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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Reading tea leaves a bit here, but could be signs Trump is really struggling to unite the capitalist class potentially? Can't find a path that appeals to all factions?
This sounds very plausible to me, but I'm curious about who the differing bourgeois factions are and where the line is between their opposing desires. Is this a finance capital vs industrial capital thing, where finance doesn't want to risk escalation and possible nuclear war but the evangelicals in industrial capital do? Or is that way off?
Industrial capital in the US is gone, it's just arms manufacturers^[ok yeah arms manufacturers, pharma, oil, and highly capital intensive production of technological goods] who are mostly aligned with finance anyway. The only meaningful split is between the technofeudalist neoreactionary types (Thiel and co) and the regular Finance Capital fascists.
IMO the standard Leninist analysis needs to be updated, especially when focusing in on the imperial core, because finance capital already devoured America and now we need to understand the contradictions within the capitalist class as being fundamentally different than they were in previous phases of the development of empire. It's not finance capital merging with industrial capital (it's not the 1930s anymore) it's finance capital collapsing under its own contradictions and giving birth to new beasts that eat their host's remains.
There are still large amounts of industrial capital in the U.S. They are usually tied directly into providing secondary goods for the U.S. service industry or auto mobile manufacturing. However, the U.S. is also still one of the largest providers of paper products internationally, because we are uniquely situated with a relatively small population to arable land (for obvious reasons). It just isn't as large as it was before percentage-wise and the job benefits are nowhere comparable to what they were in earlier times. It is literally buying into political propaganda that says manufacturing does not exist in this country. It does, it's just that the work is long, hard and tedious, and everything is moving away from unskilled labor and towards increasingly complex engineering automation and robotics solutions, of which the real labor-hour efficiency gains are unclear, but having two engineers on salary pulling unpaid overtime is usually cheaper than having four unskilled employees.
That being said, everything is dictated by finance and everyone is moving into finance. I'm not sure how it ends, but we are rapidly moving into the 'trading a briefcase full of $1000 back and forth until someone dies of starvation' territory.
The paper product thing is interesting, there's billion dollar industries in paper products like brochures that get shipped out around the world. Neoliberalism is a hell of a drug.
I think the main point is that, as much as industrial production does still remain in the core, the main part of the process of shifting the organic composition of value into capital from labor has already taken place. The rate of profit has fallen (billions must die etc etc). So we're in the fallout of that process.