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War Nerd
“[A] raucous, offensive, and sometimes amusing CliffsNotes compilation of wars both well-known and ignored.” —Utne Reader Self-described war nerd Gary Brecher knows he’s not alone, that there’s a legion of fat, lonely Americans, stuck in stupid, paper-pushing desk jobs, who get off on reading about war because they hate their lives. But Brecher writes about war, too. War Nerd collects his most opinionated, enraging, enlightening, and entertaining pieces. Part war commentator, part angry humorist à la Bill Hicks, Brecher inveighs against pieties of all stripes—Liberian generals, Dick Cheney, U.N. peacekeepers, the neo-cons—and the massive incompetence of military powers. A provocative free thinker, he finds much to admire in the most unlikely places, and not always for the most pacifistic the Tamil Tigers, the Lebanese Hezbollah, the Danes of 1,000 years ago, and so on, across the globe and through the centuries. Crude, scatological, un-P.C., yet deeply informed, Brecher provides a radically different, completely unvarnished perspective on the nature of warfare. “Military columnist Gary Brecher’s look at contemporary war is both offensive and illuminating. His book, War Nerd . . . aims to explain why the best-equipped armies in the world continue to lose battles to peasants armed with rocks . . . Brecher’s unrefined voice adds something essential to the conversation.” —Mother Jones “It’s international news coverage with a soul and acne, not to mention a deeply contrarian point of view.” —The Millions
330 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2008
24 people are currently reading
509 people want to read
About the author
Gary Brecher
5 books32 followersThis is a pseudonym for John Dolan, the author of Pleasant Hell and The War Nerd Iliad.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 53 reviews
November 19, 2008
You've got to be kidding me.
No one will ever mistake Gary Brecher for Clausewitz. By the author's own admission, he is fat, lives in Fresno, CA, makes his living doing data entry, then spends the other eight hours of his day in the office surfing the Web to squeeze out any info about any obscure third world conflict. Do not fear. There are always 10-20 wars being fought in the world at any given time. Brecher blogs about all of them. The book is a collection of his livid on-line rants, many of the politically incorrect to the max.
"So why get a life when you've got war?" writes Brecher. That can be said of any wargamer. From the safety of his office chair, Brecher the War Nerd expounds on all that is sick and rotten with the world, accepting as normal the desire of humans to kill each other over petty differences like race, religion, tribe, resource control and consumer goods. He is baffled why Tom Clancy pisses away $200 million to buy a baseball team instead of setting himself up as a Central Asian war lord. He accepts that war today is about guerillas sniping at government forces the world over, whilst writing off the future of high-tech weapons. Only in Brecher's parlance, high tech warfare is a "lame NASA fundraising idea." SDI? Fughedaboudit. Most weapons never get used, but go around the world and you will find AK-47s and RPGs galore.
So Brecher breaks it down to a simple list: Most wars are assymetrical or irregular; insurgents/irregulars don't aim for victory; you can't beat them by killing them all--they want you to; high tech weapons are totally useless in these type of wars; wooing the populace counts for more than combat; and the fact that "most people are not rational; they are tribal"--my gang hates your gang. "It's that simple. The rest is cosmetics."
And so the book goes on a worldwide jaunt--The Americas, Africa, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and "Hardware, Strategy and Nerd Doctrine." The sicker, more screwed up the insurgency is, the better their chances of being around a long time. As Brecher quips, "the psychos will inherit the earth."
So Brecher writes (one one of his touring jaunts): "Burma is a place where war is a permanent way of life. There are wars between the Burmese and all these little tribes they stomp on to stay in power. There are wars between Christians and Buddhists. There are wars between opium dealers who run the army and freelancers in the hills. There may even be a few communist rebels left in the mountains, gathering around the red flag. Burma has war the way Fresno has Armenians."
"...[T]he more I find out about the world, the more normal Burma seems and the weirder my life in Fresno looks."
This book definitely rates one star. I don't give this grade lightly. The book doesn't suck--it's a scream to read. It's like a "good bad movie," like "Gladiator" or "Hunt for Red October". You know it sucks, it's just fun to watch.
Brecher is so much like many of us--out of shape, never saw the sight of blood or heard shots fired in anger, safe in the rear in a comfy chair, but almost all-knowing about history, warfare and what is happening in this sick world. He is not the least bit squeamish about using force to slap the petty dictators, for that is what they understand. No group hugs and singing Kumbayah. The world is a mess. Brecher accepts this with a dose of gallows humor. He admits that "the world is going to hell in a Honda."
"War is the only good thing in my life. In fact, war is great. You're not supposed to say that, but it is. People used to admit that they loved war. It's worth remembering that, so you can tell the peaceniks they are the freaks, not us.
"... Not even the peaceniks want to give back what war gave them: the house they live in, the streets they drive down. Think about the city that you live in. Whose was it three hundred years ago? If you live in America, you live on land that was taken by conquest. I guess I'm supposed to think that Gandhi is a hero. If you think that, stop smudging my book. You're in the wrong shelf."
So writes Brecher, the War Nerd.
No one will ever mistake Gary Brecher for Clausewitz. By the author's own admission, he is fat, lives in Fresno, CA, makes his living doing data entry, then spends the other eight hours of his day in the office surfing the Web to squeeze out any info about any obscure third world conflict. Do not fear. There are always 10-20 wars being fought in the world at any given time. Brecher blogs about all of them. The book is a collection of his livid on-line rants, many of the politically incorrect to the max.
"So why get a life when you've got war?" writes Brecher. That can be said of any wargamer. From the safety of his office chair, Brecher the War Nerd expounds on all that is sick and rotten with the world, accepting as normal the desire of humans to kill each other over petty differences like race, religion, tribe, resource control and consumer goods. He is baffled why Tom Clancy pisses away $200 million to buy a baseball team instead of setting himself up as a Central Asian war lord. He accepts that war today is about guerillas sniping at government forces the world over, whilst writing off the future of high-tech weapons. Only in Brecher's parlance, high tech warfare is a "lame NASA fundraising idea." SDI? Fughedaboudit. Most weapons never get used, but go around the world and you will find AK-47s and RPGs galore.
So Brecher breaks it down to a simple list: Most wars are assymetrical or irregular; insurgents/irregulars don't aim for victory; you can't beat them by killing them all--they want you to; high tech weapons are totally useless in these type of wars; wooing the populace counts for more than combat; and the fact that "most people are not rational; they are tribal"--my gang hates your gang. "It's that simple. The rest is cosmetics."
And so the book goes on a worldwide jaunt--The Americas, Africa, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and "Hardware, Strategy and Nerd Doctrine." The sicker, more screwed up the insurgency is, the better their chances of being around a long time. As Brecher quips, "the psychos will inherit the earth."
So Brecher writes (one one of his touring jaunts): "Burma is a place where war is a permanent way of life. There are wars between the Burmese and all these little tribes they stomp on to stay in power. There are wars between Christians and Buddhists. There are wars between opium dealers who run the army and freelancers in the hills. There may even be a few communist rebels left in the mountains, gathering around the red flag. Burma has war the way Fresno has Armenians."
"...[T]he more I find out about the world, the more normal Burma seems and the weirder my life in Fresno looks."
This book definitely rates one star. I don't give this grade lightly. The book doesn't suck--it's a scream to read. It's like a "good bad movie," like "Gladiator" or "Hunt for Red October". You know it sucks, it's just fun to watch.
Brecher is so much like many of us--out of shape, never saw the sight of blood or heard shots fired in anger, safe in the rear in a comfy chair, but almost all-knowing about history, warfare and what is happening in this sick world. He is not the least bit squeamish about using force to slap the petty dictators, for that is what they understand. No group hugs and singing Kumbayah. The world is a mess. Brecher accepts this with a dose of gallows humor. He admits that "the world is going to hell in a Honda."
"War is the only good thing in my life. In fact, war is great. You're not supposed to say that, but it is. People used to admit that they loved war. It's worth remembering that, so you can tell the peaceniks they are the freaks, not us.
"... Not even the peaceniks want to give back what war gave them: the house they live in, the streets they drive down. Think about the city that you live in. Whose was it three hundred years ago? If you live in America, you live on land that was taken by conquest. I guess I'm supposed to think that Gandhi is a hero. If you think that, stop smudging my book. You're in the wrong shelf."
So writes Brecher, the War Nerd.
November 1, 2019
Brecher/Dolan is a creep. I definitely did not expect to read about the author’s rape fantasies when I picked this up from the library. The selected columns aren’t particularly enlightening either. Don’t bother with this one.
April 7, 2014
This is a collection of blog posts from Gary Brecher, the War Nerd, who blogs about ancient and modern armed conflict at exile online. I had read a handful of his columns and enjoyed them, so I decided to pick up this compilation. And I'm pretty pleased with it.
I'm not exactly a military history buff, so I can't claim that Brecher's various analyses haven't been made or refuted better by others. But I definitely learned a few things, and reconsidered what I thought I knew about various aspects of war. What follows are some of the points that stuck with me the most.
First, military forces are slow to adapt to new technology and cultural forces. For example: in WW I everyone bet big on offense, and it turned out that defense was much more important. Then in WW II, the big players, having learned their lesson from the previous war, bet big on defense (the Maginot Line being the canonical example) and it turns out that offense was the winner, e.g. the Wehrmacht, the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor, and the atom bomb. Similarly, small air craft rendered large battleships completely defenseless, but it took lots of British ships being sunk outside Singapore to really drive that point home, although it had been demonstrated years earlier. The exception to that (so far) has been the aircraft carrier, since it can provide its own air cover, but Brecher is quick to point out that in the Millenium War Games the general playing the insurgent side managed to sink over two thirds of the US fleet using large numbers of inexpensive crafts jammed with explosives.
