Image is of the aftermath of an Israeli bombing of Beirut in 2006.


We are now almost one year into the war and genocide in Gaza. Despite profound hardship, the Gazan Resistance continues its battles against the enemy, entirely undeterred. Despite Israeli proclamations throughout 2024 that they have cleared out Hamas from various places throughout Gaza, we still see regular attacks and ambushes against Zionist forces. Just today (Monday), Al Qassam fighters ambushed and destroyed another convoy of Israeli vehicles. The predictions early on in the war were that Israel would defeat Hamas in mere months, needing only until December, then January, and so on. This has proven very much untrue. Israel is stuck in the mud; unable to destroy their enemy due to their lack of knowledge about the “Gaza Metro” and, of course, a lack of actual fighting skill, given how many times I’ve seen Zionists getting shot while they gaze wistfully out of windows.

The same quagmire will occur in Lebanon, only considerably worse. Both Nasrallah and Sinwar possess a similar strategy of luring Zionist forces onto known, friendly territory, replete with traps and ambushes, to bleed them dry of equipment, manpower, and the will to continue fighting. The scale of the invasion could fall anywhere on the spectrum from “very limited” - more of a series of raids on Hezbollah positions than truly trying to occupy land - to a total invasion which would seek to permanently take control of Southern Lebanon. Neither is likely to destroy, or even substantially diminish Hezbollah’s fighting abilities. This is not wishful thinking: Hezbollah has convincingly defeated Israel twice before in its history, pushing them from their territory, and both times Hezbollah had almost no missiles and a limited supply of other equipment, relying on improvisation as often as not. The Hezbollah of 2024 is an entirely different organization to that of the early 2000s.

Attempts to drive wedges between Hezbollah and the rest of Lebanon are also unlikely to succeed. Hezbollah is not just a military force, it is extremely interlinked into various communities throughout Lebanon, drawing upon those communities to recruit soldiers. Throughout its history, it has provided education, healthcare, reconstruction, and dozens of other services one would attribute to a state. Amal Saad’s recent suggestion of using “quasi-state actor” as a more respectful replacement for the typical “non-state actor” seems advisable. And the decentralized command structures, compartmented leadership, strong succession planning, and aforementioned community ties almost entirely neutralizes the effectiveness of assassinations. Hezbollah’s Deputy Secretary General Naim Qassem has confirmed that Hezbollah’s path has been set by Nasrallah, and his martyrdom will not stop nor even pause their efforts. Additionally, he confirmed that despite the recent attacks by Israel which nominally focussed on destroying missile depots, Hezbollah’s supply of weapons has not been degraded, and they are still only using the minimum of their capabilities.


Please check out the HexAtlas!

The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week’s thread is here.

Israel-Palestine Conflict

If you have evidence of Israeli 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 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.


  • thethirdgracchi [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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    2 hours ago

    The buzz on the Telegrams is that Washington is claiming Iran is about to hit Israel with a ballistic missile attack “imminently” so we’ll see if The Retaliation finally comes given Iran just got embarrassingly and pathetically played.

  • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    3 minutes ago

    Commander of Iran’s IRGC, major general Hossein Salami:

    The martyrdom of sayyed Hassan Nasrallah and brigadier general Nilforoushan has made a historical change in the Islamic World

    Now, everyone will witness the response of Iran and the Axis of Resistance to the assassination of sayyed Nasrallah

    His blood will write the end of the Zionist entity and its masters

  • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    2 hours ago

    IDF posted pictures of a hezbollah tunnel they say they found 2 days ago on their side of the border. Abandoned.

    It has some equipment and the construction of the tunnel is interesting. It also actually looks legit for once.

  • InevitableSwing [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    4 hours ago

    Check out this NYT update.

    Israel’s military told U.N. peacekeepers in Lebanon on Monday “of their intention to undertake limited ground incursions into Lebanon,” the peacekeeping mission, UNIFIL, said on social media. It said that “any crossing into Lebanon is in violation of Lebanese sovereignty,” and called for civilian life and property, as well as international law, to be respected.

    link

    I’ll finish the UN joke by adding a punchline

    Israel said “Yeah - you know us. We always respect civilian life, property, and most of all international law.”

  • geikei [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    Since Russia’s new icbm tests seem to be a bit hit and miss lately and with China’s test recently its important to note that while the general public in the west seem to be under the impression that Russia’s ICBMs are the faulty and unreliable ones, it is the US that actualy fields almost exclusively positively ancient barely working missiles .

    The Minuteman III is by far the world’s oldest ICBM still in active use as part of a nation’s nuclear triad. It was originally deployed in 1970 and only had a planned service life of 10 years. It’s only still operational over 50 years later because of life extension programmes but at some point, a thing is so old that there’s no life left to extend. The electronic components of that era basically don’t exist anymore. So you’d not just be re-engineering the missile’s design, you’d be re-enginering and remaking components from the very birth of the chip industry. It’s an impossible task. Which basically means as these things break down there’s no fixing them.

    The former STRATCOM Chief had this to say about the situation:

    “Let me be very clear: You cannot life-extend the Minuteman III [any longer],” he said of the 400 ICBMs that sit in underground silos across five states in the upper Midwest. “We can’t do it at all. … That thing is so old that, in some cases, the drawings don’t exist anymore [to guide upgrades],” Richard said in a Zoom conference sponsored by the Defense Writers Group. Where the drawings do exist, “they’re like six generations behind the industry standard,” he said, adding that there are also no technicians who fully understand them. “They’re not alive anymore.”

