When The Discreditor Becomes the Discreditee
I never cared much for Max Blumenthal, one of those little partisan hacks who writes for all the lefty mags and wins acclaim for being the son of a famous Clinton toady who hates Republicans (Christopher Hitchens has it right, as usual: “…[T]o read Max Blumenthal is…like being confronted with a young skunk who hasn’t learned to piss yet”). It gives me great pleasure, then, to be able to publicly heap piles of scorn on his head for the following horsehock, taken from a put-down of David Horowitz:
Despite his pretensions, Horowitz wants more politicization of the academy — so long as the process of “indoctrinating” young, malleable minds is overseen by conservative ideologues. Why else would he demand, as I saw him do while speaking at the 2005 College Republican National Convention, that college history students be assigned the discredited work of Victor David Hanson?
For the unitiated, besides being a conservative pundit, Hanson is a renowned historian who is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institute, a Fellow at the Claremont Institute, and a Professor of Classics and Coordinator of the Classical Studies Program at Fresno State. He received the American Philological Association Excellence in Teaching Award, given to the country’s top undergraduate teachers of Greek and Latin. He was also a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.
Now, Blumenthal says that Hanson is ‘discredited’, and he refers us to this link (and you must click on the link at this point, for comic effect). Really, this is so laughably absurd that I need not say more. Nevertheless, let us examine the credentials of the man who ‘discredited’ Hanson, and is appealed to as an authority by Blumenthal:
Gary Brecher is the author of The War Nerd, a biweekly column discussing current wars and other military conflicts, published in the the eXile. Brecher analyzes military strategy, tactics, and contexts of ongoing and past conflicts. While Brecher lacks military experience or formal training in war, he has credited himself as self-educated out of a personal, life-long obsession with warfare. He has also described himself as fat slob who spends approximately 8 hours a day on the internet searching for war news. Brecher describes himself as a “war nerd.”
His critique is so poorly reasoned and lacking in content that it avoids easy summary, but suffice to say it is a load of rubbish that calls Hanson a ‘traitor’ for no apparent reason other than the fact that he reached different conclusions than the esteemed Mr. Brecher.
If one is defined by the experts one relies on, I think Mr. Blumenthal has dug his very own (quite shallow) intellectual grave…
Comrades,
Can we say “LOSER”? Sure, I knew you could… Good job, boys and girls…
Look, I don’t mind discoursing with folks who haven’t been there. Many times, they can see something that I missed, some nuance that only those unattached to military service can see. However, I’ve also got some 4000 hours of combat aircrew time with the Navy. I’ve been there and done that, and that, with 4 or 5 dollars will get me a cup of joe at the local Starbucks.
Seriously, though, there are certain nuances and attitudes towards war that those who’ve been there can understand far better than those who’ve only pushed toy soldiers around a table. You can study war, and you can examine it and research it and discuss it, both tactically and strategically, but until you’ve been on the pointy end of the stick, you can’t really fathom everything that so suddenly becomes crystal clear to the veteran.
Not all veterans have similar views or experiences, but they have certain understandings that go beyond textbook learning. I’ll never claim to be a typical veteran, or to speak for all veterans, but I do know that certain things are universal.
This fellow spends his time reading and fantasizing. He’s got about as much credit to my mind as the D&D player who thinks he understands medieval combat.
Respects,
Gwedd
(and you must click on the link at this point, for comic effect).
Boy you weren’t kidding were you ….And as it turns out? it’s even an understatement. I just gotta believe Maxi didn’t think to read the bio. I hope you pasted the bio in Maxi’s Huff piece.
Aw man, WAR NERD vs Hanson?? Jesus Christ. War nerd is a pathetic, self-hating sociopath with some talent for writing amusing but poorly sourced ‘reviews’ of conflicts he has read about on the internet. Yes reviews, like movie reviews, this little sleaze gets off on war porn like it was entertainment.
He hates himself, he hates the people around him and he hates his country and humanity in general. Obsessing over war is his vicarious way of enjoying humanity’s suffering.
Check out this quote:
Since I never even finished my AA degree, I took that kind of personally. I guess it’s my fault for not getting into Yale on pure merit like Bush did. That column got me so furious I daydreamed about driving down Highway 99 to Hanson’s farm and setting all his orchards and vineyards on fire.
Futile, pointless rage, really with himself, but directed outward at a world that justifiably despises him. And Blumenthal quotes THIS idiot as an authority over Hanson? Don’t get me wrong, War Nerd’s little essays are amusing, I’ve read through a few of them myself, but he’s clearly a pathetic loser and a fool with no real understanding of military history and no understanding of the human condition that underlies a society’s attitude to war. That’s why Hanson is so interesting, because his classical training gives him insights into the way war’s practice changes, but the human condition remains constant.
War nerd hates humans, he doesn’t understand humans. He thinks he does, he doesn’t. This is a person emotionally stuck, probably forever, as an angry teenager. Notice how he complains endlessly about the heat in Fresno? MOVE, YOU JACKASS.
Listen to this idiot gloat:
It was no contest. The Romans surrounded the Helvetii and started stabbing their way through the mass of warriors, then the civilians. As they advanced, the legions would herd a few saleable-looking women and children away from the killing. They were sent to holding pens in the rear to be sold as slaves. The main body of Roman soldiers kept working through the mass of Helvetii, stabbing and stabbing. Roman soldiers were taught to use the short sword-”gladius,” which is where “gladiator” comes from-to stab, not slash. Stabbing made a deeper wound, more likely to tear up a guy’s guts and give him a fatal infection. The stab was also quicker than the big dramatic downward smash those hammy heavy-metal barbarians were addicted to. At the end of the battle, they had slaughtered 220,000 men, women and children-60% of the whole tribe. Must have been exhausting too. Imagine the sheer hard work it took to kill that many screaming, scrambling people with the Roman short sword, not much bigger than a Bowie knife.
Yeah imagine! Ooh, I’m getting a hard-on here.
One day ‘War Nerd’ going to eat the gun. No one will come to his funeral.
Ahhh. I see you’ve made his acquaintance before – this is my first. Should I be thinking Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons, perhaps?…
Comic book guy isn’t tenth as hatefull.
I do actually feel sorry for him, he’s not a real psycopath, he’s just full of rage and unable to dig himself out of the dead end his life has become. His kind are dime-a-dozen on the net, angry ranters stuck in an endless loop. He’s what Eminem would be if he was fat and had no musical talent.
Brecher is not, at the end of the day, a bad guy. Some of his fellow sickos on Exile are genuine sociopaths though. Now that I think about it, I guess I was being a bit harsh saying that he really gets off on war porn, he just feels alot of rage and violent war stories sooth him like violent video games and heavy metal music have millions of angry teenagers befor him (myself included). He’s a guy stuck, unable to grow up.
I guess I’m contradicting myself from the first post, but I’m trying to be fair here. His writing is angry but it doesn’t have the gloating, sickly sexual tone to it that a real loon takes on as he writes about violence.
That’s the subtle line between the angry young man and the genuine psycopath. Some of his fellow exile writers, like the one that slobbers over russian rape and murder cases, and the one that screws and degrades prositutes are real psycos though, and I mean that.
You want to take a shower after reading their stuff, Brecher dosen’t have that flavour.
ARE YOU KIDDING ME?
Blumenthal bases his “discrediting” of Hansen on that tin foil hat wearing moonbat?
I read a piece by that guy a few months back and I’m still looking for my jaw after it fell to the floor following my perusal of the first paragraph. My pet cat Aramas knows more about war than this guy.
Staggeringly ridiculous, isn’t it?…