Second, war as popularly conceptualized, with big nation-state armies meeting on a field out in the countryside to duke it out with few civilian casualties, is really an historical anomaly. It's not how war is fought in the modern era, and it wasn't how war was fought prior to the rise of European nation states. What characterizes primitive warfare, like what's going on in the Congo and lots of other parts of Africa, is ethnic tribes raiding each other's basically defenseless villages to kill the men, rape and enslave the women, and make off with any valuables. It's what the vikings did, and it's what the Rwandans and Congolese are doing to each other today. And for most of history, this is what war has mostly meant: not big ideological battles over territory, but one tribe of people slaughtering another's civilian population for fun and profit. The two tribes could be split by ethnicity, religion, language, or any other arbitrary division, but they have hated each other for as long as anyone can remember and can't be made to get along. In the case of Africa, the arbitrary national boundaries drawn by European colonists at the beginning of the modern era have very little to do with these divisions, and in some cases have made them much worse.
Finally, modern warfare, or "asymmetrical" or "insurgent" warfare as it's sometimes known, has forever changed what war means for superpowers like the United States. If the goal in Iraq and Afghanistan were as simple as killing the natives and taking their oil, the US could have accomplished it with relatively little difficulty. But modern war is more about propaganda and winning the hearts and minds of the natives and the folks back home, which you can't do with genocide. Genocide is also substantially easier than a lengthy occupation against insurgents, mostly because, by declining to kill all the male relatives of every guerrilla they kill, allied troops guarantee that three more are born for every one done away with. And the insurgents have by far the easier job, since they win when they win (blowing up troop carriers) and they win when they lose (by creating more martyrs for the cause). The American squeamishness around dying for the cause, best captured by predator drone strikes that do lots of collateral damage and create as many terrorists as they kill, is a large advantage for the insurgents.
Others have commented about how un-PC these essays are, with Brecher throwing out lots of homophobic and racists slurs. But since Gary Brecher is a pseudonym and persona for an academic poet, it's hard to know what's sincere and what's part of the character. But in any case, I'm capable of being entertained by bigoted views as well as by liberal ones, especially when the author brings something else interesting to the table, which Brecher does.
The real issue, and why this doesn't get a higher rating from me, is that this collection of essays lacks any real sense of cohesion and begins to feel pretty stale by the back half. The War Nerd is best consumed in small doses, and reading a bunch of his work back to back made me weary of his whole schtick, even while I admired his analysis where it was especially keen. Your mileage on this point may vary.
I would recommend this to any military history buffs who want a unique perspective on their pet topic, or any neophyte (like myself) looking to be entertained and enlightened about warfare in about equal measure.
I'm not exactly a military history buff, so I can't claim that Brecher's various analyses haven't been made or refuted better by others. But I definitely learned a few things, and reconsidered what I thought I knew about various aspects of war. What follows are some of the points that stuck with me the most.
First, military forces are slow to adapt to new technology and cultural forces. For example: in WW I everyone bet big on offense, and it turned out that defense was much more important. Then in WW II, the big players, having learned their lesson from the previous war, bet big on defense (the Maginot Line being the canonical example) and it turns out that offense was the winner, e.g. the Wehrmacht, the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor, and the atom bomb. Similarly, small air craft rendered large battleships completely defenseless, but it took lots of British ships being sunk outside Singapore to really drive that point home, although it had been demonstrated years earlier. The exception to that (so far) has been the aircraft carrier, since it can provide its own air cover, but Brecher is quick to point out that in the Millenium War Games the general playing the insurgent side managed to sink over two thirds of the US fleet using large numbers of inexpensive crafts jammed with explosives.
Second, war as popularly conceptualized, with big nation-state armies meeting on a field out in the countryside to duke it out with few civilian casualties, is really an historical anomaly. It's not how war is fought in the modern era, and it wasn't how war was fought prior to the rise of European nation states. What characterizes primitive warfare, like what's going on in the Congo and lots of other parts of Africa, is ethnic tribes raiding each other's basically defenseless villages to kill the men, rape and enslave the women, and make off with any valuables. It's what the vikings did, and it's what the Rwandans and Congolese are doing to each other today. And for most of history, this is what war has mostly meant: not big ideological battles over territory, but one tribe of people slaughtering another's civilian population for fun and profit. The two tribes could be split by ethnicity, religion, language, or any other arbitrary division, but they have hated each other for as long as anyone can remember and can't be made to get along. In the case of Africa, the arbitrary national boundaries drawn by European colonists at the beginning of the modern era have very little to do with these divisions, and in some cases have made them much worse.
Finally, modern warfare, or "asymmetrical" or "insurgent" warfare as it's sometimes known, has forever changed what war means for superpowers like the United States. If the goal in Iraq and Afghanistan were as simple as killing the natives and taking their oil, the US could have accomplished it with relatively little difficulty. But modern war is more about propaganda and winning the hearts and minds of the natives and the folks back home, which you can't do with genocide. Genocide is also substantially easier than a lengthy occupation against insurgents, mostly because, by declining to kill all the male relatives of every guerrilla they kill, allied troops guarantee that three more are born for every one done away with. And the insurgents have by far the easier job, since they win when they win (blowing up troop carriers) and they win when they lose (by creating more martyrs for the cause). The American squeamishness around dying for the cause, best captured by predator drone strikes that do lots of collateral damage and create as many terrorists as they kill, is a large advantage for the insurgents.
Others have commented about how un-PC these essays are, with Brecher throwing out lots of homophobic and racists slurs. But since Gary Brecher is a pseudonym and persona for an academic poet, it's hard to know what's sincere and what's part of the character. But in any case, I'm capable of being entertained by bigoted views as well as by liberal ones, especially when the author brings something else interesting to the table, which Brecher does.
The real issue, and why this doesn't get a higher rating from me, is that this collection of essays lacks any real sense of cohesion and begins to feel pretty stale by the back half. The War Nerd is best consumed in small doses, and reading a bunch of his work back to back made me weary of his whole schtick, even while I admired his analysis where it was especially keen. Your mileage on this point may vary.
I would recommend this to any military history buffs who want a unique perspective on their pet topic, or any neophyte (like myself) looking to be entertained and enlightened about warfare in about equal measure.
March 2, 2015
Gary Brecher is fat, lives in Fresno, and enters data into a computer for a living. He lives his life as "an ant in a suit." (He also doesn't exist, but that's a long story.)
The one ray of sunshine in Mr. Brecher's life is war -- reading about it and watching it on TV. He's an autodidact who "watches smart," as he puts it, and therefore has lots of insight to share about the conflicts around the world that he studies.
I discovered Mr. Brecher when someone sent me a link to the "Whore-r Stories" on The Exile. From there I stumbled across the War Nerd, closed my office door, and read all of his columns in order. I was happy when I found them reprinted in this convenient, dead tree form.
Mr. Brecher's main point is that war and violence is the norm and not everyone in the world longs to be "an Ohio Republican" or an enterpeneur. We peaceniks are the freaks, not the people involved in the wars he writes about. Nothing could be clearer to an outsider and reject like him.
Even better and even more thrilling than this outsider point of view is his tone -- imagine H.L. Mencken writing about shit you actually are interested in, instead of Clarence Darrow or forgotten fires in Baltimore.
I forwarded some of his on-line columns to a friend from high school who didn't care for it at all. He said it is a "slashdot approach to history," but I think this book is a bit smarter than that. The things he writes are outrageous but only because he's struggling to explain it exactly as he sees it.
The chapter about the Iranian hostage crisis and the death of America's nationalism at the hands of Jimmy Carter is just perfect. If you come across this book in a bookstore, just read that.
In another essay that I greatly enjoyed The War Nerd explains the differences between Tom Clancy and him. Started with the fact that Mr. Clancy tried to buy a football team for $200M, he digresses into a demented fantasy explaining what *he* would do with that kind of money -- move to Central Asia, set up an army, adopt a religion, get funded by the CIA, have actresses kidnapped and brought to him, etc. You get the idea that Mr. Brecher has a very rich inner life.
Check out a few of his essays at exile.ru and then go buy this book.
If you are already a fan, here is an essay about Gary Brecher written by John Dolan, who knows a thing or two about The Ward Nerd: http://mokk.bme.hu/kozpont/konferenci...
The one ray of sunshine in Mr. Brecher's life is war -- reading about it and watching it on TV. He's an autodidact who "watches smart," as he puts it, and therefore has lots of insight to share about the conflicts around the world that he studies.
I discovered Mr. Brecher when someone sent me a link to the "Whore-r Stories" on The Exile. From there I stumbled across the War Nerd, closed my office door, and read all of his columns in order. I was happy when I found them reprinted in this convenient, dead tree form.
Mr. Brecher's main point is that war and violence is the norm and not everyone in the world longs to be "an Ohio Republican" or an enterpeneur. We peaceniks are the freaks, not the people involved in the wars he writes about. Nothing could be clearer to an outsider and reject like him.
Even better and even more thrilling than this outsider point of view is his tone -- imagine H.L. Mencken writing about shit you actually are interested in, instead of Clarence Darrow or forgotten fires in Baltimore.
I forwarded some of his on-line columns to a friend from high school who didn't care for it at all. He said it is a "slashdot approach to history," but I think this book is a bit smarter than that. The things he writes are outrageous but only because he's struggling to explain it exactly as he sees it.
The chapter about the Iranian hostage crisis and the death of America's nationalism at the hands of Jimmy Carter is just perfect. If you come across this book in a bookstore, just read that.
