Image is from this article on the excellent Canadian environmental journalism outlet, The Narwhal.
The Giant Mine just outside of Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada is one of the country’s largest recognized environmental liabilities. The mine’s 100 plus year history illustrates the continuity between resource colonialism in the late 19th/early 20th century and neoliberalism at the turn of the millennium.
There were several gold rushes in northern Canada/US in the late 19th century, such as the Klondike. The Giant gold strike on was first discovered by settlers about the same time as the Klondike, but as Giant is on Great Slave Lake (named for an Anglicization of the name of local peoples, not after slavery) instead of the Pacific Ocean, it is much less accessible and didn’t take off like the Klondike. Parallel with displacement of local Yellowknives Dene people https://ykdene.com/, the town of Yellowknife sprung up around small mining operations through the 30s. It wasn’t until after WW2 that the mine was developed at a large scale. Starting operation in 1948, Giant was owned by a Canadian mining conglomerate through the 80s, then some Australians, and for the last ten years of its operating life, by Americans, who went bankrupt and abandoned the property in 1999. The Canadian federal government is responsible for the site and its remediation now, similar to the way the EPA has Superfund sites in the USA.
The project is infamous for poisoning the people and environment of the surrounding area through arsenic poisoning. The ore at giant is arsenopyrite, an arsenic sulphide mineral that often contains gold. Roasting it in large furnaces or kilns releases the gold as well as fine arsenic trioxide dust. The most infamous arsenic poisoning incident was in 1951 when a Yellowknives Dene toddler in died after eating contaminated snow in the fallout area, 2 kilometers from the processing mill’s smokestack. Over the years, improvements to the mill reduced the amount of toxic dust released to the environment. This is better than blasting it into the air wildly, but meant that the site accumulated hundreds of thousands of tonnes of arsenic trioxide dust that they chucked in empty mine workings underground. Unfortunately, arsenic trioxide dissolves in water as easily as sugar and so represents a tremendous risk to groundwater and waterbodies nearby, like Great Slave Lake and Yellowknife’s water supply.
Arsenic issues contributed to labour disputes as well. In 1991 the union workers of the plant went on strike, refusing management’s demand to reduce their salary and wanting better safety measures for workers . The company brought in Pinkertons and strikebreakers, backed by RCMP thugs. The situation escalated, culminating in a bomb planted on a train track deep in the mine. When it was triggered, it killed 6 scabs and 3 Pinkertons. For the next year, the RCMP interrogated mine workers, their family and community without determining who did it, supporting the company in their refusal to sign a new contract until an arrest was made. Finally a worker named Roger Warren confessed to doing it alone and was sentenced to life in prison. He was released in 2014 and died in 2017.
Since 1999, the site has been the responsibility of the Canadian federal government and is being every so gradually remediated. Operated through what are effectively private-public partnership contracts, environmental engineering companies are attempting to clean up and isolate the huge amounts of arsenic trioxide dust. The concept is move the dust into specially ventilated chambers of the underground mine, where it is frozen in place and thus prevented from leaching into groundwater. Active remediation is supposed to be finished in about 15 years at a cost of $1 billion CAD, but will surely take longer and cost more than this. Also, freezing material in place will definitely work because the climate isn’t changing, and the Canadian north is definitely not seeing extreme levels of temperature rise.
After active works are complete, the site will require perpetual care.
Please check out the HexAtlas!
The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week’s thread is here.
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.
I hope this won’t run afoul the containment of burgerland-election-related posts, but this is more an observation/analysis of the media and the bourgeoisie’s response to it in relation to foreign policy…
I have heard my whole life, and in the news mega, that burgerland-subjects don’t actually care about foreign policy and that it had no effect on the election. And although I think there were plenty of other considerations, I think the fallout from this particular election has really solidified in my mind that that meme is another product of the empire’s superstructure imparting its own ideological conformity onto the minds of its subjects. In almost every swing-state, over 30% of voters said they would have been more likely to vote for Harris if she had put an arms embargo on Israel (without a correspondingly high number of people saying it would make them less likely to vote for her). Harris also didn’t really run a primary, and objectively ran on platform very similar to Trump’s 2016 platform sans the performative talk about abortion. 16 million fewer people voted for Harris than Biden in 2020, which suggests a deep disaffection with the Democrats themselves. Other evidence is that the two politicians who were for an arms embargo against the apartheid state won handily in districts Harris loss. And Muslim voters voting in large percentages for Stein and Trump (I think this isn’t a shift to the right, but people playing the logic of the two-party system, punish Harris by not only withholding your vote but giving her “only” opponent a vote too.)
I really think we are witnessing in real time the invention of reality about the election, and how the media perpetuates this meme that burger-landers don’t care about the outside world. Pundits are saying the Harris ran a “flawless” campaign (she only ran for a few months), that she was defeated due to racism and misogyny alone, with the most sanctioned “outsider” opinions (Sanders) being that 22% inflation and no plan to help struggling people may have led to her defeat. (by “coming from” Sanders this serves a dual purpose of marginalizing the idea that the DNC ignored working-class issues and also allows the DNC to forcefully object to it without acknowledging the movement on the left which has been making a much stronger case for this, all along, than Sanders who is essentially part of the DNC and campaigned for Harris) So now we see articles talking about the “secret gen-z men who hate women and are MAGA” which I think is a real thing, but isn’t a particularly significant phenomenon, but plays into the ruling-classes desire to reproduce the ideological conflicts of previous generations in the young-- to make that particular thing more prevelant via the Baader-Meinhof illusion. – My point isn’t to dive deep into the election itself, but I think we can all see the willful ignorance that foreign policy played in spoiling Harris’ image, tying her to Biden’s unpopularity, and making a lot of people sit the election out (why vote if the outcome is the same either way?). I think this is a ruling-class meme that reinforces itself, because if there is no democratic choice on foreign policy, then people who play the voting game have no need to pay attention to or consider foreign policy. There is no social pressure to educate yourself or create a moral red-line about murdering people abroad because everyone in the media says nobody gives a shit about it and you are stupid if you give a shit about it too.
