"Fools' Crusade" Chapter Five [20]

CHAPTER FIVE: THE NEW IMPERIAL MODEL

[Some concluding thoughts]

The book Fools' Crusade consists of an introduction, a short conclusion (which I will begin to briefly consider in the next post), and five rather long chapters. Two of these five chapters amount to little more than sustained and relentless (although not focused or persuasive) attacks on a nationality. Chapter Four searched far and wide across the history of ethnic Germans in order to bolster claims that Yugoslavia was destroyed partly as a result of resurgent Prussian/Hapsburg hegemony. And now Chapter Five, which dispenses with the relative calm and moderation of the preceeding anti-German screed in order to indulge if naked bigotry. She is not the slightest bit subtle about this--Albanians, we are assured, are a hateful, uncivilized people who are unable to restrain their bloodlust against Serbs when incited by outsiders. Like wild animals, they simply cannot resort to reason or empathy.

What to say? There is no rational response to much of what Johnstone says in this chapter. It is not enough to point out how flawed, dishonest, and selective her use of facts is. It is not enough to point out how biased she is when choosing who to belive and who to doubt. Throughout the entire book, Johnstone has operated from the premise that ethnic groups are homogenous, static, and clearly defined. Furthermore, she accepts as a given that they have collective identities and qualities which transcend temporal and spatial divides. By the end of the book, this troubling subtext has become explicit and even central to her argument. The first three chapters of Fools' Crusade centered on a simplisitc critique of Western hegemony and American foreign policy along with a distorted history of events in the former Yugoslavia, all mixed with a healthy dose of conspiracy mongering.

But here, we've had little more than crude, quasi-fascist race-baiting. It was not fun reading this chapter. What is truly depressing is to realize that she felt obliged to write it. The tiresome dreariness of her worldview almost makes me feel sorry for the woman.

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Coming up next--the exciting Conclusion to Fools' Crusade.

"Fools' Crusade" Chapter Four [13]

CHAPTER FOUR: THE MAKING OF EMPIRES

BETWEEN THE VATICAN AND THE COMINTERN

And now to the final section of this chapter. With this post, I can finally say adieu to this incoherent mess of crackpot theories posing as analysis. Apparently, 13 is sometimes a lucky number!

However, before I examine that section, I would like to briefly revisit the previous section, if only to emphasize how ridiculous and tenuous Johnstone's ridiculous conspiracy really is.

Although most of this section focused on the figure of Otto von Hapsburg (who, despite her best efforts, simply fails to live up to the sinister figure she tries to create), in the final few paragraphs she briefly details the placing of other members of the dynasty in Austria, Hungary, and Croatia. I only mentioned this, without documenting exactly how this placement was done. That was probably a mistake on my part--while I was right to dismiss this entire section as hogwash, I do the readers of this blog a disservice by not documenting her lunacy on this particular point. You have plodded through Johnstone's inanities with me, so it is only fair that I share the opportunity to have a laugh at her expense.

Here, then, is her description of one of the three prongs of the sinister Hapsburg plot to regain the throne throughout Mitteleuropa:

"Otto's second son, Georg, took up residence in Budapest in 1993, obtained Hungarian citizenship as Gyorgy, and says he looks forward to representing Hungary in the European Parliament once that country in turn joins the European Union. Meanwhile, the young Hapsburg sits on the board of the National Museum (site of his royal wedding reception) and directs programming for a popular Hungarian radio station."

My God--the horror! He's already got his feet in the door of the National Museum! Can the overthrow of Hungary's nascent democracy be far behind?

The joke is, indeed, on Johnstone. But she's a humorless oaf, clueless about her own desperation. The final paragraph of this section begins with this quote:

"The disintegration of Yugoslavia was encouraging to this hypothetical restoration in a number of ways."

And there you have it--the woman who cautioned against accepting the veracity of first-hand accounts of gang rape has just spent several pages of her book discussing a "hypothetical restoration." Good Lord. I don't know how her brain handles all the intellectual acrobatics necessary to keep this charade of an analysis going.

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So, other than Germans and a "hypothetical restoration" of the Hapsburgs, who else is a member of the vast anti-Serb conspiracy?

Why--the Vatican of course!

Yes, the Catholic Church was the enemy of the Serbs because it didn't like to see the Western Balkans slip from Catholic rule and fall under the dominance of an "Orthodox monarchy." Which, of course, ceased to exist before World War II. But never mind. Johnstone also throws the pre-WW II Soviet opposition to Yugoslavia's existence into the mix, just to spice things up.

