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The rise of LLMs as a useful development tool over the last year or so has been significant. The power and flexibility of tools like Claude Code and ChatGPT have given a lot of functionality both to experienced developers and new developers alike.
Large funeral for Palestinian youth killed by Israeli troops in West Bank; Two GOP senators join calls for Kristi Noem's resignation; Ilhan Omar attacked at town hall dropsitenews.com/p/israeli-for…
Russia Hopes Media Reports on US Plans for Naval Blockade of Cuba Are Unfounded Russia hopes media reports about the alleged plans of the United States to increase pressure on Cuba, including imposing a naval blockade to deny it oil imports, are unfo…
Apple has set a new deadline of November 1, 2026 for all Patreon creators to switch from Patreon's legacy billing system to the App Store's in-app purchase system in the Patreon app on the iPhone and iPad, as reported by TechCrunch.
Spinning tops don't spin long enough. Today we fix that!Subscribe to my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/aaedmusaytBuy the Infinite Spinning Top project file...
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Rock, Paper, Shotgun just posted:
Dune: Awakening hopes to spruce up its endgame in its next major update, coming next week
Dune: Awakening has struggled a touch with its endgame pretty much since launch, but with the MMO's next big update, Chapter 3, is promising to offer a revamp that you (yes, you! The person playing Dune: Awakening right now! Maybe!) have been after. A release date was also offered up for the big update, alongside some ...
Mexican President Reaffirms Solidarity with Cuba Amid US Blockade President Claudia Sheinbaum reaffirmed today that Mexico will continue to be solidarious with Cuba, a country that has faced an economic, commercial, and financial blockade imposed by …
Families of Two Trinidadian Citizens File Wrongful Death Lawsuit Over US Missile Strike Relatives of two Trinidadian citizens killed in a US missile attack in the Caribbean have filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the Donald Trump administration.
Delaware Senator Chris Coons questioned Secretary of State Marco Rubio about the Trump administration’s refusal to consult the Senate in advance about national security operations using the U.S. military. Specifically, Senator Coons expressed his anger…
(Photo by Nicole Neri/Minnesota Reformer) On January 23, 2026, in negative temperatures, thousands of Minnesotans turned out in Minneapolis for a strike to protest the current administration’s policies.
Israel has no legal authority to bar humanitarian workers from Gaza and the rest of the oPt. The occupation is illegal and must end, completely and unconditionally (ICJ 2024). States must suspend ties until Israel complies with int'l law. That is the starting point for peace.
Merci pour tout ce que vous faîtes Francesca. Merci pour Gaza, pour l'humanité, pour l'humaine personne que vous êtes. Paix à vous. Espérons que la Lumière puisse percer les ténèbres.
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How to get and use Expired Respirator in ARC Raiders
Expired Respirator might not be a new item in ARC Raiders, but the demand for it has gone up after the Headwinds update went live. The Trophy Display project, added as part of the Headwinds update, requires you to find and submit Expired Respirators. Doing so will earn you different rewards that might be immensely beneficial for your in-game grind. While there's an ...
Tesla says it agreed to invest $2B in xAI for preferred shares as part of xAI's Series E, despite a shareholder vote in November that failed to win approval (Kara Carlson/Bloomberg)
Many people know that it is difficult to define socialism, due to the great heterogeneity of schools and systems. But common to all schools is the desire to improve the conditions of all men and to remove all obstacles that prevent this improvement and everything that facilitates the exploitation of man by man. -- Mario Ferreira dos Santos
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Xbox Revenue Declines As Microsoft Reports FY26 Q2 Earnings
Microsoft had another big quarter on paper. Xbox, however, did not. In its second quarter fiscal year 2026 (FY26 Q2) earnings report, Microsoft announced a 17% year-over-over jump in revenue to $81.3 billion, with growth once again driven by cloud and AI. Microsoft Cloud revenue hit $51.5 billion, Azure jumped 39%, and most of the […] The post Xbox Revenue ...
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How IO Interactive Crafted Its Young Version Of James Bond
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All new Terraria Bigger & Boulder update weapons and how to get them
The Bigger & Boulder update has introduced plenty of new weapons in Terraria, and finding all of them can be a true grind. While the overall list is quite big, I have managed to find a fair amount so far. The tables below have brief details about how you can obtain them. Some are easier to obtain, while few can be quite difficult. Disclaimer: This ...
