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Radio War Nerd EP #489 — How To Survive a Regime-Change (Patreon)

Published:
2024-12-15 17:04:21
Imported:
2024-12
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Recorded: December 12, 2024

How do you survive a regime-change if you're not on the right side? The War Nerd looks at revolutions and genocides, from the French Revolution to Syria, to break down survival strategies — such as they are.

*Uyghur jihadists in Alawite-majority Latakia

 

Total time: 1:21:25Direct link to this episode's mp3 here

*

Subscribe to Radio War Nerd at patreon.com/radiowarnerd

Sound production by Telescope Audio

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Files

Comments

Ben

amazing work bud you earned it 🥈

Peacock Jive

I'm shocked at the lack of truck knowledge here. Ford ram? (Ram is made by Chrysler - now stelantis) Assumed Canadian truck size advantage? Shame on you "americans"

Gallo Altanero

We had to read that dickens novel. But then passed it around the class and put great drawings in each page. Typical but I want it.

William

So, you’ve lost your civil war and you’re thinking, what do I do now?

GG Allin Dulles

unexplained fires are a matter for the courts

NYCM&AHole

Very proud of myself

William

I think I agree with the Stalin approach, at least with the end of world war 2 and with the American civil war. Kill the top 50,000 of Nazis and confederates

CR

Once again, JD explains how the South won the Civil War and certainly Reconstruction. I am listening to the last five episodes backwards because I have totally stopped caring about anything but Ukraine, which is in a lull. Gotta give props to the U.S. and Israel for sweeping the board. I didn’t see that coming. Anyway, there are plenty of right wing anti interventionists who already expect a depopulated Ukraine to have millions of Indians replace all the people lost. You can fit easily twice as many people into this baby, and someone is going to have to actually operate and exploit Blackrock’s investments. They are torn between racism towards Indians and immigrants generally and the Azov neonazis NATO has promoted who would have a serious problem with outsiders after having us help pump up Ukrainian ethnic chauvinism to the point of them looking down on Russians as subhumans when their similarities are self-evident. Of course, we have a couple of good examples of how to thread that needle by emulating apartheid outright or even just the Gulf states’ “guest worker” slave management system.

William

Or, in the confederate’s case, give them a taste of what living on the plantation was like

Mathew Muntz

Great episode! In the most recent bonus episode of the Age of Napoleon podcast (which I'm probably not alone in listening to here), Everett mentioned the idea that Count of Monte Cristo was perhaps based on Dumas' father pissing off Napoleon in Egypt, getting imprisoned and tortured by Italian reactionaries on his way back to France, and then getting totally fucked over/blacklisted by Napoleon's government when he finally got out.

St h

Where’s the video Mark talks about (bullhorn/beefy western guy giving him the hook)?

NYCM&AHole

Yeah I wanna see that

Lojban Chauvinist

Aren't most expat Syrian refugees Sunnis and anti-Assad?

a clash of purple

The first rule for surviving regime change: be white. The second rule: be rich. The third rule: don't be around when the regime changes. The fourth rule: have a name (weirdly reminds me of smartass nerd humor pointing out that nameless characters are much more likely to die in video games and movies than named characters). I was watching a documentary about elephants recently because they're magnificent creatures, much superior in morals and intellect to humans (a vastly overrated and overrepresented species in media, tbh). Elephants in Africa haven't been having a great time due to poaching and climate change. A few preserves have been set up to try and save orphaned and injured elephants, but one of the problems they've run into is that elephants have some level of language, culture, society, etc., and those raised by humans can't ever really fit in with wild herds. It's the equivalent of the old "human raised by wolves" story, and in real life when someone is raised without human contact and socialization then they will never develop language, for example (that part of the brain, if it's not stimulated during childhood, will never develop at all). There's one elephant who was cared for by humans and then released back into the wild, couldn't find a place among any elephant herds, and so instead became the matriarch of a herd of buffaloes. The buffaloes had to learn to act a little more like elephants, and the elephant had to act a little more like a buffalo. Amazing stuff. Anyway, one *very* slim possibility, if you have no other options, is to pray that some extraterrestrial civilization happens to be observing humanity, and some good-natured aliens beam you up and take you to a human preserve on some other planet. (That's the plot of a story in the Twilight Zone VR video game; a guy in a house where everything is not quite right gradually realizes he's been abducted by aliens, but they did it because nuclear war broke out and they wanted to save at least a few humans from extinction by putting them in their best attempt at a safe human habitat.) I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings by making light of an incredibly grim situation, but cracking jokes and thinking about elephants is the only way I can stay sane thinking about this shit...