Does she update either of these factor to reflect the six decades of Yugoslav history after World War II? Don't be silly. And at any rate, her interest, as always, is not to honestly evaluate her "evidence" but rather to subversively guide the reader towards the predetermined conclusion. Which, as it turns out, leads us back to Germany--the final paragraph briefly touches on the post-WW II period, only to point out that Yugoslavia was "once again" trapped between a hostile Vatican and a hostile (after the break with Stalin) Moscow. Conservative German Catholics, we are assured, were prime movers n the crusade to undermine Yugoslavia's socialist regime. We are assured that:

"The reunification of Germany in the form of a takeover of the Democratic Republic by the Federal Republic marked the victory of this strategy."

"This strategy" being the utilization of a Polish Pope to undermine Communist rule in Eastern Europe. And so, the collapse of the Warsaw Pact turns out to have been nothing but a plot to return the Catholic nations of Eastern Europe to the German sphere of influence. Except for the Catholic parts of Yugoslavia:

"But from the viewpoint of the Catholic German rollback, Yugoslavia was not ahead but behind, a bit of unfinished business."

Not content with rewriting Bosnian, or even Yugoslav, history, our Ms. Johnstone is now rewriting the entire history of the end of the Cold War as crypto-fascist Teutonic/Catholic takeover of East Europe.

And it is on that truly bizarre note that, without any further explanation or clarification, Chapter Four ends.

Any question?

"Fools' Crusade" Chapter Four [12]

CHAPTER FOUR: THE MAKING OF EMPIRES

2. RECLAIMING THE HAPSBURG HERITAGE

My entire review of "Fools' Crusade" has been premised on the notion that Johnstone's ideas need to be dragged out into the light of day and exposed. It hasn't always been fun, and I do sometimes wonder if this entire project hasn't been an exercise in overkill, but for the most part I think it's been worthwhile. Her ideas have found enough currency in certain fringe circles that the risk of further contamination is at least worthy of concern. I have well-meaning friends who have internalized at least some of the revisionist history of the Bosnian war; I once had to play the part of scold at a party when an acquaintance quoted "some Canadian military guy from NATO" on the subject of intractable ethnic hatreds in Bosnia, and the impossibility of applying guilt to any one party. This person was willing to listen when I explained who General MacKenzie was and why one shouldn't take his commentary at face value.

The left-revisionist view of the Bosnian war (brilliantly summarized and rebuked in this article by Marko Attila Hoare, taken from the website Balkan Witness), while marginalized, poses a real danger to developing a clearer understanding of the past and building a better future. The left-revisionist distortions play on left/liberal/progressive sympathies and biases, framing their distorted version of events in terms of anti-imperialism, anti-war, and (and Johnstone explicitly does from page one of this book), anti-globalism. Johnstone and her like-minded peddlers of this debased and withered pseudo-radicalism know which buttons to push and which keywords to drop into the text. Throw in some references to past US actions in Central America, access to oil, and subtle hints of a fascist conspiracy against Serbia and you will surely find some willing, if not necessarily well-read or particularly reflective, young progressives willing to believe the worst. If you can drop sinister hints about support for an "Islamist government" even as the powers that be can't seem to pin bin Laden down, and you've got yourself the makings of an imperialist war project that simply must be resisted.

Perhaps I'm being too cynical and glib. Or perhaps I'm just angry because I am a (no longer so young) left-liberal progressive, and it disgusts and outrages me to see the language of liberation and human rights defiled in the service of two-bit fascism and drearily tribal collectivism. And it is this very outrage which has fueled me as I have patiently and systematically reviewed, to this point, 192 pages of Diana Johnstone's vile book. I make no claims to the quality of my writing or my analysis, but I do hope that by having taken her to task and left the record of one non-specialist's experience with the book, I have done some small part to undermine the edifice of disingenuous analysis and deliberate misinformation she has constructed.

That said, with the last seven pages of Chapter Four I appear to have reached a point of diminished returns; her analysis has wandered so far off the track that it simply isn't worth the time and effort required to rebut them. Suffice it to say--in part two of Chapter Four, she argues that the surviving members of the Hapsburg aristocracy are partially responsible for the Yugoslav wars. And yes, she seems to be serious. Otto von Hapsburg, she contends, had enough sway over German public opinion that he was able to push the German government into "war" against Serbia. And, what's more, the Hapsburgs have set themselves up in Croatia, Austria, and Hungary as potential princes if--I'm not making this up--Europe reverts to monarchical rule in the post-Communist era.

She does her best to make this sound like a reasonable argument, but what we have here is the story of Otto von Hapsburg, a very intelligent and capable aristocrat and--as if this should be any surprise at all--a political and cultural conservative (why one should be surprised to find an aristocratic heir to a deposed monarchy to be something of a reactionary is not explained), who has dedicated his life to maintaining political and cultural ties in the Catholic lands his family once ruled. We can discuss the wisdom or the usefulness of his life's work, but it's quite a leap to go from that to stating that the Hapsburgs have positioned themselves for a restoration.

