There were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.


If you have evidence of Israeli crimes and atrocities that you wish to preserve, there is a thread here in which to do so.


Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:

English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account.
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.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis.

English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.

Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.


The Country of the Week is Palestine! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.


Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.

The weekly update is here.

Links and Stuff

The bulletins site is down.

Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists

Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict

Add to the above list if you can.


Resources For Understanding The War


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.


Telegram Channels

Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.

Pro-Russian

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

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.


Last week’s discussion post.


  • mkultrawide [any]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    Latest from Seymour Hersh.

    THE PLAN TO WIPE OUT HAMAS

    As refugees crowd the border with Egypt, Israel prepares to hit Gaza City with US-supplied bunker busters

    full article

    It’s been one week since the horrific Hamas attacks on Israel took place, and the shape of what is to come from the Israeli armed forces is clear, and uncompromising.

    Over the past week Israeli jets have conducted around-the-clock bombing of non-military targets in Gaza City. Apartment buildings, hospitals, and mosques were torn apart, with no prior warning and no effort to minimize civilian casualties.

    By the end of the week Israeli jets were also dropping leaflets telling the citizens of Gaza City and its surrounding areas in the north that those who wished to survive had better start going south—walking if necessary—25 miles or more—to the Rafah border crossing leading to Egypt. As of this writing, it was not clear whether financially stricken Egypt will allow a million immigrants, many of them committed to the Hamas cause, to cross. In the short term, I have been told by an Israeli insider Israel has been trying to convince Qatar, which at the urging of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was a long-time financial supporter of Hamas, to join with Egypt in funding a tent city for the million or more refugees awaiting across the border. “It’s not a done deal,” the Israeli insider told me. Israeli officials have warned Egypt and Qatar that without a landing site, the refugees will have to “go back to Gaza.”

    One possible site, the insider said, is a long abandoned chunk of land in northern part of the Sinai Peninsula, near the border crossing from Gaza, that was the site of an Israeli settlement known as Yamit when the peninsula was seized by Israel after its victory the Six-Day War of 1967. The settlement was evacuated and bulldozed by Israel before Sinai was returned to Egypt in 1982. The Israeli hope is that Qatar and Egypt will take the refugee crisis off its hands.

    Israel’s obvious contempt for the well-being of the citizenry of Gaza amid the forced migration of more than one million starving human beings has captured the world’s attention and led to increasing international condemnation, much of it aimed at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

    And so the next stage must come soon. Here is what I have been told, in my conversations in recent days with officials from Israel and elsewhere, including officials I have dealt with in Europe and the Middle East since the Vietnam war, about the Israeli plan for the elimination of Hamas.

    The major issue for the Israeli war planners is a reluctance, despite the mobilization of more than 300,000 reservists, to engage in a door-to-door street battle with Hamas in Gaza City. One veteran of the IDF, who served in a high post, told me that half of the Israeli Army has been engaged for the past decade or more in the protection of the increasing number of small settlements scattered in the West Bank where they are bitterly resented by the Palestinian population. “The Israeli planners don’t trust their infantry,” the insider said, nor their willingness to go to war but what could be a disastrous lack of combat experience.

    With the starved-out civilian population forced to leave, the Israeli operational plan calls for the Air Force to destroy the remaining structures in Gaza City and elsewhere in the north. Gaza City will be no more. Israel will then begin dropping American-made 5,000-pound bombs known as “bunker busters,” or JDAMs, in the flattened areas where Hamas fighters are known to live and manufacture their missiles and other weapons underground. An improved version of the weapon, known as GBU-43/B, depicted by the media as “the mother of all bombs,” was dropped on a suspected ISIS command center in Afghanistan by the US in April 2017. An early version of the weapon was sold to Israel in 2005, allegedly for use against Iran’s suspected nuclear facilities, and the improved, laser-guided version was authorized for sale to Israel by the Obama administration a decade ago. Even then, the Israeli insider told me, Netanyahu and his advisers understood that Netanyahu’s support for Hamas was dangerous, like “keeping a tiger as a pet.” “He would eat you in a minute.”