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Former 2K Boss Leaves Amazon As The Tech Giant’s Retreat From Gaming Continues
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Five games under $5 worth your time this month
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Redirecting Iran’s oil exports from China to India in exchange for partial US sanctions relief could avert another American attack by satisfying its goal of depriving China of some of the resources that it requires for maintaining its rapid superpowe…
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Peculiar Charm god rolls and best perks in Destiny 2
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Fallout Season 1 Is Streaming Free On YouTube This Week
The first season of Prime Video's Fallout TV series will air for free on YouTube starting today, January 28.Prime Video and YouTube have announced a partnership to bring all eight episode of the first season to users. Presumably there will be ad breaks, but people with YouTube Premium may not get those. The first episode goes live today, January 28, at 5 PM PT / 8 PM ET, ...
Iran has warned the UN Security Council over explicit US threats against Tehran, while a senior advisor to the Leader of the Islamic Revolution described President Donald Trump as “fearful of defeat.”
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Target Employee Shows In Real Time How Tech Prices Are Going Up, Up, Up
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Hot Toys Finally Gives KPop: Demon Hunters Fans the Figures They Crave
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Nintendo Says No To Toxic Dong On Switch 2 As Dispatch Devs Confirm Censored Content
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The Masar Badil Urges Unified Rejection of the U.S. “Board of Peace” and Affirms the Centrality of Palestinian Resistance abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/276…
The Masar Badil Urges Unified Rejection of the U.S. “Board of Peace” and Affirms the Centrality of Palestinian Resistance
The Masar Badil, the Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path Movement, renewed its call on the Palestinian resistance forces to adopt a unified and public stance against the so-called U.S. “Board of Peace,” affirming that these initiatives are nothing but new colonial instruments aimed at circumventing the rights of the Palestinian people and imposing U.S. hegemony globally. In this context, Khaled Barakat, a member of the Movement’s Executive Committee, stressed that the resistance is capable of defeating these projects, calling for the strengthening of national unity and the safeguarding of the resistance option in the face of liquidation and normalization schemes.
Khaled Barakat called on the Palestinian resistance forces to adopt a “unified rejection of the so-called U.S. Board of Peace through a declared position,” emphasizing that the Palestinian resistance “is capable of defeating these projects and bringing the temple down on the heads of the Davos gang,” referring to the announcement of the Council’s establishment during the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Barakat’s remarks came during an interview on the program “Al-Madar” on Palestine Today TV, where he stressed that “the projects being proposed under the banner of peace are nothing but deception and a reproduction of the American–Zionist colonial logic, and an attempt to circumvent the rights of the Palestinian people and impose American law on the world.”
Barakat affirmed the “urgent necessity of immediately working to build a unified Palestinian national front,” rejecting submission to American dictates, and stressing the importance of defending the achievements of the Palestinian people and the “Al-Aqsa Flood,” and of preserving and fortifying the option of resistance in the face of liquidation and normalization projects.
He added that U.S. President Donald Trump “is not as strong as he appears,” noting that “his popularity is at its lowest levels due to the escalation of political, social, and economic crises inside the United States,” considering that his administration’s rush to launch aggressive initiatives in the region reflects an attempt to escape domestic crises more than any real strength, and stressing that Trump is not “an eternal destiny nor a god who decides the fate of the world.”
Barakat concluded by emphasizing that the current stage requires the highest levels of popular unity and steadfastness, in Palestine and across the region, to confront the plans of the United States and the Israeli occupation, defeat projects of hegemony, and thwart schemes to liquidate the Palestinian cause.
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The team behind the successful Silent Hill 2 remake has just posted a bizarre 18th-century poem and fans can’t stop speculating
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5 Persons With Alleged Links To The CPI (Maoist) Arrested By Police In Nagarkurnool District
Police arrested five persons they claim have links to the CPI (Maoist), including two cadres and three sympathizers of the Maoist party, in Telangana’s Nagarkurnool district on Saturday.
Officials of the Nagarkurnool district police said the arrests were part of an operation to curb attempts to revive Maoist activity in the erstwhile Mahbubnagar district and Nallamalla region.