In another essay that I greatly enjoyed The War Nerd explains the differences between Tom Clancy and him. Started with the fact that Mr. Clancy tried to buy a football team for $200M, he digresses into a demented fantasy explaining what *he* would do with that kind of money -- move to Central Asia, set up an army, adopt a religion, get funded by the CIA, have actresses kidnapped and brought to him, etc. You get the idea that Mr. Brecher has a very rich inner life.
Check out a few of his essays at exile.ru and then go buy this book.
If you are already a fan, here is an essay about Gary Brecher written by John Dolan, who knows a thing or two about The Ward Nerd: http://mokk.bme.hu/kozpont/konferenci...
July 17, 2022
A brutal, funny, and clear-eyed look at recent history and human nature, through the prism of modern warfare. Laugh out loud while reading about some of the worst things we humans do.
Read
December 16, 2016An excellent quote from a very entertaining and smart book:
"1. Most wars are asymmetrical or irregular.
2. In these wars, the guerrillas/irregulars/insurgents do not aim for military victory.
3. You can not defeat these groups by killing lots of their members. In fact, they want you to do that.
4. High-tech weaponry is mostly useless in these wars.
5. “Hearts and minds,” meaning propaganda and morale, are more important than military superiority.
6. Most people are not rational; they are tribal: “My gang yeah, your gang boo!” It really is that simple. The rest is cosmetics."
This is all interesting for me because I live in a small country which, realistically speaking, even though it has a big army for its size, has to most likely rely on guerrilla tactics if it ever gets invaded by a bigger neighbour.
This is of course just speculation, but I find it highly likely: if the war ever comes, we will be fighting in the cities, blowing up cars and cafés with bombs, assassinating politicians, killing civilians, hiding in the cellars of our neighbours and waiting in horror for the next drone strikes of our oppressors. And of course more of us than the attackers will be killed, but it doesn't matter, because the side which loses more men doesn't necessarily lose the war.
We will not be fighting the "good ol' romantic war" in the trenches. We won't even cruise around with tanks and fighter jets, at least not longer than a couple of days, at most. And one man's guerrilla warfare is other one's terrorism. This is how easily whole nations can become "terrorists" in media and the public perception of other countries. Remember France and Algeria in the 1960s or USA and Iraq in the 2000s.
I'm kind of amused that many reviews I've read are so pissed off because John Dolan hasn't made his Brecher character more pc. These readers think it's more important to get offended because of his tone of writing than to understand that the main subject the guy is tackling is war and he has no false ideas about the thing he knows most about.
His "racism" means that he understands that everyone is capable of hideous things. His "misogynism" means that he understands that women usually end up as victims when young hotheaded men go banging, both figuratively and literally.
If he uses an offending tone of voice or insulting phrases from time to time, it's because the subjects he talks about are ugly and shouldn't be covered with a smoke screen. He does a service for the reader because most of media, be it mainstream or alternative, doesn't. Most of the time we don't get the real picture of war, we don't get the actual financial reasons or the deep hate between tribes.
Brecher/Dolan drags it all out to the open and that "all" is a one gargantuan mirror. He challenges us to look at ourselves and the picture is not pretty. Ecce homo.
"1. Most wars are asymmetrical or irregular.
2. In these wars, the guerrillas/irregulars/insurgents do not aim for military victory.
3. You can not defeat these groups by killing lots of their members. In fact, they want you to do that.
4. High-tech weaponry is mostly useless in these wars.
5. “Hearts and minds,” meaning propaganda and morale, are more important than military superiority.
6. Most people are not rational; they are tribal: “My gang yeah, your gang boo!” It really is that simple. The rest is cosmetics."
This is all interesting for me because I live in a small country which, realistically speaking, even though it has a big army for its size, has to most likely rely on guerrilla tactics if it ever gets invaded by a bigger neighbour.
This is of course just speculation, but I find it highly likely: if the war ever comes, we will be fighting in the cities, blowing up cars and cafés with bombs, assassinating politicians, killing civilians, hiding in the cellars of our neighbours and waiting in horror for the next drone strikes of our oppressors. And of course more of us than the attackers will be killed, but it doesn't matter, because the side which loses more men doesn't necessarily lose the war.
We will not be fighting the "good ol' romantic war" in the trenches. We won't even cruise around with tanks and fighter jets, at least not longer than a couple of days, at most. And one man's guerrilla warfare is other one's terrorism. This is how easily whole nations can become "terrorists" in media and the public perception of other countries. Remember France and Algeria in the 1960s or USA and Iraq in the 2000s.
I'm kind of amused that many reviews I've read are so pissed off because John Dolan hasn't made his Brecher character more pc. These readers think it's more important to get offended because of his tone of writing than to understand that the main subject the guy is tackling is war and he has no false ideas about the thing he knows most about.
His "racism" means that he understands that everyone is capable of hideous things. His "misogynism" means that he understands that women usually end up as victims when young hotheaded men go banging, both figuratively and literally.
If he uses an offending tone of voice or insulting phrases from time to time, it's because the subjects he talks about are ugly and shouldn't be covered with a smoke screen. He does a service for the reader because most of media, be it mainstream or alternative, doesn't. Most of the time we don't get the real picture of war, we don't get the actual financial reasons or the deep hate between tribes.
Brecher/Dolan drags it all out to the open and that "all" is a one gargantuan mirror. He challenges us to look at ourselves and the picture is not pretty. Ecce homo.
September 2, 2012
One could be forgiven for not "getting" it. Gary Brecher is the pseudonym for poet and literary critic John Dolan. He was part of the original writing staff of the legendary Russian newspaper the Exile, now since driven out of Moscow by the Oligarchs and their KGB allies.
Dolan is not actually racist, fascist, or homophobic, or even war-mongering. As an artist, he's interested in pointing out the hypocrisy of modern Western liberals and the limitless stupidity and cruelty of the Neo-Conservatives.
He's got a lot of facts, but unlike a lot of war writers, he doesn't separate the nerdy aspects of war facts and figures and maps from their consequences- stone cold death and suffering. He's a true anti-war writer, but accuses the modern left of hypocrisy. He mentions anecdotally that he remembers reading " Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" in high school and watching his teacher cry during said reading. If everyone is so sad about the Indians, why don't they just give them the land back? Asks Brecher.
A fair question, indeed. War bought your 401K and your swimming pool, so what is it about war that you dislike? Brecher might say that it's not war that you hate, but seeing war in all if it's bloody reality that drives you to squeamishness. Much like the meat-eater who can't slaughter his own pig, but sustains his gluttony on others ' blood, we are all hypocrites.
From this line of thought comes Brecher's admiration for true warrior cultures. From the Sikhs to the Mongols, Romans, and North Koreans ( but not the British, definitely not the British) Brecher lavishes praise on the Last Real Men, as he'd say. Individuals who aren't afraid to admit what they are. They don't try to pass off their infractions and brutalities as " crusades for freedom".
Of special interest is one of his greatest essays " Saddam Died Beautiful". In the 2005 story, Brecher laments Hussein's hanging by that " pissant Al Sadr" as he likens his walk to the gallows as the passing of the 20th Century into a more cowardly but just as brutal and stupid 21st Century.
This, along with his polemic against Neocon classicist Victor Davis Hanson and other chicken hawks in " Triumph of the Vile" sums up his true ideology, if Brecher can be said to have one at all. These and other writings show that Dolan/Brecher is one of the only living commentators who can speak honestly about war and humanity.
August 18, 2017
When he’s talking about the Iran-Iraq war, he writes: “One of the shiny new toys Saddam had picked up on his shopping trips was the Exocet, an antiship missile that the French were peddling to anybody who had a coastline and a grudge." It’s not even one of the top ten funniest lines in the book, but it made me burst out laughing.
August 17, 2008
It's a little tempting to withhold a star because I'd read about half of these columns online already, but it's nice to have them all on my shelf, accessible without having to use any electricity. And the re-readability factor on all these mini-essays is through the roof.
Brecher is something like Howard Zinn turned inside-out; he brings you the world from an unpretentious perspective, sympathetic to the ways of life of average people in average places, except most average places consist entirely of a world of misery and vicious desperation that nice suburbanites generally don't like to mull over too closely.
When he talks about how it's only "violence" when the guy you've been beating down hits back, he almost sounds like Franz Fanon, if Fanon could write in plain speech rather than obtuse French psycho-theoretical prose. ...And if Frantz Fanon somehow morphed into a knee-jerk anti-Communist white American nationalist from central California. Um, yeah.
Granted, he's insanely bigoted shit-talker, characterizing Shiites as death-worshippers, Pashtuns as boy-fuckers, or Latin Americans as folks who are all "born knowing two things: how to lower a Chevy and that the Gringos are always to blame."
But I'd like to imagine that it's not out of a sense of genuine racism that Brecher makes generalizations about vast ethnicities, but rather to use stereotyping as a tool for understanding. That and as an effort to tweak his mortal enemies: the David Van Driessens of the world. Also, it's tempting to imagine that the racism and venom is more a part of the fictional character of "Brecher," than a real conviction or trait of his flesh-and-blood author(s) for whom he is a pseudonym. I hope, anyway.
Brecher is a fun read because you get the benefits of gleaning ideas from a dedicated player of Risk and memorizer of Jane's Weapon's Systems without any of the social agony. And he's brighter than the typical freeper or posturing mil-geek. There's none of the dogmatic troll drivel endemic to the class of people who wank themselves into unconsciousness over episodes of Future Weapons and then religiously read NewsMax as they enjoy the afterglow. So it's all the insight with little to none of the odiousness.