That von Hapsburg seems to be something of an elitist, a Catholic partisan, and a bigot against the Orthodox East only gives Johnstone something to work with. The family's real enough ties to Croatia are entirely understandable, yet Johnstone somehow seeks to convince the reader that these powerless if still well-connected nobles somehow wield the power to crush states and unleash war. If you're interested, this section covers pages 193-197, in case you want to check to make sure I'm not exaggerating.

So, to sum up--Johnstone believes that Yugoslavia was destroyed by a newly unified Germany, carrying out the revived foreign policy of the Third Reich, under the influence of the Hapsburg monarchy. And somehow this woman was able to find a publisher for this book.

"Fools' Crusade" Chapter Four [11]

CHAPTER FOUR: THE MAKING OF EMPIRES

THE PIED PIPERS OF FRANKFURT [continued]

The saga of Joschka Fischer continues; apparently we are to believe that he is almost single-handedly responsible for Germany's decision to intervene in the Bosnian war. And by "intervene," we are to understand Johnstone to mean "revive the foreign policy of Nazi Germany."

In case it needs to be reiterated, the Nazis instituted a policy of genocide in Yugoslavia during the occupation, partially carried out by their proxies in Ustashe Croatia. Puppet regimes were set up, Jews were systematically annihilated, and ethnic Serbs were left at the mercy of Pavelic's deranged regime.

And, somehow, Johnstone wants to convince the reader to believe that this was, essentially, no different from the foreign policy of Gerhard Schroder. Correction--she doesn't seek to convince the reader at all, or at least not to any great extent. Despite the pretense she makes of laying out a case for a historical continuity of German foreign policy dating to Prussian times, she makes this incredibly hyperbolic claim without acknowledging how extreme it truly is. Serb nationalists who feel that Western observers of the recent wars overlooked Nazi and Ustashe atrocities against Serbs might want to consider how Johnstone's claims trivialize the true scale of this history.

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Eventually, her bizarre fixation on the rise of Joschka Fischer leads us to this bizarre claim--the decision by Germany to send peacekeeping troops was a return to German imperialism in the Balkans. Yes, the German contributions to that woefully ineffective force in Bosnia and the decision to use air power to enforce UN no-fly provisions constitutes a repeat of Nazi foreign policy in the Balkans.

This section is long and meandering, but can summed up as simply this: Sending German air power to Bosnia was a psychological reminder of past atrocities. I have written previously about her tendency to give anthropomorphic qualities to collective groups; this section is a fine example. The implication is that Serbs as a group would be traumatized by the reappearance of German warplanes; in her world, "collective memory" is not a figure of speech but rather a literal phenomena.

She asks "why it must be German air power," when she has already acknowledged that newly reunified Germany was the most powerful country in Europe; the war in Yugoslavia was infamously hailed as the dawn of "the age of Europe." The US and the UN were more than happy to let the EC--and then the EU--deal with Bosnia for quite some time.

The above-mentioned anthropomorphism combines with some pretty sketchy pop psychology to produce a theory of that Germans transferred their guilt from World War II onto the "evil Serbs", a transference which necessitated military confrontation with a "new Holocaust." She has mixed her chronology quite a bit here--we're in Kosovo, in 1999 all of a sudden, without missing a beat--but why quibble with that? And anyway, the Albanians were, as you might remember, natural fascists and the inheritors of a Nazi client state just waiting for their Teutonic patrons to return in force.

And so part one of Chapter Four sputters to an end, with some admittedly ugly anecdotes of Albanians greeting German soldiers with Heil Hitler salutes and other fascist claptrap. Which provides Johnstone with a wonderful molehill on which to plant the flag proclaiming "Here is Mount Nazi!" She mixes and matches assorted quotes and scenes in order to create the illusion of a mass movement of Albanians flocking to sign up for SS all over again. I have to hand it to her; it's quite a spectacle. Given the widespread atrocities all over the former Yugoslavia, and the tens of thousands dead, it's quite a feat to locate the nexus of your outrage on a parade of liberated Albanians welcoming NATO troops in a parade.

This alternate history of Germany and the Balkans ends, rather blandly, with this little gem:

"In January 2002, after early resignations of the Frenchman Bernard Kouchner followed by the Dane, Hans Haekkerup, the post of UN administrator of the Kosovo protectorate went to a German, Michael Steiner, Chancellor Schroders former foreign policy advisor. Many things had changed in 50 years, not least the fact that Germany and the United States were now on the same side."

Where does one begin with such a statement? Had West Germany and the US not been "on the same side" for decades prior to this? Does she even care? I think not--when the next section begins, she immediately moves on from this crude statement. And by "moves on," I mean "moves back in time"--a thousand years.