District police officials allege that the detained persons have been identified as Dandakaranya Special Zonal Committee military instructors’ team commander Meesala Saloman alias Santhosh Nagraj and his wife Sanbatti. The remaining three persons in police custody are said to have been identified as a government teacher and Telangana Praja Front co-convener Edla Ambaiah, petrol pump owner and Civil Liberties Committee joint secretary Jakka Balaiah, and a farmer, Manshetty Yadaiah.
District police officials claim combing operations had forced the Maoists to abandon base camps and attempt to regroup in smaller units. As part of this strategy, Saloman and Sanbatti were purported to have arrived in Achampet to revive Maoist party activities with the help of affiliated frontal organizations, acting on instructions from senior underground CPI (Maoist) leaders.
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Supporters of these enforcement actions insist they are merely enforcing the law, and dismiss the kidnapped and warehoused individuals as criminals for being “illegally” in the country, for resisting detention, or for trying to disrupt or evade apprehension, regardless of their age, or medical condition, or the location they were abducted from, such as a courthouse at their legal immigration hearing. And many, including children as young as 5, have been detained or deported in violation of court orders prohibiting both. Even when these raids have resulted in the violent death of potential detainees or community members trying to protect others, a significant portion of the MAGA base and nativist forces within even marginalized communities remain steadfast in their support. Although the public execution of Alex Pretti by immigration officials has angered many 2nd Amendment adherents, including the NRA, in the MAGA base to the point that they are calling for a full and independent investigation into it, the rest of Trump’s supporters not only blame the victims for their own deaths but mock them, claiming they deserved to die for not being perfectly and unquestioningly obedient to law enforcement at all times, despite not knowing if they are really legitimate law enforcement officials as they hide their identities as they carry out orders that are far short of allegedly “settled” Constitutional law.
While this seemingly sudden hypocrisy of the MAGA movement specifically, and many others who oppose open or even liberal or moderate immigration policies, shocks many, the reality is that, despite efforts to disconnect the present from the past, there are profound, significant, and thoroughly documented historical and ideological links between slave patrols, modern policing, and DHS/ICE/CBP. If we really knew the history of this country, little of what is happening today would surprise us.
For the nearly 250 years of legalized chattel slavery in the U.S., slave patrols were the first formalized system of law enforcement in much of the South. Mandated to serve as a mechanism of control of enslaved and free Africans, slave patrols existed to protect the economic system and super profits that slavery produced.
Slave patrols operated in the same void between legality and morality that slavery itself existed in, facilitated by established law while also being deeply immoral and grossly inhumane, they enforced the legal but morally reprehensible statutes that severely limited the autonomy, movement, assembly, and education of enslaved people. And, like today’s anti-immigration offensive, they enforced those morally dubious laws in the most violent and morally repugnant ways possible because the focus was not on upholding the law, but legitimizing the racist social hierarchy.
Slave patrols roamed the Southern roads around plantations and where enslaved and free Africans lived (in some cities, the enslaved in urban areas lived in a separate, segregated area rather than on a land-intensive plantation) all day and at night, looking for Black people to stop and demand papers from. These papers proved the free status or the permission to travel of free and enslaved Africans. They broke into and raided free Africans’ homes, stopped Black people on the street in any context and location, and were legally expected to immediately and violently punish those found without papers. But slave patrollers were also known to reject, steal, or destroy papers that were supposed to keep free people from being re-enslaved, and enslaved people from being accused of escaping and being either sold back into slavery for the profit of the slave catcher, or severely punished as a runaway.
The practice of surveilling, over-policing, randomly stopping, and demanding documentation of Black and Brown people suspected of alleged criminality is not a unique feature of modern policing. These are the tactics established by the slave patrols that shape all aspects of policing today.
When the abolition of slavery led to the formal disbanding of slave patrols, their functions and personnel did not vanish. Their mandate to control the enslaved African population evolved as Black Codes, and then Jim Crow laws, established a new system of economic exploitation to replace slavery across the former Confederacy. The post-Civil War police forces in the South enforced these new forms of racialized control over Black labor and movement to protect the property and profits of capitalists still making money off of their exploitation, to provide ideological comfort to white workers–mainly the descendants of poor European immigrants themselves–that their place in the capitalist system was protected from competition with Black workers, and putting clear boundaries on the realization of full citizenship rights for Black people that the 14th Amendment may have held promise for.