On the first page of the first chapter I found an error: the FARC are the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, not Revolucionarios. It's not terribly important, "Brecher" is a war nerd, not a Spanish nerd. But it is indicative of something I've observed about him, I think. In areas where I do know something about the places and events he's describing, I nearly always find new, useful, and frequently entertaining insights, but there are also gross over-generalizations, errors of fact of varying levels of significance,* and blind spots that crop up.
Part of the fun of these columns is their bitter insouciance, their utter disregard for polite morality. But if that gets in the way of analysis, then that's something to question.
---For example, Chavez in Venezuela was buying enough semi-auto rifles for every other man, woman or child in the country not because he thought it could hold off a US invasion. He's way smarter than that. He's doing it because working class Chileans under Salvador Allende begged the socialist president to arm them against the inevitable takeover by some Pinochet or other. Allende refused, and died with a rifle in his hand, rather than living empty-handed while a mass army of rifle-bearing citizens backed him up. He's also got to arm against Colombia, the US proxy. The US could not gin up a direct invasion, Hugo doesn't have to worry about that.
Bizarrely enough, I find myself reading Brecher the same way I read Tariq Ali, Patrick Cockburn, Robert Fisk, Allan Nairn, Mike Davis, or Naomi Klein. What's going on in the world? What are the corporate media outlets refusing to tell me about? What's the real history of these complex regions, these Byzantine conflicts I've only heard a little or nothing about?
But Brecher, in some ways, is a real breath of fresh air, far distant and distinct from the often stale scent of leftist journalism. What I mean is, there's often such a need to prove oneself right and the other side wrong among the lefty journo genre, that clarity, explanation, and simplicity often disappear. Instead you get the Jeremy Scahill-type indictment-of-the-badguys screed writing which can (but doesn't always) feel pretty myopic. Okay, okay, neoliberal colonialism and crypto-imperialist expansion is a bad thing, I get it already. But what's really happening?
With Brecher, there's none of the self-censorship that's occasionally necessary among the monk-soldiers of the Amy Goodman Army. Piety and religious pacifism are not impediments to understanding for the War Nerd. There's no fetishization of certain tiny groups because they've become a pet cause. Granted, Brecher fetishizes war, but within that frame he's got miles of room to be honest.
He's like an old-school Chicago sports columnist turning his acid pen toward world conflicts. He generally knows the players, he knows the game, he may get it wrong on occasion, but even then he's fun to read.
I also like Brecher as someone who's humped his way through all the horrible, unreadable military gear descriptions, coming out the other end with only what's interesting. Once I was able to interview Thomas Frank over the phone, when he was promoting One Market Under God. He had slogged through mountains of terrible management and business literature (although "literature" is probably the wrong word to use). "How can you stand it?" I asked. "Well, I do it so no one else has to," said Frank with a smirk. And I really appreciate that in writers. It's urgent to know the background of what's going on in all kinds of fields, but it's intolerable to do most of that research. If someone credible has covered that ground already, I'm grateful.
*By "varying levels" I mean from minor to middling, never major significance.
Brecher is something like Howard Zinn turned inside-out; he brings you the world from an unpretentious perspective, sympathetic to the ways of life of average people in average places, except most average places consist entirely of a world of misery and vicious desperation that nice suburbanites generally don't like to mull over too closely.
When he talks about how it's only "violence" when the guy you've been beating down hits back, he almost sounds like Franz Fanon, if Fanon could write in plain speech rather than obtuse French psycho-theoretical prose. ...And if Frantz Fanon somehow morphed into a knee-jerk anti-Communist white American nationalist from central California. Um, yeah.
Granted, he's insanely bigoted shit-talker, characterizing Shiites as death-worshippers, Pashtuns as boy-fuckers, or Latin Americans as folks who are all "born knowing two things: how to lower a Chevy and that the Gringos are always to blame."
But I'd like to imagine that it's not out of a sense of genuine racism that Brecher makes generalizations about vast ethnicities, but rather to use stereotyping as a tool for understanding. That and as an effort to tweak his mortal enemies: the David Van Driessens of the world. Also, it's tempting to imagine that the racism and venom is more a part of the fictional character of "Brecher," than a real conviction or trait of his flesh-and-blood author(s) for whom he is a pseudonym. I hope, anyway.
Brecher is a fun read because you get the benefits of gleaning ideas from a dedicated player of Risk and memorizer of Jane's Weapon's Systems without any of the social agony. And he's brighter than the typical freeper or posturing mil-geek. There's none of the dogmatic troll drivel endemic to the class of people who wank themselves into unconsciousness over episodes of Future Weapons and then religiously read NewsMax as they enjoy the afterglow. So it's all the insight with little to none of the odiousness.
On the first page of the first chapter I found an error: the FARC are the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, not Revolucionarios. It's not terribly important, "Brecher" is a war nerd, not a Spanish nerd. But it is indicative of something I've observed about him, I think. In areas where I do know something about the places and events he's describing, I nearly always find new, useful, and frequently entertaining insights, but there are also gross over-generalizations, errors of fact of varying levels of significance,* and blind spots that crop up.
Part of the fun of these columns is their bitter insouciance, their utter disregard for polite morality. But if that gets in the way of analysis, then that's something to question.
---For example, Chavez in Venezuela was buying enough semi-auto rifles for every other man, woman or child in the country not because he thought it could hold off a US invasion. He's way smarter than that. He's doing it because working class Chileans under Salvador Allende begged the socialist president to arm them against the inevitable takeover by some Pinochet or other. Allende refused, and died with a rifle in his hand, rather than living empty-handed while a mass army of rifle-bearing citizens backed him up. He's also got to arm against Colombia, the US proxy. The US could not gin up a direct invasion, Hugo doesn't have to worry about that.
Bizarrely enough, I find myself reading Brecher the same way I read Tariq Ali, Patrick Cockburn, Robert Fisk, Allan Nairn, Mike Davis, or Naomi Klein. What's going on in the world? What are the corporate media outlets refusing to tell me about? What's the real history of these complex regions, these Byzantine conflicts I've only heard a little or nothing about?
But Brecher, in some ways, is a real breath of fresh air, far distant and distinct from the often stale scent of leftist journalism. What I mean is, there's often such a need to prove oneself right and the other side wrong among the lefty journo genre, that clarity, explanation, and simplicity often disappear. Instead you get the Jeremy Scahill-type indictment-of-the-badguys screed writing which can (but doesn't always) feel pretty myopic. Okay, okay, neoliberal colonialism and crypto-imperialist expansion is a bad thing, I get it already. But what's really happening?
With Brecher, there's none of the self-censorship that's occasionally necessary among the monk-soldiers of the Amy Goodman Army. Piety and religious pacifism are not impediments to understanding for the War Nerd. There's no fetishization of certain tiny groups because they've become a pet cause. Granted, Brecher fetishizes war, but within that frame he's got miles of room to be honest.
He's like an old-school Chicago sports columnist turning his acid pen toward world conflicts. He generally knows the players, he knows the game, he may get it wrong on occasion, but even then he's fun to read.
I also like Brecher as someone who's humped his way through all the horrible, unreadable military gear descriptions, coming out the other end with only what's interesting. Once I was able to interview Thomas Frank over the phone, when he was promoting One Market Under God. He had slogged through mountains of terrible management and business literature (although "literature" is probably the wrong word to use). "How can you stand it?" I asked. "Well, I do it so no one else has to," said Frank with a smirk. And I really appreciate that in writers. It's urgent to know the background of what's going on in all kinds of fields, but it's intolerable to do most of that research. If someone credible has covered that ground already, I'm grateful.
*By "varying levels" I mean from minor to middling, never major significance.
November 10, 2008
A collection of columns from exile.ru, Gary Brecher's War Nerd is a fascinating but occasionally flawed look at today's conflicts.
Told in an irreverent, conversational style, Brecher has a way with words that makes him like the Lester Bangs of war journals. However, that's not without a few stumbles. He shows his stripes with offhand remarks at liberals (they're weak and kinda dumb, apparently) and Christians (hypocrites, mostly.) Like many people who concentrate and are fascinated by war, he doesn't have a lot of interest in public policy or politics, and it shows in the occasional offhandedly naive statements. And occasionally he's really inconsistent: the article on India vs. Pakistan he chortles with disbelief about "Hindu militants", and since the columns are grouped by region, only a few columns later he uses the same logic to talk about how because the Tamil Tigers are Hindu, their religion encourages militant badassery. Huh?
So why is this book interesting?
Largely because Brecher focuses on the wars of today and doesn't cut out anything to spare the reader. He excoriates his fellow war nerds for being too focused on conventional wars that never happen. The wars of today are wars of insurgency and counterinsurgency, not on the back of a M-1 Abrahms, but on the back of a Toyota pickup truck with a .50 calibur machine gun mount, with the trusty old Rocket-propelled grenade as the weapon of choice.
Brecher's call to arms is that asymmetrical warfare is here to say, and it plays by opposite rules than the ones anyone wants to play. We think wars go by military victories. That killing more of the bad guys will do us good. "High tech weaponry is mostly useless in these wars," he says. And going further, he starts to form a rationality that wars are violent attempts to alter public opinion - "hearts and minds" in military terms.
Brecher says, "Most people are not rational, they are tribal: 'My gang yeah, your gang boo!' It really is that simple. The rest is cosmetics."
And after reading the essays, I'm inclined to believe him. H.L. Mencken once wrote, "Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats." Gary Brecher may be the embodiment of that quote.