"Fools' Crusade" Chapter Four [10]

CHAPTER FOUR: THE MAKING OF EMPIRES

THE PIED PIPERS OF FRANKFURT

Here's how this section begins:

"To pursue a Balkan policy so similar to that of the Third Reich, Germany had to convince itself and others that it was doing quite the contrary."

Even though the last section made the comparisons between Germany in the 1990s and the Third Reich explicit, I am still stunned that this is the benchmark she is setting. This is beyond hyperbole and even gross exaggeration; this is delusional.

And yet, she doesn't stop--she portrays the rise of the Green party as a smokescreen to hide Germany's Prussian militaristic heart from "the Russians and other victims of Nazi aggression" so that they would agree to German reunificiation. This obsession with past wrongs--and the assumption that later generations assume the guilt for the sins of their ancestors--explains a lot about her worldview.

She follows with a brief synopsis of the career of Green leader Joschka Fischer, who came to the party from a rather more revolutionary and militant far-left background. And was willing to make the sort of compromises necessary in order to hold high office. There might very well be something sinister in his rise to power, but her relentless focus on Fischer (who we've met before in the book) is absurd.

Then comes this quote:

"In 1994, the conflict in Bosnia took a new turn. Secretly armed by Islamic countries and supported diplomatically by the United States, the Bosnian Muslims were on the offensive in Bosnia itself, although the media studiously ignored Muslim attacks or military advances."

I remember CNN showing live footage of Bosnian Army movements during the failed offensive aimed at breaking out of Sarajevo. I don't know which media studiously ignored Bosnian Army activities during any part of the war, but it wasn't the Western broadcast media Johnstone loves to rail against.

Her gross exaggeration of the extent of Bosnian successes in 1994 is matched by the disproportionate emphasis she gives to the foreign mujahideen and their contributions to Bosnian military successes. I don't mean to discount their activities, neither their genuine military successes or the brutality of their means. I'm in record in this blog as disapproving of both the actions of the Islamist volunteers and the lax oversight the SDA-led government exercised over them. But the implication that they were somehow crucial to a mostly mythical change in military fortune is all out of scale to their true impact on events. They were a serious moral flaw in the Bosnian Government's cause. Johnstone studiously ignores the plank in her own eye while returning again and again to this splinter.

She goes on to imply that the siege of Sarajevo was not a siege at all (she is less explicit on this point than Michael Parenti), but rather a cynical facade maintained by the government in order to solicit Western sympathy. She then states that in 1994 "the Bosnian Serbs were on the defensive and more disposed than the Muslims to make peace," at which point we can safely assume that the reality train has left the station and left our dear Ms. Johnstone behind. There are grains of small truths and stray facts scattered throughout this giant edifice of distortion and deliberately myopic misrepresentations of ephemeral moments as fundamental shifts, but not nearly enough to justify such a wrong-headed interpretation of events.

One either gets it or one doesn't. For all her obsessive attention to detail when it suits her motives, Johnstone tends to lob statements like that without citation or elaboration. Her ideal reader won't know any better, or won't want to. The rest of us can only stare in disbelief.

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I've been out of town for a few days. This is the final section of Part One, but rather than rush through the rest I'll return to it tomorrow. I want to get this review back on track and finish Chapter Four in the next few days.

"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.

"Fools' Crusade" Chapter Four [8]

CHAPTER FOUR: THE MAKING OF EMPIRES

SELF-DETERMINATION AS ETHNIC DETERMINATION

This is tiring. The worst thing about conspiracy theorists is that they just won't stop; they invest so much energy and time into constructing their alternate reality it's difficult to keep up. Johnstone's barrage of pointless detail and her carefully constructed edifice of selective facts isn't as imposing as she would like to believe it is, but it is maddeningly elusive. Like any conspiracy theorist, she keeps the reader distracted with peripheral issues and sinister-seeming quotes from disparate individuals while failing to address her own central argument--that Germany is primarily responsible for breaking up Yugoslavia and unleashing the wars that ravaged that now-defunct country.

I very much doubt that any person reading this blog is unfamiliar with the unfortunate consequences of Germany's rash decision to recognize Slovenia and Croatia (the European Community's ridiculously narrow window of opportunity to apply for recognition also played a big part, but since Hitler didn't rule the EC Johnstone isn't interested in this angle--it doesn't have the same pizazz to blame bureaucrats in Brussels). I also doubt that anyone reading this blog is unaware of the political conditions in Yugoslavia at the moment of Germany's unilateral actions.

