Title is a reference to Resistance imagery about how Israeli soldiers will enter Gaza alive but leave it in coffins - the same is true for American soldiers in the Middle East if the regional war expands.
The image is of the Fattah-1 Iranian hypersonic ballistic missile, which its creators boast can overcome any missile defense system on the planet, has a range of 1400 kilometers (and thus Iran can strike Israel), and has a terminal impact velocity of Mach 13.
Dozens of American soldiers have been injured and 3 have been killed on a base in the Middle East. There has been confused reports about whether the attack was on Syrian territory or Jordan's - the Al-Tanf base is in Syria, but Tower-22 in Jordan is another base that helps supply Al-Tanf, and Tower-22 is the one that is alleged to have been hit. These is the first confirmed deaths of American troops since the conflict began, though it's not likely that this is actually the first deaths after hundreds of drone/missile strikes throughout the region on American bases, unless you think American soldiers are having extremely timely heart attacks just after a missile hits.
The attack is certainly impactful, though it does also have considerably symbolism. Courtesy of John Helmer:
The operational success of the strike for the attackers is strategic. Tower-22 is a logistics, supply, and rear guard post for the Al-Tanf base which US troops are operating thirty kilometres north across the border in Syria. The attack demonstrates that both Tower-22 and Al-Tanf, Jordan and Syria, are newly vulnerable to weapons which the US forces have failed to detect and neutralize. Just as significantly, the massive US airbase called Muwaffaq Salti, 230 kilometres west across Jordan, is also vulnerable now.
It indicates that Iran now possesses Russian expertise in countering American equipment:
“This is a significant accomplishment,” one of the sources said. “Was the bypassing of the US air defence system at Tower-22 pulled off with Russian assistance? US bases generally rely on the C-RAM [Counter Rocket, Artillery and Mortar] system. It was sent to Ukraine last year where the Russians have been learning to defeat it. What now of American EW [electronic warfare]? They’ve been doing a fair job of knocking drones down up to now. It seems a ‘coincidence’ that, not a week after the meetings in Moscow with Arabs and Iranians, we see this success. It’s a success the circumstances of which, we can be sure, Biden and Austin are not keen to advertise.”
I am putting my take on the table right now: I am 99% certain that the US won't attack Iran directly. I think we are still quite a while away from that being a possibility. Much more likely is that Iranian officials in Iraq or Syria will be hit by a retaliatory strike, as Israel has done recently. It is a significant escalation nonetheless. And it comes as Israel seems to be gearing up for a suicidal war with Hezbollah.
The Country of the Week is Iran! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
Updates continue to be AWOL - but I am cooking something. Hopefully.
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.
The question is who would want to go back once they have attained (or at least on the way to attain) economic sovereignty?
The neoliberalization of Russia was successful because it was turned into a colony of resource extraction, mostly relying on imported technology with low labor participation. Selling raw materials and resources allowed the Russian oligarchs to get rich while the country remained poorly industrialized - i.e. the labor is not sufficiently proletarianized. This is how Western imperialism works - by keeping the peripheral countries dependent on them, so the poor countries will keep selling you cheap resources that your country turn into added value products and resold for much higher profit.
More importantly, the sanctions aren’t going to stop even after the war ends. Russia will always have to rely on itself or import from China or elsewhere. So there is not really a choice of going back to the pre-war status quo. Somebody has got to make the treats for the people.
On a broader level, and taking into account all these information, this is ultimately a domestic fight between the finance capitalists and industrial capitalists. The clash between these two has never been more naked in today’s Russia.
To throw another variable into this ongoing struggle: Russia’s national bourgeoisie are simply far too weak to do anything useful for the economy (I need to look up where I read this again but apparently something like 90% of the bourgeoisie are pro-Western libs and already mostly had their assets confiscated outside of Russia), so the state has since 2022 taken on a hugely disproportioned role in revitalizing the economy. That’s why a lot of Russia’s economic recovery came from military and arms production, because it’s mostly the government who has the financial means of placing large orders to keep the economy alive.
In other words, the national bourgeoisie are far too weak to do anything useful, the pro-Western liberal bourgeoisie already have much of their assets confiscated (though they still have political power as is evident in the Central Bank and Ministry of Treasury), so the state, which had previously taken a back seat, now has to step up and do all the important work. This is an important step in history because this was what happened during WWI: the bourgeoisie thought it would be a minor skirmish that would be over by Christmas, but as the war escalated they had to beg the state to intervene in the national economy, thus creating the material conditions for socialist and workers movement to grow in the early 1900s.
