Image is from the January 2023 World Economic Forum meeting in Davos. Over 50 heads of state and 600 CEOs attended.
holding flashlight under face
Imagine a terrifying world where we are all ruled by monsters of every stripe. And not hot ones like werewolves, but instead decaying zombies and mummies who are both insensitive to, and actively benefit from the immense suffering they cause on a daily basis. The top echelon of society, filled with profit-seeking, bloodsucking vampires. And the worst of it is that they repeat on a daily basis that what they are doing is not only just, but there is no other possible way to do it.
Pretty spooky, right? What if I told you that this world... was our own?
Happy Halloween!
Friendly reminder: when commenting about a news event, especially something that just happened, please provide a source of some kind. While ideally this would be on nitter or archived, any source is preferable to none at all given.
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA daily-ish 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 (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.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
The Country of the Week is Lebanon! 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.
This week's first 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.
New Hersh article. Not sure what to think of this one. Should be noted that, earlier this week in the news mega, it was called out by other regional reporters "in the know" that the political and military arms of Hamas are not in the best of terms at the moment.
::: spoiler spoiler the Israeli military and political leadership are beginning to see the results of a carefully planned end game that will be murderous—there is no other word for it—to the members of the Hamas military now being hunted down in the tunnels and rubble of Gaza City. The orders are to shoot to kill on sight. The collapse of the military wing of Hamas has given the group’s political leadership, who claim to have not been directly involved in the planning for the October 7 massacre, a chance to demonstrate their good will and save their own lives by arranging for Israeli hostages to be transferred to a basement in the besieged al-Shifa hospital, long a stronghold of Hamas. Some Israeli officials fear that time is running out because it’s not known how long the air in the tunnels will be breathable.
A possible breakthrough, if that is the right word, concerning the hostages emerged in secret talks between Israel and Yahya Sinwar, a onetime prisoner of Israel who now directs the political wing of Hamas. Sinwar publicly announced on October 28 that Hamas was ready for what he said would be an “immediate” prisoner swap with Israel in return for the release of all Palestinian prisoners now in Israeli custody.
The Hamas leader and his colleagues have been told that survival is possible if they release the Israeli hostages and agree to begin holding immediate war-crime tribunals. The Israelis want the death penalty for those Hamas combat leaders who encouraged and then did nothing to stop the war crimes of their fighters.
“The Hamas political leadership was not involved in the massacre,” an American official told me, “and the thought was that if they agree to try their own people and order them executed, they will be given their lives while also exonerating Israel for the war. We’re holding out clemency for the Hamas political leadership—giving them a chance to surrender the hostages and cling to life by moving them to the hospital.” One key member of the Hamas political leadership, Sinwar’s predecessor Ismail Hanyieh, left Gaza with his family before the October attack took place.
A significant factor in the talks, the American official said, has been the Hamas horrors that involved the raping, mutilation, and murder of Israeli civilians, including the very young and very old, who were left unprotected by the Israeli military during the ten or so hours of rampage on October 7. Graphic evidence of the unimaginable brutality was recorded by iPhones and GoPro head cameras and relayed in real time by the Hamas fighters to family and friends in Gaza and the West Bank, and is now gradually being released by the Israeli government as worldwide condemnation mounts of Israel’s retaliatory bombing of Gaza. Those unopposed attacks, at last count, had led to more than ten thousand deaths and worldwide rage and demonstrations protesting the Israeli decision to target the civilians of Gaza—an assault seen as a war crime by many. Hundreds of thousands marched Saturday in Washington, Berlin, Santiago, Rome, and London calling for an immediate ceasefire.
The concept of an Israeli-instigated war-crimes tribunal amid a bombing campaign that has flattened much of Gaza may seem out of a bad novel but an Israeli expert on the region, who knows of the seriousness of current hostage talks, surprised me by depicting Sinwar as someone “who could be open to a deal.
“He is a fanatic and an ascetic,” the expert said of Sinwar, who served twenty-two years in an Israeli prison for murder. “Dedicated to the cause. No family, very religious but got very friendly with Shin Bet [Israeli internal security] guys while in prison and was seen as not irrational. He will want a chance to give service to the cause. He will be open to a door.” Sinwar also became fluent in Hebrew while in prison. The expert predicted that Sinwar, along with some of the Hamas officials now in Qatar, “would want any deal to include a commitment that Israel would not come after them if a deal is made.”
Evidence of Sinwar’s publicly promised prisoner deal—his initial offer called the release of the Israeli hostages to be traded for thousands of Palestinian prisoners now in Israeli jails—is the hoped for flow of the current Israeli hostages to their much safer, drier, and healthier quarters below ground in Gaza’s Al-Shifa hospital. I was told that water and food would be available.
At the time of writing the Israeli infantry, aided by the bombing, is in the process of either blowing up Hamas tunnels or sending in combat units, accompanied by dogs trained to sniff out human beings, with the mission to kill Hamas soldiers on site or to force others to the surface where they are being shot on sight. The two hundred Hamas soldiers who were captured during or in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks “were not interrogated nicely,” I was told by an Israeli combat veteran, and they have provided higher numbers—an estimated 35,000 fighters, total—of the Hamas fighting force than were known to Israeli intelligence, adding to the many questions left unanswered by the attack.
