news

CW: Nazi shit

MI6 distances its new chief from Nazi grandfather

I like how MI6 try to make it sound that having a muderous Nazi grandfather is a good thing and an example of diversity in action, actually:

A spokesperson added: "Blaise's ancestry is characterised by conflict and division and, as is the case for many with eastern European heritage, only partially understood.

"It is precisely this complex heritage which has contributed to her commitment to prevent conflict and protect the British public from modern threats from today's hostile states, as the next chief of MI6."

The Daily Mail, which first revealed the family link, reports that it found hundreds of pages of documents in an archive in Freiburg, Germany, which showed Mr Dobrowolski was known as "The Butcher" or "Agent No 30" by Wehrmacht commanders. He reportedly signed off letters to his Nazi superiors with "Heil Hitler" and said he "personally" took part in "the extermination of the Jews".

NEWS — Senate R’s refusing Dem request for a bipartisan meeting with the parliamentarian on using current policy baseline to pay for tax cuts.

As far as I understand this, Republicans don't even want to have a vote to disregard the Senate Parliamentarian (as the Senate rules allow), but want to just pretend the Senate Parliamentarian doesn't exist. If this doesn't work, they will go with the vote thing anyway, or just fire the Parliamentarian. But in any case, pretending the Parliamentarian doesn't exist is the only correct thing to do. Maybe some day, a politician will do the same thing but in order to pass good legislation.

The Israelis are now lying like Trump.

NYT

Maj. Gen. Eyal Zamir, the chief of staff of the Israeli military, said the damage caused to Iran’s nuclear program in 12 days of war was “not localized, but systemic.” In a video statement on Wednesday, Zamir said that Israel has determined that “Iran’s nuclear project suffered a severe, extensive, and deep blow, and was set back by years.” He also said Israel’s operations in Iran included those of “commando forces on the ground, who operated covertly deep inside enemy territory to secure operational freedom.”

And I'd really like to hear how the Israelis successfully bombed knowledge.

Interesting, some explosions have gone off in Latakia province (Syria) recently:

"According to informed sources, a series of powerful explosions has struck bases belonging to foreign militant groups affiliated with the terrorist al-Jolani regime.

As reported by Al Mayadeen, the blasts occurred near the village of Qurfays in the countryside of Latakia, targeting facilities linked to the drone unit of the so-called Ministry of Defense of the Jolani terrorist regime."

https://en.mehrnews.com/news/233646/Over-10-powerful-explosions-rock-Syria

Seeing several polls saying Polish support for Ukraine joining EU has dropped significantly. Like 85% to 35%. Hungary 95% are opposed to them joining EU

🇮🇷 BREAKING: Confirmed launches from Iran towards Northern Israel and the Negev

I think this is as good a time as any to share a fantastic Marxist analysis on the Islamic Republic of Iran, excerpted from Chapter 4 of "Why the World Needs China" by Kyle Ferrana, which is overall an incredibly brilliant book that has my full recommendation for everyone to check out.

CHAPTER FOUR

Bourgeois Anti-Imperialism

Chapter One identified the divisions in the global periphery between the comprador bourgeoisie who collaborate with an empire to extract resources from their own country, the national bourgeoisie who seek to retain these resources for their own exclusive benefit, and the lower bourgeoisie or petit bourgeoisie who aspire to join one of the other groups by attaining greater capital. Just as they did in Venezuela, the less prosperous bourgeois classes have a strong incentive to eliminate the restrictions on development that comprador rule enforces upon a neocolony. This chapter will explore their goals and limitations, their relationship with the other classes, and the nature of their conflict with the super-empire. […]

