in the region with a proclivity for terrorism (though this probably isn’t Israel’s doing, in this particular case).


Anyway, Azerbaijan. Not a great country, I think. Did some genocides. They’re a petrostate that is hosting Cop29, which I suppose is a way for the bourgeoisie to implicitly convey their contempt for the green movement. They got weapons from Israel, too.

Just for the record, there’s an Iranian province called East Azerbaijan, which is not the same as Azerbaijan.


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 Azerbaijan! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.

Please check out the HexAtlas!

The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week’s thread is here.

Israel-Palestine Conflict

If you have evidence of Israeli crimes and atrocities that you wish to preserve, there is a thread here in which to do so.

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.


    • MelianPretext [they/them]@hexbear.net
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      1 month ago

      Why should they? The resolution is a cynical pantomime act: a “genocide remembrance” proposal co-sponsored by two of the most vicious genocidal states of the 20th century. A Western-backed resolution urging the world to “commemorate genocide” at a moment when there’s an active genocide against Palestinians is the height of moral bankruptcy.

      The ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina are undoubtedly real and Yugoslav/Serbian actors are directly culpable, but the vicious swath of ethnic cleansing that followed the catastrophic disintegration of SFR Yugoslavia were committed from all sides. The tunnel visioning on the Yugoslav/Serbian atrocities against Bosnians (and Kosovans) is a deliberate narrative aimed at absolving NATO and its regional underlings of any fault and pinning the entirety of the blame in the historical “canon” on the remnants of the last socialist state in Europe.

      Kate Hudson’s work “Breaking the South Slav Dream: The Rise and Fall of Yugoslavia” quotes a LA Times article covering the 2002 Hague Tribunal which rather remarkably declared at the time that “Milosevic, as a scapegoat in a show trial with a predestined outcome, would be a perfect medium to exorcise the guilt of those who are trying to obliterate their complicity in provoking the Balkan Wars.” So it is as well with the Yugoslav/Serbian atrocities whose single-mindedly focus by Western Human Rights scholars and “Genocide Studies” academics for the past decades is meant to whitewash the crimes of all others involved.

      The infamous Srebrenica episode itself exemplifies the typical atrocity narrative structure that Western scholars and journalists employ where they blow up a single isolated incident on the big screen and toss out the rest of the film strip with the background context and prelude, the usual “Last Thursdayism” gimmick where history only began, Book of Genesis-style, at the moment the designated adversary committed the act in question. As Hudson writes:

      Serbian atrocities in Srebrenica in 1995 – including the alleged massacre of over 7,000 Muslim men and boys – were widely publicized, although it is notable that by the end of the 1990s only a tiny fraction of the anticipated number of bodies had been found. The fact that Serbs had previously been brutally driven out of Srebrenica by the Muslim leader Oric, and had suffered atrocities at Muslim hands – such as the massacre of 500 Serb civilians on the Orthodox Christmas Eve in 1993 – were not widely reported.

      Most states don’t care enough to challenge this Western narrative, which is why a resolution like this will likely pass, but for those countries which understand the cynical rationale behind this blame-shifting whitewash, where victims and perpetrators are selectively remembered, there’s absolutely no reason to play along. If everything in its entirety regarding the collapse of Yugoslavia was commemorated, Clinton, Kohl, Albright and all the Western war criminals would be pinned alongside Milosevic. Their aim is to prevent that so this selective remembrance narrative is the end result.

      Meanwhile, the West will happily talk endlessly about Bosnia’s past while at the very present, the country is still non-sovereign and governed by a NATO appointed colonial viceroy, the “High Representative,” who can toss out election results and depose Bosnian elected officials at will.

    • What_Religion_R_They [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      The two Russian-language sources emphasize that Vucic thinks this UNGA resolution will be used to “annul” the status of Republika Srpska (whatever that means, I haven’t listened to his radio-interview), and to pursue damages from Serbia for the genocide as punishment for “Serbia’s independent polity”. This is obviously one slant, but maybe he thinks China will vote no on some realpolitik basis.