Bulletins and News Discussion from September 30th to October 6th, 2024 - Qassam, Qassem, Quagmire
Bulletins and News Discussion from September 30th to October 6th, 2024 - Qassam, Qassem, Quagmire
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.
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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 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.
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It’s wild that there’s also a major strike going on in all the major ports of the east coast and it’s not even the #1 topic on here lol talk about a decade of a week.
launching a futile invasion while the ports of your imperial master are unmanned because longshoremen are on strike
Sucks to suck
The union said they'll continue to support military-related shipping
I have yet to find a single socialist party in the US that has any idea whatsoever of what to do about labor imperialism. It feels like their labor theory is arrested at, "unions are good let's have more of them". Many are "in solidarity " with literal weapons manufacturers unions for the weapons used on Palestinians right now.
I am not sure whether this is due to naivete or if they just don't feel up to the task of entering these spaces and educating, as it will require years and years of coordinated and principled agitation to succeed at that and socialist orgs are small.
Educating is not enough. You can't get someone to understand something that their salary depends on them not understanding. We need American empire to collapse faster and for there to be a clear call to action for workers inside these spaces to join the side of the oppressed people of the world, and to make it clear that in the long term their interests lie with the international working class because American imperialists can only sustain the American labor aristocracy due to undue gains from looting the periphery. That realization won't hit until America is close to losing its hegemony.
It can be challenging to get someone to act directly against their material interests, sure, but there have already been unionized Anerican longshoremen that refused to transport military goods intended for Israel. It is possible to build at least that much consciousness among the rank-and-file and it is facilitated by strong contracts and education.
Working directly against the empire requires targeting other industries with different tactics IMO. The questions there should be like, "how do we make it so Boeing can only produce 5 JDAMs per month and 3 of them fail QA?". Some of the ways to help that happen are too cool for me to elaborate on too much but let's just call it direct action.
I do validate that the labor aristocracy logic is overall valid and that this is why capitalist propaganda is so effective on them. But that does not mean there are no cracks in the armor. We should also do our best to anticipate where productive social relations are going, and in my opinion, they are moving in the direction of proletarianization in the impeeial core. That should make our targets more fertile for organizing but also more dangerous.
they are moving in the direction of proletarianization in the impeeial core. That should make our targets more fertile for organizing but also more dangerous.
class collaborationism in the face of crisis is the biggest threat we face and it's the biggest hurdle for the American labor movement to get over. Fascism must be crushed if the international working class is to survive.
Eurocentrism is a powerful factor in the opposite sense. Prejudice against the Third World, very much in favor today, contributes to the general shift to the right. Certain elements of the socialist movement in the West reject this shift, of course. But they do so most often in order to take refuge in another, no less Eurocentric, discourse, the discourse of traditional trade unionism, according to which only the mature (read European) working classes can be the bearers of the socialist future. This is an impotent discourse, in contradiction with the most obvious teachings of history.
- Samir Amin - Eurocentrism, For a Truly Universal Culture
clowns, giving up their biggest leverage for what? To betray the international working class.
Settlers right yet again.
I saw that today, and I felt so crushed (though I should have expected it)
Anytime American workers get me excited they gotta go do this shit
Port strike plus that chunk of NC getting obliterated is going to be rough.
At this point, I wouldn't be shocked if they openly assassinated the union head like a Boeing whistleblower but even less discreet. Like bombing his car or some shit. If that's not where we are, it is where we're going.
If that port strike goes on for a week, it'll be the top issue. This can fuck shit up fast