The War Nerd
@TheWarNerd
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Radio War Nerd podcast. Author of "The War Nerd Iliad" & "Pleasant Hell". Email: radiowarnerd at gmail dot com
Joined October 2012
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UP NOW, RWN
#446
with Jeff Stein
@JStein_WaPo
talking about ways the US has construed and used John Brown's insurgency.
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I was wrong. I. Was. Wrong. There's a lot else to say about Ukraine, but that's the most important thing, and I want say it loud and clear.
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So both Denmark and Sweden have now closed their investigations with no public findings, obeying the wise old adage "If you can't say it was the Russians, don't say anything at all."
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Look at the discipline here. A cheerleader standing at attention is blasted by artillery, and takes one step forward, stands at attention again. No one else breaks ranks. The ghosts of Napoleonic commanders are nodding in appreciation.
🇺🇸 The 4th of July celebration went wrong - Fireworks injured several people😱
Several people were injured after fireworks hit a crowd at an Independence Day celebration.
The incident took place at the Lovel Edwards stadium in Utah.According to the local police,six people were
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Say what you like, but that first line will live in the poetry anthologies of the 25th c.
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Watch the interview with US expert Dylan Griffiths. Pretty conclusive.
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Very sorry to hear about
@cushbomb
's medical emergency. He's always been brave and intelligent without making a big fuss about it, and there's no higher praise.
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Thanks to everybody who reported that RWN gets a mention as part of the "dirtbag left" denounced by Jeet Heer in a bizarre New Republic...
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🚨🚨Here it is: Seymour Hersh exclusive on RWN.
Free & unlocked, courtesy of our subscribers..
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There were many loathsome articles smearing Hersh for his Nordstream article, but this one topped the list. 'Culture reporters' who've been reassigned to stories like this do the best job, for the same reason 14-year olds make the best hit men..
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Every carnie fortuneteller knows better than to make specific predictions that can be proved wrong. So by Monday, the Atlantic Council's Melinda Haring will be either vindicated or...who am I kidding? She'll be wrong & still funded. That's their job: being wrong & having no shame
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This is a glorious moment in which the President of Guyana kicks a posh BBC interviewer to death. The willed ignorance of colonialism is eerie with these guys.
“Let me stop you right there…”
Caribbean nation Guyana is booming after discovering oil. BBC’s Stephen Sackur puts it to President
@presidentaligy
; lobbyists say oil is bad for the climate.
Dude wasn’t having it. Mans was ready!
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Yemen's Shia provinces are now completely blockaded. There's mass starvation and a cholera epidemic. The Anglosphere could stop this if it cared. But the mass outrage seen in stories like Aleppo never materializes. It's very strange.
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When you try to focus on insiders like Albright, you start to wonder if they were ever right about anything more complex than stopping at red lights...
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68 children killed...This will get ignored by a whole dumpster load of humanitarian interventionist trash...
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You ever get the feeling the cultural elite in this country is just flat-out stupid?
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This warms my heart. I once tried to say that a certain famous theorist who wrote fashionable nonsense about Sade had simply not read Sade, but you couldn't say that effectively before social media.
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A hero. Refused to talk when tortured. There are heroes, but you don't want to live in a time and place where they are tortured into being.
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It looks like Nimrod Aloni, former Gaza commander for the IDF, has been captured with dozens of other Israelis. This changes the balance in Gaza. The IDF was able to bomb Gaza at will in past battles, because none of its own were on the ground...
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Didn't see this one coming, but doesn't look like the IDF did either. Infiltrating southern Israel with small squads before launching low-tech rocket barrages is an interesting move. The massive retaliation can't be directed so easily at the infiltrators.
Palestinian forces have launched a surprise rocket attack on Israel, killing at least 22 Israelis and injuring hundreds more
Israelis will now be asking why their nation’s spies failed to see the deadly attack coming ⬇️
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This man was a great general, in an era with few top-level commanders worth remembering. He was brilliant from the beginning, and perhaps the best in the world at what's emerging as the key military skill of the era: managing local allies...
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"Abandon Biden" is the least we can do. His DNC handlers will wave the Trump doll in our faces, but there's always a Trump doll at hand for the creeps who run the DNC. They've always counted on voters to forget Arab casualties before the next election...
