I highly encourage my readers to check out the following article from the New Left Review by Jasmin Mujanovic:
A Fool’s Account: Diana Johnstone, Yugoslavia and Her Delusion
In the comments section below the article, Muhanovic publishes a response from Johnstone; it is typically incoherent and borderline racist Muslim-baiting, and little else. Johnstone has long since abondoned any pretense of being open to easily verified information and well-documented fact, and so her response almost feels perfunctory. She will keep repeating the same tired lies over and over again in defiance of contrary information, or reality itself.
Mujanovic's reply to this rebuttal ends with this bold, clear statement:
"I invite Ms. Johnstone to detail her vision for the Bosnian people. As it stands right now, readers understand her as an active genocide-denier and continued supporter of an apartheid regime which has institutionalized in Bosnia a system of discrimination, revisionism, racism and, most of all, dispossession. I would certainly hope that she has more to offer the Bosnians than the provisions for comfort of their persecutors, exterminators and plunderers."
This gets at the heart of Johnstone's nihilism, and the ammorality of all Balkan revisionists. They have no positive vision for the region, no genuine committment to furthering peace, stability, and justice in the region. Her vision, and that of Michael Parenti and others, is all negative--they know what they don't like, and they seek to fit reality to fit that vision. The fate of the actual people who are the theoretical subjects of their intellectual exercise is of no concern to them.
5 comments:
On a somewhat related topic from Balkan Insight: http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/main/news/28889/
Johnstone's reply to Mujanovic is a lump of dead fish. She doesn't seem to have much notion of political analysis. Setting the entity's genocidal origins, what sort of system does she think operates in Republika Srpska? She seems to have no analysis of current-day FRY to offer other than that the Muslim central government of Bosnia wants to do away with the "Serbian" - sic - part of the federal state. No need to discuss the reality of Republika Srpska and what sort of a regime operates there, or even to come up with the sort of critical analysis of the central government that wouldn't take much effort. Sloppy, shallow and anachronistic. The day job presumably pays well enough.
Jasmin Mujanović wrote: "Likewise, the preservation of the borders of Bosnia-Herzegovina (little changed since about the 14th century, despite the claims of certain nationalist chauvinists that Bosnia was a “creation” of the Communist or current Western regime)..."
After the 1463rd and the collapse of the medieval kingdom, Bosnia was reduced to a province of the Ottoman Empire, without "statehood" and its own borders.
"After the 1463rd and the collapse of the medieval kingdom, Bosnia was reduced to a province of the Ottoman Empire, without "statehood" and its own borders."
Anonymous - so what? Do you mean to say by that the Bosniaks have no right to their country and their nationality? What is certain is that Bosnia in its borders and the Bosniaks are not a "creature of the West, or of Tito's": that is just a Serbofascist propaganda lie intended to delegitimize the Bosniaks and the Bosnian state and nation.
But where the genocidal serbofascist crusaders did not succeed with wholesale mass murder, destruction, rape and terror they will certainly not succeeed with cheap demagoguery and propaganda lies. And no scrap of paper gives their genocidal creature "RS" any legitimacy. I will state the obvious: The Bosnian Serbs are well advised to ask teh BBosniaks' forgiveness and try to make copmpensation for teh evils they have done. Because next time the boot might be on the other foot. Then, possibly the grandchildren or the great-grandchildren of today's chetniks will have to pay for teh sins of their forebears. This is not a threat, it is teh logic of justice denied. Where justice is denied, avengers will be born. If one side thinks irt can keep the territories it robbed through war, then the other side can legitimately and logically claim to win these territories back by the same. And believe me, I will not grieve for the side which started it all in 1992.
Abdulmajid (Friend of Bosnia)
Your fellow Americans on Bosnia, Srebrenica, etc:
http://qlipoth.blogspot.com/2005_10_01_archive.html
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