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.
https://xcancel.com/RTSG_News/status/1872735726187757724#m
Hinkle is such a clown, it always surprises me a bit with how he seems to be able to meet with Communist parties like this though.
Edit: was unfamiliar, it isn't at all surprising in this case.
KPRF is a nazbol adjacent mess so it's not that duprising
KPRF is not nazbol wtf, it’s just a useless soc dem-ish party that doesn’t know its own direction.
The nazbol party - I have been told by people on this thread before - was an edgy art project started by Limonov, who was close friend with the Exile/Radio War Nerd gang in the 1990s. It is banned in Russia and had maybe ten thousand members at its height.
Hexbear sees literally any imperfect socialist party outside of the West: is this nazbol?
Its just orientalism "oh look at those whacky russian political ideologies!!", spread by HOI libs and other weird r/historymemes guys
I usually stop reading when people use “Nazbol” because it’s a clue that they don’t actually talk politics in a tangible way
Limonov was basically a nationalist liberal. Before the fall, liberal dissidents would use nazi iconography as a way to be edgy. As the fall happened, he adopted the sickle and hammer to basically put himself in opposition to the pro-west dying communist party. The ideological inconsistency is not something really special in a regime that is collapsing that is grabbing the nearest ideology. Another figure that ressembles Limonov is Mishima and it is not coincidental since Limonov admires Mishima as a person and a writer. Mishima also tried to have debate to form a united front with the communist at the Japanese left peak because he sympathized with the nationalistic with the leftist movement, but saying that they still need to find their nationalistic zeal that was invented by imperial japan in ww2
The irony is that the populism and the pan ideological movement that Limonov managed to build was emulated by various anti-Putin groups such as Navalny.
Thanks, I’m still trying to understand his connection with the Radio War Nerd guys plus the other Exile guys like Taibbi and Levine. Did they all believe in this shit?
I think it was you who told me last time that the whole movement was started as an edgy counter-culture art project.
I think belief is a dime in a dozen in the 90s, most people just want to cling to some semblance of mass movement to cope with the regime change. But the incoherence of a movement in a long run probably doomed the project. When the storming of the Dumas happened, the protesters knew that it was over before they go in, there are no real tangible project to work with.
I see a certain similarity with the cultural revolution, where with time the mass movement lost its ideological goals and as the central government shattered the remaining red guards and the prospect of change is destroyed, it allows people to transition into the reform era relatively smoothly.
And yes it was from Mark Ames recounting in Radio war nerd’s various episodes and some episode of trueanon that recounted the origin of Limonov’s are project. Basically it was a project turned movement with 3 charismatic leaders (letov, limonov and dugin) and a bunch of impressionable teens. Some uses it for clout like Limonov and Letov, other tries to use it for political reasons like Dugin. Ultimately Dugin splits from the rest to form the eurasian front because he wants a more political oriented project but his influences is eclipsed by Limonov’s.
The exiles is not really a matter of beliefs, it’s a flimsy collection of actual investigative journalism with yellow journalism (i think people tends to forget how innovative it is as a concept at the time), but i don’t believe that people in the organization believed in Limonov project, from Mark’s perspective it was more like the absurd nature and the raunchiness of Limonov’s columns that made him a contributor of the Exiles. Regardless of Limonov’s beliefs, he is a good writer by some accounts.
Nazbol adjacent. They hold many horrid social views and do a lot of reactionary tailism, that's why I called them that
That’s not national bolshevism though, their views are not any different from many “reformist/electoral” communist/workers parties that you typically find in the developing world.
Nazbol itself isn’t even a coherent ideology (if it even existed as a serious political project as another commenter has pointed out) that tries to combine contradictory far left elements like nationalization with far right symbolism, which itself was an art project (per Limonov: “what the insensitive Russian citizens, who react only to extremely brutal, horrifiying and shocking events, really want is the arrival of Fascists.”) to make fun of the Russian people for being too weak to fight back against the onslaught of global capital as the country was being torn apart in the 1990s until Putin banned them.
KPRF is not “nazbol”, they are no better than any social democratic parties that pops out from the eastern bloc after the fall.
It’s mostly populism that attracts an ever decreasing pensioner population that is inevitably conservative socially
Also, Nazbol is not a thing anymore (if it was a real thing to begin with) after Putin passed the anti-extremist law circas 2000
Oh really? Makes sense then, actually. A match made in heaven.
Yeah ACP is pretty actively modeling themselves after the KPRF
Huh, interesting. Still, seeing PatSoc infighting is pretty funny. Gotta do more research on the various "Communist" groups.
In what sense?
Eastern bloc populist social democratic party.
Basically ordoliberalism
… that’s not nazbol, and do you mean this?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordoliberalism
Yes, Nazbol is not real.
And yes, most eastern bloc soc dem parties’ platform are ordoliberal