Image is from Futurama.
Happy holidays, fellow godless communists. We are in year three of the Five-Year Plan to eliminate all Christmas cheer and create a world free of the joys and festivity of Christmas. Nobody should have to be reminded that in our concrete brutalist communist strongholds, NO ornaments are allowed in December. Please report any Christmas trees, snowflakes, baubles, and presents to the evil secret police, and anybody caught violating their Volcel Pledge by having a tentative kiss under a mistletoe will be shot on sight.
Developments lately have been grim. Our Supreme Communist Dictator Brandon is being removed from office by Christmas-loving patriots, and soon, Christmas will adorn the White House for another four years. This is obviously very disappointing, but while Christmas joy is strictly prohibited, good vibes are still strongly encouraged. Revolutionary optimism (a term we only bring out when things are going very badly and we need to be delusional) shall triumph over defeatist rhetoric by stooges of the Christmas regime.
We must have hope. Our foreign allies aiding us in destroying Christmas now possess hypersonic weaponry, allowing us to compete with and overcome the engine technology powering Santa's sleigh. Abroad, they have destroyed factories and hit cities with missiles travelling at unimaginable speeds into precise targets, while the Christmas regime struggles to produce their own such missiles, as they are still reliant on aircraft bombing campaigns. Precision has a quality all its own, or something along those lines. We just have to hold out another two years or so, and I swear to you: we will live in a world without this accursed holiday.
No current struggle session discussion here in the news megathread please, you will be banned from the comm and your comment will be removed.
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.
Back from my self-imposed Hexbear exile, I needed to turn off news (which dramatically failed) and stop reading some of the weird ass tantrums here. Now some unrelated points as usual:
Situation in Syria is slowly reaching a new chaotic state. Numerous sectarian clashes between HTS and Alawites, and Kurds vs Turkish-backed fighters in the north. The main cities are still calm and in an optimistic mood though, I was in a video call with my cousin on Monday and he filmed some of the markets and main squares in Damascus, it looked pretty calm and people are still in some sort of revolutionary euphoria. Iraq 2003-2007 is still definitely on the cards, sectarian battles and stuff like that will escalate and reach a climax before things settle. The new government from a pure bureaucratic standpoint are doing okay imo though, things are slowly returning to normal and somehow functioning.
Russian crossing of the Oskol was strangely uneventful, they just crossed from 2-3 points and established a pretty solid bridgehead on the other side of the river. I expected some grand battle when they would inevitably cross the river one day, but it was pretty anticlimactic and Ukrainian troops on the west bank of the river seem to be unprepared and outnumbered even by some Russian troops without heavy equipment. Kurakhove, Velika Novosilka and Toretsk seem to be wrapping up by the end of January, next step is probably Pokrovsk until some bigger Russian movements by summer 2025. The war in the current pace still doesn't reach any final stage until summer 2026.
Visiting Iraq with the wife and the kid in around a month, you'll get a trip report and some non-doxxing pics if things permit.
I don't like how things are going in Iran, the country seems to be entering a hard period of decline and they'll be Syria'd by Trump and Israel if they don't get their shit together soon.
This website has some of the dumbest drama I've ever seen lmao, grow up
I heard people describe current situation in Iran with perestroika. I dunno much
Don't know about Iran specifically, but from what I know about the Middle East, many of their economies, even those that had a lot of state intervention, are experiencing a decay that is analogous to Soviet zastoy/stagnation period.
Even with Israel occupying more territories in Syria?
Even with the sectarian infighting you mentioned?
I guess you can consider this Baathist stable...
Well yeah, the Baathist state was stable until it wasn't, and considering the past 14 years, it feels insane that anyone could sit in a car from Daraa to Idlib without getting extorted at a military checkpoint by some NDF robbers. I was also just talking from a bureaucratic standpoint, the overall situation is shitty of course. It's just impressive that simple services such as the streets getting cleaned, border checkpoints working and wages being paid are functioning despite the whole government evaporating in a week.
And this is why Al Sham has left the site
LP is low key supporting HTS and talking about how competent they are and how much euphoria there is (among the Sunnis and Islamists of course, nevermind the complete terror going through all the minority populations and loyal soldiers of the old secular government). He also repeatedly shit on Assad and kept talking about how he's glad his government was collapsing.
Al Sham would never, she was a principled anti-imperialist.
I get that because of LP's identity, many of you are afraid to criticize the implications of the things he says but I'm arab and I'm not afraid to say it sounds like Islamist rightwing zionist narratives. He sounds like my reactionary uncles who love Qatar and Sisi, or like the idiotic anti-Assad elements within the Palestine movement who don't realize they've been fooled by the Zionists into attacking the axis of resistance.
