A reminder that as the US continues to threaten countries around the world, fedposting is to be very much avoided (even with qualifiers like “in Minecraft”) and comments containing it will be removed.

Image is of a Russian missile impacting Ukraine.

As we rapidly approach the fourth anniversary of the beginning of the Ukraine War (an anniversary I absolutely did not expect would occur while the two sides were still in combat), we have seen Russia turn to a new strategy, starting late last year but intensifying in December and now January.

Russia seems intent to disconnect Ukrainian cities from the electrical grid by focussing bombing on thermal, gas, and hydro stations, causing major power blackouts across the country. Russia is also bombing substations relatively close to Ukraine’s three nuclear power plants (Zaporzhye, the fourth, remains under Russia control), studiously avoiding hitting the premises of the NPPs themselves for obvious reasons. Even if they’re far away from the NPPs, striking the substations does have risks, because if the nuclear reactors aren’t shut off before the substations are bombed, there is a possibility that there will be insufficient backup power to prevent a meltdown - hence why Russia hasn’t really attempted to do this for four years.

Most of the electricity generated in Ukraine comes from the nuclear power plants, both because of the infrastructure they had initially (Ukraine was 7th in the world in nuclear electricity generation before the war) and because Russia has bombed most non-nuclear power stations and substations already. Over the last couple weeks, we have seen Ukrainian media fly into a frenzy about long-lasting blackouts, especially in the middle of winter. After the Zionist entity destroyed virtually all civilian infrastructure in Gaza while the West cheered on, they now appear to have changed their mind on whether such strikes are an effective and humanitarian option to subject millions of people to.

Regardless of whether you personally believe these Russian strikes are justified (I’m pretty iffy myself), it must be stressed that Ukraine has been bombing Russian tankers and oil refineries and power stations for a long time now, so in a sense, this is a retaliation. It’s also remarkable, compared to Western wars, that Ukraine was even still allowed to possess a functioning electrical grid for nearly four years into a war of this magnitude. That all being said, while Ukrainian strikes have been somewhat but not overly impactful on the Russian oil sector, the response is clearly very asymmetrical: Ukraine’s power grid is, according to Ukrainian energy corporations, now 70% degraded and is virtually impossible to now repair, and blackouts can last most of the day.

For everybody’s sake, I hope a ceasefire and peace deal will be reached soon. But after four years of seeing opportunities for an end to this war squandered over and over, I’m not holding my breath.

Last week’s thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.

Please check out the RedAtlas!

The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.

The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine

If you have evidence of Zionist crimes and atrocities that you wish to preserve, there is a thread here in which to do so.

Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. 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.

Mirrors of Telegram channels that have been erased by Zionist censorship.

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.

  • Tervell [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    78·
    14 days ago

    https://xcancel.com/ArmchairW/status/2016380234354847744

    Last week the Iranian government disclosed that 2,427 civilians and members of the security services and 690 insurgents were killed in the “riots” earlier this month, which recontextualizes what actually occurred - and explains the push to “manifest” a new Iranian government. Allow me to explain some insurgency theory. A “conventional” insurgency, as we saw in Vietnam, basically follows five phases per Galula:

    1. Creation of the insurgent party
    2. Cooption of all other opposition groups
    3. Guerilla war
    4. Conventional war
    5. Final overthrow of the government

    This is the standard model of revolution by insurgency as used by the East Asian communist movements - China, Vietnam, et cetera. Critically, it involves the parallel creation of a communist state at the same time as the extant state is destroyed - the insurgent leaders will arrive at the abandoned government palace, sit down at the former El Presidente’s desk, and can immediately set about governing the country in an orderly way through the apparatus of the Party that is now spread root and stem through society at large. There is, however, an alternative method if you just want to seize power and don’t care so much about governing anything. Galula refers to it as the “bourgeois-nationalist shortcut” method, and it’s quite simple - the insurgent party replaces the years of boring organization and coalition-building in Phases 1 and 2 with a few weeks of MASS TERRORISM.

    more

    If the target state falters and fails to crush the insurrectionists during this critical stage, the insurgents will be able to rapidly organize a guerilla army using their newfound notoriety and political power and proceed to go about fighting the revolutionary war and eventually overthrowing the government. There won’t be a state apparatus left afterwards to let the revolutionaries govern anything, but generally the kind of people who use these methods don’t really care about little things like that.

    There is a critical drawback to this model, however - if the state doesn’t buckle and cracks down effectively during the key terrorism phase, the insurgency is doomed. Unlike the communist model, in this phase the insurgency isn’t a broad-based social movement that can withstand official sanctions - it’s a plot involving a few hundred heavily-armed maniacs who can simply be killed by the police.

