The Top Ten Wars Of All Time. Ever.

10.

World War Two:

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1939-1945

I’m a Hollywood producer. American soldiers are noble and handsome. Now I’ve decided German ones are too. Tom Cruise looks hot in his uniform. I’m like that guy from GQ who used to beat off to a picture of Himmler. I’ll just forget about the fact that the guy Cruise is playing was a massive anti-Semite who believed in a mythical Aryan Germany.

I’m a World War II era American general. Those crazy mad Japs are going to fight to the bitter end. What? They want to surrender? It’s a ploy. Let’s drop two Atomic bombs on them to make sure. We can’t have Johnny Communist thinking they’ve got a bigger dick than us. Cancer? What are you talking about? Stop being such a lily-livered appeaser. Give me your lunch-box you fag. I’m gonna beat on you like I beat on Dresden. Churchill says it’s fine.

The Mongol Conquests:

1206-1281

In which a guy started fighting people near him, realised he was good at it, did more of it and never stopped. Then, when he died, he told his sons and grandsons to keep doing the same thing. The Mongols were bringing mass genocide to the Middle East long before the Bushes. Temujin (Genghis Khan to those of you not familiar with real history) was a player when it came to women and happily fathered more children than Keith Allen. In fact, he has 16 million descendants. And this wasn’t because he was a libertine, it was because he was a traditional guy who recognised that it would be rude to conquer a group of people and then refuse the women they offered you out of fear.

The Trojan War:

12th/11th Century BC

Because you can’t read Greek I can’t really explain the whole thing to you but I’ll try and you should use this opportunity to feel bad about not reading Greek.

It’s like this: War is better when it is fictional. In fiction, you can have Gods that are constantly either fucking each other or fighting each other. In fiction, the main character is completely invincible except his heel. Would you get a thousand ships together and spend 10 years fighting outside a massive wall because a pretty guy stole your wife? Nope, you’d just bitch about it. To make it convenient, all the people in this war had little character traits, so it’s like watching a buddy-film in which everyone has their own little foible: one of them is “wily”, one of them tames horses, one of them is “old”… It’s cosy.

First Italo–Ethiopian War:

1895-96

Those tree-dwelling natives couldn’t possibly win out. After all, they never gazed upon the Sistine Chapel, never owned the Pope and they don’t have massive guns. Wait, they do have guns, they got them from us. Now I’ve got a load of justice eggs on my Italian face and everyone at home wants to kill me in an orgy of Imperial shame. Shit. Postscript: The whole thing was eventually re-run in the italo disco/Afrobeat blog wars of 2008.

The Battle for Middle Earth

The Third Age

You’re all thinking about the film but I’m thinking about the book. I can paint pictures in my mind but you need CGI. To you, Gandalf is tall and has a beard, but I know that he actually looks like me. You think Aragorn is the son of Arathorn. He’s actually Aragorn, son of me. In the book, Orlando Bloom isn’t there to screw it all up by trying to engage in po-faced “banter” with that comedy troll from Scotland. It’s just me and my friends slaughtering orcs and making-out with unicorns.

The Crimean War:

1853-56

Probably the only war fought against Russia which didn’t involve the other side bitching about the snow. At least nurses like Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole did stuff and won acclaim. Except Seacole, who was mixed-race, and therefore didn’t count. Weirdly Berwick-upon-Tweed, which became its own special entity because Scotland and England often fought about who had to keep it, was on the declaration of war as one of the participants but not on the peace treaty. This meant that the town was at war with Russia, and then the Soviet Union, for 115 years until the signing of an official peace treaty between the Mayor of Berwick, wildly over-stepping his job description, and a Soviet official.

Franco-Prussian War:

1870-71

When it comes to wars, the Germans never get any props because everyone is too busy giving them a hard time for the massive war they caused by being very evil. But this is a good example of a war which saw the Germans doing what they do best: killing French people really easily. They may as well have been picking them off as they filed out of the Champs Elysees MacDo, it was that simple. It was so easy the Germans even got to use anti-aircraft guns, which they invented for a joke to shoot down hot air balloons.

American Civil War:

1861-65

Forget about slavery, this was about The Kings of Leon going to war, cutting a dash with all their bearded brethren. The Union general at the start of the war hadn’t fought properly for half a century and was too fat to ride a horse. They ended up with a drunk who won the war and went on to be President. The Confederates had Stonewall Jackson who used to fall asleep while he was eating lemons. No-one knew where he got the lemons from, but he always had them. The South will rise again…

The Vietnam War:

1959-1975

You may not think The Doors are cool, but that’s just because you haven’t chased the snake down the river into the garden of the damned. Hendrix played over images of burning jungles, Parisian students marched, and John Lennon wore a caftan while an endless narration grandly intoned: “It was 1968 and the world was burning…” Of course, that whole hemp-smoking student anti-Vietnam thing was totally funded by Mom and Pop, who had made their money selling arms/napalm to the American government. So, John Jr. could do a bit of rebelling at some damn candy-ass liberal arts college (assuaging Pa’s guilt and muting Ma’s burning Vietnamese children nightmares) and then fuck off and become either Ben or Jerry.

The Spanish Civil War:

1936-39

You just had to be there. If you weren’t an oppressed Basque or Catalan you were probably an internationally recognised artist, like George Orwell, who hid his Eton lineage in true hipster fashion and dined out for years to come on stories that involved sharing bread with peasants and ruffling the hair of curly-haired children/ Ernest Hemingway.

Now those first-gen hipsters and wrinkled Marxists weep quietly into their Newcastle Brown Ale, mistily recalling all those times in the past when there was great oppression and a clear good v. evil battle. After all, you didn’t need to worry about losing the actual battles and plunging your country into a half century of dictatorship when you looked pretty cool and could play most of a 12 bar blues on a beat-up guitar.

OSCAR RICKETT