Image is a frame taken from this video of Iranian missiles raining down on Israel without interception due to a weak and depleted air defense system after a year of war and genocide.
Mao, 1956:
Now U.S. imperialism is quite powerful, but in reality it isn't. It is very weak politically because it is divorced from the masses of the people and is disliked by everybody and by the American people too. In appearance it is very powerful but in reality it is nothing to be afraid of, it is a paper tiger. Outwardly a tiger, it is made of paper, unable to withstand the wind and the rain. I believe the United States is nothing but a paper tiger.
When we say U.S. imperialism is a paper tiger, we are speaking in terms of strategy. Regarding it as a whole, we must despise it. But regarding each part, we must take it seriously. It has claws and fangs. We have to destroy it piecemeal. For instance, if it has ten fangs, knock off one the first time, and there will be nine left, knock off another, and there will be eight left. When all the fangs are gone, it will still have claws. If we deal with it step by step and in earnest, we will certainly succeed in the end.
Strategically, we must utterly despise U.S. imperialism. Tactically, we must take it seriously. In struggling against it, we must take each battle, each encounter, seriously. At present, the United States is powerful, but when looked at in a broader perspective, as a whole and from a long-term viewpoint, it has no popular support, its policies are disliked by the people, because it oppresses and exploits them. For this reason, the tiger is doomed. Therefore, it is nothing to be afraid of and can be despised. But today the United States still has strength, turning out more than 100 million tons of steel a year and hitting out everywhere. That is why we must continue to wage struggles against it, fight it with all our might and wrest one position after another from it. And that takes time.
Please check out the HexAtlas!
The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week's thread is here.
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.
I'm sure there are ways this is true, but the current genocide in Gaza is incredibly unpopular and the very large majority of Americans want an end to Israeli aid.
Probably only 25% of Americans actually benefit in a material way from imperialism (settler colonialism is a different matter).
Can you tell that to the like 75% of people I encounter god damn it
I mean, it is theoretically unpopular in terms of polling. But Americans aren't actually doing anything about it, for the most part. They don't attend protests or rallies, they won't commit to not voting for the administration doing the genocide, they don't join orgs.
Obviously some do but the statistics would be stark in contrast. Say 70% say they are against the genocide of Gaza but only (roughly) 0.1% will actually join an org or do any work on it. (Roughly) 1% will actually go to an action, literally just be present.
In reality, Americans like to feel like they are the good guys and against bad things but they do fuck all about it, including even educating themselves, and when they do take action it is almost always what the bourgeois political class tells them to do.
Nope. Wrong. 100% of westerners benefit from imperialism. usa is built on genocide americans benefit directly from that imperialism. Oil is only as cheap as it is because West Asian oil producers live in fear of war. Anything manufactured overseas is cheap because imperialism has supressed living conditions and wages through violence or the threat of it.
I did specify settler colonialism as distinct.
Yes, things are "cheap". But real wages are much lower than they used to be when Americans actually played a part in manufacturing, so their relative purchasing power is actually declined. In the same time frame, every single component of the social democratic safety net has been shredded. The expansion of production imperialism and mass labor exploitation from the global south has coincided exactly with the degradation of American life along every single measurable axis.
Huge numbers of Americans live in cities and homes built before the Cold War and especially long before unquestioned US hegemony, and they can't afford those. No infrastructure that isn't a highway (which actively makes life worse in every metric) has been built since before WWII. Every piece of water, sewage, electrical, other utility infrastructure is in deep disrepair. Healthcare is completely inaccessible for millions and millions of people. Education is abysmal. Depression and obesity run rampant. Millions of people are killed by drug epidemics, COVID, and cars.
The benefits of imperialism are funneled to the capitalist class and the labor aristocracy, which is absolutely real but limited to a large minority. The majority of the US working class has received nothing but piles of plastic garbage and garbage that resembles food. In no quantifiable sense has the extension of US imperialism improved the lives of most Americans.
Edit: we should never forget that the fundamental feature of imperialism as we understand it is the dominance of monopoly capital. The effects of monopoly in the imperial core are also extremely bad for the working class, and the US today is more monopolistic than any large country has ever been.
yes those masses and growing of homeless and those bleeding out in gutters in ghettoes and those being wasted away dying at 50 in lumpenized meth-addicted post-industrial towns and those in run down slum neighborhoods with poisoned water, and those lining mass prisons wall to wall in greater proportion than anywhere in history really 100% benefitting because of cheap oil and 2ndhand toasters.
to say nothing of capitalism's contradictions being definitionally impossible to outrun. The rate of profit always falls. Anti-imperial and de-colonial struggles will always continue until they win. China is only growing as well and actively has been speeding this up for ages. Monopoly capital being financialized in globalized firms and stored in swiss banks etc. does jack shit for many but the few who own it and the tiny number of middlemen. This just smacks of a detached and privileged position that comes from not spending a lot of times in truly poor and destitute and broken and left-behind areas even in the US in the 'heart of the beast' so to speak. Idk how anyone who's lived and worked in these kinds of places could say this kind of stuff and the other ultra handsitting stuff you said elsewhere, which also erases a long history of struggle which prompted multiple waves of reactionary crackdowns and criminalization and both bureaucratized and street white terror campaigns for a reason.
You can be oppressed by the system but also directly benefit from it. The 2 are not mutually exclusive.
The benefits of being in the imperial core trickle down even to the people living in the cracks. The higher rate of dug addicted homeless in America is not just because of wealth inequality but also because homeless drug addiction outside the imperial core is an extremely short existence. Try being drug addicted and homeless Mexico or Russia and watch your life expectancy get cut in half.
Don't make assumptions about who I am and what I have seen. I was homeless for most of my 20s. I spent a couple winters living under bridges in america because being a homeless bum in California with no government assistance was easier than being homeless in my home country.
deleted by creator