Saturday, September 30, 2006

"Fools' Crusade" Chapter Two [1]

After 22 posts, devoted to 40 pages of text (that's 1.8 PPP {'Pages Per Post'} for those of you keeping score at home), I finally was able to bid Chapter One, "THE YUGOSLAV GUINEA PIG," a fond adieu.

Even as I was ripping Johnstone's logic, moral bearings, and selective use of facts to shreds (not that I'm a particularly knowledgable or astute critic; shooting rhetorical fish in a barrel is tedious work but in the case of Balkan genocide deniers, someone's gotta do it), I was repeatedly struck by the impression that the entire chapter had the feel of an extended introduction. So many different themes and arguments were introduced and breezed through, so many assumptions were briefly introduced, and so many premises were referred to, that after going through the entire chapter in detail the reader is bound to expect further elaboration in coming chapters.

After all, Johnstone makes no bones about it--she is going against conventional wisdom in this book. She is making claims that Western governments, Western-dominated international organizations, mainstream media outlets, and the bulk of Western intellegensia colluded either deliberately or by unconscious acceptance of faulty imperialist logic and distorted facts. That's a pretty sweeping claim. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

And yet, as we've seen, she covers a lot of ground in Chapter One. It is not only a matter of questioning the conventional understanding of events, as we have seen--anything more than a cursory reading of her book so far reveals that Johnstone has embraced an ideological framework directly at odds with notions of individual rights, individual identity, and--most notably--individual conscience and responsibility.

Taken along with her blanket dismissal of genocide charges against the Serb leadership, suggestions of fascist conspiracies directly traceable to World War II, implied charges of an Islamic fundamentalist jihad, and a decades-long Western strategy to dismember Yugoslavia, Johnstone's explicit endorsement of the logic of collectivist group identity along ethnic lines and her insistance that international law somehow recogzine the tribalist dismemberment of a multi-ethnic nation-state is staggering; she isnt' merely jousting with conventional wisdom about the Bosnian War, she is refuting the Enlightenment, secular Western tradition.

You would think this would require more than 40 pages.

So I begin Chapter Two--"MORAL DUALISM IN A MULTICULTURAL WORLD"--with the expectation that the rest of the book would go on to flesh out the themes and arguments laid out in Chapter One. I have my sources ready (it is worth mentioning again that, by and large, Johnstone relies on the same books and articles I, and most likely anyone reading this blog, have read; her ability to quote approvingly from books such as Silber and Little's Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation while completely ignoring the inescapable conclusions the authors draw is quite amazing). I have my previous posts up on another browser window, since I assume we will be revisiting the same issues, and it wouldn't hurt to have me previous comments handy.

In short, I begin Chapter Two expecting Johnstone to really bring out the big guns. This, I suspect, is where the choir she is preaching to expects to get the payoff. Chapter One was the appetizer; now we're ready for the main course.

It took all of one page before the sinking feeling of deja vu confirmed itself; my hopes that her arguments would become more intellectually vigorous and substantial were cruelly mocked. After drearily trudging my way through the disingenuous, rhetorically muddied, conspiracy-insinuating Chapter One, I had hoped to encounter more full-blown, fleshed-out argument which are at least worth engaging. In Chapter One she had, on occasion, stumbled across a valid point or two; I was hoping to sink my teeth into some of these legitimate points in order to sharpen my intellectual focus and grasp of the events.

Alas, no. Chapter One, it turns out, was an introduction to nothing. She already has her cards on the table. In Chapter Two, she simply moves on to the next half-baked, occasionally incompatable mishmash of misused fact and tenuously implied insinuation.

Keep in mind, this book was published in 2002, not 1996. Many of the uncertainties and much of the misinformation that prospered during the chaotic uncertainty of the war has since been cleared up. At least, in the universe you and I live in. In Johnstone's world, fact-gathering and analysis stop wherever is convenient for her thesis.

Which is all a very long, convoluted way of saying this: Johnstone begins Chapter Two with the tired, discredited notion that the most famous and bloody single mortar attacks on Sarajevo were committed by the Bosnian military against its own people.

Yes, she brings these old charges back up, as if they are fresh, unknown to the reader, and unexamined by outside observers. After all the bombast and bluster of the first chapter, THIS is the best she can do. Johnstone has played her game so far as if bluffing is beneath her, clearly implying that she's holding such a great hand there is no need for her to stoop to our level and play the game. And then she shows us what she's got. And it's nothing.

In short, Chapter Two promises to get ugly; I've browsed through enough to note that we will be treated to the revelation that there were no concentration camps in Bosnia and that the allegations of mass rape were fabricated. For all her intellectual posturing, for all her efforts to play the cooly objective "progressive" intellectual, it all boils down to lying through her teeth on behalf of her ultra-nationalist allies. As it turns out, her tediously constructed thesis has leading precisely nowhere; her pedantically footnoted book, cobbled together from a hodge-podge of sources either dishonest or dishonestly used, adds up to less than nothing.

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