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This is the ONLY story I can find on Turkish/Azeri atrocities in the war. It's astonishing, the silence.
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About Bernie's Rogan endorsement: Irish Republicanism was mired in something weirdly like cancel culture long before the term was in use. Martin McGuinness, who was roughly a zillion times smarter than anyone else in the room talked Sinn Fein down from that fierce defeatism...
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They need a laugh track for NATO announcements like this
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Look at those flags. On the left, the Nazi black sun of Protasevich's buddies in Azov; next, the familiar heritage-not-hate special; then, and my fave, the Saudi flag—not IS, but Saudi. Proof there's an ecumenical movement out there in the demon worlds.
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God damn. All praise for
@MaxBlumenthal
(once again). I keep being shocked. You shouldn't get shocked at this age. But did the rest of America decide, somewhere along the line, that all Iranians (and Russians, and Chinese) were legitimate targets?
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Mark
@MarkAmesExiled
got it perfectly five years ago. Send this to any media people you know.
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Oh no. We made Bari Weiss cry. Her squib is worth reading in the way a lot of Weiss's godawful prose is: She's so inept that every rhetorical move shows up clearly. In that way she's like the dogfish of rhet analysis, a perfect specimen for first-semester dissection courses...
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For most of my life, there's only been one possible way to criticize Israeli abuses in the American media: "It's bad for *Israel* to do these horrible things." The idea that it was bad for the people on whom they were inflicted was taboo.
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We just recorded an interview on Germans in the Civil War with
@cushbomb
featuring August Willich, the guy who got turned down for a duel by Karl Marx.
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Astonishing stupidity. No matter how hard you try to think like an Atlantic-Council zombie, it's impossible to see any scenario where this works well for the US...
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The logic of "Trump does it, so it's bad" is typically bizarre....
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...Russia, demon of choice for the coasts--for bigots who don't want to think they're bigots--with China the preferred demon for the heartland. And a Georgetown product squaring the circle with this insight:
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Bourdain told the rubes his best truth. That's what HST taught: tell your best truths to the rubes, don't save it for your insider friends. Not as easy as it sounds, especially on topics like drugs or Palestine. He did it, and made it fun.
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Check out this story on Flynn's pardon. "Russia" gets nine mentions, "Russian" three. "Turkey" and "Turkish" not mentioned once. NATO is a bipartisan zombie.
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The Sun will go out before you see a BBC story like this about the civilians dying in far greater numbers in Gaza.
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It's sooo good to be out of the academic business which punishes real dissent as fiercely as it champions fake daring.
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Honored to have been a guest on
@CHAPOTRAPHOUSE
Great interviewers, fast company for an old man to keep up with.
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This is the big betrayal. You knew it was coming, but it's here now and it makes me sick. There's no honest way to be neutral on Rojava. It was one of the great doomed leaps in history.
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Is there some way to stop this? This one hurts. The prospect of seeing the heroic women of the YPG/J turned into centrist achievers--it's unthinkable.
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I support Bernie. It seems like such an easy choice. A pleasant one, in fact, and that surprises me. Never expected to feel affection for an American politician. He does & says the right thing over & over, & manages to keep his good nature despite all the filth thrown at him...
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White Helmets evacuated by the IDF. The tone of this article more guarded than earlier BBC articles praising the WH. A lot of hedging going on—probably as close as we'll see to an apology from mainstream media for getting everything wrong about Syria.
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Gaza looks like a replay of Lebanon 2006: If you can't get your troops to go into the tunnels, blast the whole civilian world around them.
Only three of Hamas’ 24 battalions have been destroyed by Israel’s 9 month brutal offensive in Gaza, according to forensic analyses of Hamas units. The battered north of the strip has seen a significant resurgence.
Military experts say that Israel’s heavy-handed bombardment +
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Just recorded a rush RWN episode to try to make some sense of the last 24+ hours, hope to have it posted tomorrow.
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The Turkish state warns Armenia (the little fragment that survived the Genocide) to stop making trouble or it will "pay."
This is beyond sickening. And thanks to NATO, Erdogan can send in the army and get away with crushing what's left of Armenia.
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Edward Luttwak on the poor career choices made by European youth.