Vagrancy laws came to this country with the colonists from English common law, and were used to control the poor, beggars, and those deemed “idle” through the criminalization of their poverty. These laws were applied in the same way in the colonies and then in the expanded United States, criminalizing the poor and destitute. Prohibitions on loitering—wandering around without any apparent lawful purpose—were a part of the program of poverty or “idleness” as a criminal offense, were also enforced against the economically excluded, which led to vaguely worded vagrancy, loitering, and suspicious persons laws that targeted people considered objectionable or “out of place” in some way, rather than any particular conduct. But criminalizing poverty only produced more opportunities for private enterprise to profit off of the punishment of the poor for being poor, which has always been a feature of designating behavior that is not violent, anti-social, or destructive to others in a capitalist society a “crime.”This is similar to the modern private prison corporations that realize massive profits through mass incarceration of working-class and poor Africans who are their primary targets, but also folds in Indigenous Americans, and migrants from imperialism from mostly Global South countries in the U.S. today. Capitalism continues the exploitation that creates the poverty that millions are denied the ability to escape, and imperialism continues to destroy the home countries of people who are forced to leave for their survival, only to be thrown into for-profit concentration camps in the U.S. or one of its vassal countries, like El Salvador and its massive CECOT facility, willing to profit from the gambit as well.
The core historical directive of policing has consistently been the defense of capital, land, and economic status through the brutal control of the working class, poor, and racialized and other marginalized among them, not the universal protection and service of the community. Tactics like racial profiling, “broken windows” policing, excessive and pervasive surveillance, and the disproportionate use of excessive force and extrajudicial executions that are rarely punished are all deployed to maintain the physical and social segregation today that was initially enforced by slave patrols, plantation militias, and the deputization of white citizens to police the enslaved.
But these were not merely unofficial or accepted practices carried out by racist white, local, or state authorities. Racist and oppressive policing is backed by legal and judicial precedent that is itself foundational in its justification of racial discrimination to facilitate economic exploitation.
Supreme Court decisions like Dred Scottv. Sandford that denied Black people citizenship and gave opportunity to Chief Justice Taney to declare that white men had no obligation to observe any rights for Black people, and Plessy v. Ferguson that established “separate but equal” as a legitimate social structure even though the separate was never equal, and state and local ordinances that limited access to housing, education, movement, and economic stability for Black people provided federal validation for the brutality and bloodshed used to enforce discriminatory state and local laws for generations, leading to the modern expression of these abuses in immigration enforcement today. The latest example can be seen in the September 2025 Supreme Court ruling codifying racial profiling in immigration stops into law. The ruling in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, in which Justice Brett Kavanaugh opined that a Hispanic person’s ethnicity can be used as a factor in providing “reasonable suspicion” for immigration agents to stop and question people wherever they encounter them, is the license immigration forces needed to carry out the spectacle of racial profiling and resulting violence that have been dubbed “Kavanaugh stops.” While the brutality that has ensued from these stops has led Kavanaugh to try to claim that these outcomes are not what he meant to happen, the damage is and continues to be done.
The contemporary practices of DHS, ICE, CBP of house-to-house raids, raids of houses of worship, mass detentions, violence against deportees in public and private (including sexual violence and abuse of children), and family separations—draw unmistakable comparisons to the operations of slave patrols and other historical modes of racial control.
Just as slave patrols focused on enslaved Black people and Jim Crow-era and later police focused on Black communities, immigration operations today disproportionately target specific racial/ethnic groups—predominantly Haitian, African, Latino, and other non-European immigrant communities. But as we have seen in the first not even full month of 2026, they will brutalize and even murder white people who stand in defense of their neighbors and the very laws that MAGA insisted they were committed to all these years, the U.S. Constitution and its guarantees of due process and equal protection under the law for all people in this country, “legal,” or “not.”
