Image is of a destroyed American AWACS plane in Saudi Arabia, of which there is a very limited supply and each of which is enormously expensive both monetarily and in terms of components. Iran hit this with a precision drone strike that likely cost ~$20,000.
I don’t have much to add from the last megathread description. This isn’t to say that nothing has happened or has changed since then - decades are still happening in weeks - but the general flow of the war is remaining the same. Trump sometimes threatens to open the Strait with troops and flatten Iran to rubble, and other times threatens that he’s gonna back off and let other countries handle it if they really want little trifles like “fuel” and “energy” so much. Iran continues to strike across the Middle East. The West continues to bomb civilian infrastructure due to their relative inability to affect the missile cities. In all: things are generally getting worse for America and the Zionists.
April is the month where the last ships that left Hormuz before it was closed will arrive around the world, so the last month of economic turmoil has been a mere prelude to what’s going to occur in the near-future. The silver lining is that Iran appears to be formalizing the new state of affairs in Hormuz, creating a rial-based toll to allow passage between a pair of Iranian-controlled islands where they can be monitored, meaning that, as long as the US doesn’t do something exceptionally stupid, the global energy crisis may “only” last a couple years instead of simply being the new reality from now on. Some countries have already agreed to this arrangement, and others will inevitably follow despite their consternation as their economies increasingly suffer.
Last week’s thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
Please check out the RedAtlas!
The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
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.
This is a great NYT update summary of Trump’s speech.
Trump has concluded speaking after 19 minutes. Nothing new was said tonight. This was a rehash of his Truth Social posts over the past month.
I’m amazed that an editor didn’t jump in and nuke it or force the reporter to make it ten times as long.
Written on an Iranian drone launched at the Zionist entity:
“I, Shahed-136, am going to Tel Aviv for negotiations on behalf of the noble people of Iran.”
School shooter culture to school bombing culture. End america
A correction will appear in tomorrow’s print edition:
“A headline with an article on Friday about President Trump’s threats to leave NATO misstated the full name of the body. It is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, not the North American Treaty Organization.”
Top minds over there.
Got this very bad vibes report from a comrade visiting Cuba:
Situation here in Cuba is quite grim.
Poverty rampant. Huge piles of garbage in Havana because of no trash pick-up. The vendors are desperate for tourists, so many will harass [Partner] and I (sometimes for blocks). Many people in rags, begging for money. We were warned that a lot of people will try to scam us. We quickly learned most people being friendly to us just wanted money—i’m probably said “no dinero” 100 times in the several days. We were told not trust buying water off the street and that drinking the tap water will make us sick. [Partner] also had her Cross necklace stolen off her neck; I wasn’t able to catch the thief, and she was very upset (her mom gave her that necklace as a gift).
There aren’t grocery stores like we have in the states. The street food is… questionable. The garbage piles create sanitation and heath problems.
In sum: we don’t hate imperialism enough for what it did to this country.
Imagine this guy being an actual “Russian spy”. He would say it out loud in the first week of campaigning in 2015.
Iranian General Seyed Majid Moosavi responded to US imperialist threats:
“You will not send Iran back to the Stone Age, you will send your soldiers under the tombstone instead. The Hollywood fantasies have twisted your thinking so that you, having a modest 250-year history, threaten a civilization that is more than 6,000 years old.”
Russia, China and France on Thursday effectively stymied a push by Arab countries to get the United Nations Security Council to authorize military action against Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, saying they opposed any language authorizing force, according to a diplomat and a senior U.N. official.
The EU (France is the only EU member state on the security council) voting with China and Russia against the United States and the Gulf monarchies is certainly an interesting development. Won’t put much stock in it given it’s a symbolic vote, and the Gulf states can’t do shit regardless, but might be a portent of things to come.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/02/world/middleeast/arab-iran-hormuz-force.html
is it just me, or has this war brought the logic of empire into open public discourse?
Ex-Iran foreign minister, involved in peace negotiations, badly wounded after US-Israel airstrikes
Former Iranian foreign minister Kamal Kharazi has been seriously wounded in a strike on Tehran that also killed his wife, according to Iranian media reports.
Outlets including Shargh, Etemad, and Ham Mihan reported that his home was targeted earlier in the day in what was described as a US-Israel strike. He was subsequently hospitalized with severe injuries.
According to Mehr News Agency, Kharazi had been actively involved in diplomatic efforts in recent weeks. He was reportedly overseeing engagement with Pakistan ahead of a potential meeting between Iranian officials and US Vice President JD Vance.
Two Iranian officials cited in reports suggested that the targeting of Kharazi may have been intended to disrupt ongoing diplomatic efforts. The former foreign minister was considered a veteran policy expert and a moderate political figure.
Kamal Kharazi recently said in a CNN interview that he no longer believes diplomacy is viable, accusing the United States of deception during negotiations. “I don’t see any room for diplomacy anymore. Because Donald Trump had been deceiving others and not keeping with his promises, and we experienced this in two times of negotiations – that while we were engaged in negotiation, they struck us,” Kharazi said.
This was probably the worst day of the war for us Lebanese. The scenes in Beirut today are just brutal, and it’s even worse in Sour and the rest of the abandoned South. Our government is nothing more than a Zionist tool against the Shia of Lebanon, and I can’t help but feeling backstabbed by the shortsightedness and naivety of Iranian negotiators. What is the value of a ceasefire that doesn’t lift the burden of the most vulnerable and wartorn part of the Axis of Resistance? God help us
My guess is he asked them to do something very crazy and they said no.
NYT reaches new levels of both-sides reporting
From Drop Site’s twitter
Chinese civilians with technical backgrounds are increasingly posting detailed military analysis online aimed at helping Iran counter U.S. forces, in a growing grassroots trend across Chinese social media, according to the South China Morning Post.
The effort appears informal and unpaid, with engineers and STEM-trained users sharing tactics, simulations, and breakdowns of U.S. systems — including mapping U.S. military sites, outlining missile strategies targeting aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf, and modeling defenses against a potential U.S. landing on Iran’s Kharg Island oil terminal. Some content has gone viral, including tutorials on targeting advanced platforms like the F-35.
On March 14, a video by an account called “Laohu Talks World,” subtitled in Persian, outlined how Iran could use low-cost systems to target an F-35, drawing tens of millions of views. Five days later, Iran claimed it had struck a U.S. F-35.
The creator studied at Northwestern Polytechnical University, a major Chinese defense research institution. “He is not short of money. He makes videos just for fun,” a source told the Post.
It would appear that posting is indeed praxis…