[…] The Iranian Revolution of 1978 is commonly oversimplified, often called the “Islamic” Revolution due to the theocratic system that eventually emerged. More fundamental to the Revolution’s development, however, was the ongoing class struggle. Under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s reign, the population of Iran had doubled, and the working class became the most numerous—particularly in Tehran and other urban areas, as many peasant sharecroppers, unable to purchase enough farmland to live off following the Shah’s land reform program in the early 1960s, migrated by necessity to the cities. Without their support, the popular movement would have been unable to overthrow the comprador Shah. Rather than ideology—religious or communist—the essential causes of the urban proletariat’s mass mobilizations were low wages, rising rents, severe income inequality, and the insufficiency of the Shah’s reforms. Workers began a massive strike wave in 1978, culminating in a general strike in October and November which paralyzed oil production; 35,000 oil workers had gone on strike demanding wage increases. The Resolution of the Ashura March of December 1978, which the New York Times reported was attended by “several million” protestors, demanded “the right of workers and peasants to the full benefit from the product of their labor.” The Shah fled the country the following month, never to return.

As a remnant of feudalism, the landholding clergy were quite naturally conservative, yet by 1979 it was a demographic inevitability that feudalism would never be restored as the prevailing mode of production in Iran. The millions of new city-dwellers could not return to the countryside even if they wanted to, and reversing land reform was politically impossible even for a figure of Ruhollah Khomeini’s considerable influence. However, decades of repression by the Shah’s secret police had severely diminished every potentially revolutionary organization (liberal and communist alike), leaving only the clerics relatively untouched (with the exception of Khomeini himself, who had been arrested and exiled). At the height of the Revolution, the clergy therefore found itself in command of a broad alliance of classes—everyone, really—that had mobilized against the Shah.

This alliance quickly destroyed the Iranian comprador class and redistributed much of its wealth. Many wealthy pro-Western business owners followed the Shah, or else fled after the Islamic Republic was officially declared by referendum in April 1979. That summer, the revolutionary government moved to expropriate their assets, as well as nationalize all private or foreign-owned banks, insurance companies, and large-scale industry, all without compensation. Between 1979 and 1980, the nominal minimum wage was tripled, and when the rural peasantry seized 800,000 hectares of farmland from large private landholdings, the government was either unwilling or unable to return the confiscated land to its former owners.

Nevertheless, once their common enemy had been eliminated, the alliance gave way to the class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat. While Khomeini’s government gave to workers with its left hand, it ruthlessly crushed their independent revolutionary leadership with its right. All Marxist parties were banned and their leaders arrested. Even the Tudeh Party, a Marxist-Leninist organization which had supported Khomeini, was eventually suppressed in 1983. Throughout the 1980s, the government executed several thousand political prisoners, including not just the Shah’s former secret policemen and loyal military officers, but members of the People’s Mujahedin of Iran (A militant organization that had attempted to overthrow the Islamic Republic, it joined the Iraqi side during the Iran-Iraq War, and has since become a willing tool of U.S. regime-change efforts), and many communists as well. Workers’ councils, which had seized factories and organized local proletarian resistance to the Shah, were gradually disbanded or replaced by Islamic Councils more loyal to the government. Meanwhile, Iran’s secular national legislature became dominated by the petit bourgeoisie. In A History of Modern Iran, Iranian-American historian Ervand Abrahamian writes: “the Majles, which had been a debating chamber for notables in the distant past and a club for the shah’s placemen in more recent years, was now filled with the propertied middle class. For example, more than 70 percent of the deputies in the First Islamic Majles [elected in 1980] came from that class. Their fathers included 63 clergymen, 69 farm owners, 39 shopkeepers, and 12 merchants.”

Today, there can be little doubt that the Iranian bourgeoisie has developed and holds state power with a grip that is stronger now than it has ever been. In 2006, the Islamic Republic’s constitution was amended to allow the privatization of 80% of shares of government businesses (excepting the National Iranian Oil Company and several other key state-owned entities). Though implemented at a slower pace than neoliberal shock therapy, privatization has nonetheless proceeded over the last two decades, even despite strikes and protests by the affected workers. Within a few privatizing the banking sector, including Bank Saderat Iran, one of the largest state-owned banks. According to the Tehran Times in 2014, hundreds of state-owned businesses had been privatized or were slated to be privatized; by 2017, the government had privatized over half the country’s power plants, and further planned to privatize at least 80% in total. By 2019, the government formally held only a minority share—which it pledged to sell entirely by 2021—in Iran Khodro and SAIPA, two of the largest domestic car manufacturers.

