Title is a reference to Resistance imagery about how Israeli soldiers will enter Gaza alive but leave it in coffins - the same is true for American soldiers in the Middle East if the regional war expands.
The image is of the Fattah-1 Iranian hypersonic ballistic missile, which its creators boast can overcome any missile defense system on the planet, has a range of 1400 kilometers (and thus Iran can strike Israel), and has a terminal impact velocity of Mach 13.
Dozens of American soldiers have been injured and 3 have been killed on a base in the Middle East. There has been confused reports about whether the attack was on Syrian territory or Jordan’s - the Al-Tanf base is in Syria, but Tower-22 in Jordan is another base that helps supply Al-Tanf, and Tower-22 is the one that is alleged to have been hit. These is the first confirmed deaths of American troops since the conflict began, though it’s not likely that this is actually the first deaths after hundreds of drone/missile strikes throughout the region on American bases, unless you think American soldiers are having extremely timely heart attacks just after a missile hits.
The attack is certainly impactful, though it does also have considerably symbolism. Courtesy of John Helmer:
The operational success of the strike for the attackers is strategic. Tower-22 is a logistics, supply, and rear guard post for the Al-Tanf base which US troops are operating thirty kilometres north across the border in Syria. The attack demonstrates that both Tower-22 and Al-Tanf, Jordan and Syria, are newly vulnerable to weapons which the US forces have failed to detect and neutralize. Just as significantly, the massive US airbase called Muwaffaq Salti, 230 kilometres west across Jordan, is also vulnerable now.
It indicates that Iran now possesses Russian expertise in countering American equipment:
“This is a significant accomplishment,” one of the sources said. “Was the bypassing of the US air defence system at Tower-22 pulled off with Russian assistance? US bases generally rely on the C-RAM [Counter Rocket, Artillery and Mortar] system. It was sent to Ukraine last year where the Russians have been learning to defeat it. What now of American EW [electronic warfare]? They’ve been doing a fair job of knocking drones down up to now. It seems a ‘coincidence’ that, not a week after the meetings in Moscow with Arabs and Iranians, we see this success. It’s a success the circumstances of which, we can be sure, Biden and Austin are not keen to advertise.”
I am putting my take on the table right now: I am 99% certain that the US won’t attack Iran directly. I think we are still quite a while away from that being a possibility. Much more likely is that Iranian officials in Iraq or Syria will be hit by a retaliatory strike, as Israel has done recently. It is a significant escalation nonetheless. And it comes as Israel seems to be gearing up for a suicidal war with Hezbollah.
The Country of the Week is Iran! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
Updates continue to be AWOL - but I am cooking something. Hopefully.
The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week’s thread is here.
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 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. - 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.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
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.
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.
Read this response first if you want full context.
Before I start, I want to preface this by saying that even though it may not be obvious to foreign observers, believe me when I say that the rhetorics and contentions you all have has already been extensively discussed and debated by anti-imperialists in the Global South. It may not be in English, it may not be available in neat and easily read blogs, essays and articles, but it has been discussed and taken into account.
Have a little faith in the Global South, okay?
Starting with the first article, it’s a reddit post. I am not bothered enough to even begin to engage with that. It’s reddit.
Second article - okay so some random guy swooped in and said some wrong things about sexuality and got barred as a result.
Okay so no one here denies discrimination exists and sex education is lacking. What I am against is the use of this unforunate circumstance for psyops and NGO infiltration. We don’t need an NGO to say that we lack good sex education policy.
Third article - that is all completely true.
Fourth article - random culture war bullshit that was imported into Singapore by the West in which the article itself notes that the chances of any law proposal coming into fruition amounting to zero.
Fifth article - this is where it gets more serious and has some interesting stuff I want to highlight.
Firstly let’s talk about the website. “Express your heckin’ LGBTQ+ identity.” Ok some random company that profits off LGBT suffering by selling LGBT themed pins and apparrel and then funnels it into some other LGBT NGOs (more on this below). Yeah, seems about right.
I can talk a lot about the individualization, commodification and liberalization of “LGBTQ+” “identity” and it’s harmful impact on Global South gender and sexual diversity but I’ll not mention it here so it doesn’t lead to an essay.
On the article itself :
First few paragraphs, nothing of use, just the event that the first article covered and a high school level statistics course I guess.
It then discredits some pop science transphobic authors which I agree with.
