Israel trying to pass the hospital bombing off as Palestine doing it is utterly disgusting and guarantees Netanyahu a spot in the deepest pit of Hell for all eternity, obviously, but do not forget that
a) the only reason why Westerners will believe it is because they want to believe it - they are not being brainwashed and this is not some masterful propaganda being weaved around us to turn kind-hearted people into monsters,
b) no Westerner opinions matter at all. In most Western countries there is no real anti-Israel option to vote for even if they did realize that Israel was a giant factory for crimes against humanity, and Westerners protesting against things in general almost never achieves anything (tens of millions protested for BLM in 2020 and not only did the situation not change, it got worse), and
c) the people whose opinions do matter (both the people in the region, and the leaders who aren't already Zionist compradors) already know that Israel is full of shit and that they just murdered nearly a thousand civilians in a single bomb attack.
It is despair-inducing to think that the genocidal Zionist entity is so brazenly, so smugly getting away with bullshitting this away into a cloud of confusion, as they release their metaphorical squid ink just like they did with the stupid babies story, but the propaganda and the media narrative that they are creating isn't what matters. It cannot address the fundamental contradictions ripping the country, the region, and the world apart any more than masterfully-applied makeup can fix a stab wound. It can merely obfuscate.
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.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
The Country of the Week is still Palestine! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants.
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
The weekly update isn't coming because I'm sick and too focussed on the collapse of the Zionist entity.
Links and Stuff
The bulletins site is down.
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can.
Resources For Understanding The War
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.
Telegram Channels
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
Pro-Russian
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
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.
Last week's discussion post.
Correct (except for the petrodollar part, see below), as long as a commodity is for sale in dollar, America can get it for free. This was how the US built an entire global supply chain centered around exporting its industrial capacity to China, and have its “free lunch” simply by printing money. The problem with defense is that nobody is going to want to sell their military equipments to America to be used against them (except maybe the Europeans).
The neoliberalization of the US military industrial complex came after the collapse of the USSR, which was preceded immediately by the total and complete domination of the US military weaponry against the Soviet-armed Iraqi army during the 1991 Gulf War. With almost zero significant losses, it became clear that the US military hardware was so far ahead of the Soviet armament (at least the export variants) that after the fall of the USSR, together with the collapse of the Soviet arms industry, America no longer needs to build up its weaponry anymore. China was still irrelevant at that point.
So, how can the MIC continue to survive when America has no more enemies to challenge them? Through grifting. By proposing and promising next generation military equipments that are so impossibly complex, and require endless upgrades to become even minimally operational, the US Federal Government was sucked into a spiral of perpetually financing military projects that serve more as “luxury items” than suitable for operations in actual modern warfare.
The F-35 program, for example, is now over-budgeted by trillions of dollars, is teemed with hundreds of severe defects with no permanent fixes in sight, requires complex maintenance and logistics that are completely unrealistic in a real war. A state-of-the-art Formula 1 race car, if you will, that is over-engineered for urban asphalt roads at best, and completely useless for gravel and rocky terrain at worst.
The only way out for the US to regain its military strength is the re-industrialization of its military industrial sector, which is not going to happen because it runs counter to the benefits of the financial capitalists i.e. Wall Street. This is why the US today has only a single factory in Akron, OH that still produces the M1 Abrams main battle tank, at a production rate of 1 to 12 per year. Russia can easily produce a hundred of their MBTs, perhaps even more now after the SMO, each year.
Regarding petrodollar - I see this “myth” kept getting perpetuated among the anti-imperialist circles. It is true that the dollarization of fossil fuel commodity is one of the means through which the US exerts its control over the energy importing countries through monetary imperialism. However, it is far from the only manner from which the US dollar derives its monetary power. The end of petrodollar is objectively beneficial to many developing countries that rely on earning dollars to purchase fuel, but it wouldn’t cause anything more than a minor dent to the hegemonic status of the US dollar.
Where does that power comes from?