Also known as “Foucault’s boomerang” or the “imperial boomerang”.
Image is of a sniper on the roof of the Indiana Memorial Union at Indiana State University, overlooking a student protest.
The Imperial Boomerang is the observation that the tactics of mass oppression and totalitarianism used by Western countries in their colonies and neocolonies will, sooner or later, return home to be used against the citizens of those Western countries. While the people living at the time of WW2 were, rightfully, in deep shock of the concentration camps used by Nazi Germany, those paying attention to what was occurring in Africa would not have been terribly surprised. Concentration camps were used in several countries in order to separate out ethnic groups and place them in more easily controlled environments which aimed to prevent them from rising up and fighting back against the Western governments which exploited them. There is the additional factor of governments taking notes from each other - Hitler was inspired by America’s racial segregation and genocide of indigenous groups, which author Carroll Kakel among others have written books on.
Today, the totalitarian strategies used by the Zionist entity in occupied Palestine are being brought home to Western countries as the American Reich and its global influence accelerate in their decline. Gaza was and is a cyber-concentration camp, with digital surveillance taking place alongside old-fashioned techniques of paying informants. Aside from being an unsinkable aircraft carrier and disrupting the entire Middle East, Israel’s primary role appears to be to generate new ways to monitor entire populations. Propaganda about China being an authoritarian police state with social credit scores and AI which knows where everybody is at all times was probably created, at least in part, to deflect attention from Israel doing those exact things. The paranoid and flimsy American regime with its gerontocratic upper circles now use these tactics at home: cracking down on any and all protestors with political views left of Mussolini; placing snipers on roofs ready to fire at the slightest provocation; and arresting organization leaders. Pegasus has wormed its way around the world, with a notable recent example in Poland, in which the previous conservative government used the spyware to monitor the current liberal ruling party. The Israeli military, experts only in killing children and not actual warfare, have trained the police of other nations.
It would be easy to end the preamble there, on a gloomy note about the brick wall - or, indeed, iron curtain - that upstart left-wing groups are up against. What history has shown is that these regimes are, in fact, beatable. Liberation movements around the world have found ways to counter imperialism, even if they required wars in which millions of their countrymen were murdered. The legacy of Israeli propaganda psyops and digital tracking is not victory, as Hamas demonstrated on October 7th and continues to show with every ambush executed and every Merkava destroyed. The legacy of Western military defence equipment is not success, demonstrated by every missile fired by Hezbollah and Iran which hits Israel. The legacy of the American Navy is not competence, with a naval blockade of the Red Sea still maintained after months by one of the poorest countries on the planet.
The protests of at least the last couple decades have been marked by failure to produce material results: from those against the Iraq War, to Occupy Wall Street, to the BLM protests of 2020. Of course, it would be silly to tell American protestors to start digging tunnels. But sooner or later, the failure of Western protest movements will be overcome, and a more effective strategy will be devised, in order to deflect the boomerang.
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 the United States! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
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The bulletins site is here!
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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 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.
(edit: Damn it, I only read the Microsoft article, but the Ars Technica article already explains all of this better. I’ll keep this here in case this helps anyone.)
Sounds basically like an extension of existing encrypted DNS protocols (DNS over HTTPS, DNS over TLS) which integrates with the firewall. Can’t think of a reason to be concerned about this. It strikes a balance between encrypting DNS lookups and allowing network admins to see which websites you’re using. Think like corporate networks and work-from-home employees. If you don’t configure it then you don’t have to use it. “Zero Trust” is a marketing buzzword for the idea of authenticating endpoints before sending data, a lot of different things claim this label.
Quick primer on DNS (not a networking expert)
DNS is a protocol for converting names into IP addresses, so that you can type hexbear.net instead of remembering the IP address for hexbear. Classic DNS works by having a DNS server which provides IP addresses to devices which send lookup requests. DNS servers are usually hardcoded on your device somewhere in the system settings. Many free public DNS servers exist (Google has 8.8.8.8, cloudflare 1.1.1.1, etc) and also your ISP usually offers their own.
Company networks often have their own DNS to resolve internal names on the intranet (pointing to private zone IP addresses) before asking up the chain for names on the public internet. In a home setting, people also set up their own private DNS servers to block malicious names, for example to block advertisements by returning “not found” replies for lookups of domains that serve ads. (Pi-hole, Adguard)
Some problems in the classic model:
To solve both of these problems, encrypted DNS uses certificates to both authenticate and encrypt DNS lookups. The response can only be decrypted if the server can encrypt the traffic using a key you trust. (Same idea behind HTTPS.) To be clear, encrypted DNS is already a thing, this is not the new thing offered by ZTDNS.
This ZTDNS (Zero Trust DNS) integrates with the firewall. A typical firewall blocks all incoming traffic by default, and allows all outbound traffic. This means you can’t receive spontaneous traffic from hexbear.net if you never opened the site. However, if you first send a request to hexbear.net, then the firewall learns to open a hole for hexbear.net to reply back.
ZTDNS modifies this setup by blocking all outgoing traffic by default. Only when an IP address is known to be associated to an allowed domain, then the firewall allows outbound traffic to that IP.
I think the main point is that it forces all DNS lookups to use the system DNS:
This part seems a little more concerning:
I don’t think this invents that ability, administrators already have control over firewall rules and DNS servers. If they wanted to block hexbear.net, they could already configure DNS to return “not found” for that domain. Or set up some firewall rule to block outbound traffic to 37.187.73.130.
I suppose this way is more secure in the event you get malware on your computer. If the malware tries to phone home and send sensitive information, it will get blocked by the firewall if the destination isn’t allowed by the DNS. But that comes down to how effective the DNS rules are.
This is not true of existing secure DNS protocols like DNS over HTTPS and DNS over TLS, where the client makes a direct, encrypted connection to the DNS server. Not unless the client is configured to use the DNS server that the network tells it to, e.g. via DHCP.
I haven’t looked at the details of M$'s design here, but it could be concerning if you’re allegedly using a “secure/encrypted” protocol but the local network admins can still snoop/interfere despite the user configuring their system to securely connect to some well-known, outside DNS server.
Yeah agreed there. I have to admit I’m kind of split on encrypted DNS because it’s so convenient to block ads on all devices on my home network, but obviously not giving that kind of control and information to network administrators is better, like on coffee shop wifi.
I’m not afraid of the term Zero Trust lmao that would be funny “oh my god… zero trust… … they’re lying to us bros”
sure DNS over HTTPS is more secure but in practice isn’t it just everyone handing over all their browsing history directly to google and cloudflaremost of the time anyways? watch them just leak all of the traffic to a third party server or something like apple
Lol yeah I’m not worried about Zero Trust either, just saying it’s marketing fluff. And yes in practice this isn’t going to fix all the other privacy issues with the internet. Microsoft doesn’t care about that, this is about selling enterprise software with the word Zero Trust attached. But otherwise can’t think of why this would change the game for normal people, even work from home employees who are already monitored.
Yes this is what happens. You give them all your connection addresses.