The racism is as overt today as it was in the 19th century, as Trump regime immigration officials admitted months ago that they are relying on racial profiling to determine who they target to enforce the boundary between “citizen” and “non-citizen” or “legal” and “illegal immigrant,” continuing the mandate of slave patrols which enforced the boundary between “slave” and “free” and often disregarded the boundary altogether. All three systems, slave patrols, policing, and immigration enforcement, all rely on types of pervasive, persistent, invasive surveillance, the threat or reality of incarceration in immigration detention, jails, and prisons, and the threat of family destruction through the sale of enslaved family members, to convict leasing and mass incarceration, to family separation and deportation, as central mechanisms to force compliance and maintain the established social and economic hierarchy through racial terrorism.
As horrific as the public executions of white Minnesotans Renee Good and Alex Pretti are, they were preceded by the murders of Keith Porter, Jr, Brayan Garzón-Rayom, Marie Ange Blaise, Jesus Molina-Veya, and dozens more under the latest regime’s immigration policies. That the deaths of white people spurred the demands for accountability and even abolition among a larger portion of the population, after the deaths of more than 30 non-white people were not responded to in the same way if at all, is also a by-product of the racial bias inherent in this country’s history that has been ingrained in the psyche of its people. Even the good white people who do want change do not realize how they have been conditioned to not care about the repression of “the other,” and only respond when that repression shows up on their door or the door of someone they can personally identify with.
The history of policing in this country compels us to understand that removing the present figurehead of the U.S. regime will do little to end the suffering of the people targeted by this centuries-long system of social, racial, and ultimately economic control. The only thing that will change this material reality for all of us is a socialist revolution led by the people who are the most impacted by this centuries-long program.
The people, rightly and righteously angry about the deaths of the latest victims of this system, are ready to launch a nationwide general strike to elevate the demand to abolish ICE after a well-supported general strike in Minneapolis that saw many cities across the country carry out solidarity demonstrations. However, the meaningless “reforms” like body cameras and limits to use of force that House Democrats demanded as they voted to continue funding ICE will not achieve the desired outcome, even if Senate Democrats do what they promised and refuse to vote for the funding bill. So, where does this leave the people fighting in the streets??
Simply put, the people must move beyond simply demanding to abolish ICE and even the police, as has been the demand among Black radicals for decades. Rather, the people must pivot fully toward confronting and abolishing capitalism and this entire system that still needs slave patrol/police/ICE violence to protect it from those it exploits the most, and everyone who would stand with them in defense of humanity.
For all of us to live free, capitalism–not just ICE–must die.
Jacqueline Luqman is a radical activist based in Washington, D.C.; as well as co-founder of Luqman Nation, an independent Black media outlet that can be found on YouTube (here and here) and Facebook.
Luqman Nation consists of Abdushshahid and Jacqueline Luqman, DC-based podcasters, activists, and writers bringing information to the neglected masses of the...
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PC Gamer just posted:
The call goes out for a 'massive international strike' at Ubisoft: 'We are treated like children who need to be supervised, while our management gets away with lies and breaking the law'
Five separate unions in France are ratcheting up the pressure as Ubisoft looks to close studios and cut workers.
The strategy of tension refers to the NATO strategy in post-World War II Europe to defeat the ascendant communist parties. In Italy, this was referred to as Operation Gladio, and involved money laundering, ballot stuffing, murder, and kidnapping. Outside of Italy, this strategy of tension took many forms: funding fascist stay-behind armies in Germany, setting up fake press agencies full of hitmen as in Aginter Press, and coordinating assassinations and decapitation operations. When viewed historically over the longue duree, the imperialist class that implemented the strategy of tension in postwar Europe is still a hegemonic force in geopolitics. Today, the targets are not so much powerful communist parties (although the targeting of socialist China is part of the imperialist strategy today) but instead targeting any renascent social formations seeking sovereignty from the US dollar system and attempting to build a multipolar world. The aim of this article, then, is to view the recent unrest in Iran through the lens of the strategy of tension to show how what was once a tool of a newborn NATO has now morphed into a full-bore system of hybrid warfare. Some of this analysis will take us back to 1979 and the birth of the Islamic Revolution, with an aim of showing that history cannot be read in its immediacy, but rather should be viewed as the development, integration and disintegration of social formations according to the overarching structures of the world-system: capital and imperialism.
