Image: one of our POW camps filled with captured soldiers of the Christmas regime.
Season's greetings, fellow godless communists. I'm here to disseminate orders from our Supreme Communist Dictator as we once again find ourselves fighting against the very concept of Christmas. As a reminder, by the end of our five-year plan, we plan to be in a position to attack and dethrone God, but this intermediate step is required to fulfil this directive. Our forces in the field have made significant, if gradual, progress since you received your mission update last year. It has been difficult, but we have developed a series of defensive lines to prepare for a counteroffensive out of Lapland that will try and reach the Gulf of Bothnia in an attempt to cut the land bridge that we have set up across Scandinavia.
Currently, we foresee a few major threats. General Santa Clauswitz has been developing many tools in his workshop, including artillery-launched snowballs, barbed tinsel, and reinforced gingerbread armor plating for his tanks and infantry carriers. President Frostyy has made the following public statement: "The socialists who wish to destroy us have no idea what their defenses are about to face. Democracy will always defeat autocracy. Christmas will always triumph over X-mas. The leaders of the axis facing us are all on the naughty list and will be tried for crimes against festivity once this war is over."
Delusional as this may be, the next couple days will be the most dangerous as they stage their counteroffensive, and we need everybody to pitch in and get into defensive positions. We expect this to be the last major push that they will make before collapse. Please report any Christmas trees, mistletoe, or general symbology of the Christmas regime to your superiors.
Over and out.
The weekly update is here on the website.
The Country of the Week is Finland! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
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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 daily-ish 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 (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
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.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
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.
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.
Lebanese Marxist Dr Ali Kadri when asked about the new relationships of Soft/Hard power following Al Aqsa Flood. (It's in Arabic and very long, I just used machine translation for the excerpts. Some interestingbits to chew on)
"this is a vocabulary used by the dominant imperialist ideology. We should not use this vocabulary (soft power, hard power, and the like...). Power crystallizes according to the balance of forces and according to the goals of capital, but the main force has always been the power of the military. When you kill the world and defeat it, you can defeat it intellectually. ...what I want to say is that shaking the image of "Israel" is inevitable. "Israel" is part of the composition of capital, and since capital is a fictional matter, as we have said, the mere fact that the illusion of this fantasy falls, its imaginary power with all its effects will fall. It is not necessary to win over this illusion with weapons, but it depends on people's awareness first and foremost. As soon as people see that "Israel" is an illusion and weak and is part of an imaginary construction, "Israel"will fall. And if this thing is neglected by Arabs and Muslims, our weakness lies in the inability of people to see the illusion of "Israel". "Israel" is an alien entity from the region, and even they-the Israelis-know that they are hired by world capitalism to strike the Arab and Islamic peoples, and this is taken for granted. ... The bottom line is, we should think about something else differently. The military and violence is the fundamental actvity of all the practices of the imperialist powers. ...
Interviewer: your words lead me to the last question about the Arab left, where is the Arab left today from what is happening?
Ali Al-Kadri: we reap what we sow. The weakness and powerlessness of the Arabs in the street is the result of a weakness of thought. The war of thought is the cornerstone of confrontation, and if we do not have an alternative thought that removes the illusion of capital in a way that completely changes the face of the region and changes the balance of power in these countries, what are we doing in our reality. Our Arab reality has enormous capabilities to produce, impose alternatives, impose the conditions of our peoples on the international trade exchange process, and cancel the western settlements that colonize thought mainly from universities and ways of thinking, but the problem is in the entire global left and not only us.
The West has become aware of the danger that the left is the birthplace of many new ideas that could destabilize its influence. So, the West undermined the left with projects of buying the left and buying revolutionary thought, and what's more, especially paid academics. I consider it a victory of our Lebanese and Arab people that academics are not the ones who lead the people and the revolution, otherwise the situation would be a disaster for us. ... Therefore, I find the crisis is a crisis of thought, a crisis of alternative thought. There is an absence of alternative thought, based on Western liberal thought, which has polluted the thought of the peoples in the Global South as a whole."
In other words, capitalist realism