John Dolan (2) (1955–)

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!… (lisätietoja)

John Dolan, better known as the War Nerd, just can't catch a break. Regular fans of his work from the eXile days know that his life often seems like one woeful, pathos-filled episode after another, lightened only by his ability to see the humor in his increasingly bleak existence and record each improbable setback in his inimitable, why-isn't-he-famous writing style. Much of the best writing is both hilarious and saddening at the same time, and so this chronicle of this disastrous attempt to leave New Zealand to start a new life in Canada is both characteristically well-written as well as twinge-inducing. His wide-ranging talent makes even the most depressing of these journal entries of dwindling funds, hostile hippies, and encroaching winter nights both moving and memorable. They say that comedy = tragedy time, but there's enough tragedy in the life of Dolan and what can only be the most patient wife of all time that, in his hands, it's funny right away. I subscribe to his listener-funded War Nerd podcasts to help keep him off the streets, and as you see here, that's much harder than it sounds, so chip in to preserve one of the truly unique, individual authorial voices we have left.… (lisätietoja)

The War Nerd, Dolan's famous alter ego, has a soft spot for the losers of history, especially when they really didn't deserve their usually bloody end. His trip to the National Museum of Interventions, a Mexican museum dedicated to invasions of their country located in the Mexico City suburbs, is filled with his typical mix of historical narrative, keen insight, admiration for the inherent pathos of losing, and the resulting self-deprecation as he sees elements of himself in history's parade of shmucks. Every exhibit reminds him of something else, and the resulting capsule histories are worth their weight in gold, or at least buckshot. The War Nerd is evidently very polarizing among "real" military scholars for reasons that aren't quite clear to me; even if he could be accused of oversimplification, lack of rigor, or of partisanship (his enduring disdain/grudging admiration for the British has become very endearing to me over time), you're not going to find his talents really anywhere else. Perhaps it's fitting that the author with the most passion for war is a poet, because who else would write so grippingly about a subject like this? His passion for the subject is contagious, which is why I'll always keep going back to him.… (lisätietoja)

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:

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.… (lisätietoja)