The article mention two authors which is supposed to indict Singapore’s LGBTphobia because they were invited into a webinar?? Ok so some people thought these frauds had something valuable to say, doesn’t really signify much about the quality of life of LGBT people in Singapore.
And then it tries to scaremonger about “misinformation”. Hmm where have I heard this term before? Oh right, western liberal circles.
The article is very liberal because it reeks of the short-term sightedness present in all liberals, whether Amerikan or their comprador counterparts. We have been suffering with “misinformation” for 500 years under colonization and imperialism.
I do not care about the article’s scaremongering and pathetic elaboration on “muh SCIENCE!!!”. The East doesn’t really treat Science as some sort of sanctimonious and immutable ideology to bully others for wrongthink. That’s why traditional medicines still exist.
And the article’s whole tangent on vaccines misunderstands the entirety of the US situation aswell. Perhaps the history of colonized people and US culture where large vaccination drives, quarantines and mask-wearing cultures isn’t the norm may lead to many Yankees resisting when the government forces people to do it. It is not just evil Trump ignoring ScienceTM.
In the section about Quentin Van Meter, this paragarph stood out to me:
Ok that’s an interesting NGO I never heard of before. Let’s look at their website.
So a random website made by some volunteers. Seems innocent enough.
Then I look at their collaborations.
On the first home page:
Ah the infamous Asian Pacific Transgender Network.
Some of their sponsors include the Robert Carr Fund and the Global Equality Fund.
Robert Carr Fund gets its money from:
I searched the Global Equality Fund and found it on www.state.gov of all places. Oh very nice.
It’s nice that Google also funds APTN to really drive home that the US is a dictatorship of Capital.
The rest of these orgs:
TheProjectX - an NGO that wants to legalize sex work lol. No further comment.
The T Project:
and ILGA World
Their other Co-Sec General: “Global Interfaith Network on Sex, Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Expression (former Co-Chair)” the org in which has funding from:
Oogachaga has this to say about their own website:
Yes, the NGO is sponsored by the High Commission of Canada and is transparent about it.
The jokes write themselves. It’s like a russian nesting doll of NGO and Western fuckery.
Sex education is an important issue that gets hijacked by “civil society” that politicizes and polarises the people. I have not read the book and it’s use of “civil society” in the title discourages me from ever touching it.
I’m sorry that Singapore isn’t an Orientalist Authoritarian Despotic State that will restrict anyone from entering if they are speaking anything that someone else would disagree with. (And this isn’t even the case - it’s just a random online webinar.)
It is argued that anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric is entirely imported (which I agree) but seemingly when I say that pro-LGBTQ+ rhetoric also comes from the West it is somehow belittled.
I expect that for the comprador liberals who doesn’t even know about their own colonial history but I am a bit dejected that this same rhetoric is also conveyed in an “anti-imperialist” site.
Perhaps it is a means to divide the people and cause instability like I said in my previous comments? So yes, I will call it western cultural imperialism when Christian sodomy laws were enacted that restricted Global South cultures to the Eurocentric gender binary but I will also call it western cultural imperialism when these liberal NGOs faff about “queer theory”, “intersectionality” and “lgbtqia+ rights”,.
This is because it all inevitably came from European Enlightenment epistemology (which itself stems from Western Philosophy), reeking with self-centered individiualism that can not facilitate and forment lasting gender and sexual liberation.
We survived 500 years of onslaught and invasion. We will develop our own path to liberation.
I recognise that life is, perhaps, awful, but that won’t make me give colonizers an inch when they WILL take the whole mile.
I wrote these two long effortposts with the acknowledgement that it may just be disregarded as a slight of hand and all my time invested here may just be wasted. But I’ll say this: this perspective I am saying right now isn’t fringe. It may not be directly structured into the sentences I formulated in these two posts, but it is more common than you think. I’m going to take a long break after this. This has exhausted me.
Excellent materialist investigation and insights. Thank you for your efforts its exhausting combating orientalism and Western paternalism.
Ok, so, I might be dumb, but what are these NGO’s actually doing that causes material harm? I can see they’re being sponsored by big companies but how are they hurting people? They just seem like generic tax dump off sites that make people look good when they put 0.1% of their income in it
If both are imported than the one that nullifies the other (pro) should be supported
How does it hurt you to support gay people? Why is complaining about someone else’s treatment of gay people negatively affecting the working class in Singapore?
If I recall correctly @Al_Sham@hexbear.net has linked an Arabic article on the role of civil societies for regime change in Lebanon. I can’t find it. It may prove to be helpful for you.
