Image is of the aftermath of an Israeli bombing of Beirut in 2006.
We are now almost one year into the war and genocide in Gaza. Despite profound hardship, the Gazan Resistance continues its battles against the enemy, entirely undeterred. Despite Israeli proclamations throughout 2024 that they have cleared out Hamas from various places throughout Gaza, we still see regular attacks and ambushes against Zionist forces. Just today (Monday), Al Qassam fighters ambushed and destroyed another convoy of Israeli vehicles. The predictions early on in the war were that Israel would defeat Hamas in mere months, needing only until December, then January, and so on. This has proven very much untrue. Israel is stuck in the mud; unable to destroy their enemy due to their lack of knowledge about the “Gaza Metro” and, of course, a lack of actual fighting skill, given how many times I’ve seen Zionists getting shot while they gaze wistfully out of windows.
The same quagmire will occur in Lebanon, only considerably worse. Both Nasrallah and Sinwar possess a similar strategy of luring Zionist forces onto known, friendly territory, replete with traps and ambushes, to bleed them dry of equipment, manpower, and the will to continue fighting. The scale of the invasion could fall anywhere on the spectrum from “very limited” - more of a series of raids on Hezbollah positions than truly trying to occupy land - to a total invasion which would seek to permanently take control of Southern Lebanon. Neither is likely to destroy, or even substantially diminish Hezbollah’s fighting abilities. This is not wishful thinking: Hezbollah has convincingly defeated Israel twice before in its history, pushing them from their territory, and both times Hezbollah had almost no missiles and a limited supply of other equipment, relying on improvisation as often as not. The Hezbollah of 2024 is an entirely different organization to that of the early 2000s.
Attempts to drive wedges between Hezbollah and the rest of Lebanon are also unlikely to succeed. Hezbollah is not just a military force, it is extremely interlinked into various communities throughout Lebanon, drawing upon those communities to recruit soldiers. Throughout its history, it has provided education, healthcare, reconstruction, and dozens of other services one would attribute to a state. Amal Saad’s recent suggestion of using “quasi-state actor” as a more respectful replacement for the typical “non-state actor” seems advisable. And the decentralized command structures, compartmented leadership, strong succession planning, and aforementioned community ties almost entirely neutralizes the effectiveness of assassinations. Hezbollah’s Deputy Secretary General Naim Qassem has confirmed that Hezbollah’s path has been set by Nasrallah, and his martyrdom will not stop nor even pause their efforts. Additionally, he confirmed that despite the recent attacks by Israel which nominally focussed on destroying missile depots, Hezbollah’s supply of weapons has not been degraded, and they are still only using the minimum of their capabilities.
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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.
Richard D. Wolff & Michael Hudson: Middle East Exploding, Ukraine Crumbling! the US Take Action?
Michael Hudson had a normal one today. Even Richard Wolff was like wtf.
Also a lot of interesting anecdotes of Hudson (who apparently still live in the 1970s) during his time at the Hudson Institute (no relation, named after Hudson River) dealing with the neocons.
Judge for yourself if these are banger quotes or the deranged ramblings of a madman:
- “The United States doesn’t want to see a ceasefire, it wants to use Israel as a catapult; everything that happened today was planned out just 50 years back in 1973-74. I sat in meetings with the head of Mossad who then became Netanyahu’s chief military advisor. The whole strategy was worked out essentially by the Defense Department by the neoliberals and [Henry] “Scoop” Jackson - the ultra-right wing neocon who sponsored them all.”
- “The starting point for all US strategy since the 1970s was that Democracies no longer can field a domestic army with a military draft. America is not in a position able to field enough of an army to invade a country.”
- “That means today’s tactics are limited to bombing, not occupying countries. Neither the Israeli army or any other army are really able to invade and try to take over a country the way armies did during WWII.”
- “The US wars haven’t scaled back because it has a fallback position - it was going to rely on foreign troops to do the fighting as proxies instead of itself. The first example was to create the Wahhabi Jihadi fighters in Afghanistan and Jimmy Carter mobilized them against the secular Afghan interests. Carter justified this by saying, yes they’re Muslims, but after all we all believe in God, so the answer to the secular state of Afghanistan was Wahhabi fanaticism”
- “The US realized that in order for a country to fight to the last Afghan, the last Israeli, the last Ukrainian, you really need a country whose spirit is one of hatred.”
- “Herman Kahn’s (model for Dr. Strangelove) greatest achievement was to convince the US empire builders that the key to achieving their control of the Middle East was to rely on Israeli as their Foreign Legion.”
