Diana Johnstone Shows Her Cards

In the comments section of this post on this blog, an anonymous poster passed along the following link:

"Why the French Hate Chomsky" By DIANA JOHNSTONE"; he or she also suggested that "I think some of her criticism is driven by emotional issues." I rather glibly agreed with him/her, intending only to suggest that her "analysis" is neither honest nor serious.

Frequent reader Owen countered, quite rightly, that there is nothing "emotional" about this latest screed from the well-known genocide denier; her work on such issues is rather deliberate and self-aware. As I noted several times in my lengthy deconstruction of her truly awful work on the Bosnian War, Johnstone clearly knows enough about the facts and information which would obliterate her painstakingly crafted arguments to avoid them completely; nobody can negotiate the minefield of contrary information and eyewitness testimony as successfully as she does if they are actually unaware of those inconvenient complications. Johnstone knows what she is doing.

But what, exactly, is it that she is doing? This rambling, open letter-turned-editorial screed doesn't address Bosnia except in passing, but it does reveal some of the larger ideological agenda that Johnstone and other advocates of a Red-Brown/anti-liberal democracy coalition are crafting. I no longer believe that these people are unconsciously stumbling into the embrace of petty fascists such as Hamas and the Serbian Radical Party; Johnstone, Chomsky, and others have concluded that the far right are their best allies in a fight to undermine the liberal order. Johnstone set out merely to scold the French media and intelligensia for being insufficiently deferential to Chomsky, but the scope of this open letter soon widens greatly. In order to make her case that Chomsky was a "victim" of a concerted Western ideological campaign to discredit him, she chooses to elaborate what the ideological underpinings of this supposed campaign are.

First off, though, the obvious needs to be stated--Johnstone is a terrible writer. She veers between addressing Chomsky directly ("Dear Noam"; "to see you in person") to referring to him in third person ("deep geopolitical significance that Chomsky has") in the same paragraph! Of course, the reasons why Johnstone is such a poor writer are easy enough to ascertain--good writing is clear writing, and clear writing is a product of clear thinking, a reasonable mastery of the subject material, and most of all of intellectual honesty. Johnstone seeks not to illuminate but to obscure and obfusticate; she does so through tortured logic, selective use of decontextualized facts, and a disingenuous misrepresentation of opposing viewpoints and contrary information. If she were a more effective demagogue or a crudely emotional populist, she might be able to somewhat transcend the feeble foundations of her arguments, but Johnstone is a drearily pedestrian propagandist and therefore her rhetoric is thoroughly hampered by her decision to dissemble, deceive, and mislead. She cannot write clearly because her ideas would not withstand the scrutiny which direct presentation would subject them to.

But while Johnstone cannot bluntly state the collectivist/anti-liberal ideology she espouses without setting off alarm bells, it's all there in this letter. And not by accident--Johnstone has rather neatly laid out the underlying rationale for the far-Left embrace of, and advocacy for, genocide denial.

Her assertion that the "the animosity you have aroused in certain circles in France may have less to do with linguistics than with your role as the most prominent American critic of US foreign policy" might be attempt at humor, but is also a neat summation of how Johnstone, Chomsky, and their comrades deflect any and all criticism of their ridiculous claims and dissembling--by dismissing all specific criticism of specifics as merely general attacks on the general idea of a critique at all. Chomsky, in other words, is not attacked for supporting Hamas, or the Khmer Rouge, or for making any of his many inaccurate, misleading, and/or dishonest statements about American foreign policy and history--no, all attacks on him are clearly simply a reaction to his status as a critic of American foreign policy, period. Of course, Johnstone is a little too shrewd to actually say that; but this standard defense gets used with such regularity, there is little need to give her the benefit of the doubt.

The rest of the paragraph after the above quote is worth noting:

"My own opinion is that this role as virtual symbol of systematic moral criticism of American foreign policy is the fundamental cause of the campaign against you that began over thirty years ago. To my mind the uproar first over Cambodia and then over the defense of Professor Robert Faurisson’s right to express his views freely was essentially a means to the end of discrediting the leading American critic of United States imperialism."

And there we have it--there is a "campaign" against Noam Chomsky, and the issues at the core concern his statements on the genocide of the Khmer Rouge and the Holocaust denial of Robert Faurisson. Fine--at least she does not ignore the elephant in the middle of the room. So what to make of this?

First, though, Johnstone needs "to put this argument in context". No doubt. The context, then, is the Cold War--specifically, American hegemony over the West during that period. Johnstone is not entirely incorrect to describe Europe at this time as being split between "the two victorious nations" (United States and USSR), but her analysis seems to reduce the situation to nothing but a division of spoils, with nothing to choose between the two. Citizens who lived under the two different systems might beg to differ with that.

