Radio War Nerd EP #19—Torture
Dateline: Turin—The War Nerd gets early release from Italian hospital to do Radio War Nerd . . . War Roundup: US glumly concedes North Korea tested H-bomb . . . Burundi inches closer to disaster . . . Saudis hire US/UK military advisers to improve targeting in Yemen . . . WaPo admits Russia succeeding in Syria . . . Su-35 vs MiG . . . Syria Army advances, as do Kurd-Arab forces . . . Turkey using Kurds on frontlines against PKK . . . Reagan's hero Jonas Savimbi . . .
War Nerd Book of the Week: "White Guard" by Mikhail Bulgakov . . .
Torture: When did torture go out of fashion? . . . Early Reagan-era article "Case for Torture" by Michael Levin . . . Killing all POWs was as normal as slavery until recent times . . . US didn't start torturing under Bush — Central America death squads, Vietnam, Korea . . . POWs in US Civil War got worse as war dragged on . . . South's Andersonville POW camp was a death camp . . . Britain invented concentration camps in Boer War . . . Myth of Nazis treating POWs well — 3.3 Soviets died in Nazi POW camps . . . Jane Mayer's "The Dark Side" about Bush-era torture . . . John Yoo & David Addington . . . Does torture even work? Not for interrogation, but good for extracting false information, terrorizing local communities . . .
Comments (8)
Shoutout to my fellow sickos who got in to RWN in late 2024 and are digging back in the crates 8 yrs later
Boo at the forceful and patronizing endorsement of Sanders
Do not quite remember if it was on this show or the last one, but after Mark's "rant" about the origins of the libertarian movement, i am reading his expose on NSFW Corp, of the Koch brother's ideological influences... And YES, this shit is really weird, and fascinating. Thanks for the heads up, Mark. Feel free to make these kind of "interventions" in future shows. So much that have happened, and we do not know about...
Everyone who got the show notes saw the reading list..I'd like to recommend A.J. Langguth's Hidden Terrors. The book goes into detail about Dan Mitrione (mentioned in the podcast) and the CIA's training of South American governments in torture techniques to use against leftist opposition. Pretty brutal reading.
Everyone who got the show notes saw the reading list..I'd like to recommend A.J. Langguth's Hidden Terrors. The book goes into detail about Dan Mitrione (mentioned in the podcast) and the CIA's training of South American governments in torture techniques to use against leftist opposition. Pretty brutal reading.
The Nuke Map is pretty dang cool <a href="http://www.nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://www.nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/</a>
In terms of books, I want to mention Stephen Kotkin's new biography of Stalin "The Paradoxes of Power" which I'm currently reading. It the first of a massive three volume set, the second of which is supposed to be published this year. It does a really good job of putting the man in his historical context, rather than focusing exclusively on his individual psychology as so many others often do. All the talk about the Greens and violence in Ukraine made me think about that. As I'm sure you know, Stalin loved the play based on that book "The Days of the Turbins." It's generally believed this is why he let Bulgakov live.
I remember reading about Polish POW:s after the warsaw uprising being put in ex Russian POW barracks. They refused to enter because it was in such a horrible condition. What happened was that the german soldiers whent in and cleaned the barracks. These where ressistance fighters that could easilly have been shot as saboteurs by the germans getting better treatment then Rad army soldiers.