So even though the media will replicate this idea that burgerland-subjects, particularly young men, are actually becoming more right-wing, that they don’t care about Gaza or the outside world, I think what you are actually seeing is the aspirations of the ruling class in finding an analysis that will uphold the status quo and placate as many people as possible. They don’t want to acknowledge that there has been a mass movement for Palestinian liberation, and when leftists repeat that yankees don’t give a fuck about foreign policy I think it plays right into the hands of the ruling class.
I think you can also argue that Americans do care about foreign policy because it affects them. People know that the wars have a big party of the responsibility for inflation and the cost of living crisis and people can see that they can send trillions to the periphery to get blown up while the core is falling apart.
Death to America
I am a proponent of the “Americans don’t care about foreign policy” line. In this case, I don’t think foreign policy helped, but at least the one exit poll set of data I saw had 4% of people saying it was their top issue compared to 33% or something saying the economy and 15% or something saying immigration. The American electorate is insulated enough from the most direct outcomes of American foreign policy by way of geography that its just not as big a driver of how people live day to day as other things. Like lots of things, the actions of the imperial state are generally not popular with the electorate, but other topics trump it.
Also, people care about foreign policy for different reasons. Here on this anti-imperialist/marxist news forum, we care because we support global liberation movements as a way to improve the lives of people everywhere and disdain the moral depravity of imperialist policies. That to me is different than someone in the US thinking “damn we’re pissing away money on Israel, they should fight their own wars so we can have more health care/tax cuts/infrastructure”. In this framing, which I don’t think is uncommon, foreigners aren’t peers with the American voter, they’re just an obstacle to Americans getting what they want.
Finally, Americans are an insulated nation by way both of geography and material conditions. Most Americans don’t travel outside the country, their education system is myopic and bad, and since they make all the TV, they aren’t encountering culture from elsewhere on the globe.
All that said, you’re right that for the purposes of actual agitating in the imperial core, as anti-imperialists we can’t just indulge in a thought terminating cliche and then stop explaining. We must never stop explaining.
4% is small, but it still seems like plenty to effect an election, especially in swing states where foreign policy became a top issue, because the issue is straight up genocide.
How many non-voters were included in that exit poll?
Good point. Also, between the antigenocide movement on the left and the anti-Ukraine war, mostly from the right the center still insisting that we give billions of taxpayers dollars while their constituents treats are being squeezed through inflation and austerity is probably missing the equivalent of a political layup.
Great post. The average American is so replete in contradictory positions that it’s hard to nail down exactly how many more votes Harris would have gotten if she had done XYZ but seeing people (including Hasan, whose electoral coverage I watched over the night to keep me awake if anything else) point out that the issues that the media finds important are NOT the same as the ones that people find important was an eye-opener for me. Like with his example that Harris’ initial policy of punishing grocery store price-gouging was very popular and only became MORE popular despite the Republicans and right-leaning Democrats pumping out propaganda about how the mildest price caps so poor people can afford to eat would be 1984 communist Venezuela Soviet totalitarianism China dictatorship hyperinflation.
I’ve expressed over the years my “observation” (which probably unknowingly draws from some French philosophers that I haven’t gotten around to reading) that Western and especially American politics is this cultural miasma that is disconnected from the rest of the world and material reality, with Atlas carrying this abstracted-away propaganda reality on his shoulders, which explains why despite bettering of material conditions ought to poll well (and often does), a massive minority or perhaps even majority of Americans just cannot be persuaded to give a shit. It’s like the political version of how the stock market literally does not reflect anything anymore, every single oil refinery on the planet could implode in one hour and the oil markets would budge by like, 5%, and then correct themselves and go back to normal. Japan had a massive single-day crash semi-recently and then it just got back up if as nothing happened because it wasn’t connected to anything, it was just a psychological thing or some rich guys trying to make money or whatever happened there.
But now I’m beginning to think that actually, I’m the idiot and this political disconnection never truly existed and I was being propagandized and brainwashed by the media to think that Americans just don’t give a shit, when clearly, millions really do! Biden being this absolute dogshit candidate even back in 2020 getting the most votes ever while campaigning on “nothing will fundamentally change” broke my brain and I believed the media when they said that those two facts were connected, when it doesn’t actually seem to have been because Harris was even more “nothing will fundamentally change” and now the Republicans won the fucking popular vote! So I’m glad you’ve more eloquently expressed this nascent thought. I really ought to have connected the dots better because I go on and on about how Day’s hypothesis of brainwashing not being real but for some reason it was a huge blind spot for me. The spectacle of the voteball consumed my critical thinking; the owl of minerva flies at dusk.