Radio War Nerd EP #3 — Albania

Inspired by Kolonel Bunker, I humbly submit this bumper sticker https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gU5ZvXFgjwy5Tyj9vzIIzBY53hh99jBi/view?usp=drivesdk

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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?

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.