One year on. Hundreds of thousands are dying or dead, millions are displaced, the Middle East is undergoing its greatest changes in a generation, Iran has directly attacked Israel twice in one year, and Yemen has proven that the US Navy ain't worth shit. We are the closest we have been to nuclear war (discounting accidents) in decades, but also the fall of Israel.
Because one day, the prisoners of a concentration camp paraglided over a wall.
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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.
Sorry if this is an ignorant question but - what do those UN troops actually do? Like there are thousands of them on the Lebanese border right? This isn’t a criticism I just genuinely don’t understand, like what do they do all day, what’s their purpose there now?
Nothing. They do nothing. The UN is the most useless organization ever invented and does nothing to prevent wars and genocides. Instead it makes sure that wars and genocides are all that happen.
All those predatory loans, the veto power they gave a certain country, their courts are all bullshit and only cement white supremacy in the world.
I have a coworker who was a UN soldier in Lebanon in the 80s.
The way he described it is that they were basically cops and hall monitors. He would make sure that locals wouldn't dig up and steal cables or rebar while observing israeli soldiers.
Not much, it’s basically a militia stationned in weakened state, sometime when they get bored they get involved in the community such as giving little courses to children or sometime they start an HIV epidemic by starting a sex trafficking network
They also enjoy spicing up the local water supply like in Haiti
they give yoy food if you approach them
I think the most cynical interpretation is that they're kinda just occupying forces but without the baggage of having them necessarily be Western. The slightly less cynical view is that they're just there to make the UN seem like it's accomplishing anything while not actually doing anything because the UN is more-or-less just another diplomatic/military arm of the United States. It's like pretending to work on something innocuous like writing emails or whatever while your boss walks behind you, but your actual secret job is being a drone operator murdering children all day long.
I think the UN could probably be shifted towards doing some good in the world, it's not necessarily fatally flawed from the foundation upwards unlike most US imperialist institutions, but in practice I think that it'll go out once the US hegemon has well and truly fallen, just like the League of Nations collapsed once the British Empire/Western Europe was in its final years as the hegemon, and it'll be replaced by a China-headquartered version sooner or later. If for no other reason than in 20 years, the US will have probably sanctioned every country outside of Europe and getting diplomats into New York will be a total nightmare.
They are there to do the job of the local police and army. I think Israel was basically forced to agree to this weird arangement that the Southern of Lebanon would be occupied by UN peacekeepers to stop the Far-Right Christian militias, Leftist, Hezbollah from causing more conflict. But what they actually do is just be the support of the local Lebanese police, they don't usually engage in conflicts (seems like Hezbollah ignores them) but they still get attacked by Israel.