Jason Thompson

Who was the Al Jazeera journalist you mention who immediately turned on Iran? Is it Motasem A Daloul? I couldn’t believe when on 12/7/24 he tweeted from Gaza basically “Iran sucks and Hezbollah sucks, they aren’t helping Gaza, they are anti Sunni”… basically blatant anti Shia stuff, and all these Shia and Lebanese and Syrians responded with variations of “what the fuck, man”. Really felt like turning on a dime

Christopher Small

One thing to add about the Terror in Revolutionary France is that the bulk of it wasn’t even the old nobility, but rather people who were accused of things like hoarding, who the San-Culotte's were sent off to hunt down as essentially a busy-box to placate them while they were cut out of any real power. There probably was a fair amount of hoarding, of course, partly due to intentional price-gouging, partly due to the fact that that’s just how you survive when there are food shortage everywhere. I guess the takeaway there being that, the way so much of the way political violence hits people is through these petty little mechanisms. If you’re in a targeted group, you likely won’t be executed for any grand reason, but rather just because you’re the face people will put on any systemic breakdown and/or day-to-day problem for them. Arbitrary power often isn’t imposed in some big “no more freedom law” but rather through things like restrictions on contraband that nobody can meet. Things like that give every guy manning a checkpoint the pretext to make themselves a little dictator in your life any time they want. But they can also keep that guy on the bubble because it gives their superiors something to hold over them.

Steve Mathews

This is the only reason we care about the Titanic too.

No

There's a quote from Trotsky i always remember where he talks about the army shooting collaborators and he makes the simple point that prison sentences aren't a deterrent for potential collaborators during a war cause they can just wait to be freed by the enemy. There's a cold logic to that unfortunately

No

There's an election soon in Germany and politicians are already talking about sending Syrians back, though some pointed out that the German health system would collapse without the 6000 Syrian doctors here. The economy would probably also collapse if they mass deported everyone else. Racism isn't a rational belief system though, they may do it anyway

Ander Pierce

Love the episode. So grim and good 👌🏻

Trazdat

If you ever do more on the Paris Commune, you should look at its effects on the chattering classes in the US too. Sadly I don’t have a source off hand but I’ve heard that elite horror at it played a significant role in deflating elite support for reconstruction.

A

Oh bother not this furr guy

Isaac Suárez

If nothing else, it appears that at least some Alawites are choosing to fight. I’ll be curious to see how things play out in Latakia and in the regions that are more distant from the HTS controlled core. I’ll also be curious to see how well HTS is able to hang together. Turkey is not doing great economically- they’re gonna put a lot of eggs in the basket of the incoming regime. If HTS gets sucked into more conflicts than it can manage, or if HTS command isn’t able to control its proxies and allies vis a vis Israel and the US, then conditions in Syria may get far worse. Everyone’s eyes will be on IS- the go to ethos for the embittered and defeated. https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/toppled-syrian-regime-forces-ambushed-transitional-government-troops-at-latakia/3424902

Neil Y

On the topic of the Paris Commune, reading David Harvey's essay on Sacre Coeur and the legacy of the commune was the first time I actually was able to really understand the crime of discredit and slander committed against the people of Paris. Highly recommend

julio

Very interesting episode. The lessons seem to focus on what to do if youre a member of the target group, but what might be some lessons for others? A couple types of cases that would be interesting to discuss in follow up episode occur to me: 1) cases, IF any, where the target group was able to successfully defend themselves, at least for a time, and the strategies they pursued to do so. It seems like the worst case is when you're a member of a target group in the sectarian/racial/ethnic case. I can only think, perhaps, of the Indian Wars, on the assumption that American expansion was a form of "regime change" imposed on native people (although better described perhaps as regime creation/imposition). 2) the range of kinds of responses on the part of members of the in-group, in cases where they might have been sympathetic to the targets. I am, of course, not at all interested in these due to the possibility white nationalists seek to realize their race war fantasies during the tumult of mass deportation (if they occur ) once Trump gets into office.

