Image is a frame taken from this video of Iranian missiles raining down on Israel without interception due to a weak and depleted air defense system after a year of war and genocide.
Mao, 1956:
Now U.S. imperialism is quite powerful, but in reality it isn't. It is very weak politically because it is divorced from the masses of the people and is disliked by everybody and by the American people too. In appearance it is very powerful but in reality it is nothing to be afraid of, it is a paper tiger. Outwardly a tiger, it is made of paper, unable to withstand the wind and the rain. I believe the United States is nothing but a paper tiger.
When we say U.S. imperialism is a paper tiger, we are speaking in terms of strategy. Regarding it as a whole, we must despise it. But regarding each part, we must take it seriously. It has claws and fangs. We have to destroy it piecemeal. For instance, if it has ten fangs, knock off one the first time, and there will be nine left, knock off another, and there will be eight left. When all the fangs are gone, it will still have claws. If we deal with it step by step and in earnest, we will certainly succeed in the end.
Strategically, we must utterly despise U.S. imperialism. Tactically, we must take it seriously. In struggling against it, we must take each battle, each encounter, seriously. At present, the United States is powerful, but when looked at in a broader perspective, as a whole and from a long-term viewpoint, it has no popular support, its policies are disliked by the people, because it oppresses and exploits them. For this reason, the tiger is doomed. Therefore, it is nothing to be afraid of and can be despised. But today the United States still has strength, turning out more than 100 million tons of steel a year and hitting out everywhere. That is why we must continue to wage struggles against it, fight it with all our might and wrest one position after another from it. And that takes time.
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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.
Military contractors certainly will look for any basis to justify more contracts, but there is an incredibly strong impulse among the American ultra-bourgeoisie driving the initiative to prepare for war with China. From their perspective, if the United States cannot remain peerless, they have already lost, and the only way they can arrest China's development is through military intervention. It is the only alternative left after sanctions have failed to frustrate China's development of many cutting edge technologies.
Is it at all practical? Is there a material basis for military victory? Probably not. To compete with China on economic, academic, and technological terms with a quarter of the population, profound domestic social reforms need to take place. The US needs to send as many people to universities as possible, needs to employ as many people in PRODUCTIVE labor as possible, ensure that they are in good health, ensure they are housed, stop flushing millions of human-years down the toilet with mass incarceration and premature death, etc. But those reforms would be tantamount to a revolution. They are off the table, and constraining China militarily is necessary to keep them from coming to fruition out of economic necessity. The American ruling class will not sacrifice their ability to have their cake and eat it too. They want to remain the peerless masters of the world while desperately clinging to an utterly backwards regime fueled by an incomprehensible waste of human potential.
So, yes, the US commentariat/politico types have been cheering for war with China, that's true. However, the Pentagon tends to have a bit more sober and realistic analysis of conflicts/potential conflicts, because they are the ones who would actually have to fight it. A lot of the first IS government officials/employees to say either outright or leak to the media on background than the war in Ukraine isn't/hasn't been going well, and that the Ukrainians will need to make peace, have been Pentagon officials. Of course, there are definitely people in the US military that want war with China. There are various factions to the US military like there are in any other organziation. I am just a lot more skeptical of how much the Pentagon actually wants a shooting war with China, at least relative to how much the politics sickos who don't have to actually fight want a war.
Unfortunately for those military types they're not in charge. The CIA has the ability with State Dept to just start a war. Instruct their pawn in Taiwan to declare independence, ensure the US president who is commander of the military knows they must intervene to defend them or else be seen as weak. President orders it, generals object and facepalm but China is already on the move and there's nothing that can stop it at that point.
So it's not what the generals want. Yes they can probably stop or dissuade the president from launching pre-emptive attacks for no particular reason but it won't go down that way. Instead it will go down as a crisis (an engineered one obviously) that will occur, demand action and the US will feel based on everything that it is that it has no choice but to act and so it will be.
I suppose China could just let them have Taiwan but if they do the US will station tens of thousands of troops and missile systems and probably nukes on Taiwan before long and China won't get it back this century in this case which is a real deal-breaker.
I think that military conflict doesn't need to grow intense.
Like Ukraine it just needs to happen enough that the US government can pull a big lever called "fast decoupling" and force companies out of China quickly by slamming down a wall of sanctions. And like with Ukraine they can drag the EU into this via "defending democracy" and get them to pull their companies out and to do sanctions, divestment, decoupling.
This may be more about re-orienting the world for campism and a new cold war with the west withdrawing and putting up economic walls against China/Russia/BRICS and then trying to draw as much of the world as possible into their sphere while keeping out as much of the world from the BRICS sphere as possible with a strong possibility they can get India to pick up the slack from China and turn their position in BRICS into the kind of Turkish/Hungarian position inside NATO which is a spoiler who restrains the rest of it and takes contrary actions for its own self against the group interests and agenda. It's a modified form of the cold war playbook the US used to success in the first cold war in the 50s through 70s. Strategic coups, destabilization operations (terrorism, separatism in key regions) to disrupt China's supply routes and access to key resources and the belt and road.
This would be a time buying exercise. It would lock down NATO/EU markets for only western companies and non-Chinese/Russian firms and aim to out-compete using cheap labor while betting on crushing China/Russia on high technology leading to growing discontent and shortages as well as them falling behind. What if one of the points of the Ukraine war is to kill enough young men that they can justify importing a ton of desperate migrants to create a cheap factory (deeply destabilized due to the tensions of this situation) on the periphery of the EU to replace Russia/China along with their utilization of India? I wonder sometimes.
There's a real chance the US will just do something like deploy mines or AI-drones and dump them in the straits to try and cut off China's navy and land a bunch of weapons systems and special forces to fight China. The idea of a full confrontation between the US navy and the PLAN may never materialize so the intensity of the conflict will be lower. The US will use their vast air power to airlift in supplies and troops to the island. China can still win if they want to but it increases the costs and draw it out to be enough of a media spectacle that the people in the west are turned against China and the pressure for decoupling succeeds.
The "War with China by 2027" isn't coming from the CIA, it's coming from the US Navy. As I said in my original comment, it is why I am skeptical that it's an actual policy goal from the Navy instead of an excuse to get more funding.
Exactly, they can't outcompete China while also basing the economy on layers and layers unproductive parasitism. The problem is, they also can't win a war against China for the same reason, and I think a good number of them realize that.