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

If you have evidence of Israeli crimes and atrocities that you wish to preserve, there is a thread here in which to do so.

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.


  • micnd90 [he/him,any]
    ·
    edit-2
    10 months ago

    I'm reading Engel's classic "The Conditions of Working Class in England." I'm kinda not impressed so far, okay the thesis of the book was good, but it is a simple observation and probably high school report tier. He did it in a somewhat condescending way, because Engels was an aristocrat, son of German industrialist who owns cotton mills. He made his report as if the working class are just subject to study, like physics and chemistry and it is fairly dehumanizing. The book was written with a very distant narrative. There is also a lot of Engels romanticizing rural country life and the good 'ol days, in a way that is a bit chuddish, going in on a lot of tangents that "back in the countryside, people would get married and be traad, but in the cities people are degen alcoholic druggies and there are prostitutes everywhere." I grew up in rural area and I'm pretty sure there are way more alcoholic druggies in rural areas than in the cities. Halfway through and I'm not liking this Engels guy

    • Greenleaf [he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      10 months ago

      Full disclosure: I loved the book, and I wish someone would write something similar for 2024 for life in a place like Dhaka.

      I had a different take on it. Yes, it does read like he’s giving a “report” on the situation because that is kinda what he was doing. He had only been in Manchester for like 2 years when he wrote it but he spent a lot of time personally checking stuff out. He was doing what we would call today investigative journalism. Just because you are somewhat distant from the subject doesn’t mean you don’t care or see yourself as “better”, you’re just trying to appear as objective as possible. His goal was to describe the conditions workers had to live in at the time, which not really different from our times, the middle and upper classes were sheltered from. If someone today wrote a book about the conditions migrant workers have to endure, I would not necessarily be critical if it doesn’t include a bunch of theory or if the author’s not pouring their emotions into it because that’s not the point of the book.

      Regarding the “all these city kids are a bunch of drunks now”… I get what you are saying but I think the point he was trying to make was that it was capitalism that was turning the kids into “removed”. In those same chapters those same kids are working like 12-16 hour days from age 5. Any kid with that kind of life, it’s not surprising that you might turn to booze and prostitution when you’re 13. It’s cause and effect. Engels doesn’t explicitly say this but I think the connection is heavily implied by him. Like, it’s an objectively a very bad thing if you have kids involved in that. Engels isn’t blaming “the city” in general, he’s describing what life is like for the proletariat, and the cause of all the suffering is capitalism.

      It’s not a work of theory, it really is just a “report”. That said if your not digging it, if you ever plan on reading the first volume of Capital, Marx recaps a lot of what Engels says in that book anyway, so I don’t think it’s a required read by itself or anything.

    • Maoo [none/use name]
      ·
      10 months ago

      Engels was low key not actually that good at theory lol. He was a poster and a good benefactor of our boy Marx but not as great of a direct contributor as cool pictures with him, Marx, Lenin, and Stalin would have you believe.

      • IceWallowCum [he/him]
        ·
        edit-2
        10 months ago

        He did co-write the manifesto, edited Capital II, III and later editions of I, plus is responsible for most of Marx's texts having survived at all IIRC.

        • Greenleaf [he/him]
          ·
          edit-2
          10 months ago

          I tend to think of it like a Lennon/McCartney thing. They were better together than either of them separately. Like Lennon, Marx is clearly the more talented one. But he needed McCartney to sand off his edges. The best director in the world still needs a talented editor, and without it the movie will be shit.

        • Maoo [none/use name]
          ·
          10 months ago

          Capital is not well-edited so that's (accidentally) kind of a backhanded compliment!

          It's not that Engels was bad or useless, he was very helpful to Marx and was a good collaborator. He's just in no way a major figure without Marx and he reveals his mediocrity in many of his (often chauvinist or blatantly Eurocentric or... just kind of intellectually lazy) works.

          I think it's a useful exercise to critically examine why Engels was part of Marxist canonization and why that process existed at all. It's one of those things that is now taken for granted.

      • TreadOnMe [none/use name]
        ·
        10 months ago

        Highly disagree. The German Ideology is essential to understanding Marxism's materialist and moral grounding.

        • Maoo [none/use name]
          ·
          10 months ago

          I think it can be entirely skipped as its important concepts appear in later works, including Capital, and a lot of it is polemic specific to its time and Eurocentric speculation. Probably the weakest work with Marx's name on it, it only became known in any way due to spelunking by Soviets while they built a canon. No one read it until the 1930s.

          Pretty good example of what I'm talking about, really. Engels' contributions as a theorist were exaggerated to a degree by the Soviets, such as these previously unpublished works that had basically no real impact until the 1950s-1960s. It's not that he's useless, he was a good benefactor and collaborator, but without Marx Engels was minor.

          • TreadOnMe [none/use name]
            ·
            10 months ago

            Again, I disagree. It lays out those fundamentals in a way that is then built upon in Capital so you know what concepts you are looking for. It is a stepping stone to the greater canon, and the Soviets were correct to include it. You can skip it, but there is literally no reason to, it is an outline to what comes later.

    • zed_proclaimer [he/him]
      ·
      10 months ago

      He made his report as if the working class are just subject to study, like physics and chemistry and it is fairly dehumanizing. The book was written with a very distant narrative.

      This is actually how it should be, scientific socialism requires doing a cold dispassionate autopsy