The Islamic Revolution took place in the waning period of Arab nationalism and towards the twilight of the Soviet Union, in a period where the hegemony of US capitalist-imperialism was concretizing its control over West Asia through its attack dog, “Israel”. The previous ruling classes of Iran: the Shah and imperial court, the big capitalists, and the landlords were content to normalize relations with the Zionist state and participate in Western security operations and schemes across the region and the world. This system, protected by the brutal Savak secret police, wore down the popular classes of workers, merchants, clerics, and peasants. With the Islamic Revolution, the popular classes took control of Iran and guided the country on a path of sovereign development, anti-colonialism, with the state taking control of major industries and nationalizing the patrimony of the Iranian people. Max Ajl describes it thus:
The last major Jacobin-style revolution of the last millennium, the 1978–1979 revolution in Iran, marked a turning point in the history of the region. Mass mobilizing the population…it drew on a mix of Marxism, dependency theory, liberation theology, and Arab republicanism… By the early 2000s, Iran’s doctrine of “strategic depth” merged with ideological commitment in layers of the state to anti-imperialism and anti-Zionism, and increasingly it became a semi-industrialized semi-periphery.
This takes us to the events of the last two and a half years and especially the last few months. Operation Al Aqsa Flood was a decisive blow to the Zionist-imperialist system of domination. The IOF and their American backers have been thoroughly exposed as paper tigers. This operation by the Palestinian resistance would not be possible without Iranian financial and material support, which does not come with ideological strings attached, as Marxist as well as Islamic groups in Palestine receive this support. Since 1979, Iran has had a target on their back because of this unwavering–and in fact, constitutional–support for Palestine and the oppressed peoples of the world. The level of Iranian support is a key factor in the anti-colonial movements against Zionism. Turning to Ajl again:
Iranian weapons and training are free, representing “the possibility of access to weapons for the poor”… Indeed, their blueprints are often open-access or freely shared from Iran to its state and sub-state partners.
Ever since the birth of the Islamic revolution, with the Iraqi invasion and kinetic warfare failing in the first round, an entire edifice of hybrid warfare has been set up to destabilize Iran and promote regime change. Sanctions and external meddling in the financial system have been two main practices.
Imperialism is the current phase of capitalist accumulation, and as such it defines the structural forms of accumulation on a world scale. Hegemony of the US dollar, financialization, and wars of extermination and regime change define the current epoch of capitalist-imperialism. Thus, the first signal of the attack on Iran in late 2025 was when the US used their regional satrapies—Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Turkiye—to destabilize the Iranian currency. This caused protests among the merchant class who are rightfully concerned about their businesses which are already squeezed by maximum sanctions. These protests were portrayed in the western media as anti-state and anti-revolution, when in reality there were no such sentiments among the merchant class protesters. Currency manipulation is a tool of the sanctions regime that brings the hammer down on ordinary people, and this tool has assumed critical importance as sanctions become among the favored strategies of imperialism. Yet, in Iran, other more kinetic interventions are made; namely, the mobilization of internal dissent and mercenaries.
After the currency devaluation, internal fifth columns of Mossad agents and disgruntled monarchists were activated to join the protests and indulge in violent outbursts which caused unrest and thus, a government response. According to Dr. Mohammad Marandi, the main groups in Iran serving imperialist designs are fourfold: MEK, an exiled political organization that receives funding and training from the U.S. via Albania. Then, there are the pro-Shah monarchists whose main base of support is in Los Angeles. Thirdly, what remains of ISIS after Qassem Soleimani and the IRGC routed them from 2013 onward. Finally, there are the Kurds in the north of Iran who are separatists receiving US training and munitions, similarly to the Syrian Kurds who have been mobilized by the US military to de-Arabize the north and with whom the imperialists facilitate oil sales. This element of the strategy of tension is a key link in the chain, which enables western media outlets to sway their audiences into believing there is a popular movement against Iran from within.