Poverty has declined considerably since the Revolution, recently aided in large part by substantial direct cash transfers from the government during the early 2010s; yet hard limits to this willingness to redistribute wealth have emerged. A combination of U.S. sanctions, declining oil prices, and the COVID-19 pandemic caused economic disaster in Iran during the latter part of the decade. GDP per capita plunged; in 2020, the World Bank downgraded Iran back to its “lower-middle income” classification, and despite the still-existing welfare state, inflation likely outpaced wage increases, according to analysis from Iran’s Ministry of Finance and Economic Affairs. Yet Iran’s new rich went unharmed; while two decades of progress in reducing rural poverty were erased, the government’s priority during the crisis was to support the stock market with large infusions of cash from its sovereign wealth fund, in effect sustaining private fortunes with public money. […]

Iran's Mehr News: "at the same time as the Zionist regime attacked several points in Iran, Trump spread his delusions and announced an alleged ceasefire between Iran and the United States"

Really WTF is going on

Iran rolls worst ceasefire ever, asked to leave the Resistance

The Venezuelan government, led by President Nicolas Maduro, made an urgent appeal to the international community to hold a “Summit for Peace and against War”, to curb the growing global tensions that could lead to a nuclear conflict.

The proposal was formally presented to the diplomatic corps accredited in Caracas in an act headed by Vice President Delcy Rodriguez and Foreign Minister Yvan Gil, who warned of the imminent danger of an escalation of war with catastrophic consequences for humanity.

During the meeting with the Vice President, Rodriguez read a message from Maduro in which he stressed the need for “an immediate cessation of hostilities and a political solution based on dialogue, international law and respect for the sovereignty of peoples”. The initiative seeks to promote a coordinated response among nations to avoid a crisis of global proportions.

• Telesur

Explosions in Qatar :), could be interceptions :(

I love how trump uses the N word to refer to nuclear lmao

iran, do you have google maps? google "intel facilities".

Also, oil very definitely thinks this is it for closing the strait:

To start us off, Simplicius.

Now, there's a somewhat common trope, particularly among pro-Russia and pro-Resistance commentators, of the "allowed strike"; that is, a military strike that both sides know is about to happen and mutually agree to happening for some reason (usually to save face or allow some diplomatic objective). Unfortunately for somebody like me, who thinks conspiracies along these lines are a form of cope and are usually conveniently unable to be disproved because neither side will admit to it, there are actually recent confirmed cases of this happening, like an Iranian strike on a US facility after they assassinated Soleimani that allowed Iran to save face, or a 2017 Tomahawk strike on the Syrian Shayrat base that just so happened to miss all the important targets and deal little damage.

You know where I'm going with this - Simplicius posits that the Fordow strike was allowed to occur by the Iranians in order to provide Trump with a way to appease neoconservatives but also exit from a budding forever war. I personally don't think this is the case, but I can't say it's certainly untrue (again, because they do actually sometimes happen). The evidence he suggests:

• Some sources say that Trump informed Iran that he was about to strike Fordow and that the strikes are intended as a "one-off"
• Iran didn't even attempt to engage with the B2 force. It's not even as if they tried to hit it and missed, even the US doesn't say that they bravely battled Iranian fighter jets to reach Fordow - Iran did not do anything at all despite having time to prepare and knowing what the US would strike a week in advance. Yemen, with much, much less air defense than Iran even in its current state, posed a more significant threat to B2 bombing raids than Iran did during this bombing raid. There is still basically no evidence that Israel is able to fly directly over Iranian territory due to Iranian air defense, and yet the US could reach central Iran entirely unmolested.
• It was a relatively small strike, not consisting of enough bunker busters to be sure to destroy the facility.
• Images of the holes left over show that the bunker busters were not stacked up, which many experts expected would have to be the case to breach the facility - essentially a daisy-chain of destruction down to Fordow.
• In the days prior, Iran used a bunch of flatbed trucks to seemingly stack dirt into the entrance tunnels, presumably to provide a degree of reinforcement to stop them caving in if they were struck. This feels a little strange to do in any case, but protecting the entrances to a facility that they claim is evacuated and that the US is claiming they will soon obliterate is weird; why would you need to re-enter it if there's nothing left?

