As is tradition, at around this time of year, we discuss the latest developments in the communist plan to destroy Christmas and everything festive and jolly - including that bastard kulak Santa Claus. Down with holly and myrrh, and up with historical materialism!
This year, I'm highlighting the economic trend of de-Decemberization, as the world struggles to break free from the seasonal hegemony imposed by the North Pole. Some regard it as a rather overhyped phenomenon, stating that the chains of Christmas are too frozen for any country to thaw and break in the current environment. Others are more optimistic, and assert that perhaps an alternative world holiday could be established to outright replace it, or maybe a series of smaller holiday traditions can bring it down like a pack of wolves bringing down a moose.
To return to seriousness, as this year draws to a close, I hope everybody here - yes, also you, the person reading this - has a 2026 that was better than 2025, and that the efforts of the United States and their proxies are foiled at every turn. One day, humans will live in a world free from empires, and it would be nice if as many of us as possible lived to see that world's birth.
At the very least, I'd like to live to see an aircraft carrier sink beneath the waves.
Last week's thread is here. The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
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The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. 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.
Mirrors of Telegram channels that have been erased by Zionist censorship.
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.
I don't see it as a bust. The strat was successful. The Zionists had to cry uncle.
I guess bust wasn't the right term, but it definitely wasn't the decisive counter those in the anti-imperialist sphere had hoped and coped for (all the talk of the millenium challenge, etc.)
They hit a mossad base and a couple time at an airbase. In exchange Israel wiped out all of Iran's entire civilian leadership and air defense grid. It was still an exchange in Israel's favor
This is such a massive overstatement as to be indistinguishable from Zionist propaganda.
Before the war we were hoping that Israel was on its last legs and would shortly be destroyed. After we were coping that Iran probably hit a few jets and at least the supreme leader was still alive. It’s not an overstatement, our expectations were severely out of line with the realities on the ground. The entire axis of resistance was building towards this one cumulative conflict that could be decisive, and then it just get of dissolved. Iran backed down, Ansarallah isolated, Hezbollah neutralized, Hamas suppressed, Syria captured by ISIS Zionists, supply lines shattered. We need to be realistic about what happened here.
US and Israel carved a path into Iran where they could hit Tehran and were operating air superiority the entire time, Iran was unable to shoot down even a single jet due to the SEAD/DEAD done by the Americans during their strikes on the nuclear facilities (which also seem to have worked, no serious activity has been reported at these sites since)
There was an extreme blindness to the strength of our enemies here that still leads to people coping about it.
If you had that expectation you were unrealistic to begin with. This was always going to be a protracted struggle and Al-Aqsa Flood merely marked the beginning. Everyone in the resistance understood this. It was Westerners who had idealistic and naive expectations.
You need to stop taking your information about how the eight day war went straight from Zionist propaganda and misinformed "OSINT" bros. "Israel" took far more damage than it let on, so much so it was they who were forced to beg for peace, and they never enjoyed the kind of absolute air supremacy that their propaganda claimed.
The claim that they penetrated all the way to Tehran is blatantly false. They never fully suppressed the air defenses once Iran recovered from the surprise attack, and they were mostly forced to launch standoff strikes from outside Iran, from Iraq, Azerbaijan and the Caspian.
Their only hope was to overwhelm Iran "shock and awe" style in a few days and hope for regime change. They tried to topple the regime, they failed, they would have failed even if they killed Khamenei because they fundamentally underestimate the resilience of Iran, and in any protracted war of attrition they would have lost, they just don't have the depth for that kind of conflict.
Even the initial wave of sabotage, assassinations and drone strikes launched from inside Iran was ultimately a failure because it exposed their infiltration network which Iran then hunted down. They burned those assets for nothing, because it was never about "nuclear weapons", it was about regime change.
The reality is that "Israel" has suffered three major defeats, one in Gaza, one against the Houthis, and one against Iran. They are in a far weaker position now than before, even with the so-called "victory" in Syria (which will turn out in the long run to be much more of a problem for the entity than it ever was under Assad, who at least kept things stable and kept the Zionist entity's border with Syria safe and quiet for them).
Even against Hezbollah who are practically in a two front war with the reactionary elements of Lebanese society and the comprador Lebanese government stabbing them in the back, still "Israel" did not manage to meaningfully advance on the ground when you compare with the 1982 invasion of Lebanon or even the 2006 war.
Their performance in all of these theaters has been abysmal considering they have the full backing of a superpower feeding them limitless armament and intel, plus even more weapons and recon from every major European military, plus assistance from local Arab comprador regimes.
