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.
China’s foreign policy is uh… shall we say, flexible?
The PRC invaded Vietnam for taking out the Khmer Rouge. China also allied with the US to destroy the USSR (when the US was diplomatically isolated from the world and undergoing stagflation from the oil crisis - the predicament of the US in 1970s was far worse than it is today) because they believed that the USSR was attempting to encircle China through military buildup in Vietnam. In many ways, China saved the US empire when it was at its lowest point.
I guess you can say its strategy is to “play both sides and come out on top”, which to be fair, seems to be pretty successful so far.
Bad for the world, more like.
Arguably, as there is apparently no hope for stuff like guaranteed housing and guaranteed access to healthcare in the PRC since the privatisation of the economy and the unwillingness of the party to go back to the better economic system.
But sure, the PRC has managed to become a beneficiary of the current colonialist nightmare that NATO has forced upon the world. Yay?
People here won’t like to hear this, but the Chinese model is taking the IMF export-led growth model to an extreme.
Assuming constant demand, every Chinese trade surplus means some other exporting countries lose that trade revenue, all to the benefits of the Western countries who enjoy the Global South competing with one another to sell them cheap products, of course. After all, they can always hide behind tariffs when they deem some of their industries to be threatened.
It worked very well for China’s economic growth, but really at the expense of the working class of other countries, who now have to work even harder to drive their costs lower in order to compete with the Chinese products.
This wasn’t something new, and it had been taken advantage of first by Japan, then Taiwan and South Korea, and other Southeast Asian countries like Thailand, until China joined the WTO in 2001 and leveraged its huge labor force to gain absolute advantage and surpassed all of these competitors.
The USSR was something else entirely. It was self-contained and did not rely on Global South competition to drive wages low, which only benefit Western imperialism.
This is one of the reasons I vehemently disagree with the argument that “cheap Chinese products” are somehow good - no, you want Chinese workers to get paid what is worth their labor, so they can in turn buy stuff from other countries and drive the growth and development of those other countries. All that trade surplus China is accumulating is simply to allow them to show the IMF that their budget is “well balanced” with deficit kept below 3% and is therefore “fiscally responsible”, the best student of IMF neoliberalism.
Yes, and that is bad for the world. And the people who claim that this is being done as some part of a long con to defeat capitalism have nothing to substantiate their claim.
Unless you take back your words about the destruction of the USSR being a good thing, I find it absurd that you would say this stuff (which I completely agree with) but come to the conclusion that that is a good thing the way you did mere months ago.