"Fools' Crusade" part xvi

ABOUT THIS BOOK

The Introduction concludes with this section.

"The purpose of this book is to provide information and analysis to dispute the belief that NATO intervention in Yugoslavia was beneficial."

That's interesting--up to this point, it seemed pretty clear Ms. Johnstone was claiming the war was unjustified. Now she's merely accusing the intervention as not being beneficial?

This requires calling attention to aspects of the Yugoslav crisis and conflicts that are either distorted or neglected in mainstream commentary.

Translation: Look forward to an obsessive focus on minor inconsistancies and nearly irrelevent historical asides.

The comes her Ezra Pound moment; a 16-line channeling of Serbian natinalism, articulated by proxy in all its paranoid, self-aggrandizing, collectivist glory. Here it is:

"The inevitable selectivity may be reproached as evidence of a "pro-Serb" bias."

I don't know about 'pro-Serb' but it certainly seems proactive. Nip it in the bud.

"Inasmuch as the dominant mainstream bias has been blatantly anti-Serb, this is unavoidable in an effort to recover a fair balance."

I almost wish I hadn't already read any of Johnstone's articles or interviews prior to encountering this book. After 13 1/2 pages of intellectual postering, the mask is about to come off.

"However, for what it is worth, I can state at the outset that I am not "for" or "against" any people as such."

Translation: I'm not a racist; it's just that all those Croatians are fascists and the Albanians are terrorists and drug dealers. Why won't they just stay in their own neighborhoods?

"All peoples have their own variants, their own ways of expressing human qualities and weaknesses."

And now the mask is completely off--Johnstone is explicity preaching the gospel of ethnic nationalism, in general race-conscious terms.

"I am "pro-Serb" only if that means that I consider the Serbs to be human beings like everybody else, neither better nor worse."

Boy howdy--when Johnstone decides to go all in, she really commits. She manages to explicity echo the persistant sense of martyrdom that infuses Serb nationalism even while implicitly speaking colletively about Serbian people.

"I have no personal connection with any party to the Yugoslav conflicts. The only thing that may have inspired a special sympathy for Serbs is the fact that they have been subjected in recent years to an altogether extraordinary campaign of racist calumny by commentators and politicians in NATO countries. The slander of an entire people is an injustice for which there is no court of appeal other than public opinion."

The stupidity and dishonesty in this quote hardly merits a response. Still, I'm a little grateful that Johnstone drops her guard like this. It makes my arguement stronger.

She closes this section--and the introduction--with the claim that the NATO intervention was a cause, not a response, to instability and violence in Kosovo; then she summarizes the chapters. And that's it.

Before I leave the Introduction behind and move on to Chapter One, I want to present one last quote, from the last paragraph:

""Because of the constant interplay of past and present events in the Balkans, I have chosen an order that is not strictly chronological."

While she most likely considers this a minor aside, it's quite telling. The stereotype of the Balkans as being an exotic, otherworldly place where ghosts of the past somehow determine the present is not unique to Johnstone. But her throwaway line about her account not being "strictly chonological" is accurate in ways she does not intend. Like most Balkan genocide revionists, Johnstone mixes the chronology of events in Yugoslavia in order to confuse issues of cause and effect, accountability, and so forth. This is bit more truthful than she realizes.