Told in an irreverent, conversational style, Brecher has a way with words that makes him like the Lester Bangs of war journals. However, that's not without a few stumbles. He shows his stripes with offhand remarks at liberals (they're weak and kinda dumb, apparently) and Christians (hypocrites, mostly.) Like many people who concentrate and are fascinated by war, he doesn't have a lot of interest in public policy or politics, and it shows in the occasional offhandedly naive statements. And occasionally he's really inconsistent: the article on India vs. Pakistan he chortles with disbelief about "Hindu militants", and since the columns are grouped by region, only a few columns later he uses the same logic to talk about how because the Tamil Tigers are Hindu, their religion encourages militant badassery. Huh?
So why is this book interesting?
Largely because Brecher focuses on the wars of today and doesn't cut out anything to spare the reader. He excoriates his fellow war nerds for being too focused on conventional wars that never happen. The wars of today are wars of insurgency and counterinsurgency, not on the back of a M-1 Abrahms, but on the back of a Toyota pickup truck with a .50 calibur machine gun mount, with the trusty old Rocket-propelled grenade as the weapon of choice.
Brecher's call to arms is that asymmetrical warfare is here to say, and it plays by opposite rules than the ones anyone wants to play. We think wars go by military victories. That killing more of the bad guys will do us good. "High tech weaponry is mostly useless in these wars," he says. And going further, he starts to form a rationality that wars are violent attempts to alter public opinion - "hearts and minds" in military terms.
Brecher says, "Most people are not rational, they are tribal: 'My gang yeah, your gang boo!' It really is that simple. The rest is cosmetics."
And after reading the essays, I'm inclined to believe him. H.L. Mencken once wrote, "Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats." Gary Brecher may be the embodiment of that quote.
July 11, 2018
Almost knocked off a star because the writer overdoes the Gary Brecher persona, but they're unparalleled in presenting international military events in a straightforward, interesting way. This book and The War Nerd Dispatches were excellent starting points for me in understanding recent military history all over the world. They changed the way I read international news – after reading Brecher, I open up drier sources on some ethnic conflict going on in [country] and go, "ah, the group that did [colorful anecdote] in the 90s against [enemy group]!"
I found Brecher's edgelord irrelevance helpful – he sounds like an unreliable source, so I kept looking up fishy sounding details to check for corroborating sources, and learned more in the process. (The majority of things I looked up are true, some things are unfindable – no English source on [Satanist cult in North Africa] – and some things are 'I can only find one example of the thing he mentions', as in the case of Kim Jong Il abducting South Korean actresses.) Brecher does not come off as authoritative, and therefore the understanding of world events he gave me is not one I'll hesitate to correct when faced with other evidence.
A valuable thing I got out of this book is a sense of the sameness of military conflicts, across the world now and across time. The same general class of postcolonial ethnic tensions, religious dynamics, patterns of bribery/funding, recruitment pools, guerrilla tactics.
Another is a sense of when national borders are and are not important: "What you really see when you look hard at places like Mauritania is how unimportant these countries’ borders really are. What’s happening here is happening all across the Sahel: North vs. South, Arab vs. “black,” Islam vs. Western. And all of it is bubbling up against a background of rapid desertification plus rising birthrate."
I found it a great intro to international relations and military history.
I found Brecher's edgelord irrelevance helpful – he sounds like an unreliable source, so I kept looking up fishy sounding details to check for corroborating sources, and learned more in the process. (The majority of things I looked up are true, some things are unfindable – no English source on [Satanist cult in North Africa] – and some things are 'I can only find one example of the thing he mentions', as in the case of Kim Jong Il abducting South Korean actresses.) Brecher does not come off as authoritative, and therefore the understanding of world events he gave me is not one I'll hesitate to correct when faced with other evidence.
A valuable thing I got out of this book is a sense of the sameness of military conflicts, across the world now and across time. The same general class of postcolonial ethnic tensions, religious dynamics, patterns of bribery/funding, recruitment pools, guerrilla tactics.
Another is a sense of when national borders are and are not important: "What you really see when you look hard at places like Mauritania is how unimportant these countries’ borders really are. What’s happening here is happening all across the Sahel: North vs. South, Arab vs. “black,” Islam vs. Western. And all of it is bubbling up against a background of rapid desertification plus rising birthrate."
I found it a great intro to international relations and military history.
June 25, 2008
John Dolan, er I mean, "Gary Brecher" is the new H.L. Mencken -- hilarious and guaranteed to piss you off half the time, but also intellectually curious & tough-minded. Whether he's demolishing the right-wing France-bashers or steamrolling the namby-pamby grad-school peaceniks, he keeps you riveted, and you still feel like you're learning a thing or two along the way.
A very compelling book, even if you've already read all the columns online.
A very compelling book, even if you've already read all the columns online.
October 25, 2010
Great summary of all the fucked up shit past and present going on in the world. Cynical, funny, smart, this book was great.
Quotes:
"So when the rebellions started around 1750, you ad this wild, amazing, totally messed-up little island full of crazy people who were all going crazy in different ways. Out in the forests are escaped slaves still speaking African languages, doing voodoo, and sharpening their machetes. On the plantations are hundreds of thousands of black slaves getting worked to death under the whip and they've got machetes, too. In the cities and in little towns are the mulattos, who speak French and wear those George-Washington three-cornered hats and want a bigger piece of the pie. On top of them is a thin layer of jumpy French colonists who have a shoot-first-ask-questions-later attitude with any slave who gets an attitude. And on top of them are a few French government types who keep trying to put the whole mess back under control and make it a nice, comfortable French province."
"But the locals weren't totally happy. For one thing, the white American troops didn't discriminate the way the "Haitian elite" expected. The "elite" was mulatto and spoke French. They considered themselves way superior to the "blacks," the pure-African peasants who spoke Creole and did all the actual work. Naturally, these mulattos expected to collaborate with the foreign whites to keep the blacks down where they belonged, and the so-called elites were outraged when the marines made it clear that as far as the Americans could see, everybody in Haiti was just plain black."
"Duvalier too two classic power-consolidating steps - so any of you wannabe dictators out there, get your Palm Pilots out and take notes. First, he set up a presidential guard, separate form the army and packed with his own men. Second, he started a second armed force, a counterweight to the army. Think Saddam's Republican Guard, Khomeini's Islamic Revolutionary Guard/Pasdaran, or Mao's Red Guard."
"Christians are stone killers. You put a Christian and a lion in an arena, and the Christian'll have the lion for lunch. Just look around you: Lions are just about extinct, but the whole world is full of Christians singin' about God's love, ready to disembowel anybody who won't join the chorus."
"Kibila wasn't classic hero-rebel stuff. He was a fat man, for one thing. They always mention that in the wire stories, like getting fat is the biggest sin anybody could ever commit. Pisses me off. Us fat people have dreams too, you know. You know the saddest thing about being fat? Having some kind of heroic daydream, then suddenly seeing your reflection in a window or mirror. Suddenly you realize, whoa, I'm not entitled to dream about that stuff."
"Liberian history is supposedly tragic, which is newspaper code for "funny as Hell." I can't help it; it is, It's not like I don't sympathize."
"Out of a total population of 0 million fighting the Germans from 1914 to 1918, the French lost 1.5 million men. A lot of those guys died charging German machine-gun nests with bayonets. I'd really like to see one of you office smartasses joke about "surrender monkeys" with a French soldier, 1914 vintage. You'd piss you Dockers. Shit, we strut around like we're so tough, but we can't even handle a few uppity Iraqi villages. These guys faced the Germans head-on for five years, and we call them cowards?"
"The fight over this stupid island was just a slideshow. The real fight is over a couple of pieces of Moroccan coastline that the Spanish still hold, thanks to some old colonial treaties (the same way the United States claims Guantanamo). The Moroccans were sending a message to the Spanish: Suppose we march a few thousand Moroccan civilians into those colonial holdovers? Do you squeamish Spaniards really have the balls to machine-gun ten thousand Moroccan civilians right there in front of the TV cameras? The Moroccans have already tried this kind of "civilian invasion" technique - and it worked. They took the whole Spanish Sahara by sending 350,000 Moroccan civilians marching over the border. Totally unarmed, daring the guards to kill them. And not a shot was fired. The Moroccans had won a huge chunk of territory without firing a shot."
"Which is a real downer. The lessons are all pretty depressing. For example: Actual military capability doesn't mean much. Armies are for making gestures, not fighting. The best way of invading a territory you want is the way the Moroccans did it in their "Green March" into Spanish Sahara: Assemble a big crowd of civilians, and send'em across the border, daring your enemy to wipe them out on-camera, live."
"You were going to have a difficult time explaining to one side or the other why you were still alive and hadn't done the patriotic thing by dying under enemy occupation. We're talking about millions of civilians dragged into the Gulag for the crime of surviving the Nazis."
"All it did was give war a bad name. All that was left when the Germans and Russians had bled each other to death was the Anglos: us and Brits. All that was lift to believe in after 1945 was business making money - that whole stupid, boring, white-bread way of life. My life."
"People with something to lose don't like dying."
"And that's where it comes back to the Merkava. A great design, yes, But the whole greatness of the design advertises the weakness of the Israelis: They don't like taking casualties...The Merkava is a way to protect Israeli soldiers more than it's a way to kill Palestinians. See, in that way, it's a defensive weapon. Whereas an AK-47, with a Pal standing in the street firing at the Merkava, is an offensive weapon. Not that it can hurt the Merkava, because it can't. But it says, on camera, "I want to die and to kill." And the Merkava says "Yikes, you people are crazy, go away." A tank vs. a rifle is an unequal battle - but not always in favor of the tank."
"Stand back and squint at the two wars, and you see something weird: We did well against the tougher opponent, Afghanistan, because we didn't want anything from the place. We wanted Iraq to be a lot of stupid, dreamy stuff, voting booths and cheap gas. You pay for dreaming on duty."