Supporting HTS is a very unfair accusation, I've always been against them despite being very critical of Assad in the past. Assad is of course the lesser evil, but that reality simply doesn't exist anymore and it's better to move on and adjust to a new reality instead of clinging on to a dead project. After nearly 14 years of instability and half of the population being displaced because of the war, it's hard to look at any wider geopolitical implications or anything like that, what happened happened and hope for the best. I've been one of the biggest advocates for the Axis of Resistance on this website, but that project is now in terminal decline after the assassination of Nasrallah and the fall of Assad, so I don't think that it's bad to point out the shortcomings of the project now that it's pretty much over. Yeah the current situation is shit, Syria is going through it's own Iraq post-invasion phase which will inevitably kill a lot of people, but that doesn't mean that there's zero optimism about the future. Iraq was destined to be an American colony if you would analyse the situation back in 2003, but 15 years later the country emerged as a strong anti-imperialist state in the end.
Except you aren’t talking about anti-imperialist elements in Syria when you talk about “hope for the future” you are sugar coating Al Qaeda who are armed and trained by Zionists. They are fascists and our enemies. Act like it.
Iraq is better now because ISIS has been defeated by the Axis, and Axis forces have significant influence in the country. The opposite happened in Syria, ISIS just took over and destroyed the Axis there. You basically are saying "well Iraq had a tumultuous change but look they are doing OK now" to whitewash ISIS.
If the Axis of Resistance is defeated, why are Sunni Syrians in a state of "Euphoria" over that fact? Because they are traitorous dogs like the Saudis and Jordanians - they hate Iran more than they hate Israel because they are hard rightwing and sectarian ignoramuses. Just say it clearly and stop trying to spin it as something else.
That, and nowadays, I try to avoid
I could criticize him but I don't think I'd change his mind
To let things slide for the sake of peace and friendship when a person has clearly gone wrong, and refrain from principled argument because he is an old acquaintance, a fellow townsman, a schoolmate, a close friend, a loved one, an old colleague or old subordinate. Or to touch on the matter lightly instead of going into it thoroughly, so as to keep on good terms. The result is that both the organization and the individual are harmed. This is one type of liberalism.
Her reasons for leaving, I suspect, were different than LPs, even if they are both tired
I think one of the big reasons things are so slow is that Russia is more than happy to kill Ukrainians on the battlefield. They are slaughtering Ukrainians in war, why speed things up when they could easily wipe out any resistance before it even forms?
That reeks of the same body-count fetishism American brass applied in Vietnam, "If we kill enough of them, eventually they'll run out" except it ignores the fact it takes bullets, shells, and oil to actualize the million plus body-counts they imagine
Vietnam in 1969 had a smaller population than Ukraine, lost three million and still won, the 18-24 demographic of Ukrainian will get older and it doesn't matter how many 30-year-old Ukrainian soldiers die, an insurgency is coming regardless
This is a ridiculous and flawed analogy.
Vietnam did not have a massive population bottleneck and aging population, there is basically nobody in the 18-25 age range in Ukraine. Lowering the draft age would be more symbolic than anything, and wouldn’t impact much of anything in recruitment numbers.
In addition, Vietnam lost 3 million people total, mostly civilians. Ukraine has lost 1 million soldiers.
The US strategy in Vietnam was “kill anything that moves” and their numbers were padded by obscene civilian massacres. Russia is doing no such thing and has kept civilian casualties to a minimum.
Aging population and the bottleneck are irrelevant in the face of pitiless conscription and NATO support and I don't buy the 1 million dead soldiers statistic, 1 million soldiers may have been rotated out, wounded, died and deserted, but 1 million KIA is bullshit same as the 1 million dead Russians theory
Assuming the 28 million worst case scenario of Ukraine's current population, that still leaves at least 4 million able-bodied men who can be rounded up and pushed onto the frontline
The whole demographic collapse theory should have been scraped the second after the Kursk Offensive, the math never added up and for good reason
Pitiless conscription isn't the Orc pits of Saruman from LOTR, they can't spawn new people out of the mud. NATO support doesn't mean more bodies able to hold trenches unless they are willing to directly involve themselves in the war.
There were about 150,000 18-year old men in Ukraine in 2023, and that includes young men who have already volunteered and are part of the UAF. Then it decreases every year up to 22-year olds, with as few as 80,000. Many of these people will also be rich, draft dodgers hiding, working in essential industries already or otherwise unable to be conscripted.
There aren't "millions" more teenagers for Ukraine to draw upon, and children dragged kicking and screaming into trenches do not make for good soldiers anyway.