Western media operations are another key element in the strategy of tension because they shape the narrative. The merchants who protested because of the currency devaluation are shown in the media as one of many groups who want to overthrow the revolutionary government. In one amazing clip from Sky News in the UK (viewable in the interview with Dr. Marandi above), the host talks about ‘bodies piling up in the street’, and other trauma farming narratives. Then, when she is corrected by Dr. Marandi, she walks back her statements, but it is already too late. The image of a bloodthirsty regime has already been crafted. In the American media, outlets from the likes of liberal NPR all the way to conservative Fox News speak in a unified voice, portraying Iran as a house of cards ready to fall. When confronted with the images and videos of millions of Iranians out in the streets defending their state and revolution, Western media pundits and celebrities like Elon Musk call the videos A.I., or say that millions of people were forced to go out and protect their revolution by the government. We are dealing with a sort of Schrodinger’s Iran: both on the cusp of collapse and powerful enough to force millions of people to defend the government in the streets. The final consideration in this analysis of the strategy of tension is how the left in the West responds to Iran, and how their maldeveloped view of imperialism shapes this perspective.
In many circles of the Western left, a third positionist posture is often taken when dealing with the question of Iran. ‘Neither Washington nor Tehran’ or ‘neither Tel Aviv nor Tehran’ seems to be the clarion call of these leftists. For example, in a recent Jacobin Radio episode, the position is portrayed as such by the guests: “Iranian protesters overwhelmingly reject both the Islamic Republic and the shah’s dictatorship”. Or we can look at an interview in ROAR magazine regarding the Syrian crisis, where the guest being interviewed insists that “they [anti-imperialist Marxists] tend to think that imperialism is an essence ensconced in the US or in the West and will never think of Russia or China or Iran as imperialist powers”. Arab anti-imperialist, socialist scholars such as Ali Kadri and Anouar Abdel Malek, before him, contend that this third positionism has to do with the fact that “imperialism as a central factor in the power structure of modern times was viewed in its immediacy and not as a contemporary expression of a historical process”. For Kadri–originally speaking about Chomsky’s third positionism in the Iraq war–this is tantamount to supporting imperialism:
What purpose other than backing the imperialist invasion does such a statement serve[?] Neither consequentialist nor deontological ethics, nor any other ethic for that matter, can be invoked to support such a view. Although there is no puritanical theory without ideology, the ethic of such ‘beautiful souls’ negates everything and achieves nothing.
Put plainly, the Western left believes that the real forces challenging Zionism and imperialism should be replaced with morally untainted and ideologically pure forces which will end imperialism and abolish the value form in one broad stroke. The calls to ‘free Palestine’ from the Western left become a whisper when questions about Iran, the axis of resistance, or in fact, non-Marxist, Islamic revolutionaries enter the discourse.
All of this combined: media operations, currency manipulation, mobilization of fifth columns, and use of the pliant left in the West to promote certain narratives form the current strategy of tension used by the imperialist forces to destabilize and destroy Iran. The reasons for the imperialists to destroy Iran are manifold: Iran’s support for the Palestinian revolution, the fact that Iran represents a sovereign and autonomous center of development and accumulation in West Asia, and relatedly, Iran being the number one supplier of energy to China. While regime change has failed this time around, as it did in Venezuela, we should be vigilant and continue to challenge the Zionist-imperialist assaults on the global south.
Hanna Eid is a Palestinian American writer, researcher, and a Union electrical worker. His writing concerns mainly imperialism and anti-imperialism in West Asia and West Africa.
While the corporate media paints Iran as a rogue threat, the truth is far more inconvenient: Washington has spent decades sabotaging diplomacy, arming region...
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Mexico: Call for Mobilization for the Release of Anarchist Prisoner Arturo Lugo
Anarchist activist Arturo Lugo was arrested in Guadalajara on January 8, 2026, by the Mexican state and transferred to the Altiplano high-security prison. His supporters denounce acts of torture and recall that he had already suffered violence and sexual assault in April 2020 during the evacuation of the FES Acatlán school (UNAM), where he was protesting against institutionalized sexual harassment. In response, a call has been launched for a month of “anti-authoritarian struggle” in all its forms to demand his immediate release.
Faelyn
in reply to 🦜 The Last Refuge - Rag Tag Bunch of Conservative Misfits - Contact Info: TheLastRefuge@reagan.com • • •I saw Coons grill Rubio over the fact that the Secretary of State didn't give the Senate heads up on the Venezuelan mission.
But come on, Congress leaks like a sieve.
Also, half-wit Coons doesn't get the difference between a diplomatic assignment and a military mission.
Dept of War ran this event, not Sec of State.