"Mao's battle plan is simple. It can be adapted to almost any country as long as you've got the basic ingredients: mean landlords, hungry peasants, educated city people who couldn't care less what's happening in the countryside. In other words: if you're got a really fucked-up agricultural country. Nepal had that. Mao's plan doesn't take military geniuses to make it work. What it does take is lots and lots of discipline and patience, because you must avoid battle until the odds are overwhelmingly in your favor. So the first rule is: No Hotheads Need Apply. Step one is to work the villages. The university-trained commie recruiters fan out into the villages and radicalize the locals - which isn't too hard when the landlords have been buying and selling peasants like mules. The next part is harder: You set up a shadow government. You don't attack the local police or army at this stage - you try to make them irrelevant. Instead of taking complaints to the cops, peasants take their quarrels to a People's Court that meets in a shed at night. Instead of paying regular taxes, you pay people's taxes to a guy who comes around at night with a notebook and a bag. The idea is to isolate the cops, tax collectors, and other informers - to "put out the eyes" of the government in the area, so that by the time you're ready to attack, the government won't have any intelligence system worth in the name and you'll take the ruling elite completely by surprise."
"The more the cops and soldiers terrorize the locals, the more isolated the army ends up i nits sandbagged barracks. Nobody feeds the army intelligence anymore; it's holed up, always on the defensive, no longer capable of choosing the time and place for combat."
"And U.S. intelligence has its own reasons for pumping up the North as a nuclear threat. The bigger the threat, the bigger the DoD budget."
"And like I keep saying, no matter what your social studies teacher told you, it's not normal for "people of different faiths to get along and respect each other." What's normal, everywhere int he world, is for people of different faiths to spend Friday nights sharpening up their machetes and taking a few practice swings with Dad's crowbar so they can go trash the "people of different faiths" on the other side of town on the weekend. And maybe, if they get lucky, steal a sofa or a Samsung VCR from the richer crosstown infidels."
"It's always the same story: It's not "violence" until somebody hits you back. Till then, you don't notice your guys hitting the other tribe. That's just normal background noise. It takes blood, buckets of it, to get a person's attention. And not just anybody's blood - it's gotta be your own, or that of a close relative. Otherwise it's just spots on the sidewalk."
"Well, just you do-gooders wait for the next big warquake, when the crude runs dry. You'll see the old ways come back fast - and you'll be amazed at how your most PC friends are the first to switch. People are joiners, just like dogs. Today's do-goeders will be the first berserkers to jump off the longboats and get down to the rape and pillage."
"But those wars are rare and will get rarer. Because there's a much cheaper, easier way to make war. This way doesn't require any of the building blocks of conventional war: You don't need industry, aircraft, armor, or massive armies. In fact, this kind of war can be played by any group of wackos who can round up a dozen or so bushwhackers. All you need is small arms and a grudge - and those are the only two commodities most of the world as a surplus of."
"People want democracy and peace and all that kind of stuff. No. In fact, Hell no! Let me repeat your first lesson: Consult your own experience instead of believing the talking heads. Do you care about those things - I mean, compared with money and sex and taking revenge on the MR2 that cut you off a couple of blocks back? The only ideology I see around me is God."
"Yes, Grasshopper, you must meditate on the fact that people are superstitious tribalists. Democracy comes about 37th, if that. Nobody wants to face that fact: We're tribal critters. We'll die for the tribe. More to the point, we'll kill for it. We don't care about democracy. And I'm not just talking here about people in tropical hellholes like Somalia. I mean your town, your street. Most Americans are just like me: old-school nationalists.We want America to be Roman, to kick ass. The rest is for Quakers."
"1. Most wars are asymmetrical or irregular.
2. In these wars, the guerrillas/irregulars/insurgents do not aim for military victory.
3. You can not defeat these groups by killing lots of their members. In fact, they want you to do that.
4. High-tech weaponry is mostly useless in these wars.
5. "Hearts and minds," meaning propaganda and morale, are more important than military superiority.
6. Most people are not rational; they are tribal: "My gang yea, your gang boo!" It really is that simple. The rest is cosmetics."
Quotes:
"So when the rebellions started around 1750, you ad this wild, amazing, totally messed-up little island full of crazy people who were all going crazy in different ways. Out in the forests are escaped slaves still speaking African languages, doing voodoo, and sharpening their machetes. On the plantations are hundreds of thousands of black slaves getting worked to death under the whip and they've got machetes, too. In the cities and in little towns are the mulattos, who speak French and wear those George-Washington three-cornered hats and want a bigger piece of the pie. On top of them is a thin layer of jumpy French colonists who have a shoot-first-ask-questions-later attitude with any slave who gets an attitude. And on top of them are a few French government types who keep trying to put the whole mess back under control and make it a nice, comfortable French province."
"But the locals weren't totally happy. For one thing, the white American troops didn't discriminate the way the "Haitian elite" expected. The "elite" was mulatto and spoke French. They considered themselves way superior to the "blacks," the pure-African peasants who spoke Creole and did all the actual work. Naturally, these mulattos expected to collaborate with the foreign whites to keep the blacks down where they belonged, and the so-called elites were outraged when the marines made it clear that as far as the Americans could see, everybody in Haiti was just plain black."
"Duvalier too two classic power-consolidating steps - so any of you wannabe dictators out there, get your Palm Pilots out and take notes. First, he set up a presidential guard, separate form the army and packed with his own men. Second, he started a second armed force, a counterweight to the army. Think Saddam's Republican Guard, Khomeini's Islamic Revolutionary Guard/Pasdaran, or Mao's Red Guard."
"Christians are stone killers. You put a Christian and a lion in an arena, and the Christian'll have the lion for lunch. Just look around you: Lions are just about extinct, but the whole world is full of Christians singin' about God's love, ready to disembowel anybody who won't join the chorus."
"Kibila wasn't classic hero-rebel stuff. He was a fat man, for one thing. They always mention that in the wire stories, like getting fat is the biggest sin anybody could ever commit. Pisses me off. Us fat people have dreams too, you know. You know the saddest thing about being fat? Having some kind of heroic daydream, then suddenly seeing your reflection in a window or mirror. Suddenly you realize, whoa, I'm not entitled to dream about that stuff."
"Liberian history is supposedly tragic, which is newspaper code for "funny as Hell." I can't help it; it is, It's not like I don't sympathize."
"Out of a total population of 0 million fighting the Germans from 1914 to 1918, the French lost 1.5 million men. A lot of those guys died charging German machine-gun nests with bayonets. I'd really like to see one of you office smartasses joke about "surrender monkeys" with a French soldier, 1914 vintage. You'd piss you Dockers. Shit, we strut around like we're so tough, but we can't even handle a few uppity Iraqi villages. These guys faced the Germans head-on for five years, and we call them cowards?"
"The fight over this stupid island was just a slideshow. The real fight is over a couple of pieces of Moroccan coastline that the Spanish still hold, thanks to some old colonial treaties (the same way the United States claims Guantanamo). The Moroccans were sending a message to the Spanish: Suppose we march a few thousand Moroccan civilians into those colonial holdovers? Do you squeamish Spaniards really have the balls to machine-gun ten thousand Moroccan civilians right there in front of the TV cameras? The Moroccans have already tried this kind of "civilian invasion" technique - and it worked. They took the whole Spanish Sahara by sending 350,000 Moroccan civilians marching over the border. Totally unarmed, daring the guards to kill them. And not a shot was fired. The Moroccans had won a huge chunk of territory without firing a shot."
"Which is a real downer. The lessons are all pretty depressing. For example: Actual military capability doesn't mean much. Armies are for making gestures, not fighting. The best way of invading a territory you want is the way the Moroccans did it in their "Green March" into Spanish Sahara: Assemble a big crowd of civilians, and send'em across the border, daring your enemy to wipe them out on-camera, live."
"You were going to have a difficult time explaining to one side or the other why you were still alive and hadn't done the patriotic thing by dying under enemy occupation. We're talking about millions of civilians dragged into the Gulag for the crime of surviving the Nazis."
"All it did was give war a bad name. All that was left when the Germans and Russians had bled each other to death was the Anglos: us and Brits. All that was lift to believe in after 1945 was business making money - that whole stupid, boring, white-bread way of life. My life."
"People with something to lose don't like dying."
"And that's where it comes back to the Merkava. A great design, yes, But the whole greatness of the design advertises the weakness of the Israelis: They don't like taking casualties...The Merkava is a way to protect Israeli soldiers more than it's a way to kill Palestinians. See, in that way, it's a defensive weapon. Whereas an AK-47, with a Pal standing in the street firing at the Merkava, is an offensive weapon. Not that it can hurt the Merkava, because it can't. But it says, on camera, "I want to die and to kill." And the Merkava says "Yikes, you people are crazy, go away." A tank vs. a rifle is an unequal battle - but not always in favor of the tank."
"Stand back and squint at the two wars, and you see something weird: We did well against the tougher opponent, Afghanistan, because we didn't want anything from the place. We wanted Iraq to be a lot of stupid, dreamy stuff, voting booths and cheap gas. You pay for dreaming on duty."
