Iran has struck Israel.
previous preamble
The continuing fall of the remains of the British Empire is pretty entertaining from the outside: an archaic royal family that is seemingly being smote with disease by God itself for their past crimes; a navy that virtually no longer functions, ramming into foreign ports and under constant repair; and an economy that cannot seem to stop sputtering, fucked whether they're in the EU or outside it. Watching the impacts on people from the inside is a little more worrying, though.
A fifth of the population is in poverty, including nearly a third of all children. These figures have barely shifted since the Labour government in the early 2000s, aside from a decreasing poverty rate for pensioners. Actually, poverty hasn't substantially shifted since Margaret Thatcher. Before her, the poverty rate was around 14%, but her catastrophic policies caused a major increase, and poverty levels since then are still 50% higher than over 50 years ago, because neoliberal economic policy since then has not fundamentally changed. Parties and corporations have impoverished the usual vulnerable groups, such as large families, minority ethnic groups (including half of Pakistani and Bangladeshi households!) and disabled people. These differences are also regional, with the North more impoverished than the richer Southeast (but some of the poorest boroughs are in London, so it's a complex pattern).
With Corbyn's defeat in 2019 mere months before the pandemic began, the Labour Party shifted back towards the right, with left-wingers purged from the party if they did not kowtow to Keir Starmer. This leaves us with a situation where the only substantial difference between the two parties would be on social policy, but it goes without saying that economic policy is the overwhelming factor that determines if minorities can have a decent life. Worker-oriented movements since then have been largely not under the umbrella of major party leaderships, such as the Don't Pay movement in late 2022 that arose in the wake of dramatically rising energy prices where 3 million people vowed to not pay them (which did lead to results).
Most notably recently is the major upset in the constituency of Rochdale - the victory of George Galloway - who is the leader of the Workers Party of Britain, which describes itself as both socialist and socially conservative. This took place both in the context of aforementioned economic troubles, as well as anger over Israel's genocide of Gaza in the British population, especially in British Muslims. It remains to be seen how much of this is an isolated event, especially as Corbyn has, understandably, refused to collaborate with Galloway due to his socially conservative stances. The UK general election will be held at some point within the next 9 months or so, and might well be a shitshow depending on what happens domestically and geopolitically before then; parallels to the current American electoral shitshow with increasing anger over Biden are pretty apparent. The Conservatives are quite likely to lose given 14 years of uninspired rule if current polling is correct, but it truly is a race to the bottom.
The COTW (Country of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific country every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied nations. If you've wanted to talk about the country or share your experiences, but have never found a relevant place to do so, now is your chance! However, don't worry - this is still a general news megathread where you can post about ongoing events from any country.
The Country of the Week is the United Kingdom! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
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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 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.
Yes, their military is so impressive that even
would struggle against them in a conventional war
I'm not simping for the US military here, but that is simply not true. Air superiority wins wars, and the US has 10x the number of jets and they were produced 30 years after the ones Iran has.
In the current situation, a "conventional" war would require ground troops to move between Iran and Isn'treal. US aircraft carriers parked here:
could essentially prevent any meaningful ground force from Iran reaching Isn'treal. And that's before even considering Saudi involvement, who have a modern airforce, once again twice or more the size of Iran's.
Egypt, nor other of the other north African nations, have any interest in stopping US naval forces passing through the strait of Gibraltar or into the Mediterranean.
Air superiority is a perquisite for winning, but it does not by itself win anything. Close to a decade of bombing Ansar Allah did nothing. Dropping enough ordinance to split the moon in half on top of Vietnamese civilians did not win that war. Glassing the Korean Peninsula did not win that war. Having complete air superiority over Afghanistan and Iraq for decades didn't win us those conflicts. The Zionist entity has been bombing civilian infrastructure in Gaza for months and haven't come close to defeating Hamas.
I suppose we need to get into the weeds a bit here and define "war" and "winning a war". Is the goal regime change? Total occupation? We know that the US can launch airstrikes and missile strikes from its carriers and bases all over the region at Iran. It has zero capacity to invade and hold even a small fragment of that country. It doesn't even have full air superiority. Iranian hypersonic missiles would skip right past naval defenses and sink a carrier in seconds. Even if it didn't, there's no way a carrier group could defend itself from the hundreds (or thousands) of missiles swarming it.
Because what wins wars, what really wins wars, is the populace. The masses of Vietnamese were sympathetic to the communist freedom fighters. Fidel Castro started his revolution with a few dozen dudes hiding in a swamp. But the masses, the people, supported him and his struggle. And they ultimately prevailed. The Bay of Pigs failed to do the same. To invade and hold a nation, the invader must get the populace on their side. There is no other way. The USA tried for years to hold Iraq and Afghanistan and it didn't work because the people fucking hate us.
The people of Iran would absolutely never accept US occupation. Iran is a civilization-state, a fiercely proud people who would fight to the last breath to prevent the Great Satan from conquering their nation. The USA could (and possibly will) carpet bomb Tehran and the nation at large, reduce its state and people to a state of complete abjection. We're seeing that happen in Gaza. That's not "winning a war", that's "brutalizing civilians". If you can't (or don't want to) win over the populace, the only other option is their removal. Forced relocation or mass murder.
No matter how many innocent corpses are created from muh superior jets, it won't actually win a long-term military objective.
Could it realistically do even that? It's one of the few countries with hypersonic missiles, superior to US tech. It manufactures drones (many of which Russia buys and use to great success in Ukraine) that could cheaply render enemy air bases and strips unusable making the touted air superiority of the US moot. Even the US knows they would get their asses handed to them if they ever attempted to militarily fuck with Iran. From my understanding, the only actual advantage that the US has over Iran is nukes.
I honestly don't know what Iran could do about a cloud of B-52s firebombing their homes. I don't know much about that plane's capabilities and Iran's high altitude air defenses