Onto my response, the material harm NGOs cause to people are two-fold.
On a societal level, they aim to circumvent and build alternative structures to the current government and thus without the “democratic accountability” that these governments have to face (even if they are bourgeois dictatorships, they still have to manage the contradictions within society to remain in power). This can be seen in many colour revolutions that have occurred the past 50 years.
They also introduce and import foreign concepts, what I call “academic lib phraseology”, without the democratic consultation and “diffusion” to the masses. The masses here aren’t dumb when they realise that these NGO liberals speak the same as any other NGO liberal in other countries or those in the West. This is not a coincidence.
On a local level, despite their claim to the contrary, they actually maintain and sustain the oppression of LGBT people. Since they do not address the material basis of the oppression and are funded by foreign elements, their only justification and purpose for existing IS the existence of the oppression of LGBT people in the targeted Global South country.
Why would an LGBT rights NGO founder want to achieve LGBT liberation? The founder would lose their only source of income and their entire career!
This is similar to when the labour aristocrats in a trade union stops representing the interests of the rank-and-file.
This also means that the NGOs feature the worst of the liberal activists, who are often groomed by the West in the first place through their scholarship programmes. They are filled with opportunists and careerists, because to them, civil society is their way of climbing the corporate ladder and for their “professional development”.
“LGBT” is in scare quotes because it is a foreign concept that has not gone “indigenization” or like I said before, “democratic consultation of the masses”. You may be surprised to find how many people reject the LGBT label because they recognise that this fundamental process has not occurred and perhaps may never occur if the West keeps interfering.
I hope my exposition here helps understand why I am hesitant in using “LGBT” uncritically.
And truthfully, gay people will not be affected if I claim to support them (or not support them) because I have only spewed words on a public forum. There needs to be action with theory - like you yourself recognise.
It doesn’t phase me in particular if you repeat these narratives and say you support gay and/or LGBT people. If you want to believe that I am a homophobe and transphobe that has a personal vendetta against LGBT people, believe away. If you only want to understand a country through Western opinion polls and what liberal Western-funded NGOs tell you, I can’t stop you.
But please don’t act surprised when anti-imperialists in the Global South reject this assertion.
Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar has a whole section on this but these article is a good start.
https://al-akhbar.com/Politics/327588/ذخائر-الحرب-الناعمة-الأخبار-تنشر-بيانات-ووثائق-التمويل-الغربي-للمنظمات-غير-الحكومي
https://al-akhbar.com/Politics/327901/
Soft War tag مقاتلو الحرب الناعمة https://al-akhbar.com/Keyword/11347
Unfortunately this is one of the many “forbidden topics” in English “left” internet 🤷♀️
Watch how quickly otherwise reasonable people start sharing Radio Free Asia/Europe and NED resources and Soros and Ford Foundations as “facts” the moment the topic arises…
I’m definitely willing to buy NGO’s being bad, but LGBTQIA+ activism isn’t even remotely comparable to ideologies that have been brought over by colonialism or whatever. As you’ve stated these organizations have an active material interest in not supporting LGBTQIA+ interests, which implies that, unlike the majority of ideas imported from the West or as part of imperialism, there isn’t any active violence being used to force people to participate in it. It seems unlikely to me that there would be roving bands of white people killing in the name of gay rights, or “schools” being instated to force gay rights on people.
So it not having undergone “indigenization” is seemingly irrelevant. It’s silly and absurd to reject it on those lines, like rejecting germ theory because you first found out about it from a white person level silly.
Also, at risk of coming across as a “no true Scotsman”, any actual queer or LGBTQIA+ theory would account for different conceptions of gender locally.
So yes, this seems pretty homophobic. Also…
Ok, few things:
Finally,
In no circumstance do I reject this. I do, however, reject the idea that you entirely represent all discussion that has been had there, because not only does queer Marxist theory exist that has been written by non-white, non-Western people (how absurd and racist is it to even suggest otherwise?) but it is extremely unlikely to me that some random internet person could even remotely convey all of the arguments and ideas that an entire diverse and inclusive community has had (I do not mean this offensively- I am also a random internet person). Are you gay or queer in any way? This statement makes me curious about your experience with queer culture. I’m willing to believe that I am lacking a lot of information as a Western person, but the way you approach this conversation communicates to me that you are missing some experience in queer theory and ideas as well.