Does Diana Johnstone Believe Her Own Bullshit?

In the interest of keeping up with one of my favorite Balkan revisionists, I read the latest installment of the ongoing saga of Diana Johnstone Versus Reality, and I found myself wondering--as I did frequently during my months-long slog through her delusional epic Fools' Crusade--to what extent she actually, sincerely believes the garbage she writes?

In her case, this question is a bit more interesting than it would be if it were applied to a clumsy propaganda tool like Michael Parenti; Johnstone actually seems to have done a little actual research in her work. Unlike some other revisionists, she occasionally throws some stray facts which would not be readily available to readers of nothing but mainstream news coverage of the Balkan wars. It goes without saying that her facts are very carefully and selectively chosen to match her argument, and usually taken very much out of context and presented out of proportion to their actual import in the grand scheme of things, but that is exactly the point. In her writings on Kosova, for example, she is obviously aware of the existence of the Kosovar Albanians underground parallel government and health care system from the 1990s, as well as the high numbers of students at the University of Pristina, and the use of Albanian-language texts from Hoxha's Albania.

But how does one acquire those facts and yet miss so much of the context surrounding them? How does one know that Albanian-language schools were importing textbooks from Albania without also learning that Serbian authorities had been clamping down on the production of Albanian-language texts--indeed, the teaching of or even the use of the Albanian language--for years before that? How does one know that the KLA had become a heavily-armed, popularly supported guerrilla army without knowing that Ibrahim Rugova had been leading a non-violent movement of resistance against a police state which responded with further repression and terror for years?

I am past wondering why a so-called "progressive" chose to side against an oppressed, impoverished minority against a well-armed and oppressive minority--Johnstone's bias is less understandable than Parenti's naked admiration for neo-Stalinist brutality, but it is so thorough and relentless as to be beyond discussion. While "Fools' Crusade" made her preferences clear, it did not explain them. She was forever twisting facts and data and random quotes in an effort to cast doubt on the generally accepted version of events in the former Yugoslavia, without ever producing a compelling reason to accept the need for such a convoluted re-reading of what seems quite obvious. Of course, there is a ready audience of gullible would-be leftists and knee-jerk anti-Americans eager to sop up any critique of Western hegemony as long as it sounds coherent and reasoned. True believers don't need to scratch the surface to see the logical inconsistencies and factual errors tied together with the weak thread of bogus "anti-imperialism".

I get that; I understand why there are people willing to believe this garbage, and why this kind of shoddy pseudo-scholarship can get published and read and even receive favorable reviews from people who desperately want to believe what she is saying. There are well-meaning who don't know enough to recognize the fraudulent hodgepodge of scattershot insinuations and mischaracterizations for what it is, and who have no motivation to do the very small amount of reading and critical analysis needed to blow the illusion of a cohesive oppositional critique to pieces.

And as noted above, I don't even question her motivations anymore--she is a collectivist at heart, a dogmatic leftist who has internalized the idea that nations can be 'progressive' or 'reactionary' as corporate entities; internalized this notion so much so that she slips into the language--and the mindset--of the implicitly racist ethno-nationalist without missing a beat. She is what she is.

But I still wonder--idly, perhaps, since I care nothing for the woman except so far as she continues to cloud the discourse on the Balkans--what goes on in her mind as she goes about her business. In place of honest inquiry and diligent research, instead she scours the recent historical record for the very few, select facts which--removed from the living texture of history, shorn of any relation to the other disparate tidbits of reality she has gathered, and forced into a predetermined narrative--serve to do little more than feed into paranoid tribal mythologies and further the bitterness and isolation of the Serbs she pretends to care so much about.

And then, I wonder how she and her ilk sleep at night.