Ukraine needs soldiers. Today's young Europeans indulge in all manner of dangerous pursuits & duly die on mountains, in fast cars, on motorcycles, and by overdose. But v few volunteer to fight in Ukraine's independence war, as their 19th century predecessors did in Greece & Italy
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This is a remarkable investigation by
@MaxBlumenthal
. It deserves to be read and reread. You see the same alliance of self-righteous monsters, doing the same dirty work as ever...
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What's up with the Guardian? Fares is killed in Idlib, and the first part of the story is still about his problems with The Regime. Casual readers are invited to miss the key fact—Fares was killed by the jihadi militias we've been coddling all these years
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Did everybody just start saying "Stochastic"? I feel like Rodney Dangerfield, looking up a word at my age.
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If you want to see where Lister, Weiss, and the rest of the hounds get their pro-jihadi line, look no further. Here it is from Sauron's mouth.
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By way of admitting the Ghost of Kyiv never existed, the BBC posts an adoring The Making Of story...
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PBS's
@JaneFerguson5
— one of the very few mainstream journalists to report on the dirty war in Yemen.
Is there a way to ask the NYT, WaPo, and the Guardian about this? They all seem to have axed their ombudsman/public editor positions.
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If you're too young to remember when the IRA/SF were fighting, you may not realize how stunning this is. SF was supposed to be doomed forever by its association with insurgency. Instead they have real and growing power.
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Remember Robert Ford, former US ambassador to Syria who agitated for regime change? Even he is offended.
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At this point it'd be a relief to find a story on Xinjiang that didn't have dirty fingerprints all over it, not even smudged.
So far, nope. There's another story today, credited to Newlines Institute—funded by Fairfax University in the DC suburbs...
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A lot of people are apparently too cool to be shocked at the media tiptoe on Gaza atrocities. Not me. Oh I understand it, the big flinch away from a stance that can get you in real trouble; I know cowardice when I smell it...
The silence of most Western journalists over the mass slaughter and maiming of their Palestinian colleagues is - and let's just speak plainly here - absolutely disgusting and unforgivable.
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At some point you have to say Stop bluffing. You're gonna commit your country of 25 million to a war with China...on China's coastline? If you mean it, you should be fired. If you don't, see above, re: stoppin' bluffin'.
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45% of Yemeni children under 5 are permanently damaged, in mental & physical development, by years of artificial famine. They will NEVER be OK. That's the cruelest way for the "Coalition" to wipe out the next generation of potential Yemeni antagonists...
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This is a very important article. I was there for a good deal of it. There are countries where they have to kill you to shut you up but in the US journalism elite, all they have to do is shun you. That's very un-eXile.
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When the security forces kill a beloved figure, there will be anger at the funeral. The standard technique is to have cops/army stand back, let the occupied people blow off some steam. The IDF is doing something very different, provoking more confrontation
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There's video of an Azeri soldier beheading an old Armenian civilian who begs for his life before the knife cuts his throat. I won't include it here. But you have to wonder why these videos get zero coverage. The media silence over Azeri atrocities is astonishing.
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Gang-raping prisoners of war is just too chaotic, and must follow 'regulations for the torture of prisoners.' Israeli society is completely insane ATM, and getting worse as it's ignored by Anglo media.
"The ... problem for me here is that it's not a regulated policy of the state to abuse the detainees..."
Israeli journalist Yehuda Schlesinger, from the newspaper Israel Hayom, defended the soldiers in the Sde Teiman rape incident and advocated for systemic sexual violence
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It's gettin' hard to believe the—I guess "depravity" is the word—of these miserable bastards posing as champions of human rights
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The Turkish state has brought along a lot of throat-slitters from the defeated sectarian militias, and there's nobody more bloodthirsty than a defeated genocidaire. And every one of these deaths will have American fingerprints on it.
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I did a guest appearance on Hell on Earth with
@cushbomb
and
@saywhatagain
. The series is about the 30 Years War but my job was general background on medieval war.
Hell on Earth: Appendix 4 - WAR
🏹⚔️🏹⚔️🏹
We're joined by
@TheWarNerd
John Dolan to discuss the evolution of war from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern period, and the ways armed combat shaped society and politics of the time.
For subscribers here:
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Ten years ago, the NYT was looking for love, and found it in..."Free Libya." One thing I'll say for the British Empire: They didn't mix their lethality with a whinging, clingy, please-love-me desperation.