- “The US realized then that the only kind of full scale war that a Democracy can afford is an Atomic War, but that only works against adversaries who can’t retaliate. The result of today’s military alliances means that any attempt to use nuclear weapons is going to risk full scale nuclear war. What is left for the US? There is only one form of non-Atomic war that Democracies can afford, and that’s Terrorism. You should look at Ukraine and Israel as the Terrorist alternative to Atomic War.”
- “The whole idea of Ukraine and Israel is to bomb civilians, not military targets. It’s a fight to destroy the population under an Ideology of Genocide - that is absolutely central and not an accident.”
- “Zionism has been Christianized and has accepted the hatred of the Other”
- “There cannot be peace in Asia or in Ukraine, because then the status quo would remain and the US would not be able to take over these countries as satellites; peace would mean dependent countries gaining independence”
- “Many neocons at the Hudson Institute, 50 years ago, were Trotskyists or their fathers were Trotskyists and they have picked up Trotsky’s idea of Permanent Revolution; but instead of the Permanent Revolution spreading from the Soviet Union, the neocons believe the Permanent Revolution is the American Empire itself spreading to the entire world.”
- “Who wants to live in a world where we can’t control? Who wants to live in a world where we can’t siphon off their economic surplus for ourselves? That’s the kind of mentality we’re dealing with.”
Honestly feels like half of news mega heads would probably ramble like this at the dinner table after two glasses of their preferred alcoholic drink.
Yeah I basically did this at a bar I frequent last week and I need to wait at least a month to go back and hope nobody remembers. I have a few bars to rotate through like that
“The US realized that in order for a country to fight to the last Afghan, the last Israeli, the last Ukrainian, you really need a country whose spirit is one of hatred.”
Seems right to me. If there was an “Israel” next to Cuba or Venezuela then the people of those countries, I think, would be experiencing lives not unlike those of the people of Palestine. It doesn’t quite work on the Korean Peninsula since you don’t have that fundamental hatred there, no desire by either side to reunite if it means incredible amounts of bloodshed.
I might quibble with calling it “hatred” only because to me that implies some sort of ancient grudge or something. I just think hatred and settler colonialism are dialectically related. Feeling as those you are entitled to someone else’s land because you are deserving and the other isn’t. I have read accounts of settlers in North America in the 19th century, and they are every bit as hate-filled, bloodthirsty and savage as Zionist settlers in the West Bank are today.
I don’t necessarily think they’re wrong, but this is how you would sound like to normal people when you talk about this stuff lol.
Like ok I don’t think neocons are trots, I don’t know what christianized means. His description of America’s divide et impera strategy is a bit dramatic “spirit of hatred” like it’s an innate quality or something. But overall he pretty much outlines the shift to modern warfare after vietnam and the reasons for this pretty coherently.
“The starting point for all US strategy since the 1970s was that Democracies no longer can field a domestic army with a military draft.
This is incorrect.
Imperialist democracies can’t field a domestic army with a draft. I’m quite sure that you can field a domestic army with a draft as long as the cause is just though. The issue is that you can’t fight wars people don’t want.
This was Hudson’s argument. The protests that Johnson had experienced shaped their imperialist strategy forward. He also considered the “Democracies” he mentioned as not democratic and simply imperialist states. Listen to the full episode for the exposition.
Trotsky was literally his godfather lol!
Hudson’s father was a labor leader in Minneapolis and a lot of Trotsky’s supporters who fled the USSR ended up being their family friends, who would tell stories about how Stalin was the literal devil. He grew up in that kind of household. His father was jailed for being a socialist leader and I also heard second hand that his aunt was “disappeared” by the feds for doing labor activism.
Also, a lot of what we know about Stalin today only became available after Putin fully rehabilitated Stalin in the 2000s. Before that, both the Soviet and Russian texts were a lot more murkier about Stalin, and these were the materials that historians had to work on. I don’t blame someone in the West who became politically aware in the 20th century for being anti-Stalin simply due to how much propaganda there were against Stalin since the 1950s.
The first four points are good, then it starts getting more and more deranged, but he manages to bring it back by pointing out that Ukraine and Israel bomb civilians on purpose (Zelensky’s “victory plan” for Ukraine included the terror bombings of Russian cities using NATO weaponry), then it descends into derangement again, but he manages to bring it back with the last point, which is the key to everything.
The quotes were just random excerpts taken whenever I thought he got over-excited lol. I’m not going to transcribe a full hour of content. But he did give detailed anecdotes about his dealing with the neocons back in the day. Basically what he’s saying is that he’s heard the exact strategy being planned out at the Hudson Institute (the role would be taken over later by RAND Corporation) since the 1970s.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