The myth of German responsibility for the war simply doesn't stand up to even the most cursory scrutiny; considering her general evasiveness and her tendency to rapidly skirt around incidents and facts rather than dwelling long enough to give her reader a chance to pause and reflect on the logical and factual inconsistencies in her arguments, it's rather surprising that she has chosen to devote an entire chapter to this ridiculous premise. Perhaps she hopes to overcome her audience with sheer volume. There might be some merit to this tactic: I'm finding myself growing increasingly unwilling to even engage her "ideas" by this point. For most of this book, she has been wrong-headed, factually inaccurate, and unwisely or immorally premised. But her analysis always seemed grounded in some warped view of reality. In this chapter, however, the connections she is trying to draw are not merely tenuous and ill-advised, they simply don't exist. She might as well claim that the Freemasons were behind the breakup of Yugoslavia; it would be plenty easy to marshal just as much evidence to support that theory.

Still, this chapter contains a few howlers worth commenting on.

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After snidely describing the reunification of Germany as "a unilateral takeover of the German Democratic Republic in the East by the Federal Republic of Germany" (another Western plot against an innocent socialist victim, no doubt), Johnstone makes it clear that anyone who took German assurances that they would not be repeating "the aggressive policies of the Third Reich" were dupes. Note that she does not hedge her bets with something along the lines of a return to "traditional German militarism" or some other reference to expansionist and militaristic German tendencies dating to the Prussian state; she specifies the Third Reich. Her reference point is the Nazi period; the decision to set Hitler's foreign policy as the bar which post-1990 German policy in the Balkans will be judged is hers, not mine.

This is the same Diana Johnstone who considers comparisons between the horrors of Srebrenica to the Holocaust to be rash and driven by emotional hyperbole rather than a sober consideration of the facts. Can we expect her to apply this rigorous standard to evocations of Nazi aggression when discussing NATO actions in Yugoslavia?

We shall see in future sections. This one dwells, at some length, on reunification and the sinister implications of the rebirth of a united Germany in the heart of Europe. And in case there is any doubt that she blames Bonn rather than Belgrade for the carnage in Yugoslavia, there is this little gem:

"Although Germany's support to the breakaway republics dealt a fatal blow to the peaceful life together enjoyed by Yugoslavia's peoples,..."

She then implies that Germany took in Serb refuges only to transfer Nazi war guilt onto individual war criminals; she lists three specific cases tried in German courts by request of the ICTY, all of which she implies were not only questionable cases but which were typical of German harshness with individual Serbs, who could serve as scapegoats for Germany's Nazi past.

She closes this crass and intellectually bankrupt section with this howler:

"The exceptional readiness of German courts to condemn Serbs contrasts disturbingly with the absence of any proceedings against Wehrmacht officers who massacred thousands of hostages in occupied Serbia in 1941."

First, I should note that she has earlier pointed out that no German courts took responsibility for trying Nazi war criminals after World War II. The fact that the Allies dealt out victor's justice at Nuremberg and had no interest in allowing German courts that kind of jurisdiction--especially when complete de-Nazification was not yet accomlished--should be blindingly obvious, but this is Diana Johnstone we're talking about. And why the reader should be shocked that German courts wouldn't try officers for war crimes during the Nazi period is beyond me.

And that is the end of this section--four pages of screeching "The Nazis are back!"

"Fools' Crusade" Chapter Four [7]

CHAPTER FOUR: THE MAKING OF EMPIRES

THE NEW UTOPIA: PEOPLES WITHOUT BORDERS

This section is the Twilight Zone of Johnstone's book--for four pages, Johnstone argues strongly against the very mentality that has underlined her book to this point. Why the discrepancy? Because this time, the people who are preaching ethnic unity and the incompatibility of that unity with secular, cosmopolitan democracy are Germans.

Her ability to discern national conspiracies, mass movements, and sinister foreign policy strategies based on the words and deeds of a handful of NGOs based in Germany (or supported by German foundations) is impressive. I've no doubt that there is something to her critique, in a limited way--Germany and Austria most likely have encouraged the self-determination of a wide variety of smaller nationalities throughout Eastern Europe. And I'm sure they did so for very cynical reasons--what better way to undermine the new European order after the German Empire had been diminished and the Austrian no more?

This section discusses a hodgepodge of different groups, founded in different places at different times--all the better to mix them together in order to create the illusion of a unified social, cultural, and political crusade. Johnstone insists that the attempts between the two World Wars to stir up nationalism in the East, and the call by another group in 1971 to overcome national boundries, were linked. In her version of history, there can be no doubt that they were; but considering that nearly fifty years, and a great deal of history, separate these two examples one would hope for at least a modicum of elucidation. None is forthcoming.

She doesn't even miss a beat when she compares this organization's call--in 1971, remember--to turn national borders into administrative borders to the German push

"--in Yugoslavia--to transform administrative borders into national frontiers. The apparent contradiction is explained by the fact that in both cases German influence increased."

The fiction that Bosnia's borders were mere administrative divisions has been soundly and decisively refuted; her continued use of this tired and easily disproved propaganda lie is remarkably brazen and sloppy. You see her theme--the Germans were only interested in independence for Slovenia and Croatia because this would expand the German sphere of influence.

