With the funeral of the late Khamenei drawing crowds of millions of Iranians, and many dozen visits from foreign delegations and high-up figures from around the world, the war itself has hit a temporary lull. It appears that the battle over whether the Omani route is legitimate is continuing, with transits sometimes relatively elevated (but still nowhere close to pre-war levels) due to American air support, and sometimes stopped by an Iranian strike. What’s currently happening in the negotiations is extremely unclear to me because of a massive deluge of conflicting information and intentional disinformation.
However, with Vance confirming on live TV that they are treating the MoU as an opportunity to refill oil stocks (not physically possible to any significant degree given current transits and the SPR’s current level) and that they’ll see where they’ll go from there, the US maintaining that Iran cannot be allowed to have a toll/service fee system, and of course the ethnic cleansing in Lebanon, I currently can’t see how this ends without a return to war. The alternative, of course, is that either the US’s or Iran’s position is much precarious than they’re letting on, and they are bluffing but will capitulate under serious fire. I’ve been keeping my mind as open to the latter possibility as I have the former, and of course, it’s not as if Iran’s economic situation is all sunshine and rainbows and so that could potentially be the deciding factor, but to me, militarily, Iran has never looked stronger. The missile cities truly stood the test, and its air defense network is still plenty powerful enough to deter American planes and drones from getting too close to its airspace.
Elsewhere, we are nearing the completion of the latest wave of comprador installation in Latin America, with Colombia and Peru returning to a hard right political stance after a brief stint with more left wing politics. Venezuela is also being forced into submission regardless of which party is technically in charge under threat of overwhelming force by the US, after the US successfully bypassed Venezuela’s major and only defence, a well-armed and party-loyal population in the hundreds of thousands, by simply saying “If you take arms against us on the ground, we will do you what we did to Gaza.” Whether the Venezuelan people will continue to accept this humiliation or rise up is still up to debate, but if there is no response by the government at all, it does seem to spell a pause, though not necessarily the end, of Chavismo as it is currently conceived, and new developments will be needed to take Venezuela forwards. And, finally, Cuba has been forced to take the Dengist route (reform and opening up) for the possibility of survival after nearly a century of a more tightly controlled socialist economy, as the siege this time around proved even more impactful than even the very difficult times after the fall of the USSR. The next logical steps for the US will be to crush Brazilian and Mexican leftist politics, so we may see the ignominious return of the Bolsonaro faction, and perhaps even the man himself.
As I currently see it, with electoral tampering and fraud now both very commonplace and essentially unpunishable by leftist forces, there’s three main paths forward for the continent: 1) a return to the anti-imperialist guerrilla warfare that characterized much of the 20th century due to the once-again-confirmed failure of electoral politics; 2) just accepting submission to regional US hegemony as the US withdraws and relocates its forces and agents from Eurasia under fire, and hoping that maybe they can win an election here or there and that Somebody Abroad Does Something (the mythical “international community”, etc); or 3) the allure of the growing Chinese hegemony proves too powerful for even the American compradors to resist and they sign developmentalist business deals with them that undercut the IMF and World’s Bank plan to maintain imperialist underdevelopment.
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The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on the Zionists’ 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.
Mirrors of Telegram channels that have been erased by Zionist censorship.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
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.
Reminder that the US endured gas shortages and shocks to their economy because they refused to drop support for the zionist entity in the 70s resulting in OPEC stopping shipments to them. There was gas rationing in effect and the US still refused to do much about the zionist entity.
As I’ve noted in another post the US has many more avenues of demand destruction (including much more efficient cars, work from home computing), much more domestic oil production (ability to profit off shortages globally), and more reasons than ever to not care about or even want the global south to suffer and Europe to become more dependent on the US for energy reasons than they did back in the 70s.
Frankly though it’s still too early to definitely say it seems likely that the US didn’t blink when Iran made its demand for the US to stop the zionist entity. The cost to the US was too high, the zionist PM will literally go to prison if this stops so he’s not willing to stop for anything short of his own security forces couping him or the US starting to bomb them I think. Add on decades of building unquestioning 100% dogmatic loyalty to the zionist entity among both parties, congress showing it will not approve Trump’s deals with Iran and things are not great.
I think on some level it may be Trump understands this will impede his vision of “make America great again” because it will result in higher prices and various other problems which do not assist his plan but hinder it. But for the normal congress they couldn’t care less as his whims are not really essential to the plans of empire and the way it has been running and the way they’re fine with it continuing to run using the old playbook.
The global economy collapsing could be good for the US bourgeoisie as they can buy up even more stuff, impoverish and social murder kill more people. They’re convinced AI automation is right around the corner and they want to liquidate excess amounts of proletariat before that proletariat starts demanding universal income concessions or considering revolt. It could be enough to really push rentierism to the forefront with the AI cost problems and really set the stage for permanent subservience and own nothing and be happy serfs some of them seem to dream of.
All around it’s a very bad combination of factors.
I do think Iran hasn’t really fully explored its force options against the zionist entity for stopping the incursion into Lebanon. Maybe they just don’t have that many advanced missiles, maybe they fear the consequences but they clearly have some ability to be launching on the entity and making things miserable and bringing a higher cost that might be enough over enough time to force elements within the entity to depose the PM. I’m not sure if they’re set up for that but Mossad could always JFK him if they really want to and feel its in their interests.
To say the US “endured” the 1970s oil crisis is kinda burying the lede, no? The neoliberal deregulation movement began in that moment, with Carter exempting all oil producers from environmental regulation. The news spun stagflation as caused by unions making wages too high. A massive crisis of profit was formed by that oil blockade, one that pushed the capitalist world economy to the ropes before they came up with neoliberalism. Western offshoring, the US and UK busting the air traffic controller and coal miner’s unions, Reagan scrapping New Deal banking laws, the Plaza Accords, and so much more would be unimaginable if the ‘stagflation’ crisis had not occurred. There is a Western ‘narrative’ split between our brave treatlerites rationing gas (you could only go every other day) and the economic crisis caused by too many unions.
In the 70s, Nixon had just dropped the gold standard and the whole world of fiat currency fuckery was before American finance. Meanwhile in the 20s, we haven’t stopped quantitative easing since 2008. The fact that the USA hollowed out its industry means that it cannot do so again. Meaningfully, imperialism has run out of frontiers. Even though there’s a degree to which China and Russia are geopolitically opposed to the West, they are not economically separate. Fifty years ago, there was a socialist world market. The West spent the 90s sucking blood from its neck, and now they can’t do it again. There is no pile of world class Soviet technology to be bought for pennies, and China already went through reform and opening up. The physical and financial solutions that allowed stability and success the last time we ran this crisis no longer exist, cause they got used up for that stability.
i agree with your interpretations of the motives and psychology of the bourgeois and their agents, but i don’t think those motives are rooted in reality. An American official just told India that the USA would make sure not to give them the technology to do what China did, while 50 years ago Kissinger was working China like the world depended on it. i do agree that global economic collapse is at least seen as a good thing by capitalists. That said, instead of hoarding a reserve to sell later at eye-watering prices or actually using any of those demand destruction measures you described, our brightest economic minds are crippling the strategic reserve so that a handful of people can benefit from insider trading. The actual industrial crisis baked into the weaponization of the Strait of Hormuz always had a lead time, we were talking about a July or August cliff point even in February. It’s darkly fitting that the people who rose to power by being the best at making a quarterly profit and suing people are being undone by a problem that takes six months to hit and can’t be sued. It’s simultaneously a basic exercise in statecraft and an outside context problem for the biggest, wettest boy.