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Radio War Nerd EP #493 — The First Time America Tried "Reshaping The Middle East" 1947-58 (pt. 2: Syria & Lebanon) (Patreon)

Published:
2025-01-15 21:35:10
Edited:
2025-01-15 21:52:02
Imported:
2025-01
Tags:

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Content

Recorded: January 14, 2024

Part 2 of our series on the US Empire's first stab at "reshaping the Middle East", this episode we follow CIA man Wilbur Crane Eveland as he's sent to Lebanon and Syria in the mid-1950s to spread more democracy in the form of coups, election meddling, and ultimately invasion. With the usual results.

First - we discuss current events: LA fires & impending Gaza ceasefireAt 28:50 - part 2 of our series on the first time the US empire set the Middle East on fire in the 1950s

*NYT editorial comparing Nasser to Hitler, July 9, 1958. Six days later, US troops invaded Lebanon to save it from "Hitler."

*Books & articles mentioned:-Ropes of Sand, Wilbur Eveland Crane-The Game of Nations, Miles Copeland Jr-MI6: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty's Secret Intelligence Service, Stephen Dorrill-"Cold War and Covert Action: The United States and Syria, 1945-1958", Douglas Little, Middle East Journal, 1990

Total time: 1:38:37Direct link to this episode's mp3 here

*

Subscribe to Radio War Nerd at patreon.com/radiowarnerd

Sound production by Telescope Audio

Check out the Radio War Nerd Merch store here!

Order your print or ebook of John Dolan's new book Erdogan Pizza: Dispatches from a Violent & Grotesque World

Files

Comments

Xi

Hey the direct download link is showing a 404 error

Terry Dunk

I will take the privilege of first comment to say that I'm loving this series, feels like classic RWN. That said, let me also entreat you Mark to try out the rounder, long 'A' phoneme when pronouncing Iraq, Iran, et cetera rather than the very Middle American 'eye-rack' I feel like you tend to favor. Said with love!

JoR

Small correction, Mark. It's not that we won't ever own a house in the Palisades. We're never owning houses ANYWHERE haha

JoR

Completely agree. Throwback to the first year of episodes when it's just 2-3 hours of no guests

Ira Lewy

Gunna need an episode on this ceasefire :s

Garibaldi

Excited to see if any freaks pop up into the comments to angrily insist that the SSNP is actually left-wing and their insane racial policy, connections to Mussolini, and Nazi flag are all just crazy coincidences.

Jason Thompson

I can never get enough Evil Dead references from y’all. This is the true populism

Podconsoomer

They are pretty sus. But they did give some martyrs for Gaza so for now 🤷🏽‍♂️&🫡. They seem pretty harmless now even if they may or may not be fash adjacent.

William

This Dolan is fully armed and operational

Garibaldi

Yeah I mean I don't think they are like a global threat, but objectively, they are a fascist organization. Whether or not they by coincidence their own goals temporarily align with Gaza is irrelevant.

Winston Reid

Something John might find interesting is that Altadena is the final home and resting place of Owen and Jason Brown, John Brown’s son. Owen participated in the raid on Harper’s Ferry. His funeral was the largest event held in Pasadena up to that point. He was buried on “Little Roundtop Hill” in West Altadena, the peak was later renamed “Brown’s Hill.” His old grave stone read: “Owen Brown, Son of John Brown, the Liberator.” It was reinstalled in 2021.

a clash of purple

If they fight the IDF, then they're doing more good than most "leftist" organizations that have ever existed. Who's doing more for the Palestinians? The SSNP? Or every English-speaking leftist org in the world combined? I don't know if the American left, such as it is, is even doing anything to support the pro-Palestine student protestors on American college campuses, let alone fighting the IDF.

a clash of purple

At some point, a lot of millenials are going to inherit houses from their parents, once the boomers *finally* die off. It's going to be one of the biggest generational wealth transfers in recorded history. I assume at that point, this leftist twinge in the American population will evaporate, and all these DSA types are going to turn into Reagan-style conservative swine.

a clash of purple

These upper-class twats and deep state spooks who run the world are really beyond caricature.

