this post was submitted on 05 May 2025
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Image is the famous photograph Raising a Flag Over the Reichstag, taken during the Battle of Berlin.
On Friday is May 9th, which is the 80th anniversary of Victory Day, which Russia, among other places, celebrates as the day when the Soviets defeated the Nazis. Naturally, one of the current hotspots of fascism in the world today, Ukraine, is essentially threatening that they might strike Russia or even Moscow itself during that timeframe. Any such strike would almost certainly be symbolic and not aimed at anything too important, as I doubt even Zelensky and his American handlers would actually want to kill a world leader, not least somebody like Xi Jinping. But I would not be surprised if they tried something nonetheless, if only to disrupt the event in some way and not actually kill anybody.
And, as we're on this topic, @[email protected] has reminded me that Tuesday is the anniversary of the Nazis burning the Institut für Sexualwissenschaf in 1933, an early institute advocating for the rights of LGBT people, and which also provided early forms of gender-affirming surgeries, as well as hormone therapies. We are currently seeing a crackdown on LGBT rights throughout swathes of the imperial core (as well as countries in the periphery, to the extent that those rights existed there already), and this Nazi-inspired movement will be similarly defeated in the future.
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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CPC says based on testing, covid was present in the US before it was present in China
totally understand why they're throwing accusations back at the US given the lab leak conspiracism, but there's no good reason to doubt that the virus crossed over to humans somewhere in southern China given that China is a) a rapidly urbanising country in which the potential for crossover events is significantly greater than in an already-urbanised country like the US, and b) is already known (and has been for decades) to have large natural populations of animals that carry the kind of coronavirus that SARS-COV-2 is. There's a reason that the first SARS also showed up in this region.
it's not China's fault, and they did essentially the best job of any govt on earth at handling the contagion given the scale of the outbreak they were suddenly faced with, but we don't need to get dragged into shit flinging and start throwing ludicrous accusations to match the enemy's ludicrous accusations. Better to focus on the facts: China was open about the virus from the get-go, sharing as much information as they could, rapidly carrying out research and giving the world the warning through the established channels; other states such as the US failed to heed that warning and co-operate.
Did you actually read the document? There’s plenty of reason to doubt
The document doesn't give any particularly strong evidence or point to any study indicating that covid-19 likely originated in the US. Here is a scientific paper which provides strong genomic evidence against the lab origin hypothesis, and in favour of recent zoonotic crossover from bats. Nothing in what it states is incompatible with the idea that the virus crossed over to humans somewhere in southern China (but not Wuhan, which was the first major outbreak within China) in late 2019. Some of the key points the doc makes:
Covid-19 does not appear to have been circulating in Wuhan prior to December 2019 when a super-spreader event occurred at the Huanan seafood market
Covid-19 was clearly circulating within the US by January 2020 and these outbreaks likely occured in December 2019
There was a flu outbreak in South Carolina in September 2019
There were some other minor respiratory outbreaks in the US in late 2019, some of which weren't respiratory viruses we already knew of (which is typical for respiratory viruses, as there are uncountably many)
The CDC director stated that some covid-19 deaths were mislabelled as flu deaths early in the outbreak
One particular extract:
The level of "argument" being given here is that there were 35% more respiratory disease outbreaks in Virginia compared to the average of the prior two years in late 2019, and the reader is supposed to infer that some of those were covid-19, though the author(s) of this document don't outright state that, because it's plainly flawed reasoning and would be too embarrassing to make such a claim. There's a very obvious political motivation behind the lines of "reasoning" advanced in the latter part of this document, it's clearly written to with the aim of substantiating a politically convenient argument rather than interrogating that argument fairly.
the covid variant found in China is NEWER than the ones found elsewhere https://web.archive.org/web/20200410111500/https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/covid-19-genetic-network-analysis-provides-snapshot-of-pandemic-origins
One thing it says and which might be worth looking into the mentioned (but not properly cited) statements by WHO and other health organizations on is that there seems to be evidence that the virus entered China on cold storage vessels with international origins. That doesn't speak to it being from the U.S., necessarily, but it does tend to point to it not originating in China.
Yeah, the rest of it—especially the speculation about U.S. biolab origin—seems to be more of "here's an alternative explanation that's just as plausible, given the evidence, as the official U.S. propaganda narrative". Which is mainly just more posturing and noise from another source.
But yeah: though it'd be interesting to know more conclusively how and where the disease originated from a scientific and epidemiological perspective, unless there does turn out to be evidence (not present so far as best I can tell) it was manufactured...who the fuck cares where it's from politically? Stupid shit.
I take your point that nothing in the paper provides compelling evidence for the origin being from the US, but you originally said there was no reason to believe it didn’t cross over to humans in Southern China, based on circumstantial speculation.
The evidence does make a case for there being a) no COVID in Wuhan prior to Dec 2019 and b) the circulation of COVID in the US around Dec 2019. The position is therefore that COVID was contemporaneously in the US and China, which substantially weakens the case for a Chinese human crossover.
As for your assertion that China is home to larger populations of the kinds of animals that carry coronavirus, the document also presents negative testing results in bats and deer of the region as part of the origin tracing research.
In any case the authors of the paper don’t actually assert that it came from the US, but rightly point out that China has co-operated with the WHO in allowing and carrying out studies to trace the origins while the US has refused to even entertain the idea.
This would be true if major outbreaks occurred in the US and China at the same point after December 2019. But they didn't - Wuhan experienced an outbreak around 4 months before the first large US cities were similarly badly hit. Given that Wuhan is one of the largest cities in central/southern China and a key transit hub for the whole country, it makes sense that it would be the first urban area that the virus reached and exploded in, thus finally getting noticed following a period of low-level transmission in the surrounding rural areas. If the virus emerged in the US in late 2019 you'd expect New York or some other city to get hit like Wuhan did around when Wuhan did, rather than getting hit around when the rest of the planet besides China did.
Here is a paper from Nature last year which models coronaviruses in bat populations in Southern China based on data taken from bats in that region and proposes a
Here is a paper from 2018 discussing the discovery of viruses similar to MERS in bat populations in the region.
As I said, SARS popped up in the same region in the early 2000s because these viruses are endemic to bat populations in Southern China and recent urbanisation is a driver of crossover events. There isn't a comparable animal reservoir that we're aware of within the US, and genomic studies of the virus strongly suggest that it's unlikely to have leaked from a lab.
The US doesn't test nor has the ability to detect it most of the time. When people die, nobody cares.
Thanks for the helpful response. I was probably a bit too quick to jump on the bandwagon this time I think
this point is always glossed over when this discussion comes up. if covid originated in and was circulating the US in late 2019 there would have been inmissable outbreaks in the US first, no?
But could there have been a slower spreading variant first, circulating in stealth mode in the world? I fully believe that Western neoliberal healthcare could have missed these if they were singular unexplained pneunomia looking things in the elderly or anyone, we just treat symptoms if people aren't dying.
Maybe whatever got introduced to China was already a variant that was able to take off better? Tourism could have a role here that nobody would want to look into as that too is important to the economy.
I know that the og variant got completely eradicated from my country and the following one was introduced by a single group of petty bourge alpine skiiers that travelled to Austria. It took months for the new variant to take off here, but it was traced back to those tourists.
Afaik even cats can get it. Stray cats are common in touristy places like the mediterranean cities. Who knows honestly, but the white paper does claim it wasn't found in wildlife around Wuhan.