The requests by President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who recently visited Tel Aviv, for a bombing “pause” were rejected out of hand by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli military leadership. One knowledgeable American official told me that a ceasefire and a pause are seen by the Israeli leadership as the same thing: a halt in the bombing. I was further told that one general in the Israeli command headquarters in Tel Aviv noted any bombing pause at this point will only be “to reload.”
As the Israeli bombing and ground attack continues—Gaza City is now under siege from the North, East, South, and the Mediterranean Sea—Sinwar and his political wing colleagues also have been told that their own chances of survival will improve if they continue to ensure that the Israeli hostages, now believed to total 248, are moved to relative safety in the hospital.
“Thirty-one of the hostages are seventy years and older—one is said to be a Holocaust survivor, and two are infants, aged four months and eight months, with no mother or father, and twenty-three under eighteen years of age.” The Israeli who relayed those numbers to me said that the International Committee of the Red Cross “has not been pressuring Hamas to grant them access to the hostages, although it did seek almost immediate access to the two hundred Hamas prisoners in Israeli custody.”
Meanwhile, the Hamas soldiers still alive in the tunnels underneath Gaza will be suffocating soon from a lack of fresh air, as there is little fuel left to run the generators necessary for a constant flow of oxygen. Food will be getting rancid and water supplies may be running low. The more than two hundred miles of tunnels will inevitably become a death trap, making life below ground as difficult as it is above.
“Hamas must begin to release the hostages,” the American official said
Honestly, Hersh has been pretty bad on this conflict so far. Not sure what his personal position is exactly. Like, is the following his position, or some dumbfuck American's?
Seriously? Do they think that Hamas hasn't figured the advanced technique of "stockpiling"? These things were worked out in guerrilla tunnels half a century ago, if not before then. I didn't think anybody was stupid enough to think that Hamas planned, for over a year, on doing a guerrilla war for months on end - and forgot about food, water, and fuel? Whoops, I spent all our budget in the Anti-Israeli Baby War Crimes department!
He also references the "tunnel dog attacks" when that video the IDF published of one such incursion had a dude clearly wearing a bite sleeve and not even speaking Arabic.
There's also ways to naturally ventilate tunnels that don't require any machines, and many of the Hamas tunnels are small enough that humans walking through would cause what is known as the"piston effect" wherein their movement sucks air in behind them and pushes it out in front of them. That's not even thinking about stuff like passive ventilation using wind catching towers and whatnot.
I think he's relaying what his sources are telling him as gospel, which I mean, is what he normally does. I guess it's possible that Hamas fucked up logistics, but it does seem implausible given the level of planning that went into the attack. We'll see what the accuracy of this is, but it potentially highlights one of the main weakness of his reporting on this conflict: he doesn't have any Palestinian or Arab sources. Most of his sources are Israeli or American, so he can offer a good idea of what is going on internally in those camps, but not necessarily on what is happening on the Palestinian side.
If you think of Hersh's (at least, current) work as "This is what the US intelligence establishment might be thinking" instead of "This is what the reality of the situation is, unknown to us mere mortals without top secret clearances" then it makes more sense. Really the only reason why we put so much stock in him before this conflict was that he revealed info on the Nord Stream explosion, which simply could not plausibly have been done by anybody other than the UK/US, so it makes sense that the US intelligence establishment would know a lot about it behind the scenes. For all this tunnel business, I suspect they're way of their depth - pun intended.
[citation needed]
only over a hundred Israeli armored vehicles destroyed/damaged in the first week of a months-long war? Hamas might as well surrender now tbh
This reads like a straight CIA drip. Hersh missed big time on this one, lots of absurd statements that just don't follow.
As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, Hersh's reporting is basically celebrity gossip blind items but for the NATO NatSec community instead of Hollywood. He hits a lot because his sources are within that sphere and are talking about stuff happening within it that maybe aren't going to hit the mainstream press. So a report from him about "Here's what the CIA actually did" is going to be much more reliable than "Here's what is going on inside Hamas'" because he has sources in the CIA but not Hamas.
Whether or not this is intentional stovepipping or an influence operation is hard to say. He's doing this on substack and not in a major outlet now, and his main readership are real news freaks like us. If this report gets coverage in more mainstream outlets touting him as reputable, after they entirely ignored his Nord Stream reporting and shit talked him, then I would lean towards that it probably is that, whether he is willingly participating or not. The target audience would probably be the wider Western audience with whom the NatSec community seems to have lost control of the narrative, with the intent being to spread doomerism.
The flip side is just that his sources are overconfident, have bad intel, and/or just generally don't know what they are talking about. There's also the possibility that this reporting is accurate, but I currently have a a number of reasons to doubt it, which I have discussed in my other comments.
his last one was really iffy too - probably best to not listen to him much on this lol