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.
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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 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.
The government fights back against the central bank’s monetary austerity. It’s better late than never. The central bank will, predictably, raises key rate early next year because “spending more money into the economy means more inflation”.
A tug of war situation where we will have to see if the government will run out of money to spend first (since they don’t control the money printer) or if the central bank’s key rate will lose its efficacy first?
This is a war of attrition between the industrial and finance capital within Russia that has been going on for more than two years.
Why doesn't the bigger state institution simply eat the smaller state institution?
Because the libs are willing to bring down the entire economy if they don’t get their way.
I also suspect (this is admittedly pure vibes-based speculation from intuition developed over several decades of being a communist) that Xi was truly shaken by how much further the Shanghai libs were willing to go to let Covid spread to the whole country. The entire Zero Covid policy had to be dismantled because of them, and these are the people who are willing to kill millions and place the entire country in jeopardy just to make sure that the “market principles are not violated”.
The last few years have really made me reevaluate my long-standing criticism of Stalin’s purge. It was brutal, violent and no doubt that many innocent people were entangled in it, but I shudder to think of the alternatives where the libs continued to hold sway in the Soviet government. No way the Five-Year Plans would have succeeded, and that means the Soviet Union would not have been able to industrialize in time to defeat Nazi Germany.
Like, if you were the president of Russia or China today, what would you do with the libs?
For Putin and many Russian people, it’s the fear of slipping back to the 1990s hellworld. It’s better to be slowly boiled to death than to be plunged into a nightmarish dystopia. It is understandable that nobody is ready for a radical change that will uproot the entire society. So, they did some small scale motion against the libs but never willing to go all the way.
For China, their economy has been growing well in spite of the challenges. It is better to pretend that the status quo can somehow persist, than to try anything radical that would upset the balance. There was some purge against the libs during the 20th CPC Congress in the fall of 2022, then Covid spread throughout the entire country. By winter, Zero Covid was dismantled. I can’t even say I was surprised when the government has decided to “save the property market” this year, despite the disappointment.
For Xi in particular, it was personal for him to be against radical change:
CW: self-harm
As you know, Xi Jinping’s father, the decorated commander Xi Zhongxun, was humiliated in public at a struggle session (the actual struggle session, not the Hexbear meaning of it) during the Cultural Revolution and was banished to a rural factory for decades before his name was reinstated. Xi himself lived a difficult life until the Reform period.
Xi’s sister, Xi Heping, committed suicide under the constant harassment by the Red Guards. In the official narrative, she “perished during the difficult times of the Cultural Revolution” but everyone knows what the actual story was.
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Bottom line is that getting rid of the libs is more difficult than most people pretend it to be. If you succeed, you get called a brutal dictator who killed plenty of innocent people. If you fail, you get blamed for the catastrophe that befell your country. You need a revolution with the people fully behind you to go all the way with it.
What's your read on the average Chinese citizen's understanding and desire for such a thing these days?
The average people don’t care as long as their lives continues to improve, and life has been quite good in the last 10 years or so compared to the previous decades (like, at a scale you cannot even imagine).
But that’s not to say that everything is going well in China and that people are satisfied. There have been a lot of netizen outrage during Covid, the property bubble and the recent unemployment (which is a bit of an issue right now, especially with youth unemployment) but most of that takes place on the internet. It’s the typical complaints you see on social media and very little of that will translate into actual movement on the ground. (And no, there is not going to be people toppling the government no matter how much foreign intelligence agencies want to engineer a color revolution for that)
And to be quite honest, the only people who can distinguish and are actively hostile against the libs are the leftists/nationalists, which generally comprise of the old left and a smaller section of youth who were radicalized just before and during Covid (starting around late 2019-2020). The vast majority of the average people don’t participate in such discourse and wouldn’t know the difference between industrial and finance capital, have very superficial understanding of liberalism socialism etc., just like everywhere else.
(Also it goes without saying that what we’ve seen on the internet is mostly people who live in cities that are relatively wealthy compared to the rural regions. There are many many millions of people who still live in the rural area who have limited connection to the netizens discourse and their lives are just as distant to your average urban Chinese people)