Home
Creators
Search Recent Random
Posts
Search DMs Popular Hash Lookup Tags Random
Importer
Import FAQ
Register Favorites Keys Review DMs Logout
Community
Telegram ThePornDude
Home Creators Posts Import Register Favorites Logout

Radio War Nerd EP #159 — Russia-Ukraine Naval Kerfuffle + "Pistachio Wars" (Patreon)

Published:
2018-12-01 02:22:19
Edited:
2018-12-01 19:34:30
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Downloads

Content

Recorded November 30, 2018

Guests: Filmmaker Rowan Wernham & journalist Yasha Levine 

The War Nerd & Ames talk about the weirdly stylized naval "clash" in the Azov Sea between Russian naval forces and a few Ukrainian boats. More interesting than the one-sided sumo match is the larger political and military background leading up to the Kerch Strait kerfuffle . . . Also: no discussion would be complete without a close reading of perhaps the dumbest Atlantic Council warmongering article ever, which is saying a lot . . .

At 1:47:45 we talk to Rowan Wernham and Yasha Levine about their new documentary feature "Pistachio Wars" about the murky Beverly Hills pistachio billionaires sucking California's water supply dry and profiting off Iran war tensions . . . Levine also tells us about his depressing recent visit to Ukraine, drained by austerity, wars, ultranationalism & despair . . . Pledge to the Pistachio Wars kickstarter campaign by clicking here. 

* Maps

* Kerch Strait "clash"

* Ukraine's evolving borders, first half 20th C

Total time: 2:53:19

Direct link to this episode's mp3 here  

Files

Comments

Karl Knight

Love it when the band is back together.

Mark Ames

FYI there was a brief silent spot around the 1 hour mark, so we redid the mix and reuploaded a newer fixed version since this was first posted. We had to turn this episode around fast - long story. Brendan deserves a medal for his efforts past few days, Order Of Subotai or something like that.

Joel

The bit about the Weather Underground reminded me of a pretty absurd Syria panel featuring Bernadine Dohrn that I went to in 2014. It was basically Fox News in university panel form, with a series of humanitarian interventionlists followed by Dohrn as the token anti-war hippie punching bag. The interventionalists played a movie clip of some barrel bombings to get the audience especially emotionally pliable, then served up arguments such as (literally) "there is no civil war, it's just the people against the regime." Finally Dorhn got up to speak, her voice quivering, and started off with "uh, I actually don't know much about Syria." She suggested that as an alternative to a no-fly zone we should try fasting in solidarity with the rebels. Anyway, that's what those people are up to these days.

Gengeros

You just missed Bush Senior kicking the bucket

Tom Austin

How about Thierry coming back to talk about what's going on in France?

Joseph Yachimec

I'm interested in Limonov, haven't really been able to get a grip on him from what I've read. Isn't National Bolshevism kind of fascist-y? How come you guys like him?

Ellen Harold

I am curious, what evidence is there exactly that Crimea was given to Ukraine to compensate for the famine?

radiowarnerd

Kruschev's family (Nina, Sergei) have said that it was a sentimental gesture by Nikita, perhaps for the famine, perhaps general desire to court Ukrainian loyalty to the USSR.

radiowarnerd

He's a great writer. I don't know what you've read. I suggest starting with Podrostok Sovenko, which has been translated as Memoir of a Russian Punk. You could also read his account of working as a butler for an American billionaire, Istoriya Ygo Sluga, translated as 'His Butler's Story'. I don't know if National Bolshevism can be called fascist. It arose in response to the shock therapy imposed on Russia after 1991. Some rage seems reasonable after trauma like that. But Limonov certainly doesn't have the racial or ethnic prejudices of someone like Celine (who, BTW, is also a great writer).

radiowarnerd

Well, we can't wait around for these people all day.

radiowarnerd

With enemies like that, the mainstream doesn't need any friends.

radiowarnerd

Thanks, yeah, that's timing forged over many eXiled production nights.

Ellen Harold

Thank you for your response.

Mark Ames

As they say, "it's horrible because it's true". jesus h.

Mark Ames

Agree with John. Limonov obviously liked to toy around with shocking symbolism - he's the guy who moved to France marketing himself as the Russian Johnny Rotten. And he co-founded the National-Bolsheviks with Yegor Letov, the brilliant poet and singer in Grazhdanskoye Oborona, which puts the Sex Pistols to shame in every way, and Letov has always been on the extreme end of the left. The third cofounder Dugin is, from all I've heard, a fashy nut (never read him, don't care to). Which is why Dugin quit Limonov's party - Dugin complained in interviews after he quit that Limonov was an unreconstructed leftwing "anarchist," and he Dugin gave up on trying to move him to the right. Dugin has become a bogeyman of immense proportions among all these neophyte Russia Expert grifters, some of these clowns call him "Putin's Brain" or "Putin's Rasputin" because hey, who the hell is gonna check. Anyway, yeah as WN just wrote, this came out of the extreme circumstances of early 1990s Russia, when the ruling neoliberals believed it was just and good to impoverish most of the country, and push millions into early death. An unimaginably dark and extreme time.

Mark Ames

Should add: Anna Politkovskaya published all sorts of effusive praise for Limonov and his party before she was assassinated.

Mark Ames

As for why like him—he wrote exceptionally great memoir novels, short stories and poems.

