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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Last week's thread is here.
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.
Apart from maybe the CPRF there are no non-liberals in the Russian government. Nobody but 'the libs' had any way of winning sans the case of a revolution happening.
Mishustin is still holding the fort as a soc dem-ish prime minister and was instrumental in keeping the Russian economy alive during Covid and under unprecedented sanctions, but yeah the neolibs have more or less returned since their major setback after the war in Ukraine started.
Do you consider socdems to be socialist, and somehow not liberals? What?
No, but I associate neoliberalism with very specific monetary and fiscal policies, namely: austerity, mass privatization and anti-labor policies.
In other words, people who believe in economic theories that came out of Marginalism e.g. neoclassicals.
This is also why when China makes certain policies I call them libs even when they call themselves socialists.
Do you use 'lib' specifically as a shorthand for 'neoliberal', and not 'liberal'? Otherwise, I'm not sure why you are bringing up neoliberalism specifically right now, as both social democrats and neoliberals are liberals.
Well you have to be careful with prescribing blanket labels when discussing Russian politics and economy.
There are many who you can call “liberals” in Russia and they are indeed not socialists, yet their ideologies are still much closer to reviving the Soviet era socialist economy/war communism or at least want to implement a good part of that, compared to their Western counterparts or the neoliberals in Russia who have been fully indoctrinated with Western neoclassical economics.
The legacy of the Soviet Union doesn’t disappear just because the Union collapsed. Many of its ideas continue to linger on in the post-Soviet society and influence the people and institutions, especially after the failures of neoliberal reform in the 1990s.
Again, we need to take into account the historical trajectory of a country when discussing their situation in the present day, where the present is shaped by the past, and not fall into the liberal thinking of prescribing a blanket solution where the specific contexts of a country don’t matter, for example, all they need is “democracy and freedom” and we should bring them “color revolutions” to liberate the people suffering from corrupt regime.
I wish. So far, the only parties with seats in the government that I have seen make any sort of pro-workers action are the CPRF and A Just Russia, who did try to appeal some government decisions in the Supreme Court but, of course, were denied. I haven't checked in a few years, but even if things have changed it's just, again, only a few years of history of measures that did not go through.
If your point is that you don't consider liberals who are slightly to the left of neoliberals to be 'liberals', then I'm sorry, but that's just silly.
Not sure why you bring this up, when this comment chain hasn't seen any such prescription of solutions.
Let’s try this instead: where do you think Belousov fall in this spectrum?
Describe his politics and try and see if you can slot him into the box the way you described the liberals.
This point is that you cannot ignore Soviet legacies and the history of Russia as a country. You cannot pretend as though the influence of the USSR disappeared just like that.
Going to note that you seem to be extremely unwilling to elaborate on your claims for no apparent reason.
I wonder what political position a person who holds one of the most powerful positions in the state headed by a liberal government, who was selected as a candidate for said position by the person holding the most powerful position in the state, who hasn't done or said anything anti-capitalist that I'm aware of in the last 20 years, has. /s
I didn't provide a description of liberals in the previous comments in this comment chains. Their economic positions, however, are characterised by their favour for capitalism.
Notably, I didn't ignore those. Not sure why you are bringing this up, or why you seem to assume that I did/do ignore that.
You’re basically saying that it doesn’t matter if Russia falls because they’re not socialist and only a revolution matters?
This is not different from people who said they don’t care about Assad’s Syria falling because he’s not been great for the country. Yeah, Assad is bad but what comes after the collapse is even worse.
You might not care about this but there are hundreds of millions of people’s livelihood in danger if Russia goes back to its neoliberal way. Even a soc dem-ish government can help Russia survive against Western imperialism much longer and pave the way towards reviving the Soviet style economy.
You need to understand what anti-imperialism means if this is your take.
What? Where the hell did you get that from?
I do not recall making any claims about Russia falling or not at all in this comment chain, and I for certain do not believe that. I am firmly anti-NATO at least on account of the latter's history of slavery and colonialism.
This is an incredibly wild accusation based on nothing, and coming from a person who just a couple of months ago was in favour of the PRC crushing the USSR and plunging the world into this mess.
I mean I don't mean to be a
but maybe your talking past each other because social Democrat is a label used by social liberals for a long time.