    People joke about questionable operational readiness of Russian ICBMs but in reality, Russia has significantly more modern ICBMs in service than the US and im not even gonna mention China’s buildup in quantity and quality. It’s the US that should be worried about the operational readiness of its ICBMs. This is especially prominent after the highly publicising failure of 2 of the US’ Minuteman III tests last November. Sure, two missile tests worked in June (one barely) but given the recency of the previous failure, another failure would have spelled absolute disaster for the US’ nuclear credibility so I’m sure extra care and attention to detail was taken in ensuring that failure was not even a possibility. Problem is its douptfull that the US even has the domestic capability to replace the land portion of its nuclear triad completely without it costing like 2 trillion dollars and taking 20 years. Sure the subs will always be there and they work quite well but its interesting to see what the US will done with its land based nukes. I highly doubt either the Democrats nor the Republicans will want to be seen as the party that says "our nukes dont work and we need 1 quintillion dollars to replace them " or just completely drop one leg of the US’ nuclear triad, however unnecessary that leg may be.

    One thing’s for certain and its quite funny, and that is if the US does not find significantly more money for its military, it will have to cut back on many aspects of its military it has up until this point taken for granted. Already, we are seeing budget constraints affecting every branch of the military in very significant ways. With the USAF being forced to rethink what it wants with quite literally one of its most important next-generation projects due to budget constraints. The state of the USAF tanker fleet is also less than optimal with them significantly cutting back on the number of tankers they planned on ordering this decade by half. Instead, the USAF wants to pursue a gold-plated stealth tanker solution called NGAS to enter service in the 2030s at the same time as all of their other commitments. God knows where they’re going to get the money for this.

    The USN is also being forced to cut back on its own next-generation projects that are not limited to just F/A-XX as DDG(X) has also been running into issues. This is all in addition to F-35C procurement that is far less expedited than it should be. There is no money to expand shipyards and increase production in any significant way and submarine production is progressing at a glacial pace, with the US being unable to produce SSNs and SSBNs at the rate it needs to let alone produce surplus SSNs for Australia.

    The US Army has also been forced to consistently delay replacements for aging platforms like the Bradley, Abrams, Apache, Chinook and so on. But, given that I highly doubt the US is going to be seeing any large land war with a major power any time in the near future, the US Army can get away with it much more than the other branches can.

  • Neptium [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    Hey folks! I will be busy for a long while and will probably be inactive on this site for the same period. I am starting my final year of university - very exciting times ahead.

    As a result I’d like to leave a short primer about Malaysian and Singaporean politics on a highly contentious issue: race. Feel free to DM for further elaboration or sources regarding Malaysian/Singaporean politics. I am happy to oblige (whenever I have the time).

    Alright, here it goes.

    Class, race, culture, community, ethnicity and religion. All are jumbled up when talking about politics in Malaysia and Singapore.

    How so? Firstly we have to take a civilisational approach: Chinese, Indian, Malay and Orang Asal (“Original People”) all have their own unique history of thousands of years, and within each there are defining characteristics that define their social structure.

    What happens when this long overlapping cultural exchange in the Straits of Malacca gets disrupted by more recent and numerous immigration from South and East Asia under colonization?

    This leads to stratification and polarization of the Malayan political economy (old name for Peninsular Malaysia that includes Singapore).

    The Malayan Left had many arguments and debates on how to handle these fundamental cultural issues that have plagued the region for centuries. The debate is still ongoing.

    However, there, perhaps 2 main strands can be identified:

    1. Those that defines cultural autonomy as the primary contradiction.

    2. Those that defines class and national liberation as the primary contradiction.

    Many organisations can be labelled as one or the other but those within the same camp may not necessarily agree with each other with everything.

    For an example, those that fall into

    1. often fall into communal fights with other groups. An example of this would be the Chinese Literacy Movement that sought to maintain the existence of colonial era Chinese Language Schools, which more often than not, are also not under the purview of the colonial government (ie. in effect are private schools).

    2. often underestimate the role of culture and race in the social reproduction of the Malayan economy. An example of this would be the MCP (Malayan Communist Party). In many of their party debates, it was often assumed that after national liberation was achieved, racial/cultural/communal issues would vanish. Unfortunately for us, we did not achieve true independence and the racialised political economy remains.

    Prologue -

    I can continue of course but I hope this short glimpse can help you understand why in my arguments I often involve terms such as “racialised”, “culture” or “chauvinism”. Because it is an essential part of understanding Malayan politics.

    But understanding Malayan politics also requires some understanding of South, East and Southeast Asian politics. Under the global hegemony of US-led Capital, Eurocentrism and Orientalism pervades many thinkers, even in the Global South. There must be acknowledgment of this fundamental inequality of intellectual production which is overwhelmingly skewed to the West.

    Only then you can finally understand and deal with the material realities of what we, the peoples of the Third World, have to face everyday.

    See Read you all later.

  • QuillcrestFalconer [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    4 hours ago

    So the guy who ‘interviewed’ Ta-Nahisi Coates wrote this gem of an article:

    My adult circumcision: how I made the cut for my new religion

    To remain uncut, I was told, is to remain spiritually cut off from the Jewish people.

    The kicker?

    Medically speaking, I was already circumcised, along with most of the other babies born in America in the Eighties. But that’s no good for God. I needed a hatafat dam brit: a drawing of blood. To remain uncut, I was told, is to remain spiritually cut off from the Jewish people. That’s the idea of the “covenant.”

    What an absolute freak

    https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2014/04/my-adult-circumcision-how-i-made-cut-my-new-religion