But that is another issue. What is of interest here is how Johnstone, as she so often does, dresses a simplistic dichotomy up in the guise of nuanced, sophisticated analysis. Not very well, but she tries--French intellectuals were split between the elite who were secretly anti-American and the more pubilc (and presumably less qualified) intellectuals who were either pro-American or, as she prefers, "anti-French."

That is really the crux of the matter--Johnstone is truly a statist and a collectivist, who can only conceive of people as being part of a group of some kind. What "French interests" are or might be is something she doesn't feel needs to be be addressed. What is important to her is that far too many of these French intellectuals don't feel that they need to be lectured to by Noam Chomsky; the reason for this, as it turns out, is that "Chomsky's criticism is laden with facts", a statement as bland as it is questionable. But she runs with this idea for a full paragraph; it is striking how self-evident she believes this to be. Chomsky deals in a large volume of facts and clear analysis--evidently this is not up for discussion. If you disagree with Noam Chomsky or object to his general critiques, then you are clearly uncomfortable with facts and clear thinking. End of discussion.

It is quite tiresome to follow her plodding thought process by which she repeats Chomsky's standard defense of his activity on behalf of the Khmer Rogue and Robert Faurisson's Holocaust denial--that his activities did not constitute support for either, but rather for the rather vague notion of "free speech." This allows her to avoid the necessity to clearly state what she or Chomsky actually think about either "issue"; the notion that there is any validity to the charges in question is simply irrelvent to her. Yet she goes on to speak of the Holocaust ("Shoah myth" as she soon comes to refer to it as) as "dogma."

Now, I have serious objections to laws which criminalize such garbage as genocide denial, and if that was truly all that Chomsky and Johnstone are concerned with, there would be no argument. But that has never been the case; neither one of them has ever had the moral honesty to discriminate between Faurisson's right to spread his dishonest filth versus the legitimacy of his claims, which are of course complete nonsense.

Johnstone moves right along to the larger claim that the "Shoah cult" has had a sinister effect:

"Initially, Nazi crimes were taught as contrary to humanity in general, but as identification of victims has been increasingly centered on Jews, the effect is to implicitly divide school children between potential victims, namely the Jews, and everyone else, whose innocence is less assured."

This is complete garbage; the Holocaust was an actual historic event which actually happened at a certain time and place, and was carried out by actual people against actual people; it was not an abstraction which imposes a template on all people at all places and times.

Johnstone, however, assures the reader that this very template is now applied to situations which, she states without explanation, do not qualify as "genocide" (where have seen from the review of "Fools' Crusade" that Johnstone is in no position to lecture anyone on the meaning of the term). And yes, one of those places was Bosnia, where the Muslims eagerly accepted the role of "Victim" in order to play the proper role in order to curry American favor. Srebrenica, it turns out, was nothing more than a shrewd act of foreign policy.

There is really nothing more to be said. The rest of the article treats Chomsky's visit as if it were an event of immense geopolitical significance; Johnstone seems genuinely mystified that the entire French media didn't simply turn over their cameras and microphones to the cranky America-hating linguist to let him lecture the entire nation. As for her argument tying the Cold War to her implication that "genocide" is little more than an ideological tool by the West to divide and conquer the rest of the world, all that remains to note is this--many have noted that Bosnian genocide denial is incredibly similar to Holocaust denial. Yet it is no coincidence that so many of the people involved in the the former have also dabbled in the latter. Bosnian genocide denial is not, as it turns out, like Holocaust denial--it is Holocaust denial. We can thank Diana Johnstone for spelling that out.

Fantastic Critique of Diana Johnstone's Dishonesty

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.

"The Destruction of Yugoslavia" by Branka Magas--Part Four

Part Four: Systemic Collapse (1990-91)

The nine articles collected in this section detail the final collapse of socialist, Federal Yugoslavia. The demise of the League of Communists created a power vacuum at the federal center. Milosevic ruthlessly capitalized on the opportunity to assert his power as the leader of a Serb republic where the political center was moving to the Right and extreme nationalism was being openly promoted by the ruling "Socialist" party--the same "Socialist" party which was pushing for greater privatization of the economy.

Magas does a marvelous job of conveying a sense of how unsettled and anxious the country was by this point. The specter of the Army forming a new political party while nobody quite knew who the commander of the nations' military was exactly, for example, serves as a powerful reminder that Yugoslavia was vulnerable because nobody was at the helm. And make no mistake about it--this was the work of Slobodan Milosevic.

This entire section should be required reading for Michael Parenti and others who claim Yugoslavia was destroyed from without by Western intersts, or Diana Johnstone and all those who claim that it was the Milosevic regime which sincerely tried to keep Yugoslavia together. Their disingenuous, convoluted arguments differ in some respects (although intellectual coherence is hardly a strength of Bosnian Revisionism), but they like all baseless conspiracy theories they rely on a carefully studied, deliberate ignorance of context and foundational knowledge.