Mark Ames

the day I get pickup truck brands right is the day you can point me to the rabbit farm

Jacob Short

I also, can’t fucking stand Dickens

JoR

I'm glad I'm not the only one this way lol. I know it's like being a "bad sports fan" but I've legit listened on and off to the last handful of episodes, and I religiously listened to 95%+ of other episodes. Shit is depressing

xxx

So the only way to survive a regime change is to:

CamScott

“Headlights from a Ford Ram” made me LOL so loud my dog barked at me. Thank you gentlemen for all you do and best to you and yours.

Michael Ehrenreich

One man’s regime change is another man’s revolution

Ellen Harold

It is a bit painful to hear Dickens called "a hack". He loved France and A Tale of Two Cities is all about how the villainous and debauched aristocrats brought about their own destruction. He has Sidney Carton, as he goes to the guillotine, make this prophecy about post-revolution France and the city of Paris: "I see Barsad, and Cly, Defarge, The Vengeance [a lieutenant of Madame Defarge], the Juryman, the Judge, long ranks of the new oppressors who have risen on the destruction of the old, perishing by this retributive instrument [the guillotine], before it shall cease out of its present use. I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss, and, in their struggles to be truly free, in their triumphs and defeats, through long years to come, I see the evil of this time and of the previous time of which this is the natural birth, gradually making expiation for itself and wearing out." Perhaps you would be interested in what George Orwell had to say about Dickens, from a (I believe) a Marxist point of view: https://orwell.ru/library/reviews/dickens/english/e_chd

Mark Ames

Well dang, now I feel bad. It's an old prejudice of mine, ever since they forced us to read Dickens in high school. I wondered if it was just me, so I used my oldest son as a test subject and had him read an abridged children's version of Oliver Twist, which felt pretty authentic to the original. He hated it unlike any book he's ever read, and he's read a lot. Still talks about it the way people talk about their awful surgeries. Dickens has influenced writers I love, but as I said, I plum don't understand why.

Ellen Harold

I didn't want you to feel bad! And if you want to understand why, the Orwell essay is long but worth reading. The fact is, that one doesn't read Dickens (or for that matter, Shakespeare) for the absurb plots, or for the (non-existent) politics, or even the main characters sometimes, but for his phantasmagoric, visionary descriptions, which include the startling & unexpected details; and above all his never-to-be forgotten minor characters and their signature phrases: Mr. Micawber: "I am confidently expecting something to turn up!" Mrs Micawber: "I will never desert Mr. Micawber"; Mrs. Gummage, "I am a lone, lorn creature and everything goes contrary with me, Barkis the cart driver: "Barkis is willin'"; or Mr Murdstone's diabolic arithmetic problem, "If I go into a cheesemonger’s shop, and buy five thousand double-Gloucester cheeses at fourpence-halfpenny each, present payment... " It's "defamiliarization" -- in spades --- an essential quality, as some say, of art. The 1935 George Cukor movie with Freddie Bartholomew and W.C Fields, captures it perfectly. https://youtu.be/FjhcvknDy-8?si=PecLamuEg373lRcN As far as "A Tale of Two Cities," I recommend the really excellent 1958 film with Dirk Bogarde and Dorothy Tutin, also on Youtube. Really good, Should be better known.

Mark Ames

they did a LOT of shooting, both sides, and yeah territory was very fluid for the first two years of the civil war

Ellen Harold

I also enjoyed "Paris Babylon: the Story of the Paris Commune" by Rupert Christiansen (1996). Though the title is misleading, because the book devotes more time to the lead up to the Commune. Zola's novel, The Debacle, is also important, I understand in being one of the few contemporary sources sympathetic to the communards.

P. Shaver

I didnt know Canada had a truck culture. Here in Arizona, they're everywhere and reach so high they can't see pedestrians. I've always thought why they keep the useless and now shorter beds of the truck. If they're hauling anything it's a boat and they might as well just be driving the cab of a semi plus they could pull more giant boats and RVs.

Jim Hawley

Wearing glasses means you're reading. That's what that's about.

Alan Fulcher

Hey, it ain’t the truck nerd!