Image is a frame taken from this video of Iranian missiles raining down on Israel without interception due to a weak and depleted air defense system after a year of war and genocide.
Mao, 1956:
Now U.S. imperialism is quite powerful, but in reality it isn’t. It is very weak politically because it is divorced from the masses of the people and is disliked by everybody and by the American people too. In appearance it is very powerful but in reality it is nothing to be afraid of, it is a paper tiger. Outwardly a tiger, it is made of paper, unable to withstand the wind and the rain. I believe the United States is nothing but a paper tiger.
When we say U.S. imperialism is a paper tiger, we are speaking in terms of strategy. Regarding it as a whole, we must despise it. But regarding each part, we must take it seriously. It has claws and fangs. We have to destroy it piecemeal. For instance, if it has ten fangs, knock off one the first time, and there will be nine left, knock off another, and there will be eight left. When all the fangs are gone, it will still have claws. If we deal with it step by step and in earnest, we will certainly succeed in the end.
Strategically, we must utterly despise U.S. imperialism. Tactically, we must take it seriously. In struggling against it, we must take each battle, each encounter, seriously. At present, the United States is powerful, but when looked at in a broader perspective, as a whole and from a long-term viewpoint, it has no popular support, its policies are disliked by the people, because it oppresses and exploits them. For this reason, the tiger is doomed. Therefore, it is nothing to be afraid of and can be despised. But today the United States still has strength, turning out more than 100 million tons of steel a year and hitting out everywhere. That is why we must continue to wage struggles against it, fight it with all our might and wrest one position after another from it. And that takes time.
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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 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.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
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.
Where to even begin? Yugoslavian regional desires? Vietnamese Doi Moi and how it emerges from Le Duan and how that stems from the differences in the north and the south’s unequal development despite a common struggle? Che’s writings on USSR/Cuba/Free Trade/Sugar? Defining what differs between Khrushchev or Deng(its nothing)? How soviet “social imperialism” is in retrospect clearly subordinated to American imperialism and now China repeats the same mistakes today. The eurocommunism-maoist split and how that really does derive from various European communist parties and just about every single USA communist parties revisionism, which plays out now in various rightist deviations towards what “actually exists” and from that “what is actually possible”.
And of course all of this precedes the answer to why post colonial bourgeois nationalism flared up in border struggles with Vietnam and China, and now regrettably we have a china that continues many of these trends. Laos and Vietnam still at least exist as a good model of interstate relations, or much of the Soviet unions internal borders at least before capitalist restoration and the return of genocidal ambitions we see today.
not to be trite with you, this question is massive, and arguably as fundamental to communism as any other question nowadays, given its real applicability on how revisionism re-asserts itself time and time again, although its particular contours are obviously not at all limited to “who gets to own a couple islands along the amur river”. No easy book to start with, but Albania-China relations is probably as good a starting point as any.
The USSR coming closer to nuking China than arguably any other country has since WW2 didnt help
Also
China has diplomaticaly resolved the large majority of the border and maritime disputes it found itself in with the establishment of the PRC due to the massive changes from decolonial movements in the region, constantly changing and uncertain borders for China in the previous period, lack of border treaties with its neighbors before 1949. Often by surrendering the majority of the disputed ereas to the neighbouring country. Since its inception the PRC resolved border disputes with Vietnam, Myanmar, Nepal, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Mongolia, North Korea, Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Russia without maximalist demands, without domination through coercion and without lasting negative impact on their relations (from that aspect at least).
The point that the USSR would have invaded China due to the cultural revolution(or perhaps you are referencing something else I am completely unaware of) is absurd. It only intervened when bourgeois counter-rev was impending within the warsaw pact when it was invited.
The real nature of the question here is not persay the thought process behind how someone could mistake the USSR as an imperialist power equal to the USA, but how the theoretical underpinnings there intertwined with the great proletarian revolutions struggles within military politicization. Once we have that we do not have to throw the idea away wholesale, and it certainly ties into social imperialism in a real sense, and SPD’s being critiqued by Lenin as an origin of that phrase. I do not have persay finalized thoughts there.
To your second point it feels a bit callous to list off a couple points and not grapple with the fundamental failure of decolonizing the world along socialist lines. Certainly China, the USSR, and Mongolia were able to draw reasonable borders all together, but the sino-vietnam-cambodia war is just one example that is clearly formed by colonialism and chinese revisionism and persists to this day. And that underlying issue, not making up a tally of W’s and L’s, is what I am interested in. But certainly point taken that successes are possible, although quite a few of them likely have to due with quelling nationalistic urges in border regions more so than socialist-oblige.