She has discussed the Alpen-Adria before, and its role in the breakup of Yugoslavia. After touching on this again, she goes on to warn ominously that German nation-destroying will not end with Yugoslavia. Every minority, no matter how ill-defined, had the potential right of self-determination. She is correct to point out that this process is dangerous because national identities were still being formed in Europe, and that the process as described by these--again, non-governmental--groups could potentially empower a savvy elite. Without even bothering to note that these are merely lobbying groups, not the Wehrmacht spreading ethnic fragmentation and discord at the point of a bayonet, it is fascinating to read Johnstone discussing such valid and nuanced criticisms of the concept of nationalism and national identity in the same book which is so heavily premised on the homogeneous and static nature of Serb nationalism. Ms. Johnstone is fluent in several languages, but she seems to have acquired the word for "irony" in any of them.

And the irony builds--this German ideology of the Volkstate is a direct threat to democracy since the concept of majority rule is contrary to the well-being of a minority operating under the principle of collective identity. And any minority will automatically be oppressed by the majority in a multi-national nation-state. I have to wonder--has the women read her own book?

What does this all mean? Well, it means that Germans hate the Serbs, since you will remember that the Serbs are a "nation-building" people, versus the "nation-splitting" Croats. Another "nation-splitting" people? The Kosovar Albanians, who have been getting a lot of attention in this section. Albanians, you might remember from far earlier in the book, are prone to be fascists. So says the lady who's indignant at German attempts to create collective identities for the smaller peoples of Europe.

It's instructive that her objection to the German doctrine of the "rights of minorities" could, word for word, apply to a critique of any collectivist national identity--it undermines the concept of individual liberty. It is truly amazing that she could write this section on the heels of the 176 pages which preceded it.

"Fools' Crusade" Chapter Four [6]

CHAPTER FOUR: THE MAKING OF EMPIRES

THE RETURN OF THE VERTRIBENE

A short section which can be easily summed up--after World War II ended (my--that was quick!) ethnic Germans were expelled from countries throughout Eastern Europe. These millions of expelled Germans formed a sizable, and motivated, political bloc within post-WWII Germany.

Leaving that at that, Johnstone then quotes Vertirbener (the term translates as "driven out" and refers to these expelled Germans) Rupert Neudeck, who openly sympathized with Muslim rape victims on an emotional level, since he remembered the mass rapes that German women suffered during the advance of the Red Army during the war. Rather than empathizing with him, or at least allowing that the man had his reasons for his strong feelings, Johnstone cooly opines that his judgement was distorted, even as the emotional nature of his appeal increased their impact.

Johnstone believes that the vertriebene like Neudeck deliberately and systematically transposed German memories of Red Army mass rapes with Serbian atrocities in Bosnia. In other words, she psychoanalyzes the German publics collective reaction to the news coming from the former Yugoslavia.

She conclude with the implication that the very notion of "ethnic cleansing" was a German construct imposed on the situation by way of transferring German guilt about World War II into self-righteous indignation at the atrocities suffered by German women at the hands of barbaric Slavic aggressors.

And that is how this bizarre little section ends.

"Fools' Crusade" Chapter Four [5]

CHAPTER FOUR: THE MAKING OF EMPIRES

ETHNIC IMPERIALISM AS ETHICAL IMPERIALISM?

Johnstone summarizes the development of German foreign policy towards Eastern Europe (and specifically the Balkans) in this section. She begins in the closing months of World War I, when Prince Max von Baden submitted a paper suggesting that Germany should couch its imperialist ambitions in idealistic language. "Ethical" is the word used.

I did not adequately discuss the end of the previous sections: Johnstone argues that the ideal of the folk-state is incompatible with the modern nation-state, because the folk-state is not only ethnically homogenous but also predicated on the notion that a people fixed into a certain kind of social (and, by implication, political) development. On this point I absolutely agree with her. Apparently, this is bad when Germans believe it, but not when Radovan Karadzic does.

What von Baden was getting at was this--Germany should present its eastern imperialism as an enlightened liberation of small peoples. This would create a new monolithic political entity out of fragmentation, to counter other non-German powers in the region.

Ignoring that she is merely discussing a paper submitted by a member of the nobility in the twilight of the German Empire, Johnstone plunges ahead with her contention that she has exposed a constant--and fundamental--theme in German foreign policy towards the Balkans. Berlin and Vienna were already engaged in such a policy, she avers--ignoring that all the Great Powers were meddling in the Balkans at the time.

The Weimer Republic was committed to continuing this policy after the redrawing of Europe's map at Versailles, according to Johnstone. I am no expert on German history; she might very well be correct, but what of it? Besides the loss of territory, there were large German populations across Eastern Europe, and the the long-term stability and legitimacy of the new nations of Eastern Europe could hardly be considered a settled matter to all German citizens. In light of Nazi aggression and atrocities, it is of course difficult to empathize with German grievances in the inter-war period, but just because Johnstone insists on casting the Nazi shadow over all of German history does not mean the rest of us must follow suit.

