Image is Israeli interceptors trying and failing to intercept missiles over their cities.
Israel just carried out a widespread bombing of Iran, which has killed a number of senior officials inside Iran (though it seems the leadership is more-or-less intact) as well as a number of civilians. Important facilities have been targeted, but the amount of damage is unknown so far (note that many important Iranian facilities are deep underground, making them both hard to damage but also hard to determine if they are damaged from just satellite imagery, so reports of damage will be he-said-she-said).
It appears the attack took Iran by surprise, given that a residential block was targeted that contained some senior officials - if one saw an attack coming, one would imagine they'd be in bunkers. Nonetheless, like the rest of the Resistance Axis, I suspect that Iran has adapted their military structures to be resistant to decapitation strikes by ensuring that replacement figures are ready to take the place of killed officials.
Iran has delivered a massive missile barrage in response to Israeli aggression, even though Israel is continuing to bomb Iran. Iran is now aware of the location of many important Israeli sites, including secret nuclear sites, due to their recent intelligence haul, giving them a distinct edge.
Last week's thread is here. The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
Please check out the RedAtlas!
The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
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 problem with the Chinese strategy of geopolitical neutrality for the sake of "building the productive forces"......is that when the US and the west in general is finished destroying and crippling the rest of the world, you in turn dont get to cry foul when the bystander syndrome is turned on you by the whole world, when the US embraces its inner nazism and destroys itself while it smashes your precious infrastructure
China is not building productive forces lol. As I have written before, China already has 31% of global manufacturing share, compared to 18% in the US and 5% in Germany and Japan each. In fact, China is undergoing through an overproduction crisis right now where excessive competition has caused the rate of profit to fall to razor thin margins.
China has made many statements that it vowed to defend the global free trade arrangements, and has accused Trump’s tariffs and protectionism as violating the sanctity of the free market. In other words, China wants the Washington-led neoliberal consensus to persist. Both the US and China have benefited tremendously from such an arrangement at the expense of the entire world. This is made very clear by China’s silence when it comes to call for de-dollarization over the past three years - read the Russian proposal at the Kazan BRICS summit in 2024 to see how even Russia has largely scaled back on the entire de-dollarization effort because it does not align with the Chinese policy.
The US may think it can decouple from China, but China has just shown how many cards it can play - for example, the rare earth card that succeeded in making Trump coming back to the negotiation table. It’s a messy divorce but eventually the US will find itself unable to leave China, who just threatened to take away their child if the US insists on going through the divorce. They will come to some kind of a renewed status quo, as I have been saying before.
Isn't the point being made above that Chinese exports to the rest of the world is building the world's productive forces? As in, a big part of the current American imperialist apparatus is that developing countries have to be kept underdeveloped and reliant on Western exports and generally not allowed to create populaces that consume significant resources, so it's good if China is flooding the world with useful products (like, building materials and trains and railways and ships and phones and cars and eventually computers and chips) while also being careful to not consequently destroy the domestic manufacturing of developing nations (e.g. with how China said a while ago that they're totally fine with African nations setting up tariffs on them but also a couple days ago removed their own tariffs on every African country so as to set up mutual trade instead of African countries just being indebted to China).
and I think this is the correct play, otherwise all you're really doing is creating a new hegemon that is totally focussed on a big domestic population consuming all the spoils of the world but with a hammer and sickle on the flag instead of stars and stripes. Like, I want China to succeed, absolutely, but if in 50 years what they've created is more-or-less the same system as the United States but a little kinder to the rest of the world and less bombing and with a billion Chinese citizens in a domestic consumption economy with great social welfare and flying trains and fusion and shit, then there hasn't been any real overturning of the imperialist world system, it's merely China that's benefitting now rather than the US.
I suppose it might just be a quibble of strategy; basically: do you focus on trying to end the dollar first and then manage the consequences and opportunties of that, or do you say that maybe we should instead work within the dollar system for now (for the most part), with all the problems and risks which that inherently possesses, that you have talked about a lot, and hope that raising the development of the whole planet will create the material conditions for the dollar system to be undermined? And if your analysis is correct, then maybe China and friends have decided that they're trying the second option, for better or worse. And then if that second option fails (idk, maybe America just buys out all the world's property conveniently built for them by China anyway and then charges rent on it), then they'll be forced to return again to the first option.
Entirely in agreement. Given the 2 options, and the complex relations, it's the more strategically sound course. I hate that that's true, because if it weren't I could be more upset at a lack of action. But option 2 has a lower risk now and the more successful that strategy is (the longer they can maintain that course) the lower the risk of BOTH option 1 and option 2 in the future. The direct risk associated with option 1 is very high (war and destruction of China as a possibility) but they are accelerating ahead in a way which is constantly lowering that risk. Option 2, of course, has risks, but those are mostly risks associated with a loss of soft power in the Western Left. Global southern groups are generally more receptive to China's help than they are to our pleas for China to take over the world order and destroy the US.