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.
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.
Christ, these IOF guys were completely unprepared. If they aren't the ones attacking unarmed civilians, they have zero idea how to defend themselves. This is pretty typical of what I see of non-special forces soldiers (who are just the craziest genocidal motherfuckers), they have absolutely zero idea how to defend themselves in the event of an actual attack. Imagine not checking for drones above you in the event that you are being attacked by Hamas, having millions of dollars of equipment just sitting there and then just sitting in the bunker waiting to get blown up by grenades.
We'll see what happens when the shoe is on the other foot for the Palestinians, hopefully they have a good plan for defense, but these guys clearly aren't unarmed children protesting at a fence. Hope a couple snipers got domed here.
I think they were very easily suppressed and then the attackers simply ran up on them and tossed nades in. Either that or they were not actually performing their watch role properly and easily run up on before ever firing a shot.
I think given how infrequent this kind of attack is, how little experience anyone in the IDF actually has and how fucking boring being on one of these bases must be it's quite likely that they were simply completely incompetent and easily rolled over.
A bunch of conscripts with no experience and a lot of boredom who don't consider themselves to be in the middle of a war vs well trained fighters who have made peace with death before the operation.
Combine this with very good strategy by the Palestinians, perfect execution of every role, and very good tactics as well. It's actually not that surprising in hindsight when you put it all on paper.
The biggest thing this does is expose the Israeli army as a paper tiger, blood is in the water and every single faction of the middle east can see that it.
It's this crazy thing that people seem to believe that just because you are in the military, you think militarily. If anything, it's the opposite, people who don't join the military don't do it because they know how much bullshit it actually is. I can't imagine having to do it mandatorily.
This is the standard tactic for dealing with pillboxes if you don't have heavy weapons that can engage them directly. A pillbox provides a great deal of protection, but it also has a more or less literal bulls-eye. If you can put accurate fire on the pillbox's firing ports there's relatively little that the people inside can do to retaliate. An important aspect of static defenses is to have multiple positions with over-lapping fields of fire so the pillboxes can support each other to prevent that from happening; If one fortification is suppressed the fortifications on either side can engage the attackers to suppress them in turn.
Yeah I'm not sure what's going on with the other pillboxes here. Maybe they were hit with RPGs, rocket artillery, mortar, drone dropped bombs, or something. A lot of possibilities really.
Quite possible that the Palestinians put 5 bullets in there and the conscripts simply shit themselves, hid, and would not peek afterwards. I don't mean that in an insulting way either, a lot of people would do the same without experience.
Word. Combat is terrifying and lots of people freeze. Sometimes in their first firefight, sometimes after they've been soldiers for years. And they might not have any idea what's going on or what they were up against, just a sudden attack on the base that Hamas was not supposed to be capable of.
A conventional-weapon paper tiger, certainly. But there's always that ultimate trump card of being a nuclear-armed state. Of course I don't think even the most bloodthirsty of warhawks in Israel's government would consider nuking Gaza, due to the effects of fallout on Israeli-held territory. But the Israeli government is also one of the countries in the world most prone to extreme disproportionate violence. If they found themselves losing badly in a conventional near-peer war with neighbouring governments, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see them use nukes on adversaries' military bases.
I can see them nuking Iran or Syria if things get very bad. As a response to Hezbollah.
Hezbollah doesn't belong to the Lebanese government. Their political wing only has like 10% of the seats.
They're mainly seen as getting their funding and weapons from Iran and Syria.
Hezbollah is a really weird organization. It's powerful enough to have legitimacy in it's own right, and an important role in society, while being outside the direct control of any nation-state.
It's the best real-life example of dual power.
As long as snipers have existed it's been fairly standard practice by all soldiers to kill them when they're captured alive. Back in the earliest days of snipers. around the time of the US civil war, common soldiers believed that engaging in pitched battle was ethically legitimate, while sniping, as it deliberately singled out individuals and killed them from a position of safety, was mere murder. This position was the default through WWI and likely applied in most conflicts since.
Snipers are often reprehensible people, lacking empathy and perfectly calm when committing deliberate, cold blooded murder. This is not universal; Comrade Pavlichenko evinced a strong moral and ethical foundation for her work, and there are many lauded snipers who have been part of resistance movements engaged in asymmetrical warfare.
Now I'm imagining just how fucked up the people who kill via drone while sitting in air-conditioned bunkers in another time zone must be.
Oh yeah. A lot of them are fully aware that they're monsters. During the GWOT there were a lot of articles talking about how psychologically damaging drone operations are to the operators. Unlike conventional air strikes where the pilot just drops the bombs without seeing the victims drone operators often have kill lists, pictures, and then they watch the victims die on high-resolution cameras. Apparently the attrition rate due to psych casualties is impressive. No matter how much propaganda you pump in to them most humans are not well suited to being monsters.
Being a sniper is an incredibly demanding job. You need to be able to sit still and alert for hours at a time. You need to be able to do ballistics calculations, like trig, on the fly. You need both patience and attention to detail; Most of what snipers really do is observation and recon, rather than actually shooting people. You need to be very good with your weapons. Proper snipers use very carefully made rifles, optics, and ammunition specific to their role and goals. And it's very physically demanding; Lying in a ditch or in a shallow trench for hours or days observing the enemy or waiting for a clean shot. You have to have a lot of specific qualities to get through sniper school, on top of an attitude that let's you look a person in the eye then kill them from hundreds of meters away.
Afaik drone operators don't get any of that. They're trained, sure, but not to anything like the same level, or with the same selectiveness.