Still, it must be conceded that she is correct when she asserts that those estranged German minorities did indeed provide the pretext for Nazi expansion in the period leading up to World War II. It's instructive to note that she even uses the word 'pretext' as I just did, even as she simplistically asserts that this 'pretext' was, in fact, the substance of German foreign policy predating the rise of the Third Reich.

She closes with the observation that the Nazis sought to break up the countries they occupied or conquered by selectively 'liberating' certain aggrieved national minorities. This policy would be most effective in the east, where nationalism had come late and state-building was on shaky ground. While cynical--and utilized for loathsome ends--this policy was certainly rational, from the Nazi point of view. What are the implications of this policy in practice?

Johnstone--remarkably--says absolutely nothing about this. Nothing. This section ends with the above observation; the next section picks up after World War II ended. As always, she implies without elaboration or sustained analysis. She has the reader thinking that the horrors of Nazi policy in the east were actually merely the manifestation of ongoing German policy towards the region; to dwell too long on the point might weaken the vague impression she has managed to create. Time to move on.

"Fools' Crusade" Chapter Four [4]

CHAPTER FOUR: THE MAKING OF EMPIRES

NATION-STATE VERSUS VOLK-STATE

Johnstone's determination to prove German responsibility for war in Yugoslavia is tiring. It's easy to understand why some of her admirers praise her erudition and wide-ranging field of knowledge--she's willing to go far and wide in search of quotes and anecdotes which fit the script she's writing. Her work in this section is quite impressive.

First, she quotes Rupert Scholz on the "consequences of World War I," in comments that she then attributes to a broad effort to whitewash German actions in the Balkans in both World Wars. Scholz maintained that Germans had a historic mandate to demonstrate solidarity in the region, specifically with Slovenia and Croatia.

Johnstone makes a crucial mistake next--she assumes that she can misrepresent the meaning of a quote simply because she has taken it out of context. Here is the quote:

" "Once such a recognition is carried out, then the Yugoslav conflict is no longer a matter of an internal political problem of Yugoslavia, in which there should be no international intervention," he pointed out. "

She then attempts to summarize the gist of Scholz's comments for him:

"Once Croatian and Slovenia were recognized as independent states, it would be possible, by obtaining an UN Security Council mandate, to exercise "international security responsibility" by means of military intervention."

And now she tells the reader what she wishes you to believe Scholz's meaning really was:

"Scholz's meaning was clear: rapid recognition of Croatia and Slovenia was designed not--as was officially claimed by the German government--to prevent military conflict, but to internationalize it, in order to justify outside military intervention, with German participation, under the auspices of either the UN or the OSCE."

[As always, underlined words in quoted passages were italicized in the original text.]

Johnstone's attempt to alter the rather clear meaning of Scholz's quote is clumsy and obvious; a sign that she is less shrewd and more deluded than I suspected earlier in this book. I no longer think she is a cynical ally of Serbian ultra-nationalism. I think she believes in her paranoid fantasies.

------------

The rest of this section consists of a chronological leap that defies rational analysis. She quotes Scholz (who, in Johnstone's alternate universe, is apparantly vested with the authority to speak for all Germans at all times) speaking against calls for stability for its own sake (I'm paraphrasing slightly). His point was that a rigid insistence on existing borders might trap a people within a state hostile to their well-being or rights. He spoke of "unwanted" and "unnatural" states.

What did he mean by that? It's a good question, especially considering the ideology of the Bosnian Serb Republic versus the reality of Bosnia. Does Johnstone see the irony? Of course not--she is focused on the Germans. And for the next page and half, she segues from Scholz's 1991 speech to the writings and policies of--you guessed it--Adolf Hitler, without blinking an eye. In her telling, Scholz was merely articulating an old German idea of the "volk-state," an ethnic entity that trumped the civil state. Hitler was just one end of a consistent German spectrum of thought on the subject.

If you would like to discuss Johnstone's summary of Hitler's vision for the Third Reich, it's on page 170 of this book. In the next section, she attempts to elaborate the continuity of racialist, expansionist foreign policy in German from the time of the Kaisers right up to UN peacekeeping missions in Yugoslavia. You've been warned.

"Fool's Crusade" Chapter Four [3]

CHAPTER FOUR: THE MAKING OF EMPIRES

WHY "SERBIA MUST DIE"

After a few sentences detailing a "vehement press campaign" that supposedly turned the German public against the Serbs (considering that she only quotes a handful of print journalists and their--admittedly widely circulated--magazines, she must consider Germans either particularly easy to dupe or primed and ready to hate at a moments notice), Johnstone embarks on a critique of German involvement in the Yugoslav wars (yes, the entire chapter--one out of five in the whole book--is just on Germany) that is, if nothing else, novel--she ignores chronology altogether.

