"Fools' Crusade" Chapter Four [9]

CHAPTER FOUR: THE MAKING OF EMPIRES

OLD FRIENDS AND OLD ENEMIES

This section details connections between Germany's Cold War intelligence service and various contacts within Yugoslavia. All very interesting and certainly, in the right hands, her information about continued contacts with Croatian nationalists both within Yugoslavia and around the world might have added an informative nuance to our understanding of the Yugoslav wars. In Johnstone's clumsy hands, however, this information provides us with no insights whatsoever. We are simply told that such contacts existed, and some of them are detailed. And that's pretty much it. The reader is to infer the worst from what for the most part are neither surprising nor illuminating revelations. I'm sorry, but "covert intelligence services maintain contacts in other nations where their country has been involved" is not exactly ground-shaking.

While she has at least gone to the trouble of padding her story of an ongoing Croat/German connection based on a shared fascist history with some espionage backstory, she then moves abruptly to assert the same fascist synergy with Albanians, based on nothing more than personal and historical connections to the World War II regime. Hitler apparently liked the Albanian landscape and its people, which is sufficient to damn them in her eyes. To her, the KLA was nothing more than a rebirth of the Nazi-sponsored far-right Albanian nationalist movement from the war period. Albanians were always Serb-hating latent fascists, and the Germans gave them the weapons and the moral support to unleash their terror on the Serb civilians of Kosovo. In a mere three paragraphs, she has asserted that Germany was responsible for the violence in Kosovo as well.

Those evil Nazis had Serbia surrounded. Cue the soundtrack.