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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This is going to morph into another endless attrition conflict, isn't it? WWIII is shaping up to be the ultimate showdown of industrial capacity vs industrial capacity.
I guess endless conflicts that burn through a lot of equipment as quickly as possible to open up space for more buying is the logical endpoint of a for-profit military force. The good news is that Marxism is the framework to pull this kind of beast by it's leash.
Yes exactly. Imperialist wars temporarily alleviate crisis symptoms caused by inherent contradictions. They do the following:
This last reason is the classic one. But the previous three reasons (championed by Harvey and others) help to understand how war is also fueled by internal contradictions. Even if there was only one single big capitalist state on the planet, war would still be necessary and enemies would have to be invented. That's why Russia was denied entry into NATO when they were at their lowest point and ready to become a subservient vassal to the US. The war machine has to go on.
Iran wins an attrition conflict, so no. It will not be allowed to turn into that
that's good news, though, because the Empire isn't winning that fight
No it is not. What scares me is that the drift into fascism has poised the economists of the western world to realize the easiest way to reindustrialize (and only way really without fundamentally changing the economic order) is to shift into a war economy
Most important part of this, the industrial super power known as the PRC didn't send send significant amount of anything to anyone.
If the western mind comes around to these wars being about industrial capacity it is entirely possible that China simply throwing their lot in with one side could immediately end a war when the other realises they can not win a war supplied by Chinese capacity.
If Israel or Ukraine run out of their weapons, it means the west has ran out of weapons, if Russia or Iran run out of weapons, China is still there with the ability to supply.
If its gonna be a long, drawn out war, then we cannot claim anything based on one week alone.
Though if China DOES wait too long, it only gives the US time to build up manufacturing capacity for a war economy that could be harder to beat should they become isolated.
This is like the bat signal for @xiaohongshu@hexbear.net, a 10 paragraph post explaining why this is impossible is en route
The United States cannot build up manufacturing capacity for a war economy because the expertise to manufacture these things and the resource extraction to build them (look at how the REM ban is going for them right now) is not possible under current market conditions. The United States would have to abandon free market neoliberal economics for this to happen.
Yeah put me on the side of “this will never happen” too. For the reasons you mentioned above, but also the tremendous leverage/power this would give labor in the US.
I don't think the US is going to magically build industries and factories, even for a war effort since that in of itself is taboo. The whole idea that Trump was going to re-industrialize the US was always anti-Marxist. How is the US going to industrialize when ~30% of the Russel index corporations are zombies(unprofitable and only survive through debt) and Trump wanted to deport all the cheap labor etc...
Even stuff libs were saying about how Trump could invoke the defense whatever act to nationalize SpaceX is bonkers. This idea has always been MAGA communist adjacent too as if the US president is ever going to take some US factory by decree. Biden`s BBB was a massive failure already. Everything they do needs to be some congress spending bill for 5 years into the future, the list of issues is endless.
The real problem is the US currently existing arsenal. The US didn't participate in Ukraine, they went out of their way to send the most obsolete Abrams tanks as possible, they scoured eastern EU to find Soviet era fighters, the F-16s are F-16A or whatever literal cold war museum shit.
Meanwhile Israel is getting backed up by real F-35s and B-2 bombers. Its a completely different situation and yeah this is the real danger the F-35 is a meme but you only need some of them to work.