Others have already noted that Johnstone and others have blamed German recognition of Slovenia and Croatia for igniting a war which was already, at that point, in the works. What I mean is something more brazen--she skips around from decade to decade, pulling quotes from the Nazi period and from the time of Bismark, all to illustrate the true nature of German foreign policy in the 1990s. And what's more, she apparently means for the reader to take this seriously.

She moves back and forth from era to era shamelessly, such as in this quote:

"Nineteen months after German reunification, and for the first time since Hitler's defeat in 1945, the German media resounded with condemnation of an entire ethnic group reminiscent of the pre-war propaganda against the Jews."

In her version of reality, Germans had striven to mend fences with the victims of Nazi aggression, but this "stopped short when it came to the Serbs."

The quote "Serbia must die" was, as she openly admits, from 1914. To her, this is relevant because Germany in 1991 was following down a well-worn historic path, once again going on an aggressive campaign to punish and/or eliminate the troublesome nation of Serbia.

This section is only a little over two pages long; a full page of which is taken up with a detailed description of Nazi reprisal killing policy in occupied Serbia during WW II. This section contains more hard figures and data than entire previous chapters had, when applied to the Muslim and Croat communities. Other than wallowing in war porn, the only possible point of this section might be to illustrate Serb fears of German interference. Which is not what she discusses in the next section.

And that, honestly, is all there is to this section--the German press vilified Serbia in 1991; Nazis did bad things in Serbia in 1941. This is the foundation on which Johnstone will build her thesis.

"Fools' Crusade" Chapter Four [2]

CHAPTER FOUR: THE MAKING OF EMPIRES

1. GERMANY IS BORN AGAIN

Not much time to post at the moment, and at any rate it wouldn't hurt to allow another day for anyone who reads this blog from time to time to really soak in that last quote.

Just to wrap up this short, one-page opening to part one:

Johnstone, having laid her cards on the table regarding Germany, elaborates her theory that Germany embarked on a superficial crusade of humanitarian interventionism in the Balkans ostensibly to atone for its Nazi past but actually to continue traditional German--and, yes, Nazi--policies of expansionism in the East and military aggression against Balkan nations. The presence of Green politician Joschka Fischer as foreign minister gave the new crusade a facade of progressive respectability.

Which is where she closes this rather startling opening. In the next post, we will see that the Nazi smear isn't her usual throwing-mass-innuendo-at-the-wall-to-see-what-sticks strategy; she is going to run as far as she can with this theme.

"Fools' Crusade" Chapter Four [1]

CHAPTER FOUR: THE MAKING OF EMPIRES

1. GERMANY IS BORN AGAIN

Part 1 of Chapter Four, "Germany is Born Again," is a long section in which Johnstone--who never ceases to bemoan imprecise Holocaust parallels in discussions about Srebrenica--makes the extended argument that reunified Germany after 1990 embarked on a continuation of Nazi foreign policy. Having alluded to this previously in the book, she proceeds to devote 29 pages to this curious thesis.

After pointing out that the Yugoslav crisis allowed newly reunified Germany to flex its diplomatic muscle within Europe for the first time, and noting also Germany's push for recognition of Slovenia and Croatia (admittedly hasty acts which Balkan revisionists generally point to as somehow demonstrating German guilt for the outbreak of war), she poses some very odd questions:

"Which Germany was this? Was it the old Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm and the Third Reich pursuing its centuries-old Drang nach Osten? Or was this a new Germany, purified by penitence for the Holocaust, henceforth devoted solely to the universal promotion of democracy, civil society, and human rights" Or was it, in some very odd way, a combination of both?"

Johnstone never runs out of strawmen to joust with--the second option is, of course, impossibly idealistic and laughable. This is a frequent strategy of hers--to create an impossibly idealistic caractiture of her opponents so their views appear easy to refute.

But you see where she's going here--Germany is either the rebirth of Nazism, or the world's first purely altruistic nation. Or, she suggsts, a combination of both.

Can't wait to see what that would look like? Well, this chapter is just for you! Because Johnstone goes on to claim that German foreign policy in the Balkans was a blend of "ideals and interests", which wouldn't be notable except that she honestly believes this is somehow unique. At any rate, don't think for a second Johnstone has taken her eye off the ball:

"For Germans, assertion of humanitarian ideals as justification for foreign intervention was widely understood as a form of compensation for their Nazi past. And yet, ironically, this intervention can be shown to have marked a return (consciously or, more often, unconsciously) to precisely the forms of foreign intervention characteristic of traditional German power politics, notably as pursued by the Nazis."

Let that soak in for a day or two. We'll pick up from there in the next post.