Image is of destruction and damage inside Israel, sourced from this article.
Iran and Israel have struck each other many times over the last few days. There has been a general focus on military facilities and headquarters by both sides, though Israel has also struck oil facilities, civilian structures and hospitals, and in return for this, Iran has struck major scientific centers and the Haifa oil facilities.
Israel appears to have three main aims. First, to collapse the Iranian state, either through shock and breakdown by killing enough senior officials, or via some sort of internal military coup. Second, to try and destroy Iranian nuclear sites and underground missile cities, or at least to paralyze them long enough to achieve the first and third goals. And third, to bring the US into a direct conflict with Iran. This is because the US better equipped to fight them than Israel is (though victory would still not be guaranteed depending on what Iran chooses to do).
Iranian nuclear facilities are hidden deep underground (800 meters), far beyond the depth range of even the most powerful bunker busters (~70 meters or so), and built such that the visible ground entrances are horizontally far away in an unknown direction from the actual underground chambers. Only an extremely competent full-scale American bombing force all simultaneously using multiple of the most powerful conventional (perhaps even nuclear) bunker busters could even hypothetically hope to breach them (and we have seen how, in practice, American bunker busters have largely failed to impair or deter Ansarallah). There are several analysts on both sides who have concluded that it is entirely impossible to physically prevent Iran from building nukes.
I fully expect the US to join the war. I believe the current ambiguity is a deliberate invention of the US while they work to move their military assets into position, and as soon as they are ready, the US will start bombing Iran. After that, Iran’s leadership must - if they haven’t already - harden their hearts, and strike back with no fear, or risk following the path of Libya, Syria, and Iraq, either into either surrender, occupation, or annihilation. Every day where they do not possess a nuke is a day where lives are being lost and cities are being bombed.
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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.
The entire site gave you shit because you made tl;dr posts about how Biden is a big-brained 10d chess grandmaster imperialist who knew how to leverage USD as an economic weapon much better than Trump only to end your posts with “anyways vote for Biden.”
listen i support dunking on xiaohongshu when one of these blueanon type posts comes up but this is too far, step off my goat hexbear thank you
Okay fine. I removed that sentence.
thank you kind poster
That’s a very uncharitable read of my argument.
I said that if the US left is not prepared for the struggle, including through an armed struggle, then it’s objectively better to have a Biden/Harris administration to buy a few more years of time while building up a resilient movement in the meantime.
People here somehow wanted an accelerationist scenario with Trump but what has transpired instead is that Trump is letting his fascist thugs to deport immigrants, assault on progressive and civil rights left and right, provoking even more deranged foreign policy on Gaza and Iran, and guess what? There has been no meaningful opposition just as I predicted while fascists are roaming the streets doing what they want. The American left literally does not have a strategy to counter Trump fascism.
The keyword here is pragmatism. This was what the Chinese communists understood, but the American left doesn’t. They had to work with the nationalists to kick out the Japanese invaders, even after just experienced a huge massacre by the KMT. Can you imagine if the communists were too idealistic and vindictive to work with the KMT? Japan would have carved up China and communism would not have prevailed in the end.
Having some perspective matters. Take this from a country where communism actually won.
And we told you, repeatedly, that the Biden/Harris stuff completely deflates and stalls any kind of left-wing movement in this country, as little as there is. If we vote for them, the libs go home and completely ignore anything that is going on. The boot boys were already here, already taking families, just no one mainstream reported it or cared. You would know that if you lived here. I don’t even really have much hope that the libs being out will actually matter, but it is better for them to be out and aware of what is happening than not.
On top of that, a Biden/Harris would not stabilize things, if anything they send us careening just as fast towards fascism because they figure out how to fund it and market it to liberals who want ‘better government’. They get all the lawyers together and legalize the societal impoverishment. No bourgeois government can actually stabilize the descent, it can only piss off different cultural parties.
There is absolutely no historical materialist analysis going on here. China barely qualified as a country during the revolution, with regional petty warlords rulling large areas of the country. It was a time where you had a greater evil to fight that was actually on your home turf. What would you have us do? Rally for the fight in Iran and Ukraine? Help the Democrats deport immigrants? After all that’s ‘pragmatism’ right? That’s fighting the common enemy? The Democrats and the Republicans are not like the nationalists and the Japanese, you have to be able to see that. They are the same thing, different faces. A better thing would be to analyze would be the ideological predicament of Japanese communists at the time.
Let me be very clear here. I am fine with respecting the decisions of the CPC, even if I do not always agree they are good for communism, I have full respect for the party that has brought socialism to more people than ever before. However, I have decreasingly less respect for you in particular, because you are clinging to the coat-tails of their efforts and achievements and pretending that specifically you and your analysis have done anything to bring peace and/or communism closer to fruition than the average Western leftist.
ICE is literally kidnapping people off the streets and throw them into “detention centers”. I’m not saying this doesn’t happen under the Democrats but let’s not pretend like they are happening on the same scale, or that the fascist thugs aren’t being emboldened by Trump.
