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The War Nerd Dispatches
For the first time under one cover, the complete War Nerd Dispatches from NSFWCORP.
362 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 31, 2014
28 people are currently reading
129 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 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 28, 2017
Very much a miniature time capsule of the recent past, Gary Brecher/John Dolan's writing holds up surprisingly well. Given, for instance, the recent discovery that the French not only resupplied the Hutu genocidaires in Rwanda, but actually rearmed them, this passage (from "Congo: A Tutsi Empire, Once Again Interrupted by Do-Gooders") is even more chilling:
Other takes, like that on Turkey's secularism and democracy, have not-so-well withstood the test of time. Alas, Taksim Square was not actually a healthy safety valve to release policy preference tensions. Nor did the "red-state administration" learn any limits to be obeyed here.
Of coure, it's easy to judge all this in hindsight, and overall, Brecher/Dolan did an admirable job offering commentary as events unfolded. It's a shame he almost entirely does podcasts these days; as things around the world heat up in new and deadly and fascinating ways, his insights would be far more appreciated than most of the blithering idiots opining on Trump's presidentialityness for launching a handful of LACMs at Syria.
If there's anything major to criticize, it's the lack of editing put into this volume. There are occasional typeface changes, none of his hyperlinks have survived even as foot- or endnotes, and (this is just me) but sans-serif fonts in print make my eyes well up. But the writing is solid and accessible.
Nothing. That’s what the international community did for the Tutsis. So they fell back on the old ways: they went to war. And they’re very, very good at it. So good that their ad hoc army, the RPF, scattered the Hutu militias like billiard balls and retook Rwanda as fast as they could advance.
The Rwandan death squads fled west and hid out in the forests of eastern Congo, where all of a sudden—and this is very possibly the most sickening moment in recent world history—the same international community that did shit while the Tutsi were being wiped out went all out to help the poor “refugees”—that is, the death squads. I’ve seen this pattern before, in Cambodia. While the Khmer Rouge was slaughtering a million Cambodians, nobody did shit. But when the Vietnamese Army drove them west into Thailand, the international community couldn’t do enough for the poor “displaced” maniacs. According to Nic Dunlop’s great book, The Lost Executioner: A Story of the Khmer Rouge, the NGOs and do-gooders were spending 160 times as much on the average Khmer Rouge “refugee” as they were on their surviving victims...
That’s exactly the pattern you see now in Congo: the Tutsi, the natural rulers, are hated and demonized by every do-gooding reporter because it’s in everybody’s interest for Central Africa to stay the way it is: Miserable, bloody, and profitable. So the West, the NGOs, everybody rushes help to the genocidaires in the Hutu militia camps and tsk-tsks at the Tutsi for even thinking about taking unilateral military action to end the attempted genocide of their people. It really is the sickest thing I’ve seen in recent war, and it amazes me nobody sees it.
Other takes, like that on Turkey's secularism and democracy, have not-so-well withstood the test of time. Alas, Taksim Square was not actually a healthy safety valve to release policy preference tensions. Nor did the "red-state administration" learn any limits to be obeyed here.
Of coure, it's easy to judge all this in hindsight, and overall, Brecher/Dolan did an admirable job offering commentary as events unfolded. It's a shame he almost entirely does podcasts these days; as things around the world heat up in new and deadly and fascinating ways, his insights would be far more appreciated than most of the blithering idiots opining on Trump's presidentialityness for launching a handful of LACMs at Syria.
If there's anything major to criticize, it's the lack of editing put into this volume. There are occasional typeface changes, none of his hyperlinks have survived even as foot- or endnotes, and (this is just me) but sans-serif fonts in print make my eyes well up. But the writing is solid and accessible.
August 17, 2017
kinda problematic i guess in a proto-dirtbag-left way, but yeah from time to time i enjoy a bit of that supercharged hunter s thompson style prose. as far as i can tell the war nerd is well up on the actual technical dirtiness of current conflicts in a way rarely seen in the mainstream press. sure he can paint in broad brushstrokes but y know the amount of tax dollars the us government throw at crappy fighter jets probably needs to be written about in outraged macho moralist terms y know? i paid £25 for this and only got the kindle edition and didn't get the physical copy, what a rube huh?
November 29, 2021
A bit too dated but I appreciate it
September 2, 2018
Mandatory reading.
Not many writers have shaped my thinking over the years the way Brecher/Dolan has.
Not many writers have shaped my thinking over the years the way Brecher/Dolan has.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews