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.
Please check out the RedAtlas!
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.
So, what if we do more than protest? Like how about we actually liberate people from the detention center downtown? As an ML I am down to organize but horizontal protests with no objectives have accomplished exactly what in the last decade? Yesterday would’ve been a perfect opportunity to use our numbers to do something meaningful.
How many of the people at that march would have been willing to commit to that? Can you trust their organization and discipline? Were they equipped for it? Escalation in a revolution doesn’t come from revolutionaries, even the vanguard, pushing more aggressive and militant tactics. Doing so is incredibly risky not just for the repression it could bring but also the break it could cause between the vanguard and the masses. Each and every time, revolution comes from the masses. Our job is not to push them to militant action through propaganda of the deed (don’t work) but convince them that they must bring this system down by any means necessary and then provide the organizational structure to make revolutionary victory possible.
Let’s imagine that crowd yesterday snapped and did exactly what you suggest, storming the jailhouse. They now need to take a defensible fortress full of armed men who are absolutely willing to use live fire. The national guard is nearby and mobilized, and you can bet 1000+ plus of them would’ve headed there ASAP if they weren’t there already. But maybe the unarmed and untrained people succeed, break in, kill or capture the guards, and seize their arms. Now what?
500 marines are already on call for response to California. They’d arrive within 12 hours to besiege the already besieged fortress. What’s the plan? The US government has sieged armed complexes domestically before and they would have 0 qualms deploying any degree of necessary force to crush what represents a potential true rebellion. Will the ARs of the guards hold out against armed vehicles, helicopters, and special forces infiltration units?
What results from this? A few hundred or thousand dead, heroic Californians, who can no longer give their service to the revolutionary cause? Or do you think they would inspire a mass uprising across the country? If that’s the needed spark for the revolution, great, but I’m not so sure. Do you actually free anybody? Probably not - you’re more likely to get them killed.
You’re an ML, so you need to learn these lessons. Revolutions don’t come from us. They come from the masses. We must grow our support among the people so much that revolutionary victory is inevitable. Anything else simply won’t work. It will not be a radical armed minority that forces this enormous, blood-soaked imperialist beast to heel.
We are not yet at the “seize territory” phase, nor anywhere close to it. We’re still at the “agitate the masses, use community defense” stage. Mobility and hit-and-run guerrilla tactics would come before we start seizing facilities.
Yeah, I very much understand the impulse @marxistheretic@hexbear.net is expressing, but it’s not sound revolutionary thinking. I basically had to receive an extended lecture version of the above from some party members very recently because I was saying “escalate escalate escalate”. That drive of action for action’s sake, action to satisfy our emotional desire for justice, is an anarchistic way of thinking. It’s not how MLs analyze or carry out revolutions.
This shit will not work if we don’t have the masses on our side. Right now, though repression is increasing, we can still operate more-or-less out in the open. They aren’t black bagging or assassinating organizers consistently or in large numbers. We must take advantage of that time to build the revolutionary organization and the broad periphery of support in our class. And things are trending well in that direction; the increase in repression and an escalation of economic warfare on the working class are producing exactly the popular results a Leninist analysis would predict. More and more people are getting wise to the fact that we need to take drastic action to overthrow capitalism and build socialism. But it’s not enough people yet. If we pressed the revolution button today and dedicated all of our resources to the military conflict, we would lose. The revolution would be strangled in its crib and the decades of work to build what we have at this point would be wasted. Is that worth the catharsis of violence against the ruling class?
No. A revolutionary must be patient. We must strike when we can win, and that will be when the masses are with us. As Lenin said, we must think not in the thousands or hundreds of thousands but in the tens of millions.
Yeah that’s pretty much what my folks are saying with an added caveat of further building and developing the consciousness of workers in both unionized and non-unionized workplaces towards anti-capitalistism with a focus on u.s monopoly capital being the key problem of our every day lives and not which political party is in the chair right now. - alongside coalition building for a popular front.
The waves of militant outbursts against the state will occur whether or not we’re a part of it - obviously having boots on the ground trying to drum up support for the overall movement and work to ensure collective safety in what little ways we can is good work. Also no fedposting. - yet the key issue communists must engage with is the absolute drudgery of rebuilding our material presence within the working class. Building an actual revolutionary base is fucking boring collective work that takes time and commitment. Something that has no appeal in our contemporary hyper-individualist society of instant gratification.
Well said, my thoughts exactly. Now is the time to engage with the working class, not engage in open warfare.
How do you know when it’s time?
There are several pre-requisites, but the most obvious are clear answers to:
As it pertains to this thread:
A larger scale movement would need to answer these same questions, and that’s just the start!
The masses will initiate actual revolutionary action themselves. It will, hopefully, be very clear. We want to incite that action, but we can’t undertake it on our own initiative. They will only do so because of a vanguard party that has sufficient political influence to cause such a society-wide incitement.
I think you are moving too fast from Point A to Point F, or whichever the point is where you blow up an ICE detention center.
Here, you need to apply the same Mass Work line you would apply to any ML organization.
You need to work in the street with the different unorganized masses to solve particular material issues that arise from ICE using organized work. This work can inspire some of the masses to join the initial politically based organization to create legal frameworks that help expedite the grassroots mass work, or maybe you can jump directly into having a smaller amount of those people trascend the political into the idological and join the vanguard itself.
This process would go on until hopefully, the readings of the force correlation are positive to the point you blow up that ICE facility lmao. Real draw the rest of the fucking owl hours.
But yeah thats vanguard party work in a nutshell.
Have you seen the detention center downtown? Even if you could deal with all the cops in the streets around you’re talking about besieging a whole big ass building full of cops with guns. Be real here for a second. At this point the best we can really hope for is de-arresting and/or causing enough agitation and conflict that they stop trying to disappear people to brazenly.
Tbh I don’t think having a bunch of people is enough to do anything. Blowing a hole in the wall of the detention center to let people go free might be the closest to a quick practical solution, but it’s not really quick or practical.
Ignoring the suicide mission of assaulting a fortified position full of armed pigs with rocks and fireworks, where are the people being freed going to go exactly? Who’s willing to shelter them in the immediate aftermath? Can you trust that the people volunteering to shelter them aren’t snitches or have ulterior motives for refugees being pursued by the state? Are people able to financially and physically support an influx of people who have to live underground for years, if not decades?
Way ahead of yourself bud
Me when im killing the cop in my head