Bulletins and News Discussion from December 9th to December 15th, 2024 - Assad Must Go
Bulletins and News Discussion from December 9th to December 15th, 2024 - Assad Must Go
Image is of Assad and his family.
After less than two weeks of retreating with few shots fired and little resistance, the SAA has retreated into, well, a state of non-existence. This thereby ends a conflict that has been simmering for over a decade. With the end of this conflict, another begins: the carving up of what used to be Syria between Israel and Turkey, with perhaps the odd Syrian faction getting a rump state here and there. Both Israel and Turkey have begun military operations, with Israel working on expanding their territory in Syria and bombing military bases to ensure as little resistance as possible.
Israeli success in Syria is interesting to contrast against their failures in Gaza and Lebanon. A short time ago, Israel failed to make significant territorial progress in Lebanon due to Hezbollah's resistance despite the heavy hits they had recently taken, and was forced into a ceasefire with little to show for the manpower and equipment lost and the settlers displaced. The war with Lebanon was fast, but still slow enough to allow a degree of analysis and prediction. In contrast, the sheer speed of Syria's collapse has made analysis near-impossible beyond obvious statements like "this is bad" and "Assad is fucking up"; by the time a major Syrian city had fallen, you barely had time to digest the implications before the next one was under threat.
There is still too much that we don't know about the potential responses (and non-responses) of other countries in the region - Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, and Russia, for example. I think that this week and the next will see a lot of statements made by various parties and an elucidation of how the conflict will progress. The only thing that seems clear is that we are in the next stage of the conflict, and perhaps have been, in retrospect, since Nasrallah's assassination. This stage has been and will be far more chaotic as the damage to Israel compounds and they are willing to take greater and greater risks to stay in power. It will also involve Israel causing destruction all throughout the region, rather than mostly localizing it in Gaza and southern Lebanon. Successful gambles like with Syria may or may not outweigh the unsuccessful ones like with Lebanon. This is a similar road to the one apartheid South Africa took, but there are also too many differences to say if the destination will be the same.
What is certain is that Assad's time in power can be summarized as a failure, both to be an effective leader and to create positive economic conditions. His policies were actively harmful to internal stability for no real payoff and by the end, all goodwill had been fully depleted. By the end, the SAA did not fight back; not because of some wunderwaffen on the side of HST, but because there was nothing to fight for, and internal cohesion rapidly disintegrated.
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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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Some mintpress news.
Congress has just passed a new bill that will see the U.S. spend huge sums of money redesigning much of the public school system around the ideology of anti-communism.
What I found most absurd in the article is this new update on the famous 100 million victims of communism list:
"The principal organization promoting the 100 million figure today is the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, which has shown a similar level of both anti-communist devotion and methodological rigor. The group, set up by the U.S. government in 1993, added all worldwide COVID-19 deaths to the victims of communism list, arguing that the coronavirus was a communist disease because it originated in China."
This is just so deeply unserious. I have a really hard time understanding how people fall for this so easily.
the post-wwi flu pandemic that killed like 40 million ppl started in kansas btw
But it turns out that the first person to contract it was a communist and it was actually more like 400 million dead so we're adding that to the list too.
Welcome to Biden’s America
My 1000-year reign is just getting started Jack
I’ve gone off on this a couple times now… but there is nothing in that bill that states the Federal government is spending any money to do this or making anything mandatory. It’s simply “directing” VoCMF to create “educational materials”. For better or worse, education in the US is all done at the state and local level, the federal government doesn’t have any juice. Even when Common Core was being pushed years ago, that was never something mandated by the federal government, which has no ability or authority to mandate anything curriculum-wise. Realistically what will happen is a VoCMF will come up with this material and then it’s up to individual school districts or states to implement it if they want.
It feels weird being this position of explaining why this isn’t that big of a deal, but I don’t like when we spread information that isn’t backed up by reality. People are just seeing that congress passed an anti-communism bill regarding education and are drawing conclusions that are totally opposed to how education at the federal level operates.
Kinda disappointed MintPress would run with this angle, since I like them a lot and think they do good work.
Agreed. What will happen is what has been happening to American education for years, further ideological stratification, with certain school districts that choose to implement this crap falling even further behind their peers, but making gains in their local conservative political spheres. Mostly it just points to further regionalization of the states, mostly at the expense of poor Americans.
Yes, this decentralized approach not only harms with ideology, but also in states where schools are funded locally (that’s most of them). So rich neighborhoods have great schools and poor neighborhoods can’t get by.
Besides, isn't anti-communism part of lessons in some or even most US schools to an extent? I've had friends tell me they were thought the "100 billion gajillion" and "communism is when no food" in their school years, the school system is already designed to indocrinate, what difference would this bill make?
Yep, and let's also recall that this so-called "Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation" entity directly receives US taxpayer money for its propaganda and disinformation operations. Besides pumping out anti-communist and anti-socialist propaganda, the entity's other main purpose is to lie about and smear Russia and China specifically. Moscow and Beijing should create a Victims of US Imperialism Memorial Foundation as a response.
It’ll probably have the desired effect with how even “educated” Americans think communism is inherently anti-Democratic and social credit score is a real thing China has
no, that's incorrect. they are not spending any money. They are entirely outsourcing the propaganda. From the CBO itself:
Because the costs to implement the bill are solely the responsibility of the foundation and require no additional federal action, CBO estimates that enacting the bill would have no impact on the federal budget.
That's not really how school funding or curriculum development works. I'm in a school and it all comes from state and district direction. Anything from the federal government is taken up at states discretion for the most part. The only largely federally mandated stuff you see is pre k and earlier with head start. Even common core, often wrongly demonized, was largely developed by the states.
Edit: feds are involved somewhat in special ed bc of civil rights issues
I don't understand. I thought it was the end of history? If that was the case the US wouldn't need all that funding for anti-communism because it'll all be over soon?