Joseph Yachimec

It makes a lot more sense to me now, in the light of what happened in the 90s—even the nationalist bits, which fit with the overall conditions of humiliation being carried out under the auspices of a supposedly "international" neoliberal mission. That kind of fury about colonialism (itself a pretty national-seeming American project in this case) would be pretty easy to nationalise. Plus the whole punks wearing swastikas to shock thing. I guess the iconography would have been chosen to upset both the brave new world of the Chicago boys, and the supporters of the old regime as it stood—something I've seen Limonov had no great love for. I just felt cautious, as I'm a bit of a gutbucket old-fashioned internationalist socialist. I've heard a bit about Dugin, mostly from the usual highly anxious suspects (and some supposed "Leftists" pushing the ol' mythical Red-Brown axis), but also from Pepe Escobar, whose articles are often aggregated by Naked Capitalism. Escobar seems rather infatuated with him, but I myself am not.

Joseph Yachimec

Dugin seems to write scholarly stuff on Iran and Persian history under the name Blake Archer Williams. Wasn't one of the alt-right dudes in the States also a Persian scholar? What in the hell is up with that?

Ryan DiMaria

One of the best analyses of current events you two have put out there; found myself equally informed and entertained. Keep doing (in the words of the immortal Lloyd Blankfein) God's Work.

Leo M O'Connell

can anyone tell me the author of the 'understanding russia' book they mention?

Avery

It's Matthew Malley, and the book was indeed censored by the American Russia hands in the mid-90s. After I found Malley's views on Israel (he believes it's morally right to seize land from people who aren't "creative thinkers") and posted them to facebook, Mark disclaimed his endorsement of the pamphlet, but you can read it for free here Part 1: <a href="https://clement.livejournal.com/18391.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://clement.livejournal.com/18391.html</a> Part 2: <a href="https://clement.livejournal.com/18570.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://clement.livejournal.com/18570.html</a> Part 3: <a href="https://clement.livejournal.com/18884.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://clement.livejournal.com/18884.html</a>

Paul Vd

Putin had every right to take Crimea plus more. What the US did, staging a coup right at the same time as the Sochi Olympics was the lowest of the low.

Paul Vd

I heard that it was given over so that kruschev had more votes after stalins death

Paul Vd

Hey don't cheap out on the Russia Ukraine war. These are European towns that are at war. This is a big deal.

Ellen Harold

I have to say nothing Trump has done equals the low-down despicableness of our media coverage of the Sochi Olympic Games.

Paul Vd

Russia did pretty good for itself. The US air excerise in Ukraine ended in tragedy. And the Trident Juncture NATO exercise ended with the host country sinking a 500 million dollar frigate.

Jed Hovey

Finally got around to listening to this. I just wanted to ask, what is the take the two of you have on the legitimacy of the vote Crimea did to rejoin Russia? Was this vote legit? Was it rigged in any way? Are the numbers accurate? I guess it's always seemed pretty odd to me to use the term "annexed" when a firm majority of the population wanted it that way. But it's hard to know if the entire vote was suspect. My take has typically been that while the referendum was mostly legit, the Moscow/Putin never would have done this if he thought there was even a small chance the vote wouldn't go his way. But my understanding of the event is pretty shaky. I'm not sure how to take it.

Ellen Harold

I read somewhere that this was the third such referendum in Crimea, an autonomous region, since 1992, correct me if I’m wrong.

Paul Vd

The vote was totally legit. A delegation from the EU external action committee was there to watch the vote. They gave it full marks. Don't expect that fact to reach the Western media tho.

Paul Vd

As Jack Matlock said, the US could fix Crimea if it wanted to. They would sit down with Russia. Put Crimea as a one-off on the Russian column & put Kosovo as a one-off in the US column. Then call it a wash and both sides agree not to do it again. Then it's over and the US and Russia can make relations better again. But the US doesn't want to

Jed Hovey

All that makes sense, but there's so much misinformation floating around it's hard to know what is real and what isn't. I don't believe a damn thing most of the Western media says about Russia or Ukraine. The US press is so slanted against Russia it would be high comedy if people knew just a little bit more. That said, I wouldn't exactly put it past the Kremlin to rig a referendum to get territory either. That said, since Crimea is overwhelmingly Russian speaking and one of the main planks of the nationalist program coming out of Kiev is to make everyone speak Ukrainian I can see how that wouldn't go over very well with the locals. I suspected that Putin just saw an opportunity and took it. He knew very well most people in Crimea identified as Russian and that any referendum held there would go overwhelmingly in his favor. I thought about that too. The US could just use Crimea as a bargaining chip to get concessions somewhere else, or just offer to recognize Crimea as belonging to Russia, full stop, to put an end to this whole ugly conflict. Most of the people in DC still think they live in the year 2000, back when the US was the sole superpower, but that isn't the world they live in anymore.

Ellen Harold

I found one of the websites where I might have read about previous attempts by the Crimeans to disengage from Ukraine. Unfortunately the comments to this have not been preserved. My great grandmother got out of what was then Galicia in 1888, and my grandmother told me that great grandmother often exclaimed to her children about how lucky they were not to be there. I assume that any remaining relatives were massacred in WW 2.

Ellen Harold

In 2014 Gary Brecher wrote: “On January 20, 1991, Crimeans voted to restore their ties with Russia by almost the same percentage (93.2%) we saw in today’s election—where, according to the BBC, 93% of Crimean voters once again voted Russian. That’s a remarkably consistent vote, considering what a lot of chaos and poverty have encompassed the region since 1991. Back then, of course, no one in the West took the results seriously, because everyone knew the USSR was evil and anyone defecting from it was good. But it might be worth remembering that election now--because with Russian economic and military power backing them, the Crimeans’ vote might actually count.” Gary Brecher, <a href="https://pando.com/2014/03/17/the-war-nerd-everything-you-know-about-crimea-is-wrong-er/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://pando.com/2014/03/17/the-war-nerd-everything-you-know-about-crimea-is-wrong-er/</a>