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 #3 — Albania (Patreon)

Published:
2015-09-17 04:05:49
Edited:
2019-04-04 18:41:30
Imported:
2026-06

Downloads

Content

The War Nerd moves from Bulgaria to Durres, Albania . . . The Nerd talks about Albania's mushroom bunkers, nationalism & Skanderbeg . . . 

Direct link to this episode's mp3 here 

Comments

Coba

I don't think the tiresome conformity in the US military is a simple matter of military policy, where you can flip a switch and say "weird people are allowed in again." The British didn't allow their empire to be run by eccentrics because they were all that tolerant of eccentrics. They allowed it largely because it was their way to get rid of eccentrics, and before modern media, sending somebody off to run the empire really did mean you were rid of them. Sure, there's gradations here, and the US military is in a pretty extreme place, but the historical moment for Lawrence of Arabia types may just have passed.

Jed Hovey

Regarding moral clarity in conflict and war: I recently read Otto Kernberg's "Ideology, Conflict, and Leadership in Groups and Organizations," sections of which describe how this desire to find clear enemies who are either all good or all bad corresponds loosely to the form of psychological regression known as "splitting." He spent a lot of years working with borderline personality disorder, so that's how he looks at things, but the point stands. The desire to find people who are evil for one's own Quixotic fantasies should rightly be viewed as a form of psychological regression to early childhood. Furthermore, this is why it is so important that Russia is still the "bad guy" to neocons. Their entire identity, political and otherwise, no longer makes much sense in the absence of the Soviet menace and and the narcissism which goes along with it is desperate for something...anything to take its place. They're practically begging for Russia to act in a menacing way, begging for the Cold War to start back up so they can feel good about themselves and maintain their own grandiose self-image. This sort of propaganda is so appealing to the population at large because it allows for a set of simplistic slogans and stances to give one the feeling of knowing and understanding what is going on in the world and removes all the tough work of really understanding anything about these conflicts. Really understanding a conflict is hard, and it is very appealing to have an explanation come in which makes it seem as though none of that matters and people can go back to watching the game.

Thomas

John -- why do you and Mark keep repeating the kind of glib statement that 2013 calls for Western airstrikes against regime air power targets in Syria should be seen as the US coming perilously close to acting as IS's air force? This ignores the clearly multipolar nature of the conflict. In 2013 Assad and IS were studiously avoiding fighting each other, and even today, only something like 6% of regime airstrikes target IS assets. The overwhelming majority are against other rebel groups, which are generally more or less at war with IS themselves. Why do you ignore them? Or the civilian populations of cities like Aleppo, which have borne (born, q.v. your distaste for Michael Weiss?) the brunt of the regime air attack? -- Aleppo is possibly the world's oldest continually inhabited city, and when it stops being so, it will probably be because its inhabitants have either fled or been killed by barrel bombs. Cratering air strips and other soft air power targets seems like it could have prevented Assad from launching a war against civilian targets of the exact kind that you are disgusted to see in Yemen -- so why are you so opposed to this action? IS is Bashar al-Assad's bête noire, which was allowed to grow -- even cultivated, if you examine who was purchasing IS oil before its production capacity was destroyed -- in order to legitimize the fiction that the regime was 'fighting terrorism.' Striking Assad's air power isn't aiding IS, it's just a half-hearted attempt to get his regime to stop murdering its own people. So?

Peter Berard

You might find this funny, regarding Irish Protestant convert self-exculpating. One of my best friends is into the whole Irish culture bit. Owns a kilt, sometimes spells his name in Gaelic, etc etc. One problem: his whole family tree is straight-up Protestant Scots-Irish up until his parents generation- gentle cerebral types who moved to the Boston area and got tech jobs. He even has the look- lanky, pale, angry-looking even when he's not. So naturally I rib him sometimes when he starts being Irish. "Who's this 'we,' Orangeman??" He had an ingenious response. He claimed his people were CELTIC Christians. They resisted the romanization of Irish Christianity back in the old days and just... stuck with it until the Reformation! I was so bowled over by this this nineteenth-century style romantic revisionism, I just didn't have the heart to mention the thousand-year gap in non-Catholic religion in Ireland his supposed ancestors would've had to endure. And it's a pretty low-stakes argument- he can have all the Irish stuff he wants, as far as I'm concerned.

radiowarnerd

Jed, that's great! It goes a long way to explaining the latest punditry about Russia in Syria.