They have an enormous overmatch on paper over the resistance factions and yet they managed to achieve none of their strategic goals. Hamas is neither dismantled nor disarmed. Neither is Hezbollah. You are acting as if these are symmetric and conventional conflicts but they are not, they are highly assymetric and the win conditions are very different.
The entity loses if it cannot fully subdue the resistance. Its domestic stability is in shambles and its economic situation is disastrous. The resistance wins by showing that the entity does not have the power to force a return to status quo. By exposing their fragility and destroying their illusion of invincibility.
But most importantly the Zionist dream of "normalizing" with the Arab world is dead and the world has turned decisively and irreversibly against the entity, and not even the comprador Arab monarchies can afford to normalize now. Everyone now sees them for what they are.
Without the US behind them, "Israel" is not remotely the military power it tries to intimidate everyone into believing that they are. They never were. Their own military and industrial base is incredibly shallow, they are highly dependent on US and European support. That's why they need to do so much terrorism.
And the clock is ticking on that protection umbrella, with the US empire in global retreat and looking to consolidate power mainly in its own hemisphere, and Europe is literally falling apart.
I didn’t say air supremacy, I said air superiority. Which they indisputably had within Iranian airspace. Marmite clearly laid out how the SEAD/DEAD the Americans did created an open channel to Tehran, this is the exact level of coping I’m talking about. When I point out objective facts you say I’m repeating “Israeli propaganda”. Shielding yourself from the battleground isn’t going to improve your understanding of these conflicts. Hezbollah is basically defunct now, we haven’t seen any action from them since their ceasefire with Israel that they said they would never do without Gaza (but were forced into anyway). Syria is lost. Most of Gaza is occupied and destroyed. Come to grips
Yes Israel’s “invincibility aura” and “reputations” are damaged. That doesn’t actually win us much, we are materialists after all. These aren’t material things.
How is "Israel wiped out all of Iran's entire civilian leadership" even remotely an "objective fact"? Like, genuinely, do you seriously believe Iran has just been trucking on without a government or something?
You know what's a "material thing"? Ammunition expenditure:
Israel’s 12-Day War Revealed Alarming Gap in America’s Missile Stockpile
No THAADs ’til 2027: Missile defense experts warn of interceptor ‘gap’
Pentagon Moves To Replace Weapons It Used In Operation Midnight Hammer
As @cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml pointed out, the damage that Israel took is likely underestimated, thanks to Western companies cooperating with the entity's government to censor information like satellite images - see https://hexbear.net/post/6082813/6503753 & https://hexbear.net/post/6417398/6587464. We likely won't know the full extent of the damage for a while. And additionally, even if they didn't hit that many targets, forcing Israel and the US to expend a limited and slow-to-replace supply of air defense munitions is still obviously relevant - we're talking about material things, right? In actual material analysis of war, logistics, supply expenditures and the industrial capacity to replace said expenditures, are, in fact, quite important.
Also, I'll reiterate cfgaussian's point, a point which I've made myself several times before in other arguments and received no answer on - if Israel was completely dominating Iran... why was a ceasefire signed? Surely, a country in such a position would be able to keep going, and bomb even more Iranian targets? Given what has since come out about the expenditure of air-defense munitions, could it be that Israel was in fact not capable of continuing for much longer?
I've argued this point with them before, and I don't believe we can assume that with absolute certainty. Iran's air-defense network did indeed suffer penetration - but this does not equate to F-35s flying freely in a straight line over half of Iran to bomb Tehran. There's the possibility of using bases in Azerbaijan - a country which does, in fact, openly cooperate with Israel militarily (https://mod.gov.az/en/news/azerbaijani-israeli-military-cooperation-develops-54780.html, https://caspian-alpine.org/azerbaijan-and-israel-on-the-path-to-a-strategic-alliance), and has previously been alleged to have given Israel access to bases. And as for the strikes themselves, some could have been performed with standoff munitions, which wouldn't require Israeli planes to penetrate quite as deeply into Iranian airspace - we don't really know the precise proportions of what munitions were used here.
Standoff munitions would also tie into my other point about Israel's capacity to sustain the war, given that such munitions are much more expensive, and their stockpiles much more limited - the difficulties with sustaining bombing campaigns reliant on fancy munitions have already been demonstrated (https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/natosource/nato-runs-short-on-some-munitions-in-libya, https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2016/05/us-raiding-its-global-bomb-stockpiles-fight-isis/128646, https://www.cnbc.com/2016/04/26/us-has-depleted-much-of-munitions-needed-against-isis.html).