Image is of Assad and his family.
After less than two weeks of retreating with few shots fired and little resistance, the SAA has retreated into, well, a state of non-existence. This thereby ends a conflict that has been simmering for over a decade. With the end of this conflict, another begins: the carving up of what used to be Syria between Israel and Turkey, with perhaps the odd Syrian faction getting a rump state here and there. Both Israel and Turkey have begun military operations, with Israel working on expanding their territory in Syria and bombing military bases to ensure as little resistance as possible.
Israeli success in Syria is interesting to contrast against their failures in Gaza and Lebanon. A short time ago, Israel failed to make significant territorial progress in Lebanon due to Hezbollah's resistance despite the heavy hits they had recently taken, and was forced into a ceasefire with little to show for the manpower and equipment lost and the settlers displaced. The war with Lebanon was fast, but still slow enough to allow a degree of analysis and prediction. In contrast, the sheer speed of Syria's collapse has made analysis near-impossible beyond obvious statements like "this is bad" and "Assad is fucking up"; by the time a major Syrian city had fallen, you barely had time to digest the implications before the next one was under threat.
There is still too much that we don't know about the potential responses (and non-responses) of other countries in the region - Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, and Russia, for example. I think that this week and the next will see a lot of statements made by various parties and an elucidation of how the conflict will progress. The only thing that seems clear is that we are in the next stage of the conflict, and perhaps have been, in retrospect, since Nasrallah's assassination. This stage has been and will be far more chaotic as the damage to Israel compounds and they are willing to take greater and greater risks to stay in power. It will also involve Israel causing destruction all throughout the region, rather than mostly localizing it in Gaza and southern Lebanon. Successful gambles like with Syria may or may not outweigh the unsuccessful ones like with Lebanon. This is a similar road to the one apartheid South Africa took, but there are also too many differences to say if the destination will be the same.
What is certain is that Assad's time in power can be summarized as a failure, both to be an effective leader and to create positive economic conditions. His policies were actively harmful to internal stability for no real payoff and by the end, all goodwill had been fully depleted. By the end, the SAA did not fight back; not because of some wunderwaffen on the side of HST, but because there was nothing to fight for, and internal cohesion rapidly disintegrated.
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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.
Bitcoin keeps going up.
Apparently because Trump wants an oil like strategic reserve for crypto. Public money being used directly to stabilize (and over time increase) price for such an useless commodity.
All of this implying that Bitcoin is kinda worthless without Dollars (and other fiat currencies) flowing into it.
It's not useless, our national security state does crypto pump and dumps to raise black ops funds.
Can't they print more of the shitty paper money the US uses?
For some reason the intelligence services don't like to do some things with "official" funds, even though they'll never be audited or even questioned about it. It's also why they sell drugs.
Bitcoin is going all the way up, and probably has no ceiling as long as the dollar can sustain it, until a recession happens (where there is no sign of that happening - the rates are still high and more and more dollars are being pumped into the economy as we speak)
The real question is how will this affect the role of the dollar? It would be incredibly foolish to trade away the immense advantage of the dollar for a speculative and finite asset like bitcoin. This can affect the US government fiscal spending, and most importantly, do imperialism abroad. It could have the regressive effect of dragging the US back to the gold standard/Bretton Woods era but with a shittier asset.
The US cannot do imperialism with bitcoin. Surely they won’t allow Trump to let that happen? The most realistic take I can see is that the US is pumping up crypto (a virtual asset) to prop up the strength of the dollar (creating demand for the dollar to buy crypto) i.e. Michael Hudson’s take.
Recession is coming, more likely than not, in the next two years IMO. Corporate debt maturities are starting to hit on companies that were early adopters of liability management exercises and weren't able to turn operations around, and creditors aren't as willing to amend and extend anymore. Restructuring firms (bankruptcy consulting) are seeing a big uptick in business. A lot more PE firms are having trouble getting out of investments at the multiples they planned on, or even finding a buyer, and are starting to be more selective about their investment.
I don't think it'll affect Dollar itself that much. If US pumps up the prices that much (so much that its entire price is supported by market operations of the Government) it'll become a riskier alternative to treasuries but without any Government guarantees. Ultimately, people (and corps) will sell it for Dollars.
The Roman Empire didn’t benefit from debasing its currency either but it did and the warring generals era was disastrous but it happened because each general was looking out for themselves rather than for the empire overall.
The empire isn’t actually a monolith. There are many oligarchs and while their interests largely align, it’s a Venn diagram. If one set of players benefit from undermining the dollar in favor of bitcoin then they’ll do it for their personal benefit even if that weakens the structure as a whole.
Maybe the bankers will fight this and maybe they’ll beat the tech bros but maybe they don’t and the tech bros use crypto to steal power from the bankers. Even if that weakens the power of the empire overall, that still equates to more power for the tech bros themselves so worthwhile for them.
once again i should have just listened to Liz from Trueanon. and now i'm in that FOMO mode where i can't justify buying this high but part of me knows it might just keep going and going
honestly though the transaction fees hitting you for everything you do with it makes me hesitant to treat it like a stock and sell off after 15-20% gain or whatever because it's just so annoying
also as soon as i buy some i'm sure something crazy will happen to crash it
if you all want me to crash the U.S. economy and maybe kill the dollar just tell me to buy a couple hundred dollars of btc
Personally I don't think it's done yet. My main question is "can this get stupider?" And as stupid as this talk is, nothing has actually happened yet, there is still a lot of room for more stupidity in this market imo. I'm waiting for something at least as stupid as bored apes and the NFT-everywhere craze.
Bitcoin strengthens/props up the dollar since trading requires conversion through USDT
Leon probably wants to cash out on the bitcoin he bought 5 years ago.