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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
The new government from a pure bureaucratic standpoint are doing okay imo though, things are slowly returning to normal and somehow functioning.
Even with Israel occupying more territories in Syria?
Even with the sectarian infighting you mentioned?
Numerous sectarian clashes between HTS and Alawites, and Kurds vs Turkish-backed fighters in the north.
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.
This website has some of the dumbest drama I’ve ever seen lmao, grow up
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.
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.
That, and nowadays, I try to avoid
I could criticize him but I don’t think I’d change his mind
Even sharing what month you’re going and with whom is sorta doxxing yourself tbh. At least narrowing it down by a lot.
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.
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?
I think one of the big reasons things are so slow is that Russia is more than happy to kill Ukrainians on the battlefield.
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.
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.
