Radio War Nerd EP #379 — World of Wars: Bakhmut to Belfast

@Radio War Nerd: Maybe it's just me, but there was no e-mail about episode #379.

Is the War Nerd a vegetarian or vegan? Is that why he needs B12 injections?

Yeah, nice show dere, Markie Walnuts and Johnnyola. Nice show indeed.

I worked for years unloading hopper cars like the one with the missing ammonium nitrate. It’s very easy to open the hoppers with something as simple as a two foot length of rebar. What’s not so simple is getting the material off the ground once it has dumped out. If the cars were stationary, I suppose you could shovel it into a wheel barrow and take it, but you would risk being run over should the train start moving. If the train started moving soon after the hoppers were opened, there would be probably a half-mile two-foot deep trail of material between the tracks, which I suppose could be shoveled up too, but it shouldn’t take much investigation to find it. As for a leak, maybe a single hopper would develop a leak, leaving significant material in the car. To leak the car empty, all three hoppers would need to be leaking. Not saying I know what happened, but if someone stole the stuff, they sweat for it.

That shamrock on the monument may just be the 2nd corps unit patch

i was just road tripping the northeast, but by the time i got to northwest ny i was already exhausted and only went to Syracuse lol. i was really craving for a garbage plate and 'Cuse was surprisingly cute, so I'll try to pass by next time i hit the road

god i wish the Parti Québécois was like Sinn Féin

Thanks for trying to peer through the fog of war. I agree with you, this isn't a war between good and evil, despite what the US media say.

Check out more of some of the civil war guys at libertyrifles.org

Here is a typical Western 'Russia based' journalist celebrating the neo-Nazi attack on Russian villages. "Russia has gotten a taste of its own medicine" https://twitter.com/AlecLuhn/status/1660628218188120069

Enjoyed the report on the Rochester CW enactment and the actual regiment.

And the 'don't talk about Protasevich's neo-Nazi past' also has a dishonourable precedent from 2014, when Andreas Umland and a whole crowd of Ukrainian academics basically demanded that everybody not talk about the decisive Banderite presence among the Maidan protests. https://www.change.org/p/to-journalists-commentators-and-analysts-writing-on-the-ukrainian-protest-movement-euromaidan-kyiv-s-euromaidan-is-a-liberationist-and-not-extremist-mass-action-of-civic-disobedience

I think Mark mixed up Biletsky and Sergei Korotkikh (also known as Boatsman). Biletsky is a Kharkov native, but Korotkikh fled Russia due to neo-Nazi activities and hooked up with like minded people in Ukraine.

It's interesting that even Mearsheimer went to explain the basic artillery and attrition arithmetic recently - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-rHBRwdql8. He picked the low bar of 2:1 kill ratio, probably to protect the sensibility of the audience. I got a sense that he believes things are actually even worse in reality.

The story of Belarus "forcing down" a RyanAir flight is a myth that will never die. There's CCTV footage out there that make it very obvious that nobody was looking for or expecting Protasevich or Sapega on that flight. Otherwise, that'd obviously be escorted off the plane first thing after landing. Instead, they deplaned along with other passengers, waited for quite some time in the transit zone, and even posted on Facebook about their ordeal. Only when they were going through the passport checks, they were identified, naturally, as being on the stop list. RyanAir inexplicably deleted cockpit recording against their own rules. The pilots were never publicly interviewed. There was some, likely intentional, confusion because there had been two emails with the threat, and ProtonMail refused to publicly comment on that. MoA covered this story extensively at the time - https://www.moonofalabama.org/2023/05/closing-the-case-of-regime-changer-roman-protasevich-and-his-ryanair-flight-to-minsk.html. But the myth lives on. I'm skeptical Protasevich was even a real Nazi or fought in Donbass. Looks more like a LARP media stunt in Mariupol that got blown out of proportion. But he did get into photos with real Nazis next to him, both Ukrainian and Belorussian, there.

Great update guys. It is remarkable that there is never any news about Ukrainian casualties.

As always great and well rounded update. Just a few observations, I was in Moscow a couple of weeks ago and there’s method to the madness of taking things slow by the Russians. Everything is working normally over there and the population seems well informed and content. Also, no way they lost 100k in Bakhmut alone, they would be in general mobilisation if that were the case and no sign of that on the ground.

108 is one of those magical numbers. It's a sacred number in the Dharmic religions (Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism). The span of time between the Chicago Cubs World Series wins was 108 years. There are 108 double-stitches in a regulation baseball, the movies Taking Care of Business and Back to the Future Part II (which both predicted the Cubs would win a World Series in the future) are both 108 minutes long, 108 degrees Fahrenheit is the temperature at which the human body's internal organs start to shut overheat, etc..

All I have to go off is stuff I read on the internet, but it seems like Zelensky was in a tug of war with two high-caliber generals, and the intelligence services have just been off on their own, doing their own thing almost since the start of the war. Now that Zaluzhny is doing the Where's Waldo thing, and Zelensky is globetrotting, it's hard to know what's really going on now. But yeah, Ukraine is definitely depleted after that fight in Bakhmut, and that was entirely avoidable imo. Decisive blunder. At least a bunch of confirmed Nazis died, though. The funniest part about this whole war is that both sides are calling each other gay, so both countries are draining their supply of homophobes over an unresolved territory dispute from the 90s. Seems like the real winner there is the secret GLOBOHOMO conspiracy or whatever conservatives call it. It's so fucking funny how ISW's war coverage will be like "so here's what russian trolls were saying on the internet today" and people think that's an actual analysis of the war.

Great episode as always. To the NYTs credit, although belated, there is now a front page story explicitly calling the leader of the Belgorod incursion a neo-nazi. Get well soon John!

According to wikipedia Andriy Biletsky came from an aristocratic family in Kharkiv. As far as Fascism: “There is some discussion today as to whether the OUN ideology should be regarded as fascist or, as Lviv political scientist Oleksandr Zaitsev (b.1964) argues, is best described as 'Ustashism.' Like the Ustasha, the OUN sought to establish Ukrainian statehood and national palingesis* through a ‘revolutionary war of national liberation', or, as they referred to it, a 'Ukrainian national revolution'. The Ustasha, along with Italy and Nazi Germany came to play an important role as a source of inspiration and as a political ally of the OUN. In the early 1930s the two organizations trained their terrorists together at a joint training camp in Fascist Italy.” — Per Anders Ruling, “Terror Remembered: Terror Forgotten” (2019) in World War II Re-Explored: Some New Millennium Studies in the History of Global Studies (Berlin: Lang) . Rudling is a Swedish historian. This article is available on Academica dot Edu. *Palingenisis: In his book Fascism: An Introduction to Comparative Fascist Studies (Cambridge: Polity, 2018), Roger Griffin "uses the word 'Paligenisis' as a synonym for 'revolution’ to explore the mythic and even spiritual way fascists conceptualize a sense of total renewal, and project into the future a fantasy of creating an alternate modern world. (Think the Thousand-Year Reich.)" --from a 2018 book review by Paul Jackson, published by the Carr Center for Analysis of the Radical Right https://www.radicalrightanalysis.com/2018/09/13/book-review-roger-griffin-2018-fascism-an-introduction-to-comparative-fascist-studies/.