this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2025
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Bulletins and News Discussion from June 16th to June 22nd, 2025 - Iran, Harden Your Heart
(hexbear.net)
Image is of destruction and damage inside Israel, sourced from this article.
Iran and Israel have struck each other many times over the last few days. There has been a general focus on military facilities and headquarters by both sides, though Israel has also struck oil facilities, civilian structures and hospitals, and in return for this, Iran has struck major scientific centers and the Haifa oil facilities.
Israel appears to have three main aims. First, to collapse the Iranian state, either through shock and breakdown by killing enough senior officials, or via some sort of internal military coup. Second, to try and destroy Iranian nuclear sites and underground missile cities, or at least to paralyze them long enough to achieve the first and third goals. And third, to bring the US into a direct conflict with Iran. This is because the US better equipped to fight them than Israel is (though victory would still not be guaranteed depending on what Iran chooses to do).
Iranian nuclear facilities are hidden deep underground (800 meters), far beyond the depth range of even the most powerful bunker busters (~70 meters or so), and built such that the visible ground entrances are horizontally far away in an unknown direction from the actual underground chambers. Only an extremely competent full-scale American bombing force all simultaneously using multiple of the most powerful conventional (perhaps even nuclear) bunker busters could even hypothetically hope to breach them (and we have seen how, in practice, American bunker busters have largely failed to impair or deter Ansarallah). There are several analysts on both sides who have concluded that it is entirely impossible to physically prevent Iran from building nukes.
I fully expect the US to join the war. I believe the current ambiguity is a deliberate invention of the US while they work to move their military assets into position, and as soon as they are ready, the US will start bombing Iran. After that, Iran's leadership must - if they haven't already - harden their hearts, and strike back with no fear, or risk following the path of Libya, Syria, and Iraq, either into either surrender, occupation, or annihilation. Every day where they do not possess a nuke is a day where lives are being lost and cities are being bombed.
Last week's thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
Please check out the RedAtlas!
The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
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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Agreed and with your last point as well. I was just pointing out that Anwar was literally charged because of sodomy and many in the public fully bought into it and saw it as sufficient cause for imprisonment. Of course, this is not aimed at any specific culture and I’m sure many religious conservatives in the West would cheer for this kind of persecutions of people they see as heretics as well.
I do note that Mahathir leaned heavily into playing up religious conservatism and Malay ethnic supremacy to consolidate his power within the country.
On your last point, 100%.
He still continues to this day, nearing 100 years old, I wish he’d just call it quit lol.
I don’t know whybut many Asian media news sites continues to quote his words like he has any relevance.
I think if your position is only anti-American/Western imperialism, then Mahathir’s words do often seem to fit that bill.
For example, in the strategy to promote national industries (e.g. Proton the national car), he looked to the East (Japan) instead of the West. He promoted regional independence instead of being fully open up to Western capital, though much of his view seems informed by a belief that “the US works for Jewish capital, that’s why I don’t trust them”.
He was also unfortunately right about not taking the IMF bailout (for the same twisted reason above), as Malaysia would have suffered even worse fate in the wake of the Asian Financial Crisis like its neighbors that took the IMF deals.
Having said that, his decades of rule was also characterized by deep corruption, cronyism, mass privatization, assault on labor movements on top of stoking religious and ethnic tensions against minority Chinese and Indians that very much placed him on the right, if not borderline far right.
Mahathir is indeed unique in Malaysian politics, because he was the first Prime Minister to not be of royal origin and being born from peasants. As part of the up and coming Malay-Muslim bourgeoisie within UMNO, against the traditional British-aligned feudal bureaucrats back in the 60s and 70s, his firebrand speeches does seem quite anti-imperialist for those unaware. However, Malaysian foreign policy had already shifted east-ward and maintained this position since Tun Abdul Razak, where Mahathir was really just riding the coat tails of.
I also do think generally his anti-semitism is usually overstated especially in Western media. It plays only a small role in the grand scheme of things.
As for his Malay-Muslim supremacy, that’s a big one because for a lot of those on the left, the creation of the comprador Malaysian nation-state was already as right-wing as you can get, especially with the secession of Singapore. I have written before about the class forces that led to this secession, and so I won’t focus too much on it here but the reason I bring it up is that a lot of Malaysian liberals of any racial background, have this false idea that Mahathir was the main progenitor of racialism (racism), and that prior to his premiership there were little-to-no racial tension. This was definitely not the case.
I’d say the key contributor to rising racial tension was the failure of left-wing parties and organizations to consolidate and gain power, and of course there is a ton of reasons for this, but just to name one example, Barisan Sosialis in the 60s and 70s were the premier left-wing party that was composed of a unity between Malay-Muslim farmers and Chinese labourers. Their fall lead to a resurgence and continuation of racial-baiting in the political scene and myopic race-based party decision-making.
Furthermore, now to mention the liberals, they too had facilitated racialism within the country despite their pretentiousness and claims of being anti-racist. This is because of their misunderstanding of racialism and the causes of it within Malaysia - which has always been because of unequal land distribution, colonial-era relations of production and British-origin ideological divide and conquer.
Now the liberals have built up quite a large propaganda machine that over-exaggerates racial difference and racial tensions to practically scare voters into voting for them. It’s two sides of the same coin.
And so to call Mahathir right-wing because of his Malay-Muslim supremacism is really meaningless to those on the left here. A lot of the modern-day Malaysian political establishment and the many-many parties are right-wing by that definition, for none actually seek to reorganize the relations of production and actually end the root causes of racialism.