Image is of a harbor in Tasiilak, Greenland.
NATO infighting? You love to see it, folks.
The latest incident of America's satrapies becoming increasingly unhappy about their mandated kowtowing involves, of all places, Greenland. As I'm sure most people here are aware, Greenland is an autonomous territory of Denmark with a degree of geopolitical and economic importance - the former due to its proximity to Russia, and the latter due to the proven and potential reserves of minerals that could be mined there. It's also been an odd fascination of Trump during his reign, now culminating in outright demands.
Trump has called for negotiations with Denmark to purchase Greenland, justifying this by stating that it would be safer from Russia and China under America's protection. Apparently, Norway's decision to not give him the Nobel Peace Prize further inflamed him (not that the Norweigan government decides who receives the prizes). He has also said that countries that do not allow him to make the decision - which not only includes Denmark, but also other European countries - will suffer increased tariffs by June, and that he has not ruled out a military solution.
This threat has led to much internal bickering inside the West, with European leaders stating they will not give in to Trump's demands, and even sending small numbers of troops to Greenland. The most bizarre part of this whole affair is that the US already basically has total military access and control over Greenland anyway, and has since the 1950s, when they signed an agreement with Denmark. There are already several US military facilities on Greenland, and B-52 bombers have famously flown in the vicinity of the island (and crashed into it with nuclear bombs in tow, in fact). Therefore, this whole event - in line with his all-performance, little-results presidency so far - seems to be largely about the theatrics of forcing the Europeans to continue to submit to his whims. I would not be surprised if they ultimately do sign a very imbalanced deal, though - the current European leadership is bound too tightly to the US to put up even half-hearted resistance.
This is all simultaneously occurring alongside the Canadian Prime Minister's visit to China in which longstanding sore spots in their bilateral relationship are being addressed, with China reducing tariffs on Canadian canola oilseeds, and Canada reducing tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, as well as currency swaps between their central banks, among many other things. It seems no accident that Canada's reconsideration of their relationship with China is occurring as Trump has made remarks about turning Canada into the next US state, as well as the demand for the renegotiation of the USMCA.
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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 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.
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:
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.
Kind of frustrating that Iran is so averse to striking first. They always just let the US and its proxies set up for months, get intel on everything and then counter almost all their retaliatory capabilities with jet sorties and anti-air systems.
The start of military build-up nearby is justification enough for war by strategic and legal standards. Iran would be fully justified launching missile volleys into Israeli and American airbases the very moment the jets begin to arrive, and way way more of them would reach their targets.
I know this comes with its own set of risks, but if US strikes are inevitable then why wait for the opponent to hit you first and disable a bunch of your capabilities before you hit back? I guess I'm just lamenting that the US gets to rampage around the world, clearly telegraphing its next target, nobody does anything about it and then they do the attack they were obviously going to do. Only the US (and Russia after 2022) seems to have initiative and willpower to act. Everyone else sits quietly in fear trying to keep their head down and not get noticed. This is a HUGE advantage the US has over everyone else. It's like if a school shooter was loose in a school and everyone just locked their classroom doors and waited as the shooter slowly went around breaking into each room and massacring everyone, and nobody ever came to stop them, and the shooter got to just return home to life as normal after killing everyone - and everyone shows up to school the next day to await their turn being massacred. Everyone sees the shooter drive up, get out of their car in the parking lot, set up their equipment for 30 minutes and then walk into the school each day and everyone does nothing.
If the escalation ladder goes up to that then Iran should just surrender and install a puppet US government right now. Or get a nuke themselves (they won't)
Again, if we really internalize this mode of thought than we should just surrender and let the capitalists rule us forever, it's inherently defeatist. It's worth risking it all for freedom and socialism. Fighting instead of cowering and surrendering, even when the odds are against you, is the only path forward.
At a meta level this applies to climate collapse as well. Biding our time for another few decades enables the status quo and all but guarantees future generations will live with the collapse of global industrial civilization.
I agree with you and it's easy for me to do so from the comfort of my posting pajamas. I wish more world leaders would see the writing on the wall. AmeriKKKa has a gun to all our heads but the alternative is famine and immiseration in the not-so-distant future.
We're in agreement. I just don't like the short-term reasoning of "well the empire is too strong to fight" as it becomes a self-fulfilling defeatism.
Mao was willing to go to world war against the imperialists before China had nukes. That's the sort of leader we are completely lacking in these days
The scale of nuclear capabilities in the 1950s (when Mao said his quote about nukes) is radically different to what's possible today. Mao's supposed quote is generally cited as something along the lines of "China has a population of 600 million; even if half of them are killed, there are still 300 million people left". It's not entirely clear if he actually even said that - it seems to come from Khrushchev's memoirs, with maybe further corroboration by diplomat Andrei Gromyko's memoirs. From an actual Chinese source, as quoted in the above link, the argument is a bit different:
In the context of the '50s, Mao may have been right (at least about the numbers, I'm not really sure on his "imperialism will be gone" point). Early Cold War militaries had a pretty casual attitude towards tactical usage of nukes left-and-right as basically super-artillery because, at that point in time, it was actually somewhat viable - mutually assured destuction wasn't a thing yet (the term itself was only coined in 1962), the amount of nuclear weapons, and the fact that the primary delivery method at distance was still the good old strategic bomber (which was big, slow, and thus vulnerable to detection and interception) meant a nuclear war did not spell instant doom for everyone. Certainly it would be devastating, cities would be wiped out and millions would die, but complete destruction wasn't in the cards yet.
With the proliferation of ICBMs and the construction of even more nuclear weapons, by the '80s the Dr. Strangelove idea of "prevail and suffer only modest and acceptable civilian casualties... no more than 10 to 20 million killed, tops! (depending on the breaks)"
(dang, we don't have any General Turgidson emotes) is no longer valid. The sheer amount of weapons that can be launched, and the fact that there doesn't need to be a plane actually flying over each target to drop them anymore, makes interception of a sufficiently large proportion of them increasingly unlikely.
Fortunately, since then there have been extensive disarmament efforts, so we're back to late-'50s numbers (but more evenly distributed, rather than being mainly American nukes), but the technological advances still remain, so the precision and speed of those more limited numbers would be much greater. The US would have the capacity to just nuke each major city in Iran - and like, technically it wouldn't kill all Iranians, but Iran as a state would have ceased to exist in any form by that point. We've seen a massive increase in urbanization since the '50s, especially in developing countries, so more of the population is concentrated in fewer population centers now, and thus the nuking of those centers would be way more devastating than in would have been in the '50s. On a global scale, full-on annihilation of absolutely everyone isn't necessarily going to happen, but an individual country could definitely be wiped off the face of the map.
The US wouldn't nuke Iran, but they would launch large scale airstrikes or be on the verge of full on war if Iran were to strike first.
Especially if they sink a carrier, the empire doesn't tolerate humiliations like that.
They never forgave the humiliation of the islamic revolution in of itself.
They lost their center of operations for the entire continent of Asia, secret documents, and their agents were held hostage for over a year.