Radio War Nerd EP #225 — Ethiopia-Eritrea Wars + Rakhine State Rebellion + Annibale on Italy Pandemic, Pt. 4
Guests: Kayleigh Long, journalist + Annibale
Recorded: April 13, 2020
First - the War Nerd & Ames discuss life in quarantine on opposite coasts—Portland, and now Rochester for Ames...
At 20:09 - War Nerd tells the incredible story of the Ethiopian wars from the Derg revolution in 1974 through the Eritrean and Tigrayan wars of the 1980s and 90s...
At 1:36:00 - We're joined by journalist Kayleigh Long (RWN EP#101) to discuss surprising new twists in Myanmar's Rakhine state, where the military, fresh off ethnically cleansing Rohingya Muslims, now waging a brutal counterinsurgency against Buddhist Rakhine separatists...
At 2:08:00 - Annibale tells us about the latest Coronavirus developments in Italy—and how Lombardy's big experiment with privatized health care may be the reason why Lombardy is suffering worse than any other province in Italy...
Maps & Illustrations:
*Map of Ethiopian battles
*Castro and Mengistu
Music by Brendon Anderegg.
Total time: 2:40:28
Comments (8)
Your comment on horror movies reminded me of the wonderful and incredibly depressing “Synecdoche New York”, which apparently was inspired by Charlie Kaufman being asked to make a horror movie and making a movie about what REALLY scares people — i.e. age, death, loneliness, being unloved, etc. Of course I *also* love movies about zombies and tentacle monsters.
Maybe for Gary to become a bit more evil the book "Be slightly evil" by Venkatesh Rao could help. His essay "The Gervais Principle" blew my mind on big corporation bureaucracy and helped a lot to overcome it.
Great episode. More Africa episodes would be greatly appreciated and doing a episode on Cuba’s foreign adventures is an awesome idea.
very interesting episode for me as someone from the Horn. Quick correction would be that Somalia was a Soviet ally up until the beginning of the 1977 war with Ethiopia. The Soviets chose to support Ethiopia instead and halted all aid and weapons sales to Somalia as a consequence. Carter and Brzezinski refused to accept Somalia as a client state on short notice.
Is there an archive of previous newsletters?
Superb episode. Kayleigh Long is an excellent guest.
Re: Barbarossa and Stalin's purge, my understanding is that the big reason for the success of Barbarossa was that the Soviet General Staff had spent ages thinking about how to launch large-scale tank offensives, thinking that would be very useful from 1942 on, but had spent no time thinking about how to defend against a large-scale tank offensive, with the result that they deployed most of the Red Army on the frontier and the Germans were able to wipe it out with a surprise attack, which they wouldn't have been able to do if most of the army was stationed away from the frontier. This is obviously partly Stalin's fault, but Tukhachevsky deserves a share of the blame.
I just got tested for the 'rona, and thankfully it was the throat swab and not the nasal swab. I tried the old prostitute's trick of clenching my thumb in my fist to suppress my gag reflex, but it didn't work.