Incredible 2011 article on Bengahzi---brings to mind some of the weirder Iraq stuff from 2003
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It'll be a long time before we have anyone as great as this. If we ever do.
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Karabagh is being ethnically cleansed with zero reporting from the Anglo media. At least a third of the Armenian population has fled, but it's not easy to find any mainstream reports on the story. It may end up with those who fled being the lucky ones.
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Corbyn-smearing "think tank" got 2 million pounds from the Foreign Office. And guess how they justified it? Well, what's a handy scapegoat?
"The 'think tank' is supposed to counter Russian online propaganda.."
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.
@Roy_Gutman
caught fabricating quote by one of his "sources"—will
@thenation
retract? Did anyone fact-check Gutman's anti-Kurd hit piece?
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The big story mainstream sites have been avoiding: The IDF failed so catastrophically that it's difficult to find historical parallels. Many armies have failed to spot the signs, but they weren't dealing with a tiny, heavily-surveilled, fenced site...
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This is disgusting. Israeli proxies like Michael Weiss, who's never given a damn about anyone in Syria...
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Here
@medeabenjamin
makes every word count, while wrestling three security guys. Every single phrase is perfect. In less than a minute she sums up Yemen, Syria, and Iran. Courage and hard punching from leftward and down—this is exactly what America needs.
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A plane full of military supplies takes off from Serbia with an all-Ukrainian crew, and crashes in Greece on its way to...Bangladesh?
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If hat-man here had any talent, it might be easier to ignore the fact that he's been more consistently wrong than a drunk alchemist. But the bastard can't even write.
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What we're seein' now is a omen surplus.
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The Conservative Party which is harrying Corbyn over any fringe manifestation of Anti-Semitism it can find in his faction governs in alliance with the DUP, a party whose whole raison d'etre is ethnic hatred...
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These people...gerontocracy is too kind a description. And this dotard was just reelected. To repeat myself, my homeland has become a pithed frog.
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I've been wondering about a moment from the 1979 revolution in Iran. Seems worth investigating at the moment. This was the moment the Shah's security forces refused to fire on the crowds anymore. When did that happen? Why did it happen at that moment?
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In every war this century, armies run out of artillery shells much sooner than expected. When institutions are eternally surprised like that, something is going on. My latest RWN subscriber newsletter attempts to explain a paradox...
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This does seem like a very loud suicide bomb, one not intended to kill civilians or, perhaps, even to destroy anything, as much as to avoid dying in silence....
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This is just...very strange. What's going on with these people? If this was in a movie, I'd say it was absurdly overdone.
Wow.
Tennessee Republican Chuck Fleischmann: "You can tell the Palestinians — I will never support them!"
Protestor: "I am a Palestinian."
Fleischmann: "Then I will tell you, I will never support you. I will tell you to your face: Goodbye to Palestine!"
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This is the first sentence of a negative review of
@yashalevine
's Surveillance Valley:
"of Russian extraction...born in the Soviet Union."
I keep thinking this kind of outright ethnic hate can't have become the center-left normal. And I keep being wrong.
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Just for fun, googled "Michael Weiss Deir ez Zor." The man just never disappoints:
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Bret Stephens' raw ethnic chauvinism went too far even for the NYT. He wrote (and his editors approved the publication of) an article blandly asserting that "Azhkenazi Jews" are genetically superior...
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What's amazing is that the IDF's excuse for shooting three hostages is "Sorry, we thought they were Palestinian!" And that's accepted as a reasonable excuse.
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Patrick Cockburn on how jihadi militias got better western press by making their turf too dangerous for journalists
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Never waste time on people who are offended by great writers. I spent months going over British novels during the Irish genocide of the 1840s and they were all very, very moral. No one seems to draw the right conclusion from that.
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A perfect example of right-wing rhetoric on the Capitol riots:
"I don't think it's Trump supporters that are causing the ruckus. If it truly is can you blame them? They've been pushed too far!"
That is: "We didn't do it, and besides you MADE us do it!"
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Strongly recommend this book for anyone interested in our interview with
@cushbomb
(soon to be posted). The introduction is excellent and there's a lot of great detail. One thing you notice is that there were a lot of no-quarter battles...
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