"Mao's battle plan is simple. It can be adapted to almost any country as long as you've got the basic ingredients: mean landlords, hungry peasants, educated city people who couldn't care less what's happening in the countryside. In other words: if you're got a really fucked-up agricultural country. Nepal had that. Mao's plan doesn't take military geniuses to make it work. What it does take is lots and lots of discipline and patience, because you must avoid battle until the odds are overwhelmingly in your favor. So the first rule is: No Hotheads Need Apply. Step one is to work the villages. The university-trained commie recruiters fan out into the villages and radicalize the locals - which isn't too hard when the landlords have been buying and selling peasants like mules. The next part is harder: You set up a shadow government. You don't attack the local police or army at this stage - you try to make them irrelevant. Instead of taking complaints to the cops, peasants take their quarrels to a People's Court that meets in a shed at night. Instead of paying regular taxes, you pay people's taxes to a guy who comes around at night with a notebook and a bag. The idea is to isolate the cops, tax collectors, and other informers - to "put out the eyes" of the government in the area, so that by the time you're ready to attack, the government won't have any intelligence system worth in the name and you'll take the ruling elite completely by surprise."
"The more the cops and soldiers terrorize the locals, the more isolated the army ends up i nits sandbagged barracks. Nobody feeds the army intelligence anymore; it's holed up, always on the defensive, no longer capable of choosing the time and place for combat."
"And U.S. intelligence has its own reasons for pumping up the North as a nuclear threat. The bigger the threat, the bigger the DoD budget."
"And like I keep saying, no matter what your social studies teacher told you, it's not normal for "people of different faiths to get along and respect each other." What's normal, everywhere int he world, is for people of different faiths to spend Friday nights sharpening up their machetes and taking a few practice swings with Dad's crowbar so they can go trash the "people of different faiths" on the other side of town on the weekend. And maybe, if they get lucky, steal a sofa or a Samsung VCR from the richer crosstown infidels."
"It's always the same story: It's not "violence" until somebody hits you back. Till then, you don't notice your guys hitting the other tribe. That's just normal background noise. It takes blood, buckets of it, to get a person's attention. And not just anybody's blood - it's gotta be your own, or that of a close relative. Otherwise it's just spots on the sidewalk."
"Well, just you do-gooders wait for the next big warquake, when the crude runs dry. You'll see the old ways come back fast - and you'll be amazed at how your most PC friends are the first to switch. People are joiners, just like dogs. Today's do-goeders will be the first berserkers to jump off the longboats and get down to the rape and pillage."
"But those wars are rare and will get rarer. Because there's a much cheaper, easier way to make war. This way doesn't require any of the building blocks of conventional war: You don't need industry, aircraft, armor, or massive armies. In fact, this kind of war can be played by any group of wackos who can round up a dozen or so bushwhackers. All you need is small arms and a grudge - and those are the only two commodities most of the world as a surplus of."
"People want democracy and peace and all that kind of stuff. No. In fact, Hell no! Let me repeat your first lesson: Consult your own experience instead of believing the talking heads. Do you care about those things - I mean, compared with money and sex and taking revenge on the MR2 that cut you off a couple of blocks back? The only ideology I see around me is God."
"Yes, Grasshopper, you must meditate on the fact that people are superstitious tribalists. Democracy comes about 37th, if that. Nobody wants to face that fact: We're tribal critters. We'll die for the tribe. More to the point, we'll kill for it. We don't care about democracy. And I'm not just talking here about people in tropical hellholes like Somalia. I mean your town, your street. Most Americans are just like me: old-school nationalists.We want America to be Roman, to kick ass. The rest is for Quakers."
"1. Most wars are asymmetrical or irregular.
2. In these wars, the guerrillas/irregulars/insurgents do not aim for military victory.
3. You can not defeat these groups by killing lots of their members. In fact, they want you to do that.
4. High-tech weaponry is mostly useless in these wars.
5. "Hearts and minds," meaning propaganda and morale, are more important than military superiority.
6. Most people are not rational; they are tribal: "My gang yea, your gang boo!" It really is that simple. The rest is cosmetics."
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 28, 2024
I have a lot of conflicting feelings about this book. First off, I had to try three times to read it, because the first two times I read it, I was in an emotionally unstable period, and this is NOT a book to read in emotionally unstable periods. On the third try, I blew right through it.
Second thing is about the way it’s written. On the one hand, I wish all history texts were written with HALF the color and vigor and humor of this writer, because I would have retained way more information. On the other hand, it was incredibly difficult for me to come to terms with this style of angry, bitter humor combined with a worldview I can’t really understand.
Which, I suppose, leads into some of my major take-aways from this book: human nature is not basically good (I already believed that, but this is a pretty good secular argument for it), human nature seems to crave war and peace is the exception, and there literally are people in the world who I will never understand no matter how hard I try because they want things that are antithetical to absolutely everything I deem important. I don’t mean minor things or even the things we all know come into conflict, like religion. I’m talking about things like peace. If you look at what peoples’ actions tell you over their words, it seems like some people (individuals AND nation groups) genuinely thrive on death and war, and that that was in fact the state of things for far longer than attempts at peace.
It’s a difficult book on all fronts (except readability, it’s quite readable and certainly more enjoyable than most history texts as I’ve said), but it makes you think. I also can’t speak for how accurate this book is, but it is written by someone who clearly has a hyperfixation, so…
Second thing is about the way it’s written. On the one hand, I wish all history texts were written with HALF the color and vigor and humor of this writer, because I would have retained way more information. On the other hand, it was incredibly difficult for me to come to terms with this style of angry, bitter humor combined with a worldview I can’t really understand.
Which, I suppose, leads into some of my major take-aways from this book: human nature is not basically good (I already believed that, but this is a pretty good secular argument for it), human nature seems to crave war and peace is the exception, and there literally are people in the world who I will never understand no matter how hard I try because they want things that are antithetical to absolutely everything I deem important. I don’t mean minor things or even the things we all know come into conflict, like religion. I’m talking about things like peace. If you look at what peoples’ actions tell you over their words, it seems like some people (individuals AND nation groups) genuinely thrive on death and war, and that that was in fact the state of things for far longer than attempts at peace.
It’s a difficult book on all fronts (except readability, it’s quite readable and certainly more enjoyable than most history texts as I’ve said), but it makes you think. I also can’t speak for how accurate this book is, but it is written by someone who clearly has a hyperfixation, so…
July 26, 2022
Extremely crude and deeply sexist throughout.
Too misanthropic to be even called racist.
Proud and devout lover of death, rape, genocide, killing, etc.
And with that out of the way.
Most military books are either written for A) Historians or B) Military or Ex-Military people, this makes a vast majority of them either hopelessly outdated for the last 60 odd years of irregular conflicts that have consistently stymied the most expensive and elaborate armies that humanity could bring to bear OR just plain gobbledey-gook that you need 15 years of military experience and far too much faith in Uncle Sam to understand.
Or both.
The War Nerd is an extremely readable world tour of various wars, conflicts, terrorisms and other deadly occurrences. Brecher is consistencly acerbic and crude about just about any horrible and graphic event you can imagine; BUT assuming you can move past that Brecher offers an extremely cohesive and convincing guide to what warfare in the 21st century is.
Brecher tackles the questions of irregular warfare that America has spent trillions of dollars and countless lives trying to answer and comes up with simple and compelling analysis of what went wrong and what went right in various conflicts across the globe.
If you don't really know how America lost in Iraq or what is happening when the news mentions a conflict in Africa this book will give you a more readable and broader view than many others out there.
Just read with a handful of salt.
Too misanthropic to be even called racist.
Proud and devout lover of death, rape, genocide, killing, etc.
And with that out of the way.
Most military books are either written for A) Historians or B) Military or Ex-Military people, this makes a vast majority of them either hopelessly outdated for the last 60 odd years of irregular conflicts that have consistently stymied the most expensive and elaborate armies that humanity could bring to bear OR just plain gobbledey-gook that you need 15 years of military experience and far too much faith in Uncle Sam to understand.
Or both.
The War Nerd is an extremely readable world tour of various wars, conflicts, terrorisms and other deadly occurrences. Brecher is consistencly acerbic and crude about just about any horrible and graphic event you can imagine; BUT assuming you can move past that Brecher offers an extremely cohesive and convincing guide to what warfare in the 21st century is.
Brecher tackles the questions of irregular warfare that America has spent trillions of dollars and countless lives trying to answer and comes up with simple and compelling analysis of what went wrong and what went right in various conflicts across the globe.
If you don't really know how America lost in Iraq or what is happening when the news mentions a conflict in Africa this book will give you a more readable and broader view than many others out there.
Just read with a handful of salt.
October 5, 2018
Part of the luster has worn off since it was revealed Gary Brecher is really John Dolan, but still a fun read. I imagine Dolan writing politically incorrect analyses of global conflicts is a bit like the author of the Onion's editorial cartoons getting to indulge his worst impulses.
I think there's a current of sympathy for right-wing ideas that hides within the whole project of the eXiled, for which Dolan started writing in the late 90s, before they got kicked out of Russia. To me, the eXiled are intellectual predecessors of both Chapo Trap House and some elements of the alt-right, and I think this book, as tongue-in-cheek as it is, shows that connection.
I think there's a current of sympathy for right-wing ideas that hides within the whole project of the eXiled, for which Dolan started writing in the late 90s, before they got kicked out of Russia. To me, the eXiled are intellectual predecessors of both Chapo Trap House and some elements of the alt-right, and I think this book, as tongue-in-cheek as it is, shows that connection.
March 27, 2022
It's got its moments, and it's got an interesting thing to say or two, but the book is too long for its own good. It only really spells out its thesis in the last essay; the rest is kinda superfluous. If it's meant to be satirical it certainly feels like it's punching down, but I think that we're reading the author's id. I think he's trying to get to the deepest nature of mankind with this book, and I wish he'd embraced that instead of giving us a collection of essays about assorted geopolitics. Because the punchline is the same over and over...
