My summary of the situation as I understand it is in spoiler tags below.
summary
After many long weeks, Iran and the US have agreed that they’re going to begin negotiations on certain topics in a process lasting at least 60 days. Due to America’s perfidy during previous negotiations, trust has broken down so far that Iran demanded $12 billion of their frozen funds and several other promises, such as the end to the naval blockade, to even return to the table, which seems perfectly reasonable to me. Iran also demanded that negotiations take place in two stages, and that nuclear issues will only be discussed in the second stage, which will be several weeks from now if everything goes as planned.
The terms of the MoU have themselves been a big source of confusion and suspicion, for me and many other pro-Iranian spectators. Getting the wording exactly correct is important, because the US really is like the devil - leave room for any possible interpretation in the contract that favors them more, and they’ll insist that this was the only interpretation up for discussion. Additionally, the US might be historically bad at winning wars, but they’re very, very good at winning peaces: they set up the post-WW2 order to best suit them by playing the European powers off each other; the DPRK might have survived the Korean War politically intact but existed for nearly the next hundred years as a sanctioned pariah; Vietnam was soon forced to economically engage with the country that had dropped triple of all the bomb tonnage of WW2 on them; and so on. It is no exaggeration when I say that the negotiation phase will be the most dangerous part of this war and it could lead to the most death and destruction without a single missile impacting Iran.
However, there’s one little genocidal colony in the region that could stop this whole process from even beginning, as the US appears to have promised Iran that the Zionists will stop the war against Lebanon (and perhaps Gaza too? I’m a little unclear) and even withdraw entirely from southern Lebanon, including all bases set up since this broader conflict began. Apparently, the US promised this in return for Iran not striking the Zionists in return for their most recent strike on Beirut on June 14th. Now, the issue with this whole situation is that the US greenlit the Zionist strike on Beirut, and they knew that Iran would respond to it because they did in response to an earlier strike. If the US made such major concessions to Iran in return for this response strike not occurring, then why authorize the Beirut strike at all? Why make their position worse? Right now, I can think of two reasons. First is that they attempted to create one final embarrassment for Iran, under the assumption that Iran was so desperate for a deal that they wouldn’t risk responding. Second is that this is all one big ruse or misdirection; the US does not intend to follow through with the MoU and subsequent negotiations anyway, and so the terms they’re “agreeing” to don’t really matter.
With the MoU signing apparently set for June 19th, we’ll know for sure soon.
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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 the Zionists’ 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.
Everyone was hoping to see some humility from libs through Irans win. But instead, they turn around and act like it’s a generous gift by them personally, to entitled, undeserving Iranians. No talk about the moral depravity of starting the war at all, of all the victims, the destroyed infrastructure, the decades of ongoing sanctions.
There was even a post on Lemmy about Greenland hypothetically begging for the same kind of war against them to cash out big in the end. As if Iran had asked for all this death and destruction.
Even in this win, Iran and the global periphery and semi-periphery get not even 1% back of what was stolen from them through unequal exchange alone. Not to mention colonialism, sanctions, outright theft, all the other wars, etc
They don’t even get back what was destroyed in this war and what they were forced to invest in defense.
Also like people are dead. No amount of weregild can bring a person back from the dead.
Wow, how simple minded can liberals get.
Things Iran has that Greenland doesn’t:
There wouldn’t even be a fight over Greenland. The USA could just march in and lay claim to it.
The population of “fighting age” males in Greenland is like 20k but it’d be pretty much identical to Iran
March in? They could just declare a “memorandum of understanding” was reached with Denmark and unilaterally control the islamd remotely - Not even the fed would have to get involved.
pauses all user processes five times a day and pings mecca
You lost the war you started. Losing a war is a bad thing, it means you are forced to do something that you dont want to do.
American families will benefit from stopping the war. They will benefit from not having their sons blown up by Shahed drones. They will benefit from the Strait of Hormuz being open because this means the world economy does not go tits up.
Warren acting like she expected the MOU to have a provision for a 3.5% Tax subsidy for marginalised small business owners funded by Iran’s uranium stockpile
Ah, so the war should be continued, so that oil and other essential minerals that keep being held up in the Strait and prices could continue to climb. Surely American families would have benefited if corporations were given more excuses to price gouge. Stupid Trump
You lost the war, idiot, obviously it sucks for America. You play for the same team as trump, and that team lost.
What about this is so hard to understand?
I don’t understand how any American family would be helped if Iran didn’t get $300b.
Will Congress appropriate $300b as stimmy checks if Iran didn’t get $300b in private funds?
Congress can do so anyway regardless of whether Iran gets money or not, it is the very act of appropriation that creates Government money.
Also, export lovers should love Iran getting dollars to buy American goods. It’s “good for jobs”.
Yeah, the best part of this deal is that it is at least seemingly an American defeat known to the world. I guess in terms of frozen assets and the reconstruction fund, they could use that to trade with China since they accumulate dollars anyway, but the sanctions relief could come back to bite them in the ass, since it will be with the west they will be trading if things stay as they are. I wish they demanded the dismantling of bases in the middle east. Although for now, we don’t really even know the conditions of some of these terms and how they’ll even be enforced.
Yea if they buy Chinese goods instead there is no significant strain on US resources at all. Chinese labor and resources will be used and Americans will be unaffected.
Real repearations are paid in real goods like how Weimar Germany was forced to pay up in gold which it didn’t have, forcing the Government to bid up prices by dumping local currency to markets which no one wanted resulting in hyperinflation.
The US is not at all in such a position.
Heck, China will then use those dollars to buy US financial instruments which enable it to run the trade deficit it already does and have the dominance of the dollar reaffirmed.
That 300b dollars could’ve gone towards bombing more children
The more I think about it, the more I’m wondering if they intend to give Iran the $300bn after all.
The US financial system is the glue that binds the contradictions together! Being able to leverage inordinate amounts of debt and funnel those newly-minted dollars onto Iran would be like a second Marshall Plan, which itself set up the US for nearly a century of hegemony.