    The current Israeli war planners are convinced, the insider told me, that the upgraded version of JDAMs with larger warheads would penetrate deep enough underground before detonating—thirty to fifty meters—with the blast and resulting sound wave “killing all within one-half mile.” The insider said it was his understanding that the Hamas leadership wanted some civilians to stay put because of their need for “human shields.” The new Israeli plan of forced exit means “at least the people would not all be killed.” The concept, he added pointedly, dated back to the early years of América’s Vietnam War, when President John F. Kennedy’s administration authorized the Strategic Hamlet Plan that called for the forced relocation of Vietnamese civilians in contested areas to hastily built housing in areas thought to be controlled by the South Vietnamese. Their deserted lands were then declared to be Free Fire Zones where all who stayed could be targeted by American troops.

    The systematic destruction of the remaining buildings in Gaza City will start within days, the Israeli insider said. The bunker-buster JDAMs could come next. Then, in the planners’ scenario, I was told, the Israeli infantry will be assigned to mop-up operations: searching out and killing those Hamas fighters and workers who managed to survive the JDAM attacks.

    Asked why the Israeli planners thought the Egyptian government would agree, even if under pressure from the Biden administration, to accept the more than one million refugees from Gaza, the insider said: “We’ve got Egypt by the balls.” He was referring to the recent indictments of Democratic Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey and his wife on federal corruption charges stemming from his business dealings with senior Egyptian officials, and the alleged passing of intelligence about persons serving at the US Embassy in Cairo. Egyptian President Abdul Fatta el-Sisi, who seized power in a 2014 coup, ousting the elected Muslim Brotherhood, is a retired general who headed Egyptian’s military intelligence service from 2010 to 2012.

    Not everyone shared the assumption that all would go well after the JDAM attacks, if they take place. One former European intelligence official who served for years in the Middle East told me, “The Egyptians do not want Hamas coming into Egypt, and [SO?] they will do the minimum.”

    When told of the Israeli plan to utilize JDAMS, he said that “a city in rubble is just as dangerous as at any time. The talk of JDAMS is the talk of people who don’t know what to do.

    Hamas is saying, ‘Bring it on.’ They are waiting for this.” Using JDAMS “is the talk of a leadership that has been knocked off its feet. This was a carefully planned operation and Hamas knew exactly what the Israeli reaction would be. Urban warfare is awful.”

    The official predicted that the Israeli bunker-buster bombs would not penetrate deep enough: Hamas, he said, was operating in tunnels built 60 meters underground that would be able to withstand the JDAM attacks.

    Told this, the Israeli insider acknowledged that underground rocks and boulders would limit the capability of the rockets to penetrate deeply, but the underground surface in Gaza City is sandy and would offer little resistance, especially if the JDAMs were released from the highest point possible.

    The insider also said the current planning calls for the JDAMs attack, if authorized, to come as early as Sunday or Monday, depending on the efficacy the forced expulsion of Gazi City and south proceeds, with a ground invasion to follow immediately.

    So, for whatever reason, Israel thinks that they can get Egypt to take Palestinians because Bob Menendez is indicted…? Do they think Sisi is going to extradite himself or anyone else to the US?

    As usual, the politicians have likely way too much faith in their wunderwaffen and the troops are almost entirely unprepared for urban combat.

    • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      They really believe that these JDAM bombs will destroy the tunnels? Even in the article another source says that Hamas built the tunnels over 60 meters deep so that they can survive these attacks.

      • mkultrawide [any]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        Hersh is getting some hardware terms mixed up. A JDAM is basically just something you can attach to a unguided bomb to make it a guided bomb. The latest US bunker buster (GBU-57) can supposedly get down to 60m (I don’t think it’s ever been used in combat). I suspect we would let Israel use it, even though we haven’t sold it to anyone.

    • femboi [they/them, she/her]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      The Egypt plan is either pure delusion or cynically offering a plan they know won’t work so they can say “well we tried” when they continue genociding civillians

      • mkultrawide [any]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        I think the Israelis are being a mix of cynical and arrogant, and the US is being a mix of stupid and arrogant. I suspect Genocide Joe and Apartheid Antony actually think this is a good idea and that they can someone force Egypt into it.