It may be easy for an American-born citizen to say “it’s all the same” but for many immigrants in America, this is already causing a lot of undue stress and panic on top of feeling that the society has turned hostile against them.
We are also seeing increasing assault - quite openly - against LGBT and minority rights and while I cannot speak for them, I can imagine that many would prefer not to live in fear like that under Trump.
You are right though that both parties are two sides of the same coin in foreign policy, but as I mentioned in my initial comment, the unpredictability of Trump is what makes him so dangerous for the world. Biden/Harris at least have a level of consistency. When other countries cannot predict what America wants, it risks destabilizing the entire world and things can spiral out of control easily.
Trump does have a shock value to him, but a well oiled and competent imperialist machine with democrats at the wheel is just as deadly, if not more. And democrats deport just as many if not more as Trump has. (Deep apologies for the Vox link). But the decorum of the democrats subdues any revolutionary spirit, any rising worker consciousness, and your constant suggestion of the left (whoever exactly that is in the United States) biting the bullet and working with democrats hampers any independent left movement from developing in the United States.
That is advice that confuses many, and it isn’t idealism or purity to suggest that the left has more to lose by working with the dems.
The Communist Party and every non-profit constantly redirects leftist consciousness back to bourgeois electoralism with the Democrats. That isn’t the left marching with the Democrats, that is the Dems smothering any nascent movement in the crib and scattering the ashes as the Dems continue to create the conditions for more fascism. Working with them in the way you suggest isn’t a death sentence - it atrophies our movement. We’ve seen time and time again how the dems almost exist simply to co-opt and redirect movements. If not careful, the democrats absorb all the energy and act as a brake on any independent worker movement developing.
The more the masses see this play out, they even begin to see the dems as unreliable and disconnected from meaningful struggle. When the masses reach that level of consciousness about the two parties, then we don’t want tell them that they are strategically wrong and they need to be led back to Kamala or whomever. You may not understand how important of a development it can be to get Americans to envision anything beyond the two parties.
That does mean the United States is stuck between a rock and a hard place. The dems are a fetter for a left developing in the US, but Trump is a hammer for us (though one that at least radicalizes more Americans). It is true that the left isn’t strong in the United States, but I think you a.) underestimate how damaging the Democrats can be for the left, and b.) overestimate the difference the dems are going to make to stopping fascism.
Though you may say, and I beleve have, that the dems wouldnt stop the fascists, just give the left a few years to build up. But again, working with the dems itself makes it hard for a left to grow and develop independently of a network of bourgeois think tanks and non profits. It’s kicking the can down the road, sure, but without the ability to “train” for what’s to come. So one gains little from that.
I don’t think an analogy you make to China’s history is useful here at all and such an anology isn’t proof enough that the Left should work with the Dems in this moment as the Communists made peace with the KMT. I don’t believe the analology is enough is argue for that position. That stategic playbook of working with the Dems has already been used, we’ve seen the lack of anything it tends to build, and it delays the building of proletariat consciousness and institutions.
Not to be spiteful, but if they weren’t feeling the pressure before, then they weren’t actually paying attention to the way the political winds have been blowing. They would kidnap people all the fucking time. Of course, it wasn’t ‘kidnapping’ it was ‘legal detention’ in Guantanamo and the charges would be different (“terrorism”), but the result is the same. The same goes for any LGBTQ individuals and communities. The Democrats only adopted them into the federal coalition less than 20 years ago, they can and will be kicked out just as easily if it suits the Dems, they are already posturing towards it. Different states will serve as safer havens for them, but that is the way it has always been.
They have been “emboldened” for the last 60 years. It’s not any different, people are just pretending it’s different because the mainstream media is now actually reporting on it the way it should be reported. Just because you are just now reading about it doesn’t mean it wasn’t happening. Hell, we threw the Chinese immigrants who built the national railways out, you think anyone in law enforcement around here ever actually gave a shit that you ‘just overstayed your visa’? The only reason they ever let anyone go was to save themselves the paperwork, now the Biden administration has minimized the paperwork, legal standing of immigrants, and supercharged the processing. The information leading to these current immigration raids was likely gathered during the Biden administration.
Trump is just as predictable as Biden, in that he usually does whatever the news is telling him to do. He is not actually that erratic, as presidents go. In this case, the news is telling him not to go to war with Iran, but everyone around him is telling him to do it, except probably for the beautiful generals who are giving him ‘the options’, hence his waffling. We will see what comes of it, the military-industrial complex may just pull this one off. However, unless the news and everyone tells him to ‘nuke Iran’ he is not going to ‘nuke Iran’. When the news starts actively saying that, that is when I will start to worry. He is literally the meme of ‘Turning the racism dial and looking back at the crowd to make sure they approve’. Terrifying given the general bloodlust of the American public, sure, but not some sort of erratic madman.
Just to correct this bit it seems Fox news is hawkish and that is his main source(ex 1, ex 2). This is the major difference from the Bolton era when Tucker at Fox was IMO one of the most important voices that convinced Trump against it.