Podconsoomer

The most us in the American left have done is protest and donate to go fund mes

No

Witkoff rolls on shabbos lol

Matthew Thrunnowicki

Not “poison.” “Lepers.” “I hate them worse than lepers, and I’ll kill them in their cars.” -Revolution Blues, Neil Young He’s also clearly in a Charles Manson-like character as a narrator during this tune, so I doubt they reflect his true feelings, seeings as how he was an integral part of the Laurel Canyon scene.

Garibaldi

They think that Palestinians are part of the Greater Syrian race. So yes they do occasionally fight the IDF on a very small scale, but as I said, it's basically incidental to Palestinian liberation.

Ellen Harold

This episode was truly excellent. And I appreciate the bibliography. Thank you.

CR

Not if the reverse mortgages get the houses first

CR

First as tragedy (marines hitting the beach of Beirut), then as farce (marines hitting the beach of Mogadishu live on CNN)

a clash of purple

Okay, well, then, they suck. Sounds like the American neo-Nazis who show up at pro-Palestinian protests to try and recruit because they assume Arabs must be anti-Semites like them.

a clash of purple

I have to say, Eveland's story reminds me of Lawrence Dennis, one of the most interesting figures produced by early 20th century America. Dennis had a black mother (unknown father) and was a famous child prophet in the South, then managed to pass as white and join the U.S. imperial management apparatus. Though he didn't have the same level of education as most of his peers, he was far more intelligent and perceptive, and he grew to despise and resent the American elites for their stupidity and prejudice. In the pre-WWII years, he advocated for fascism among the highest levels of Angloid business and government, saying that a new fascist order would sweep away the incompetent, corrupt ruling class and pave the way for a new, more enlightened meritocracy (which he subtly implied at times would be anti-racist: this ties in to what Annibale said about Italian fascism vs. Nazism). Dennis was called the Brain of Fascism at one point. It was sort of an open secret that Dennis wasn't white, but everyone turned a blind eye up until the Business Plot against FDR was exposed. At that point, both FDR's administration and the coup-plotters quietly agreed to use Dennis as a scapegoat for the whole conspiracy, partly in order to avoid indicting key business leaders that FDR needed and partly because (by society's standards) Dennis was black. The FBI was insanely paranoid at the time that the U.S.'s rivals would exploit the racism of American society in order to turn blacks and other minority groups into a fifth column (there were some attempts to do that, though I don't think they amounted to much), and they went after Dennis really hard. Anyway, the judge in his case died of a heartattack and I think everyone just sort of agreed to sweep everything under the rug. Dennis continued to be a public intellectual for the rest of his life, but I don't think he ever had the same influence as before his trial. Eveland seems to have similar reactions to Dennis at certain points to the idiocy of the Angloid ruling class. But while both of them managed to rise above their class, Eveland was white, so he was never as alienated from that world as Dennis was. He was still more comfortable among them, in the end.

Matt Colston

This is true about Syrian immigrants. I am a descendant of one of those immigrants.

Hans Anders

Then as slapstick, with the Gaza pier

JoR

I'm sure you read it, but you should read the war nerds multipart coverage of the war of 1812 on the Exile

JoR

That's a very awesome story. I have a feeling Anibale is a quasi expert on that guy for some reason lol

Hans Anders

Evilin is the only correct pronunciation of Eveland

John Waaben

Appreciate your coverage of the Altadena/Eaton fire, seen lots of great wildlife (quails, woodpeckers, jays, tanagers) in the foothills near there.

James

Oil money doesn’t usually trickle down except in Norway and Russia - which might be part of why our leaders hate Russia so much.

Jakob Stenfalk

Bold of you to assume that those houses will still at that point be habitable. The car-dependent suburb was never built as a sustainable place of residence. It was always explicitly built to enable (re-)segregation - of schools and housing, but particularly of the subsidy flows that it was no longer politically expedient to mark as explicitly "whites only." It's not at all obvious that that function is still relevant at this point, so many suburbs are being allowed to decay to un-usability. And as CR notes above, the boomers might reverse mortgage to above the rooftop. Or the houses might be just plain stolen - there were lots of fraudulent foreclosures in 2008-10, and nothing in the American state's approach to foreclosure has improved the odds of the foreclosed-upon since then. So there are lots of ways for that inheritance to be either deeply underwater money pits, or straight up stolen from under the prospective heirs. (Which, let's be clear, would not be any injustice - inheritance is an atavistic feudal throwback, and it's funny when they get stolen.)