The revisionists serve two purposes: they provide rhetorical cover for certain reactionary and far-Right factions to assert their agenda under various, more palatable pretexts; they prop up this fiction by appealing to the other end of the ideological spectrum, pitching their poison both to the receptive ears and willing minds of the authoritarian (often Stalinist) Left, and among well-meaning but ill-educated leftists, progressives, liberals, and internationalist-leaning moderates and conservatives.

Johnstone's pretenses regarding the Constitutional and legal issues regarding the breakup of Yugoslavia and the role the Milosevic regime played in it would not bear the scrutiny of any individual familiar with this material. Magas does what Johnstone and other advocates of Greater Serb centralism only claim to do--take the constitution and the governing institutions of socialist Yugoslavia seriously.

"Genocide in Bosnia" by Norman Cigar--the book Diana Johnstone has never heard of.

I presume that most readers of this blog are already familiar with the excellent Genocide in Bosnia by Norman Cigar, a seminal work on the Bosnian war. Even if you haven't read it (an error I encourage you to rectify!), it is highly likely you have heard of it and are familiar with its contents.

So this is not a preface to a book review*; rather, having recently taken the time to read the book from start to finish, I was struck not only by how clearly and forcefully Cigar made his case, but also by the fact that in my readings of Balkan revisionist literature I have, to my recollection, not once come across a citation of or reference to this rather well-known and widely-cited work.

This is rather remarkable, since this book is widely acknowledged to be the first substative work in the Western world on the subject; much of the western 'case' against the Serbian political establishment was at the very least informed by--if not based on--Cigar's analysis.

And yet Diana Johnstone, for example, seemed blissfully unaware of this book while writing Fools' Crusade, a book in which she found ample space to devote to attacking David Rieff's Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West (and Rieff himself, naturally), as well as other works of journalism and advocacy. Ed Vulliamy, author of Seasons in Hell, still draws the ire of Balkan revisionists angry about the Living Marxism/ITN lawsuit. Yet, Johnstone, Parenti, and their fellow-travelors cannot seem to find time to deal with this rather large elephant in their cramped little room.

Telling, I'd say.



*And thank goodness, since I'm about to begin a review of Radha Kumar's Divide and Fall, with Philip Cohen's Serbia's Secret War waiting in the wings!

Louis Proyect review of Diana Johnstone's "Fools' Crusade"

A couple of weeks ago, American Marxist Louis Proyect left a short and rather cryptic comment, on my blog. I was curious to see what I might have written to draw his attention, since while he has written from time to time on the Balkans (from a predictably far-left Serbian-apologist perspective), he hasn't been particularly active in the Balkan revisionist project. Then I stumbled across his review of Diana Johnstone's "Fools' Crusade from the "Swans" website.

I had originally planned to consider this review at length, but considering that I devoted several months of my life to critiquing the original book, and considering that I have been so busy lately I have waited over a week to begin this review (despite the date of this post, I am actually writing this on Wednesday, March 19), I thought it best to simply make a note of his review and move on.

I am not sure how much of this chapter-by-chapter review represents Proyect's own "understanding" of the breakdown of Yugoslavia as opposed to simply a synopsis of Johnstone's text. I suspect that the distinction is pointless--they are clearly drinking from the same well, although Proyect's take on matters is more explicitly Marxist. He is honest enough to label Johnstone's portrayal of ethnic Albanians as "unsentimental," which is putting it rather mildly.

There may be little point in linking to this article now that I've chosen to pass on an extended rebuttal (at least for now), except an yet another piece of evidence that an alternate narrative of the Yugoslav wars has indeed taken root in certain intellectual circles. I mention this because I was reading the introduction to Christopher Hedges seemingly dreadful I Don't Believe in Atheists out of curiosity, and I was struck by Hedges angry denial that religion played any part in the Yugoslav wars; rather, he insisted that they were entirely a product of the economic decline of Yugoslavia. When a somewhat-mainstream liberal is parroting the Susan Woodward/Diana Johnstone line, we know we have a problem.

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I hope to return to more regular and substantive blogging in the very near future.

"Fools' Crusade" Chapter Three [22]

CHAPTER THREE: COMPARATIVE NATIONALISMS

3. CROATIAN NATIONALISM: THE END OF YUGOSLAVIA

In this section, Johnstone summarizes the first 900-1000 years of Croatian history in three quick pages. With a focus on the development of Croatian nationalism, of course. And what is the nature of Croatian nationalism? While the Slovenes are dismissed as elitist, money-grubbing sellouts, the Croats are ungrateful pretenders whose nationalism is half-baked and cowardly, compared to the heroic Serbs next door.

Cue the trumpets...

