Image: one of our POW camps filled with captured soldiers of the Christmas regime.
Season's greetings, fellow godless communists. I'm here to disseminate orders from our Supreme Communist Dictator as we once again find ourselves fighting against the very concept of Christmas. As a reminder, by the end of our five-year plan, we plan to be in a position to attack and dethrone God, but this intermediate step is required to fulfil this directive. Our forces in the field have made significant, if gradual, progress since you received your mission update last year. It has been difficult, but we have developed a series of defensive lines to prepare for a counteroffensive out of Lapland that will try and reach the Gulf of Bothnia in an attempt to cut the land bridge that we have set up across Scandinavia.
Currently, we foresee a few major threats. General Santa Clauswitz has been developing many tools in his workshop, including artillery-launched snowballs, barbed tinsel, and reinforced gingerbread armor plating for his tanks and infantry carriers. President Frostyy has made the following public statement: "The socialists who wish to destroy us have no idea what their defenses are about to face. Democracy will always defeat autocracy. Christmas will always triumph over X-mas. The leaders of the axis facing us are all on the naughty list and will be tried for crimes against festivity once this war is over."
Delusional as this may be, the next couple days will be the most dangerous as they stage their counteroffensive, and we need everybody to pitch in and get into defensive positions. We expect this to be the last major push that they will make before collapse. Please report any Christmas trees, mistletoe, or general symbology of the Christmas regime to your superiors.
Over and out.
The weekly update is here on the website.
The Country of the Week is Finland! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
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.
Before I spend energy researching what is NIAC, do you actually want to engage honestly and unravel these contradictions on this platform at this moment? Or are we just "ships passing in darkness"?
I have to ask
Edit: The guy is executive vice president of some think tank financed by Ford, Rockefeller, and Soros...
https://quincyinst.org/about/
Trista is a Swede/Iranian working in the US. As an foreign policy expert, he is generally critical of the US empire and how stupid its diplomatic efforts are in regards to especially Iran.
I appreciate that he is always factually correct and refrain from spin such as calling Hamas and Hezbollah "terror organizations" which is common elsewhere in the West.
He is also willing to say things we "know" that other "experts" try to avoid. In the above example, he rightly assumes that the assassination was carried out by Israel even though we will likely never have convulsive evidence of that.
When it comes to predictions and the quality of his analysis, he tend to be OK. He often gives personalities and individuals more importance for shaping world events than I'd care for but he is generally pessimistic that the US is going to be successful with its global affairs, diplomatic efforts and wars. I think he's approach to International Relations is from an academic area studies which makes him less dogmatic.
Idk I looked through some of the recent articles on Quincy Institute and it's basically "here's how to regime change Iran but smarter" which is honestly just another, equally insidious, branch of US hybrid warfare.
You don't get to be a high-level think tanker in Washington unless you're useful to the empire that's just how these things work.
It reminds me a lot of this garbage from another false friend US "peace organization" during the manufactured Mahsa Amini riots where the line was "lift sanctions is better regime change" basically
Is Trisa a lib? Yes. Was he wrong when he said that sanctions will not help protesters? No. These sanctions were sold to the public as a way to help regime change in Iran and he was correct in pointing out that it wouldn't.
The same with the analysis that Biden's Gaza policy hurts his chances to win against Trump.
See this is precisely where the problem starts. If you think that these are "protests" then of course the logic makes sense but these were not and have not been "protests". They are foreign-backed completely inorganic riots that rely on importing terrorist elements from Azerbaijan Iraq Pakistan and Afghanistan to cause as much chaos as possible. Even according to imperialist pollsters at John's Hopkins University something like 85% of Iranians wish that the government was MORE aggressive against the rioters and not less. The strikes that happened at the steel plants in October 2022 was because the sanctions cut off the ability for the plant owner to pay the workers. These are not "protests" in the sense of Black Americans protesting a police murder or French petit bourgeois yellow vests. It was full on attack on the nation of Iran which the imperialsits used as cover to massacre civilians. And it was doomed to fail just like all the manufactured riots since the "Green Movement" nonsense (which a lot of Iranian-American "peace activists" participated in mind you).
The real and correct analysis coming from Hezbollah affiliated professor Amer Mohsen is that the US should have either gone to kinetic war with Iran in 2006 or completely changed its policy towards the Islamic Republic. "But what you don't do is declare your intention of war and then give them 20 years to prepare for it." Sanctions, as only one part of a comprehensive hybrid warfare strategy against Iran exist in conjunction with the "soft war" human rights slander and recruiting spies of which this think tanker Trisa openly plays a part in.
By saying "yeah he's a lib but he's right" you are accepting the incorrect assumptions that his so-called academic analysis is predicated on. It is an analysis that defends America the Monstrous and obfuscates the role of Capital in determining the trajectory of history. Which is an ongoing theme among the vast majority of these 'realpolitik' Anglophone analysts who have infected the global media information space following the launch of Russian SMO.
Lebanese Marxist Dr Ali Kadri has made multiple analysis of how sanctions are extremely profitable for capital even if it does not achieve the effect of "overthrowing the regime". Even if the sanctions against Russia "don't work" (according to the realpolitik talking heads) the imperialists will maintain them because it is in service of a larger strategy of capital in cleaving the world in two.