Again, I disagree with the above. I think it's more likely that the US did actually try and destroy Fordow but simply failed, which could have been for a number of reasons, including that they didn't put much real effort into it because they were perhaps aware that Iran had already evacuated the facility of anything important. There are a limited number of these massive bunker busters, after all. No point wasting a dozen of them on empty facilities.

But anyway, regardless of what happened at Fordow, there's not a lot else to report. The same attritional dynamics are at play here and the ball is in Iran's court, so we'll have to see what they do; perhaps they are waiting for the Iranian visit to Moscow to conclude before making any significant moves.

This ceasefire has the same vibes as the one in Lebanon. Unilaterally declared and still followed.

Iran shouldn't take it. But if they do, nominally they are victorious since Israel failed to a) cause regime change and b) destroy Iran's nuclear program.

However, a) could still happen if the ceasefire is taken due to internal unrest.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy9xl4nrq8wo Talk of regime change resonates with Iranians fleeing across border

An Iranian father whose family is now living in Germany, spoke on condition that we hide his identity. Beside him, a younger woman was planning to embark on a long taxi drive with him, across steep mountain passes and narrow gorges, first to Armenia's capital, Yerevan, and then on to nearby Georgia. Two cats waited beside her in a basket in the shade.

"I would like to change the Iran regime. Everything is broken and damaged," said the man, adding that its end was "close."

He criticised others who, he claimed, complained constantly about their government but were not willing to endorse outside military intervention.

"My family… can die but it's war and for everything to change we have to pay something."

To sacrifice? I asked.

"Yes," he replied firmly, stressing that he welcomed America's decision to enter the conflict.

Please Presenald Trunt my people yearn for freedom

He’s still got it folks

Libs are getting better at posting* and leftists are laughing.

{ |*CRINGE}

Prior to the most recent aid massacre:

“A source in the resistance security in Gaza: The Arrow unit and a force from the investigation department neutralized 17 flour thieves and distributed all quantities to people for free near Bani Suhaila roundabout, Al-Bahr Street, and Al-Saniya roundabout. The thieves are threatened with a severe punishment.”

https://t.me/jeniincamp/112468

UK Poll with Hypothecical Jeremy Corbyn party

Westminster Voting Intention (🟣 Incl. Hypothetical Left-Wing Corbyn-Led Party):

RFM: 27% (=)

LAB: 20% (-3)

CON: 20% (=)

LDM: 14% (=)

🟣 JC: 10% (New)

GRN: 5% (-4)

SNP: 2% (-1)

Changes w/ regular Voting Intention without JC.

Since it's first past the post this wouldn't mean many seats but it's interesting

EDIT: Just fyi though Wagenknecht's party in germany also polled pretty high when it was a hypothetical option in polls and then during an election they were just shy of 5% and in america a hypothetical 3rd party would poll pretty high but none of the many 3rd parties get that much.

So there's probably a big difference between hypothetical options in polls and what people would vote for considering it might be a wasted vote.

‘NATO Has No Business in Ukraine’, Hungarian PM Orban States - Telesur English

Iran’s top military command vows ‘more forceful’ response if Israel repeats aggression

BREAKING | Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz says ordered the army to "respond forcefully to Iran's violation of the ceasefire with intense strikes against regime targets in the heart of Tehran"

Jun 24, 2025 8:02 AM UTC

https://xcancel.com/TheCradleMedia/status/1937420988586570117

If, and that's a humongous IF, if Trump is really right about this ceasefire thing, then I'll bury myself in a bunker somewhere in Albania and commit the rest of my life to touching grass and smoking grass, because there's really no rational actor on my beloved Axis of Resistance after Soleimani and Nasrallah.