Image is of a crowd protesting in Athens.
Last week, on Friday, hundreds of thousands of Greeks poured into the streets to strike and protest on the second anniversary of the deadliest train crash in Greek history, in which 57 people died when a passenger train collided with a freight train. On this February 28th, public transportation was virtually halted, with train drivers, air traffic controllers, and seafarers taking part in a 24 hour strike - alongside other professions like lawyers, teachers, and doctors.
The train crash is emblematic of the decay of state institutions brought about from austerity being forced on Greece in the aftermath of the 2008 Great Recession, in which the IMF and the EU (particularly Germany) plundered the country and forced privatization. While Greece has somewhat recovered from the dire straits it was in during the early 2010s, the consequences of neoliberalism are very clearly ongoing. Mitsotakis' right-wing government has still not even successfully implemented the necessary safety procedures two years on, and so far, nobody has been convicted nor punished for their role in the accident. The austerity measures were deeply unpopular inside Greece and yet the government did not respond to, or ignored, democratic outcry.
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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.
It's wild watching polls turn against Ukraine exactly as we all knew was going to happen from the start. Just have make sure a bunch of people die first before we can start talking peace.
It’s honestly a bit frightening just how quickly Westerners adopt the new propaganda line. Some of the Libs I know would have literally fought me if I pushed too hard on the very things they now loudly believe.
Consistency of belief is impossible when their ideas are just pure fantasy to begin with.
I keep thinking about how in 2022 the progressive caucus was forced to retract a letter calling for negotiations. Ukraine was at the peak of its negotiating power and Russia had mostly been pushed back by its fall counteroffensive. Now Ukraine has lost more land, hundreds of thousands more soldiers, and is dealing with an unfriendly leadership in Washington.
For his part, Biden left office without any concrete notion of what an end to the war would look like. Some people are convinced that continuing arms shipments will inevitably lead to Crimea being retaken or Putin being toppled, but dem leadership has only gestured to simplistic, patronizing aphorisms and hypotheticals while Trump's people get to seem like the adults in the room.
Fucking useless. If Putin is toppled the people that follow him are gonna be further right.
Arms shipments will never lead to land being retaken. Only offensives will do that, and only an absolutely massive amount of bodies will do that. The will to recruit 18-24 and send them to die in insane offensives does not exist because everyone involved knows you'd be throwing away a generation of people for nothing.
This wouldn't even guarantee success either.
I've never seen anyone who defends Biden's Ukraine policy contend with the fact that both sides seem to have roughly similar casualty rates, but Russia is bigger and has more people so they will inevitably win unless Ukraine can take out like 3 Russians per casualty. They can never connect the dots between their desired end result and the actual reality of the conflict.
As well, the reason Russian casualty rates are around (and abit below) parity with Ukraine's are because they are consistently advancing the front line, even if it is at a glacial pace. Anytime the Ukrainians have attempted an offensive that didn't coincide with a Russian retreat (force consolidation) they have had catastrophic casualty rates that have wiped entire battalions off the map, with the exception of Kursk (even though that was also a defense-in-depth retreat), but even then the casualty rates are still much higher than anywhere else on the line. The amount of manpower that would have to be expended in order to take back the heavily entrenched areas of Crimea and the Donbas would likely cripple Ukraine even if they did win. They would literally win the battle but lose the war in that case.
They pretend the reality of the conflict is not real and that Russia is actually losing much more men.
This has never been true in this war I don't know where you got that from. The best that can be argued for is some Russian manouvers and offensives specialy in urban warfare have been less than stellar and Ukrainian drones are far more successful than Russian circles would admit. But urban warfare is not the majority and at some stages if you even go back look at reports from Ukrainians themselves, the artillery discrepancy alone made the war completely lopsided, Ukrainian positions getting hammered by artillery while the best they can do is send a drone or two that maybe successfuly drops a single grande/small bomb once in a while.
That was before 2023 when Russia introduced their own new gliding bombs, if it was over before then its just unfair from that point onwards. Just not proportional in any sense.
What idealism does to a mf.