Gabriel Uriarte

The fact that the question "who are the bad guys?" can be asked in all seriousness by actual adults in ostensibly highbrow news programmes a very depressing feature of American MSM, to which I'm intermittently exposed as my partner likes to have the TV on if we're fixing some elaborate dish.

Patrick Conner

The extended section on Albanian bunkers was pretty awesome. They might have been useless in a fight... But that wan't the point.

Patrick Conner

The extended section on Albanian bunkers was pretty awesome. They might have been useless in a fight... But that wan't the point.

Hanso

I get what's being said about the "anti-Shia tilt" in the media, but I'm not sure if it's really as bad as you make it sound. People seem to care just as little about the horribly primitive terror bombings (the barrell bombs) being conducted on Syrian Sunni neighbourhoods. It was very interesting to see how the media handled the recent mass killing at a Douma market (more than 100 civilians killed) - the story was apparently so boring the RT could actually afford to not mention it at all. What it boils down to for me is that the Western audience really don't care about Arab-on-Arab (etc.) violence. We love our killers, and if they happen to be people we don't care about we quickly brush it of and turn the other page. The killer is what makes the story. An Arab killed by an Israeli is an incredible story, but noone cares about the Arab that got horribly killed by another Arab. This is why the Kurds are getting close to a pretty dangerous place, in terms of their rep. All the good publicity they've been getting, all the stories that have been building up this thing about "the Kurd is one of us", may very well put them in a spot were they won't be able to do any "bad stuff" at all. And "bad stuff" (in some form) will of course be necessary (sooner or later) if they actually want to keep the territory they've gotten from riding the IS-wave, as you all know. Or do you think they will be able to kill the Arabs with kindness? It's a dangerous thing when Westerners start "identifying" with you, for that puts you on their moral compass. Then you don't even have to do anything hardcore for it to be classified as "bad stuff". If you're just another "wog" you can rape, pillage and fight "real war" as much as you want, it seems.

radiowarnerd

That's an extremely good point. I've seen that with charges of "ethnic cleansing" against the YPG/J. Here they are in a territory where massacre and enslavement have become the norm and they're being accused of "unproven" displacements. That suggests they're already being held to a double standard. The only counter will be, I guess, atrocities committed against them, which will give them a certain space to operate, and there will never be any shortage of those.

radiowarnerd

I really like what you said and I'd like to quote it in an upcoming article. Is that OK? What name or pseudonym would you like me to use for you?

radiowarnerd

That's a great story. You get a lot of these absurd family tales rationalizing conversion to the dominant creed. I think I mentioned on the last podcast a Bozniak who said his ancestor had converted to Islam in order to get away with taking revenge on someone who raped a female relative. There's the slight possibility that happened, but much more likely somebody just got tired of starving and being abused.

Hanso

That would of course be a great honour! You can just use "Hanso". Looking forward to the article.

Hanso

Problem is that their main enemy is so incredibly depraved that their atrocities are hardly able to upset people anymore. The YPG relocates some Arabs and it's of course spectacular news - IS burns, drowns or enslaves and it's just business as usual. It's all about what people are expecting. There's really nothing left for IS to do in order to go "too far" - I doubt even something on like a Srebrenica scale would make much real difference. And if it happens, it has to be presented certain way by the victims! A Middle Eastern massacre is never a story in itself, but has to be made into propaganda. From what I've seen, the Kurds are to proud and old-school to understand what works in the West. I saw a really interesting Vice News documentary about the situation in Sinjar, and most of the Peshmerga there were more interested in telling the cameras about Kurdish bravery and machismo than crying about the poor girls who got abducted. Kurds can't cry - and that's a very serious weakness.