    So how does this tie into Iran? Well, earlier this month organic protests about economic issues were hijacked by heavily-armed insurgents who proclaimed their general opposition to the government, fought running gun battles with police, caused a shocking amount of property damage, and attempted to organize public support for their movement via an intense social media push - all of this with some success! Then the Iranian government cracked down hard and the insurrection collapsed. All of this ties exactly into the model of a bourgeois-nationalist “terrorist insurgency” which was defeated during its period of maximum vulnerability - the terrorism phase itself - by a robust and agile state opponent. It also explains the sudden and massive push in the West to recognize the insurgency as a rival Iranian government almost immediately - all of this was very clearly orchestrated by Western interests (read: Mossad), and this insurrection had the clear aim of either overthrowing the Iranian government outright or starting a civil war in Iran. The people pushing to change the Iranian flag emoji on this website (which remains as the pre-1979 flag to this day) absolutely knew what their intended end-state was.

    The key thing to realize is that the bourgeois-nationalist insurgency method does not require a large network and mass popular support. It requires a few hundred - or even a few dozen - hard men with guns, and a capable PR team capable of getting people behind the insurgents so as to build a mass movement and support for guerilla war overnight. This is what Mossad et al. was trying to do in Iran earlier this month, and that was in all likelihood the actual extent of their remaining attack network in the country after much of it was dismantled during and after the Twelve Days’ War.

    • Boise_Idaho [null/void, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      31·
      14 days ago

      Galula

      Galula mentioned.

      VULNERABILITY OF THE INSURGENT IN THE SHORTCUT PATTERN

      In the case when the insurgent has chosen to follow the bourgeois-nationalist pattern, his vulnerability starts from a lower level since his action is clandestine at the outset. It climbs rapidly because of the danger inherent in terrorism, which the normal police force may be able to suppress if it has not been planned and conducted on a sufficient scale. The insurgent, who needs publicity above everything else at this stage, is also at the mercy of a tight and prompt censorship.

      However, surprise plays in his favor, and he can count on the fact that the counterinsurgent’s reaction is never immediate. If the insurgent has survived the first few days of blind terrorism, his vulnerability decreases.

      It soon rises again because the full power of the counterinsurgent begins to be mobilized against him; the armed forces, particularly, go into action much sooner than in the orthodox pattern. Vulnerability goes up to a new height. If the insurgent survives, it diminishes progressively.

      When the insurgent reaches Step 3 (guerrilla warfare) and rejoins the orthodox pattern, he is less vulnerable than he would have been had he chosen the orthodox pattern at the start because he has already successfully withstood the full brunt of the counterinsurgent reaction.

    • MarmiteLover123 [comrade/them, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      30·
      14 days ago

      Last week the Iranian government disclosed that 2,427 civilians and members of the security services and 690 insurgents were killed in the “riots” earlier this month,

      So can we finally admit and discuss the fact on this platform that thousands of people died at minimum, and that something significant happened, or are the Iranian government figures also fake news now? Sorry, don’t want to engage in any “irresponsible posting”, so I just thought I’d ask ahead.

      • oliveoil [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
        51·
        14 days ago

        The propaganda line was that 30k+ people were killed by the government.

        At no point did you repeat this claim, and thus at no point did anyone argue against this.

        In truth, I was one of the people who argued against the sources you used on Pahlavi’s popularity in Iran - and I was speculating from how many people could have died from a single event in a single area (30 people) - and that got me to tens of thousands. I acknowledged how inaccurate that methodology would be, and people rightfully joked that I was deriving numbers with a similar methodology to the Xinjiang propagandists.

        I don’t want to create psychological pressure for you. I just want us to be mindful of our sources and make a note of where our info is coming from.

        In my case I was clear when I am speculating, when my source is western, when my source is otherwise.

        • Coolkidbozzy [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
          37·
          13 days ago

          I’m seeing people claim up to 50k were killed. They never posted anything about Palestine. We know what it looks like when tens of thousands of people are killed. We’d be seeing unlimited leaks of corpses.

      • Jabril [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
        44·
        14 days ago

        I thought the irresponsible posting you were accused of was related to you suggesting that essentially every person in Iran was watching Pahlavis social media content because his analytics dropped after Iran turned off the Internet

        • oliveoil [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
          27·
          14 days ago

          It was something to the effect of almost the entire population being on Instagram AND watching Pahlavi daily, including the babies, toddlers, the elderly.

          But there was a few million below Iran’s total population figures, which would preclude the implication that the entire IRGC, the army, the Ayatollah himself were also among the people tuning into Pahlavi on Instagram.

      • MLRL_Commie [comrade/them, he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        16·
        13 days ago

        Vague-posting lol. I am one of the people who said you were irresponsible, but that was you using 2 data points of likes (or maybe it was views? I can’t remember) on Pahlavi propaganda on social media from somewhere before and after the blackout to argue that he was popular with an huge amount of Iran. It was shit methodology. You post very good stuff often, but you’re not immune to mistakes and that was one. Calling it irresponsible was an adult way to engage with it, and it was not a way to call you inherently evil or unintelligent or something. Just something that you posted without the care and knowledge that you often have.