Who will be the Russian Mussolini, I wonder...
Lol we’re too far out from predicting Russian fascism at the moment (actually, Russia was close to fascism once, during Yeltsin’s reign, we will discuss that below). First, their industrialization plan has to succeed, which is not even a given at this point.
However, I’d like to offer some additional points for considerations, which in my opinion makes Russia truly one of its kind in history (I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and emphasis: just my opinions and thoughts but it could be an interesting discussion).
First, Russia is the only country in history that has within a century, went through the experience of being a (second tier) imperialist power, the (world’s first) socialist superpower, and a peripheral developing country exploited for its resources. There is simply no other country like that. All the European imperialist powers from WWI are still very much part of the imperial core today, except for Russia. Its developmental trajectory is truly unique and still today a complex mix of all three modes of economic systems.
This is why you see Russia can be sympathetic to the plight of the Global South, can align itself closely to socialist countries like China, Cuba and the DPRK, while at the same time still want to be a part of the imperial core that exploits the rest of the world (although this door is now being shut by the NATO imperialists).
People like to say “Russian imperialism” but I don’t think it’s as simple as that, in fact I think it trivializes the very complex trajectory that Russia as a country had to go through over the entire 20th century, including having to deal with a very brutal invasion from Nazi Germany, which brings me to the second point:
The crimes of Nazism has never been forgotten in Russia even after the collapse of the USSR. While all the allied powers in the West have pretty much forgotten about the history of WWII (including all the countries invaded by the Nazis), Russia continues to celebrate Victory Day annually which really hammers home the message unlike in many other Western countries. Even the Russian nationalist chuds hate Nazism.
Why is this the case? I claim (without evidence) that the specter of the USSR will always haunt Russia. Whenever Russia tries to get rid of its Soviet past, they find themselves in a worse position and had to rely on some aspects of Soviet legacies to save themselves. This parallels with the Ukrainians who managed to “de-communize” and turning full fascist. The Russians instead found themselves relying on Soviet weapons to save itself from a war because of their own troubling arms industry, they found themselves relying on remnant Soviet industries during Western sanctions to save the economy; and they found themselves relying on Soviet anti-fascist propaganda to unite the people of the country against Ukrainian fascism (I truly believe that the domestic support for the war wouldn’t have been so strong if they weren’t fighting against literal Banderites)
And this sentiment has only grown stronger since the Ukraine war. The last time Russia nearly became fascist was during Yeltsin’s era in the 1990s when the economy was in chaos, and you know what’s funny, Putin literally had to rehabilitate Stalin (which had been denounced since Khrushchev) in the 2000s to calm people down. You can say it’s all cynical nationalist propaganda, and I agree, but it’s also as I said, the specter of the Soviet Union will always haunt Russia. They tried to get rid of the Soviet past, and the Soviet specter kept coming back wanting to stay.
Why does this matter? Because if you look at the history of Italy and Germany, fascism really was about protecting private property and privatization, but if you look at the surveys of Russian citizens today, at least half of the people want the economy nationalized. Where else can you find a country with so much support for nationalization? I can’t even imagine the US having this much sentiment for a nationalized economy. Even if the people don’t have the political power, it’s still a formidable force to reckon with, especially when now Russia has to rely on its workers to sustain itself (i.e. can no longer sell cheap raw materials or strip assets and sell them to Western countries anymore, both of which are now a death sentence for a heavily sanctioned economy like Russia. Being self-reliance is the only way they get out of this mess.) People are so pissed off at Yeltsin’s mass privatization (as I said, when Russia was closest to fascism) that I don’t even know that’s something ever possible again.
And finally, some people may ask, what about the Naz Bols? I’ve always seen it as a fringe theory because you cannot mix socialism and fascism. Fascism as I’ve said is about protecting private property, which is fundamentally opposed to the goals of socialism. There is a reason why national bolshevism never gained traction anywhere in the world, because it simply doesn’t fit into a materialist model of capitalism. Both fascism and socialism are ideologies that actually succeeded, because they both played their historical roles that conformed to the dynamics of capitalist system.
Still, Russia is the wildest of wildcards and we can’t really say for sure what’s going to happen. How many of you predicted Russian invasion of Ukraine? lol!
we already had one
That’s modern Russia’s Trotsky lol
First as a caper, then as shenanigans