May 20, 2020
Una chapuza como su titulo, un compendio de historias mal contadas que solo un sociopata romanticon que ama las guerras clasicas (pero que nunca ha salido de su cuarto para saber que es el mundo) podría contar. Te encuentras con esperpentos como comparar al Sah de Persia y Ataturk. Lo único rescatable es que te impulsa a buscar fuentes mas serias y objetivas para conocer sobre los conflictos armados en el mundo
January 15, 2025
I know the War Nerd vaguely from twitter. I wasn't really aware of his whole fake persona who made around the War Nerd.
Sometimes the language is more what you would expect from a Alt-Political Teen/Twenty-year old who read for the first time an alternative viewpoint than what you would expect from a geopolitical interested desk jockey.
Also when I bought the book I thought it would be more about the hardware than about the conflicts themselves.
Sometimes the language is more what you would expect from a Alt-Political Teen/Twenty-year old who read for the first time an alternative viewpoint than what you would expect from a geopolitical interested desk jockey.
Also when I bought the book I thought it would be more about the hardware than about the conflicts themselves.
March 14, 2019
would’ve been a really solid read right after it came out, but it ages quite poorly. Not only is the information out of date and thus rendered semi impotent, but the offensive nature of the writing doesn’t square with 2019 sensibilities. Yet the historical rundowns are still quite informative and the writing is fun.
December 29, 2017
Great stocking stuffer for anyone who is interested in military battles. There is so much more to understand outside of WWII and the civil war and so little written about. Light and a quick read.
Be aware of harsh language.
Be aware of harsh language.
December 30, 2020
There are few better “American” prosaists. I've followed Dr. Dolan for more than a decade. You generally need a sense of humor, sarcasm, and an inclination to low people and places to truly appreciate him... But I GENUINELY believe he has a record, voice, and style to live eternally in the literary aether.
September 11, 2022
Superbly inflammatory satire but studded with decent insights about conflict. It’s worth reading if you can stomach the character, and it’s an essay collection so it can be picked up and dropped at will.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 6, 2017
"War is just demographics in a hurry."
October 5, 2017
While I might not always align with the writer's political ideas, the book is sharply written, well put together and quite insightful. Easy recommendation
August 11, 2018
snarky but good facts
March 2, 2021
Solid but he gets a little bit too into the character.
April 10, 2016
Gary Brecher is not the greatest writer in the world nor is he the greatest thinker on war: he is what he claims to be though, The War Nerd. Brecher's wit is razor sharp and his understanding of tactics of war shifting in the 20th and 21th century is almost staggering. His politics are opaque: a dash of realism, a hint of paleo-conservatism, and a want to pillage any village Victor David Hansen and most neo-conservative writers step food in. Brecher also "tells it like it is" in a way that can people very uncomfortable but unlike most people who do this, he doesn't have a identity-based ideology for you to buy.
These are his aughts columns and blog-posts for the eXile, and it is clear that Brecher is persona in them. Indeed, Brecher (poet John Dolan) is more of an academic and humanist than his persona here lets on or my snide comment about his constant use of sentence fragments indicates. Brecher understands the shifting focus of war, however, and clearly has obsessed over it. Brecher can be appear bigoted and yet he also can write admiringly of peoples who no one seems to otherwise give a shit about. He can be a knee-jerk anti-communism who admires female Soviet snipers and communist guerillas. Indeed, what becomes clearer--particularly once you read Brecher's writings for NSFW Corps and Pando, Brecher is not nearly as conservative as he is playing. He is doing satire at points about the nature of conservative war writing and pointing out each pain-staking hypocrisy. Furthermore, Brecher is also adapt at showing that liberal and left pieties are often just as hypocritical of anyone east of Victor David Hansen.
That said, it is hard to know exactly much is an truly satire as Brecher's understanding of war, counter-insurgency, and the actual goings on of places like South Asia and the African horn are profound. Brecher is best in talking about conflicts most people don't know about: Pakistan-India, Sri Lanka's civil war, the wars of the African Horn, and pointing out hypocrisies in Tom Clancy. It is also true that some of the romanticism of war may not be act on Brecher's part, but it is hard to say. The totally unblinkered truth is impossible, but Brecher is about as close as you come when he is getting to the brass tacks of asymmetrical warfare and counter-insurgency as well as tribal wars.
This is a good start with Brecher, but honestly, the War Nerd, even if it is a persona, is worth reading regardless of your politics or if you actually like living in Fresno.
These are his aughts columns and blog-posts for the eXile, and it is clear that Brecher is persona in them. Indeed, Brecher (poet John Dolan) is more of an academic and humanist than his persona here lets on or my snide comment about his constant use of sentence fragments indicates. Brecher understands the shifting focus of war, however, and clearly has obsessed over it. Brecher can be appear bigoted and yet he also can write admiringly of peoples who no one seems to otherwise give a shit about. He can be a knee-jerk anti-communism who admires female Soviet snipers and communist guerillas. Indeed, what becomes clearer--particularly once you read Brecher's writings for NSFW Corps and Pando, Brecher is not nearly as conservative as he is playing. He is doing satire at points about the nature of conservative war writing and pointing out each pain-staking hypocrisy. Furthermore, Brecher is also adapt at showing that liberal and left pieties are often just as hypocritical of anyone east of Victor David Hansen.
That said, it is hard to know exactly much is an truly satire as Brecher's understanding of war, counter-insurgency, and the actual goings on of places like South Asia and the African horn are profound. Brecher is best in talking about conflicts most people don't know about: Pakistan-India, Sri Lanka's civil war, the wars of the African Horn, and pointing out hypocrisies in Tom Clancy. It is also true that some of the romanticism of war may not be act on Brecher's part, but it is hard to say. The totally unblinkered truth is impossible, but Brecher is about as close as you come when he is getting to the brass tacks of asymmetrical warfare and counter-insurgency as well as tribal wars.
This is a good start with Brecher, but honestly, the War Nerd, even if it is a persona, is worth reading regardless of your politics or if you actually like living in Fresno.
June 26, 2009
This book is a collection of writings about war-torn areas, previous wars, war technology, and how much Fresno sucks.
The author is an armchair war analyst. He reads current news stories, historical battle descriptions, military strategy guides, and weapons specs, and gives his opinions.
At best, this could be a great easy-reading "Military Geopolitics through the Ages for Dummies" book, in the vein of many general history books that try to strike a balance between giving enough depth to cover the significance of important issues, and keeping the length short enough that it's easily digestable. (I've seen a few books that attempt to do the same sort of thing for other topic areas, like geography, physics, or math, but I think the history ones do it the best.)
Unfortunately, the good parts of this book are buried among a large number of annoying schoolyard-style homophobic and racist insults. Yes, I understand the author is trying to be edgy and in-your-face. If it added anything to the writing, it wouldn't bother me, but it almost felt like the author was making a conscientious effort to include it, and that became distracting and detracted from my enjoyment of the book.
The other thing that annoyed me about this book was that the author writes as if he has some amazing military perception and intuition. I appreciate that he has spent a lot of time reading history and paying attention to news stories that most people skip over, but that doesn't necessarily translate into a better capacity for analysis than anyone else that has done the same. The book is pretty recent, but there have been some major events since its publishing that he never hinted at.
Overall, I enjoyed it, but I think cleaning up the writing a little bit would have greatly increased my impression of the book's quality.
The author is an armchair war analyst. He reads current news stories, historical battle descriptions, military strategy guides, and weapons specs, and gives his opinions.
At best, this could be a great easy-reading "Military Geopolitics through the Ages for Dummies" book, in the vein of many general history books that try to strike a balance between giving enough depth to cover the significance of important issues, and keeping the length short enough that it's easily digestable. (I've seen a few books that attempt to do the same sort of thing for other topic areas, like geography, physics, or math, but I think the history ones do it the best.)
Unfortunately, the good parts of this book are buried among a large number of annoying schoolyard-style homophobic and racist insults. Yes, I understand the author is trying to be edgy and in-your-face. If it added anything to the writing, it wouldn't bother me, but it almost felt like the author was making a conscientious effort to include it, and that became distracting and detracted from my enjoyment of the book.
The other thing that annoyed me about this book was that the author writes as if he has some amazing military perception and intuition. I appreciate that he has spent a lot of time reading history and paying attention to news stories that most people skip over, but that doesn't necessarily translate into a better capacity for analysis than anyone else that has done the same. The book is pretty recent, but there have been some major events since its publishing that he never hinted at.
Overall, I enjoyed it, but I think cleaning up the writing a little bit would have greatly increased my impression of the book's quality.
April 12, 2012
Nine times out of ten, when somebody is gleefully described as being "politically incorrect", you can safely assume that person is just an asshole and move right along. The War Nerd (a fat suburban data entry clerk who might actually be the pen name of eXile literary critic John Dolan) is one of the rare exceptions to this rule, whose unfailingly misanthropic and contrarian yet well-educated and insightful perspectives on war and society manages to be both offensive (if you had any mistaken ideas about some imagined superiority of American military acumen) and funny at the same time. His articles are difficult to categorize; they're a mix of unabashed love of warfare, scathing denunciations of inept politicians and generals, sober analyses of military news, and a genuine respect for warriors of all times and places that's almost unique. Reading his book, which unfortunately includes many repeats of his old eXile articles, I was made very aware of the strange gap between the unceasingly bland and safe American heartland where I live and mankind's seemingly limitless capacity for destruction and conflict. It's hard to describe, but you'll never read some bland AP article about Iraq War casualties or "tensions" between countries X and Y again without thinking of how truly odd it is to live in an air-conditioned consumer utopia while millions of people still fight and die all over the world. Better yet, you will actually think it's funny!
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