No, there are millions of teenagers AND MEN as the graph clearly shows, yes Ukraine is fucked demographically, if that mattered politically or socially than the war would be over by now, except it's not over and Russian units like the 90th Tank Division are still getting inexplicably mauled by these units of "dead men" and more men are still pouring into the Kursk salient 4 months later, Siversk is still garrisoned, and men are still dying at Chasiv Yar, apparently Ukraine does have "orc pits", that or the population flight wasn't as severe as once thought
Your type of argument was convincing a year ago, now it's suffering from a noticeable lack of confirmation data
And as far the "essential workers" for Ukraine's nonexistent civilian economy, obviously women are filling that role
Wars of attrition take time and you lack patience. That's not my fault, or a failure in analysis. It's a lack of patience from you.
Your analysis suggests the imminence of Ukrainian demographic and military collapse, that Ukraine is now an empty country devoid of new conscripts, in that case of what use is patience, are the Russians incapable of storming empty trenches?
My whole point is YES, this is a war of attrition and that's precisely the problem, the cost in material, men, and shells is slowly but surely starting to tick up, those bullshit phantom numbers of Russian losses dreamt up by OSINT in the first year of the war, are now years later steadily materializing piece by piece, day by day; 100 tanks lost in a day is a catastrophe (which is why the Ukrainians made up stories about it happening), but 100 tanks lost in a year is a statistic lost in the scuffle, this shit adds up and I don't believe the Russians are capable of recouping the losses
I mean I agree they'll be some kind of insurgency (which, if we go by the Chechen example, the Russians know how to quell), but the Vietnamese were fighting a broadly popular war of national liberation. Ukraine is kidnapping conscripts off the street and impressing them to serve on the frontlines. There's no widespread anti-war movement in Russia, nobody's burning draft cards and things like that. Very different circumstances.
Logistically it’s quite easy to stretch Americans thin when they are fighting on the other side of the planet and have other conflicts they are also involved in.
Russia is fighting a war mere kilometers away from their logistical hubs and population centers, on territory the USSR controlled and built. They know the land just as good as the ukros. They have heavy rail lines going to the front.
Russia also has a much higher ability to absorb losses than the US does. Russia has history of losing millions of its people to war, whereas Americans have never once experienced this. Americans will balk a whole hell of a lot sooner, they aren’t made of the same stuff and don’t have the national ability to take a million losses without widespread revolt and despair.
Quite true. America prefers to slaughter millions of its own people by bungling pandemic responses.
Chechnya is a small city with a couple villages surrounding it, and they didn't have overwhelming NATO support or a logistical train into the heart of anti-Russia Europe
Russia has no interest in military occupation of any regions outside of the ones they have annexed, which all have overwhelmingly pro-Russian populations at this point.
The only "insurgencies" will exist in the western rump state, which will be the EU's problems as they will probably accept them into the EU and allow open migration.
No fucking way that's happening
I think Ukraine will get into the EU as consolation prize for not getting into NATO. Trump also wants to dump everything on Europe. I think it's quite likely that what's left of Lviv-Kievkraine will join the EU and assets will continue to monopolize and be sold off to foreign investors.
I don't see the EU doing it. there's too much skepticism around the money being pumped into Ukraine as the frontline, Europe is war weary, which has weakened the pan europa idea including Ukraine. the economic situation would be bad for the Europeans, and I do not see the Dutch or Germans, who hold a tight purse over European economics, wanting half a failed state dragging down Eurozone numbers. that's before the potentiality of an Orban veto
Join the EU as the 17th province of Poland
before 2030, there will be the territories incorporated into Russia, which might go over the Dniper in the south and won’t near Kiev, a western-backed rump state based in Lvov, and a depopulated zone in the central area. the western fringe of Maine (USamerican state, lots of trees) has no electricity and a population density of 1 person per 267 square miles (around 700 square kilometers). i think the Russian strikes at power infrastructure are trying to cause the same thing. de-electrifying (and by extension de-populating) the center of Ukraine will maintain the watershed for Crimea and Zaporozhia and have fairly obvious counter-insurgency benefits. the details probably hinge on whether there’s more money to be made from keeping the current debts denominated in hryvnia or from some kind of ECB wizardry. the IMF, Chevron, and Shell are already committed to a few billion dollars in debt, and i think that will be an eternal stone on the neck of the Lvov rump state
Even sharing what month you're going and with whom is sorta doxxing yourself tbh. At least narrowing it down by a lot.
Eh it's okay, people don't even know in which country I live and there are a million Arab dads raging on social media
Welcome back, LargePenis
removed for struggle session vagueposting