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 #200 — World War II Novels (Patreon)

Published:
2019-09-30 23:06:26
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Downloads

Content

Recorded: September 27, 2019

First, we talk about the latest news out of Saudi Arabia—Bonesaw's ceasefire announcement, the first recognition that his forces lost to the Yemeni Houthi rebels.

At 49:30 — the War Nerd & Ames discuss World War II novels, including Mailer's "Naked & the Dead", Heller's "Catch-22", Ondaatje's "The English Patient", Grossman's "Life and Fate" and others... 

Total time: 2:19:03

Direct link to this episode's mp3 here 

Files

Comments

MoldyTolge

This is the Celine content we all need in our lives. Can’t remember the name, but I recently read an article in a ~paper of record~ that claimed 100,000 Yemeni dead from the war. You guys previously brought up how the tide is finally turning on mainstream coverage but I was shocked that such a number made it past the editor, but of course it said that war crimes have been committed by both sides 🤔. That writer must be a little courageous or very thick to include, you know, the truth in an article covering Yemen.

Joseph Dunham

Congratulations on this milestone and your well EARNED success! Thanks for making this amazing podcast.

Jeremy Heffernan

Really enjoyed this episode. Have you guys ever read To the White Sea by James Dickey?

Igor Igorsson

Regarding Vaino Linna and Unknown Soldier: It's been a long time since I read it, but I remember thinking it was pretty good, but still a bit of a disappointment. I think part of that was how hyped the book was, but mostly that I had just read his 'Under the North Star' trilogy, which is amazing. The trilogy is not really about war, even if the last two books in that trilogy deals with the finnish civil war/finnish revolution, following a young tenant farmer fighting on the (losing) red side in the war, and WW2, following that same man and his sons (one of his sons is also the subject of Unknown Soldier if I remember right), from the time period after the finnish civil war up till som time in the 50s, if I remember correctly. The war part in the second book of the trilogy made me really look forward to reading Unknown Soldier, but while it was good, I did not like it as much as the trilogy.

Igor Igorsson

I read all of it in swedish, by the way. I only know some of the curse words/dirty words in finnish.

Felicity

Regarding the snipers and assassinations.. that’s just it, isn’t it...you used to have assassinations that were ideologically motivated. As the neoliberal era progressed, people actively on the left felt more and more defeated, the general population became less and less engaged politically, and then you have the rise of the mass shooting because people’s desperation, alienation and anger under capitalism hasn’t gone away, it’s just completely lost focus. People don’t understand why they feel so hopeless and some just explode or direct their anger towards scapegoats, like Muslims. Class struggle and political engagement is coming back now, but the current total surveillance state and massively more sophisticated policing is obviously difficult to overcome these days.

Samson

they are the most important. the first words every finnish baby learns

Alexander

Congratulations on Episode #200!

Nick Mould

The Vonnegut quote about Americans and poor people is indeed from Slaughterhouse Five. Here it is in full: “America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, 'It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.' It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: 'if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?' There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand – glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register. Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.”

Animals in Motion

I've read Väinö Linna's trilogy which has already been mentioned here in the comments, also in swedish, since it's somewhat of a must-read for nordic lefties. It's great. I don't know about "Unknown soldier" – it's highly praised, but I've heard a lot of mixed things about it.

I like books

its only tangentially about WW2 but Gravity's Rainbow is by far my favorite book set in the war. I think people get put off by how hard parts of it are but its also so funny and kinda surprisingly passionate in a few parts which I certainly didn't expect going into it

Jimothy Realname

September 27: 200th Radio War Nerd episode recorded. September 28: Glorious Houthi resistance army crushes 3 Saudi brigades in Najran, killing or capturing fully one thirtieth of the Saudis total ground forces in a single engagement and capturing a significant amount of equipment including Canadian-made LAV-IIIs. The curse continues to hold

Dave Dolle

A Chinese Novel "Red Sorghum" by Mo Yan

MoldyTolge

Could you post some of the swears? If you could try to come up with a crude translation that would rock but I’d appreciate learning the Finnish forms too.

MoldyTolge

Mashallah, may our nerds use their powers righteously. You hear anything about governments or the contractor acknowledging those LAVs? I heard that it might have violated explicit 🇨🇦 government policy, not surprising but hey, every time Saudi arms sales are questioned an angel gets its wings.

xnfec

There a meme going around you tube that says Vonnegut is akin to a holocaust denier because he used David Irvings figure for the casualties at Dresden (135,000) instead of later, revised figures (25,000). I read a lot of Vonneguts work and never got the impression he was a nazi sympathiser, and he was actually there at Dresden. If you survive a fire bombing you might be forgiven for thinking the casualites were higher. His books all have recurring characters which link the narratives. The character you mentioned as the traitor (Howard W. Campbell Jr) in Slaughterhouse 5 got a whole novel to himself - Mother Night. Another recurring character is Elliott Rosewater (God Bless you Mr Rosewater). What I liked most about Vonneguts work was that his characters were all understandable at the human level.

Annibale

Vonnegut had open socialist leanings

Paul Foos

A recent novel by Ha Jin, "Nanjing Requiem", historical novel about experiences of Chinese and foreigners in Nanjing, 1937. Also, a fine German novel about East Prussia in the last days of WWII, "All for Nothing" by Walter Kempowski

Jimothy Realname

As far as I can remember, the public debate in Canada was mostly centered around the LAVs possibly being used against civilians domestically. Being used in an aggressive war never seemed to come up. With how the war is going, maybe selling the LAVs to the Saudis was actually a good thing. In effect we were selling lightly used LAVs to the Houthis and getting paid by the Saudis.

