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.
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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.
The vibes of western mainstream media reporting on Ukraine has become a lot darker than it used to be. This is an exerpt from an article about Ukrainian conscripts receiving five weeks of rudimentary military training in England before being shipped off to the trenches:
Writing stuff like this would have gotten you labelled as a traiterous Putin bot a year ago.
What a terrible analogy lol, you use gravel to make roads
I think he was attempting to use the "gravel in the gears" analogy but botched it and made it sound like gravel being thrown to make a road less slippery and easier to drive on.
I think that line about Russians seeing paved roads for the first time in
may have been projection
They're still going with the Russian zerg rush narrative though
Russia's strategy is really fucked up; they have all the recon drones they need and are outclassing Ukraine as the Western media itself admits, but the Russian generals are just so stupid and cruel that they're sending a thousand unarmed soldiers into the fog of war anyway because the Russian brainpan is missing the key phrenological markers of intelligence that would allow them to use the drones that they're provided. not only that, but Russia is in a constant state of mobilization in order to keep these atrocious human wave losses up, but unlike every society on the planet up to this point, Putin's evil genius has found a way to do it such that nobody in the population even talks about it, let alone complain, so the evidence for these mobilizations and losses are really hard to confirm
This hasn't been widely published yet, but recent studies have discovered that the Russians have actually developed certain hivemind capabilities. When Russian soldiers are killed, that loss is immediately felt by the collective, alerting them to Ukrainian presence in that specific location.
By God you're saying they have developed their own Neuralink chips? We need Elon on the case right away
Wow, that is really fucked up! I guess my own slavic brain was too stupid to understand this. Thank you.
The primitive slav can derrive no military tactic except to sadistically send it's own offspring in to the enemy guns until they jam. /s
I think the narrative comes from the West not having fought a pitched war since wwii. If their enemies actually send real infantry attacks the west calls it "human wave" attacks bc they can't really understand the idea of their designated enemies fighting for their homes.
Projection lmao. Guy whos getting sent to meat grinder needs to believe that its the other guys who are getting thrown in the meat grinder.
Everyone in the west saw Enemy at the Gates and extrapolated that to the entire USSR war doctrine and by extension, modern Russia.
Not to say this isn’t projection, but that is essentially how Russia was using Wagner troops when they were doing the heavy lifting. The idea that it was wave after wave like it was Stalingrad is BS though.
Edit: I should clarify that point actually. To my understanding Wagner guys were being used to bait Ukrainians into revealing the locations of artillery pieces, missile batteries, enemy hard point locations basically. Then once a definitive target was made a precision munition would take it out. Sometimes you gotta do it more than once, yes recon drones were used, war is hard. This really isn’t any different than what some western forces would do in that situation, in fact this job would probably go to a special operations unit and be lauded as such because you’re pretty much guaranteed to take at least some fire and you need to be able to break contact very precisely.
It's great that they can just stop and sue for peace any time.
The government can sue for peace, the conscripts can not. The best they can hope for is to find some Russians to surrender to without being shot by their own fascist blocking troops first.
They ship them to the U.K. and back? Seems like an opportunity to get them away from their sadistic, overlord murderers, TBH....