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.
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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.
Why is ICE escalating in more cities while they’re getting far more coverage than their usual fascism? Why does trump want to create protests? I get that he’s always been racist, but this level of cruelty might push a lot of people over the edge
Maybe he’s just less competent than Obama/Biden
I think that Richard “Big Dick” Wolff correctly predicted what would happen: Trump’s stated goals and ambitions are butting heads against material circumstances. We saw this with the tariffs - he came out swinging and ended up having to walk almost all of it back (and forth and back and forth). I think the immigration raids are no different: He wants mass deportations and ethnic cleansing of the “illegals” but did not foresee the resistance to it that he would receive. But nevertheless he doubles down.
We are witnessing the incoherent and impotent flailings of a dying empire.
Removed by mod
Trump is all stick and no carrot. And you can’t wage effective COIN with just the stick.
I think Stephen Miller is pushing a lot of this, he’s the most extreme on immigration in the whole administration. Trump is obviously anti-immigrant too but he seemingly lets his advisors do whatever they want
If you could probe into Stephen Miller’s mind, I am 100% certain you would find that his core drive in life is to see that the US and all “white” countries remove by any means anyone who isn’t white. This would apply to a black person whose ancestors have been here for 300 years as much as an undocumented worker from Mexico, but he can’t say that about the former out loud. I’m very well acquainted with how honest-to-god white nationalists talk and use language to mystify their real thoughts and intentions, and Miller checks all those boxes.
The right wing media echo chamber is leading to severe miscalculations by the administration and the swine in charge of ICE
They’re confused by their inability to solidify fascist control over all levers of power
The 100 days are over, they’ve squandered their shot for the second and LAST time
There’s no way to maintain fascist control while also gutting institutions. In the material world you need systems and a ton of people on the payroll to impose fascism for any period of time.
Could be an impetus to round up all the people with the will to resist and start eliminating them
The Republican Party has always (within my lifetime, anyway) been a party of minoritarian rule. They don’t care that their policies are unpopular, as long as it keeps their most motivated and loyal soldiers activated. The civil unrest gives the administration the opportunity to identify and incarcerate their most militant and organized enemies, while continuing to disintegrate the Democratic Party by “forcing” Democratic mayors and governors across the country to crack the skulls of the people who would be their most militant soldiers if they actually gave a single shit about winning. It is an ambitious strategy, whether or not it will work.
Huh. The Republicans forcing Democrats to rip their own masks off, basically.
It certainly does seem to—at face value, and with the usual fascist gambit as a caveat—further the uni-party goal of getting the working class to (explicitly) accept fascism because they must come to terms with the fact that there is no electoral alternative.
I think we’re seeing a shift here, Trump won the popular vote and had the biggest win for Republicans in two decades. Recent poll numbers on support for the National Guard deployment to Los Angeles are alarming, it appears a majority of voters support such a crackdown… It’s not 2016 anymore, the political landscape has changed and swung quite heavily towards Trump on this issue.
The fact that they won the popular vote is irrelevant. They aren’t going to get rid of the Electoral College, all their voter suppression schemes, or introduce popular elections for the Supreme Court even if the numbers happen to be on their side. They prefer a system where some regions enjoy outsized influence over others and their are barriers upon barriers insulating the levers of power from the riff raff. If their power continues to grow, they’re much more likely to re-launch the campaign to repeal the 17th amendment (popular election of Senate offices) along with all the Reconstruction era amendments they want to get rid of.
Trump got 49.9% of the popular vote.
And, with a 63.7% turnout, that means 31.7% of the electorate voted for him. Did Not Vote stays winning.
Trump’s immigration/deportation policy is a key cornerstone of his politics, popular amongst key demographics (such as “legal” immigrants) and the population of the United States in general. There were two polls done on the matter of deploying the National Guard to Los Angeles, one from InsiderAdvantage which polled likely voters with 59% approving of the National Guard deployment, 2% undecided and 39% disapprove. A poll from YouGov of US adults had 38% approve, 17% undecided and 45% disapprove. However given the results of the InsiderAdvantage poll, it’s likely that most of the “undecided” people in the YouGov poll secretly approve of the National Guard deployment to Los Angeles. So the numbers are in Trump’s favour there. In a way the protests and riots, for now, are helping Trump and giving Republicans ideal propaganda, of people waving Mexican flags burning down random AI taxis and looting Apple stores, while Mexican politicians talk about restoring 1800s borders. Trump’s response is to try crush this quickly with National Guard deployments before any popular resistance or mass movement can be built, to try avoid what happened in 2020, where the protests ended up hurting Trump. It’s escalate to provoke, and then de-escalate via this same escalation, to prevent the situation from spiralling out of control.
Aside from the fact issue-specific opinion polling is pretty much garbage, I think a more likely conclusion is that the first poll is of likely voters and the second is of US adults. “Likely voters” trend right and pro-fascism.
That’s also very true, I just tend to be a little bit of a pessimist on the politics at times
Because we have gotten to the mask off stage where they want people to know they can do what they want, that the protesting isn’t going to stop them. That’s the message being sent.