John Miller

JG Ballard gets the passing nod from Dolan, that’s all the approval I need. And yes, Catch-22 all I remember from the book and old movie is the jackassery, drunk driving and a guy in a tree or something. Good fun

Jon

RWN should definitely do an episode with @AssyrianSR on the YPG's relationship to Assyrians. Some real good critiques of YPG's attempts at cultural erasure

Steve Mathews

Topic possibility - the National Training Center, a successful US Army reaction to defeat in Vietnam and a pivot back from COIN to Fulda-Gap-style training. FWIW I was there for four years, but I think there are way better interviewees out there on this subject.

Igor Igorsson

The most common ones would be "Perkele" meaning "the Devil", but mostly used as a general curse word (often combined with "Saatana" ("Saatana perkele") meaning "satan"), and "Vittu", litteraly meaning "cunt", but used kind of the way americans use the word "fuck". "Vittu" is often said as "voi vittu", but I have no idea what "voi" means. I used to know quite a few more, back when I was a welder working on construction sites together wth a lot of finns.

Andrew James

On tbe National Training Center i reccomend Defense of Hill 751 for fulda gap jerk offery, great read as a kid

David Gyllenhaal

This is going to sound nuts, but have you guys considered doing a deep dive into David Graeber's book "Bullshit Jobs" through the lens of military procurement and all its associated boondoggles? I feel like there's some great material to be got out of applying his insights to the F-35 program or to the DoD's internal auditing systems.

xnfec

My father had a copy and, when he saw me reading it one day, he asked if I found it funny. I said yes and he replied that I'd have found it even funnier if I'd been in the military (he'd been in the royal navy during the war and the naval reserve after it). I read the follow up - Something Happened - and it was eminently forgettable. I had it supporting a table leg somewhere in my house for a time before confining it to a box in my garage. It was so bad, I did not have the heart to throw it away.

Andrea S

A thought on Norman Mailer's fear/preoccupation with male homosexuality and the lack of women in "Naked & The Dead" - it can be easy to forget the mass mobilization in WW2 thrust men and women in both industry and military life into gender segregated spaces for long periods of time, often far from home and in extremely dangerous and emotionally taxing situations. Many men of this generation had their first (and often only) sexual or romantic experience with another man in the military where such close bonds formed. Blue slip discharges for homosexual conduct likely played some role in building the gay communities in New York City and San Francisco, the ports where the discharged were returned to American soil. Since the G.I. was the basis for immediate post-war images of American masculinity, its not a surprise that writers needed to set the tone of novels so male comradeship would not be taken for homosexuality.

Boobs123

If you guys were going to touch on this subject for a whole show, I would recommend checking out Edward Luttwak's "The Pentagon and the Art of War," which briefly made him an enemy of the Reagan administration.

Mark Ames

No, but the description looks good. The only bad thing I can see is the New Yorker blurb comparing it to a bad Hemingway novel.

Mark Ames

Anyone know the root of why the Russian pejorative for Finns/Estonians is "chukhonets" чухонец?

docbrownn

This might sound stupid, but is there a link I can put in my podcast app? I can’t find it and I just subscribed. I’d love to d/l the episodes rather than stream them. Apologies if this has been answered already.

Igor Igorsson

No idea. I tried looking it up but all I could find was something about finns not being able/refusing to learn propper pronunciation of the russian language, but I have no idea if this is true.

Jack McShane

Does anyone have a link for that SANCOMM(?) article.

M

Great episode. Some suggestions/reactions for you: - I recently read "Unknown Soldier[s]" by Linna. I thought it was quite an entertaining read, but I think it would firmly fall within the "squad novel" category that you both describe in this episode. It reminded me quite a bit of "The Willing Flesh." The class/psychological divide between "grunts" and "officers" (aristocrats/right-wing ideologues) is quite played up. I do not know enough to assert whether this is genuinely reflective of the experiences of Finns in WW2. - It's not a novel, but I also read "Red Star Against the Swastika" around the start of this year. It's a memoir of a Soviet Shturmovik pilot and it makes for an incredible story. The translation I read was so-so, but the elements of daily life that the author describes (including crash-landings, the sheer scale of losses, and so on) are quite impactful.

Hambone Fakenamington

Have you read/watched The Book Thief? I've only seen the movie, but I thought it did one of the better jobs of showing how the Nazis were awful, but still having sympathy for German civilians.

Chris van der Walt

Did you guys think about Primo Levi’s books at all?

eh

"Kaputt" by Curzio Malaparte is an interesting account of the war from as close to a neutral observer as you can get on the Axis side. He has an eye for striking images and as a "left wing" Italian fascist he doesn't mind playing up crimes committed by the Germans and their other allies.

Samson

it's not used anymore, or rather i've never heard of anyone actually calling finns that outside of very old finnish nationalist books/propaganda, but afaik it was derived from an old tribal name https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chud oh and "voi" is oh, as in "oh fuck". emphaticate or we you call that e: actually, i think it might still be used as a pejorative by russians people who hate finns, but the whole point of that is the relationship between finns (after finns maagically came to exist after 1800) and russians alternating between intense and mutual genocidal hatred of epid proportions, and politely disdaining neutrality. the word for a russian in finnish, ryssä, is nowadays concidered a pejorative, because finns used to simply universally hate all russians, so there was no need for a separate pejorative. so nowadays, since we dont hate russians anymore, we dont call russians "ryssä". we call them "venäläiset". because of reasons

A R

Something from the forgotten land of OZ - "TOMORROW & TOMORROW & TOMORROW" - written DURING ww2 by the first female, and longest serving, Chief Librarian of Sydney Uni with her life long partner - using the composite name Florence Eldershaw Barnard. -during WWII,

A R

ooops, ... It was heavily censured and only in the mid 1980s was the full text published, it was a pleas to withdraw from the war and become self sufficient, very apposite for the current C19 lockdown.