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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https://xcancel.com/MazMHussain/status/1935775987171483652
This is gonna be a VERY highly propagandized war. Old newsheads will remember during the 2022 and 2023 days of the Ukraine War (when they had even a vague chance of victory) how we talked about the "real war" vs the "propaganda war". This is gonna be that situation on steroids.
Israel HAS to sell an image of impending victory to their settlers and their backers in the imperial core, because if these settlers are getting confined to bunkers and losing sleep and the power keeps going out and there's not enough fuel and not even able to escape the country AND the war isn't visibly going well for Israel at all? The Zionist project will only unravel quicker.
propaganda will try to appear as objective and realist as possible so as to worm its way past your instant dismissal of it as jingostic genocidal nonsense and will instead present itself as "well, this is simply the facts of the situation, Israel reported a successful strike on [location] with [weapon], here's the video/image." a day or two after this conflict between Iran and Israel began, I started treating no new information as necessarily true (good or bad) unless it's been a little while for the information to come under scrutiny and survive it; that might be a declaration by Iran that they're striking something important and then the declaration turns out to have been invented, or some announcement that Israel has destroyed something in Iran and it turns out they didn't, or only lightly damaged it.
Remember the advances in AI in recent years as well. AI photos and even videos will be harder and harder to distinguish from real ones. It will take actual forensic analysis and geolocation to determine whether something is real or not at a certain point.
Israel already used AI photos of beheaded babies to convince Biden to support the war. They instantly fell apart upon wider scrutiny but that was two year ago now almost. AI has come a long way.
We already saw one shoddy AI attempt at a downed F35, probably some Russian or Chinese or Pakistani wishful thinking that went viral or something. I don’t think Iran has the time or resources to be putting out much AI propaganda, but the west certainly does.
One thing that has helped me sift through things with relative accuracy is whether something feels “too good/bad to be true” or just too perfect. Stable camera, smooth clear movement, centered subject, explosion fitting exactly in frame, etc. All red flags of AI artificial or fake content, the real war footage is always blurry and shitty and only catches things in the corner of the screen, that kind of stuff. Instead of direct hits, things often hit slightly to the side and do damage with blastwave/shrapnel. AI stuff is based on movies which always has the explosion directly hit the target.
Real footage is either a perfectly still camera where the subject is completely off-centered or constantly jittery because the person filming is too scared or excited.
They've also hit a number of decoys too and posted it. Not to say every missile is a decoy or anything like that, but when a truck's hit and there's no visible missile in the trailer afterwards or secondary explosions...
Many such cases…