Iran has struck Israel.
previous preamble
The continuing fall of the remains of the British Empire is pretty entertaining from the outside: an archaic royal family that is seemingly being smote with disease by God itself for their past crimes; a navy that virtually no longer functions, ramming into foreign ports and under constant repair; and an economy that cannot seem to stop sputtering, fucked whether they're in the EU or outside it. Watching the impacts on people from the inside is a little more worrying, though.
A fifth of the population is in poverty, including nearly a third of all children. These figures have barely shifted since the Labour government in the early 2000s, aside from a decreasing poverty rate for pensioners. Actually, poverty hasn't substantially shifted since Margaret Thatcher. Before her, the poverty rate was around 14%, but her catastrophic policies caused a major increase, and poverty levels since then are still 50% higher than over 50 years ago, because neoliberal economic policy since then has not fundamentally changed. Parties and corporations have impoverished the usual vulnerable groups, such as large families, minority ethnic groups (including half of Pakistani and Bangladeshi households!) and disabled people. These differences are also regional, with the North more impoverished than the richer Southeast (but some of the poorest boroughs are in London, so it's a complex pattern).
With Corbyn's defeat in 2019 mere months before the pandemic began, the Labour Party shifted back towards the right, with left-wingers purged from the party if they did not kowtow to Keir Starmer. This leaves us with a situation where the only substantial difference between the two parties would be on social policy, but it goes without saying that economic policy is the overwhelming factor that determines if minorities can have a decent life. Worker-oriented movements since then have been largely not under the umbrella of major party leaderships, such as the Don't Pay movement in late 2022 that arose in the wake of dramatically rising energy prices where 3 million people vowed to not pay them (which did lead to results).
Most notably recently is the major upset in the constituency of Rochdale - the victory of George Galloway - who is the leader of the Workers Party of Britain, which describes itself as both socialist and socially conservative. This took place both in the context of aforementioned economic troubles, as well as anger over Israel's genocide of Gaza in the British population, especially in British Muslims. It remains to be seen how much of this is an isolated event, especially as Corbyn has, understandably, refused to collaborate with Galloway due to his socially conservative stances. The UK general election will be held at some point within the next 9 months or so, and might well be a shitshow depending on what happens domestically and geopolitically before then; parallels to the current American electoral shitshow with increasing anger over Biden are pretty apparent. The Conservatives are quite likely to lose given 14 years of uninspired rule if current polling is correct, but it truly is a race to the bottom.
The COTW (Country of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific country every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied nations. If you've wanted to talk about the country or share your experiences, but have never found a relevant place to do so, now is your chance! However, don't worry - this is still a general news megathread where you can post about ongoing events from any country.
The Country of the Week is the United Kingdom! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
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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 daily-ish 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 (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
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.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
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.
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.
Most states with a decent nuclear research facility have the ability to build atomic bombs, for a lot of countries the decision to build nuclear weapons or not is mainly a question of politics, and not a question of ability. It's a problem that has already been solved technologically. Iran is definitely one such country. So if the political calculus changes, Iran could build nuclear weapons quickly. They also already have a delivery method in their domestic conventional ballistic missiles.
I believe them when they say they only don't have nukes for religious reasons, because no other reason makes sense.
I'd say it's the other way around. Iran doesn't have nuclear weapons because of political reasons (mainly to do with the nuclear deal in the past and fear of more repression and sanctions from the West) and use religion to justify their decision to not have nuclear weapons. But should the political calculus change such that the Iranian leadership would view having nuclear weapons as beneficial, they would build nuclear weapons and adapt their religious interpretations to be in line with that. As the original post heavily hints towards.
All logic leads to Iran needing nukes. It’s honestly dangerous and irrational for them to have held out this long, they risk getting nuked by Israel or couped
personally if I was Iran and I wanted to develop nukes, I wouldn't tell anybody I was doing it and only when I was pretty sure I had them, or was at the point where I had to do a nuclear test (which will virtually certainly be detected regardless of how it's done), would I say that I had nukes. so it's possible that Iran is actually constructing nukes right now and will only reveal them if the conflict reaches a critical point, of which the recent Israeli strike was a bold/idiotic step towards. but the constant boy-who-cried-wolf effect of "IRAN IS 0.45 NANOSECONDS FROM NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND WE MUST DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS!" will mean that we can't really trust rumors in the same way that we could (even if many of us on Hexbear didn't) when US intelligence agencies were correctly predicting a Russian invasion of Ukraine
recently on twitter I've seen even lib Iranians question why the hell the government hasn't developed nukes yet
I agree, but the political capital required to start or restart a nuclear weapons program is immense. It does not happen in one day. The fact that a university president is publicly suggesting that the fatwa can or should be altered is a step in that direction. Then there's also questions of foreign interference, Israeli spies would start their campaign of assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists again.
They never stopped, and they are assassinating top Iranian diplomats, generals and political leaders too. They have nothing to lose.
Iran is one of the most sanctioned countries in the world, it's hard to imagine they fear more sanctions at this point. I think in the past they did think they could use nuclear weapons as a bargaining tool, but after Trump and Biden killed the JCPOA? not so much, those days are over. after the Soleimani assassination and recent consulate bombing, they must know that they need deterrence against Western aggression. not actively developing nuclear weapons right now is just gross incompetence.
If Iran ever had a nuclear weapons program it ended decades ago. This is the consensus of everyone in every intelligence group in the world, including Mossad, and has been since at least the Bush years. The Iranian nuclear weapons program only exists between Bibi's ears.
They're obviously not going to tell the world they're developing them while they're still developing them. I don't think you can brag about having hypersonic missiles and one of the world's most advanced rocketry and go, "but we're not going to put nuclear warheads on these bad boys."
You can't just go around saying that a religious fatwa that has been upheld for decades despite all of the threats and attacks from the west is pure realpolitik. It's in keeping with Islamic views on the laws of war going back to Muhammad's lifetime. The kind of indiscriminate mass death and destruction nukes create is forbidden under most Islamic jurisprudence.
Yet Pakistan has its own nuclear weapons and Turkey is home to some of NATO's nuclear weapons. At the end of the day, if the political capital amongst Iran's leaders exists to support the start of a nuclear weapons programme, the fatwa will be altered to be in line with that.
Pakistan and Turkey aren't Shia, and aren't lead by the supreme Ayatollah. There are lots of different schools of Islamic jurisprudence, and lots of scholars and jurists, and lots of Fatwas. Islam is not at all monolithic. What Sunni scholars in Pakistan or Turkey say isn't binding on Shia jurists in Iran.