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While the Serbs rose up from squalor and oppression to fight a working-class revolt of the peasants against their perfidious Muslim overlords, the Croats schemed and plotted in the comfort and safety of the Catholic Hapsburg Empire. That, anyway, is the gist of the first paragraph.

The rest of the opening section of part 3 is a triumph of selective history and what can only be a deliberately clueless summary of the development of Croatian nationalism--clueless because, while the (selectively gathered) facts she deploys are not, on the face of it, inaccurate, they are deployed to bolster a biased and ignorant reading not only of Croatian and Serbian nationalism, but of the phenomena of nationalism itself.

We encounter Johnstone at her most disingenuous here; raising questions against one side of an argument while blatantly failing to apply the same rigorous standards of proof against the other. While grossly oversimplifying the process by which Serbian nationalism developed, she puts the development of Croatian nationalism under a microscope--while ignoring evidence that the development of national identity was never a straightforward, clear-cut, or organic process. Rather than lie about the complexities and contradictions of the Croat experience, she rather more cleverly ignores the same in the experience of the Serbs and others.

We shall see this process at work in the next post.

"Fools' Crusade" Chapter Three [21]

CHAPTER THREE: COMPARATIVE NATIONALISMS

WHAT ARMIES ARE FOR

This final section of part 2, "Slovenia: The End of Solidarity," gets in one final snide shot at the anti-militarism of the Slovenian ruling elite. Similar to the previous section, there's less than meets the eye here.

The first paragraph notes that independence for Slovenia meant the loss of privileges by JNA army staff and their families. Yes, Diana Johnstone seems to believe that a primary motivation for Slovenia's secession was a run on real estate--the homes of career officers and staff. Apparently, she feels the eviction of JNA staff from their state-owned homes was a human rights catastrophe. I don't wish to trivialize the genuine hardships such actions certainly had on the families involved, and the loss of pensions she also cites counts as a genuine hardship and tragedy in my book. But her outrage at the loss of access to state-owned assets by high-ranking military personnel contrasts rather badly with her indifference to many of the victims of the Yugoslav conflicts.

She goes on to note that the Yugoslav army was designed for defense, and that many people in the army sincerely believed in the Yugoslav ideal and in the Titoist slogan of "brotherhood and unity." All of which is true, but hardly of central importance. The country was breaking up, being torn from the inside by inflamed nationalist passions insufficiently restrained by a federal government ill-equipped to function without Tito at the top.

Johnstone imagines she has caught Slovenia's elite in a hypocritical bind when she notes how eagerly the leadership embraced the possibility of joining NATO. The revamping of the military to meet NATO standards means that local, territorial defense is no longer to be a priority of Slovenia's military.

Well, what of that? The idea is that NATO members look out for each other, and that individual nations, particularly the smaller ones, should no longer focus their resources on (hopefully) redundant defensive forces. Johnstone ignores the obvious rationale behind membership in a military cooperative pledged to mutual defense of its members. It would, indeed, be wasteful and counter-productive for a small member state to focus on autonomous defense of its sovereignty in such a situation. But I doubt very much that she cares about the reality of the situation. It simply provides her with more material with which to insinuate without any constructive argument emerging.

This section--and the part on Slovenia--concludes with the observation that the secession of Slovenia set the stage for a far bloodier conflict in Croatia. This is true enough; it is also an observation made by just about every observer and student of the conflict. Johnstone could have saved the reader a lot of time had she skipped her facetious analysis of Slovenian nationalism and merely stated so.

"Fools' Crusade" Chapter Three [20]

CHAPTER THREE: COMPARATIVE NATIONALISMS

SUCCESS STORIES

One notably theme running throughout Johnstone's book has been the viciously condescending snideness applied to the victims of the war; Slobodan Milosevic receives far more empathy than Muslim rape victims. This second section of Part 2 "Slovenia: the End of Solidarity" is essentially four pages of pointless and irrelevant innuendo disguised as an expose. The theme of this section appears to be "Let me throw in any stray fact which might shed a bad light on the Slovenes."

Her first point is that Slovenian nationalism is what she calls "bureaucratic nationalism," which means that it was driven by an entrenched elite. The entire first paragraph points out that Slovenia is a small country, so independence allowed the republic's political, economic, and cultural elites to suddenly become big fish in the new big pond of independent Slovenia. Once again, the sophisticated and nuanced Ms. Johnstone is shocked and appalled to discover that sometimes, political and business leaders do not act entirely out of altruism and idealism.

The second paragraph claims that Slovenia's transition to democracy (which she puts in quotes--no explanation why) "had much in common with that of Serbia." The parallels she draws are legitimate if, considering that we are considering two republics in the same country, rather unsurprising--politicians were usually former Communist Party leaders, she notes, although why this should be surprising in a formally one-party dictatorship is not explained. She does attempt to slip in an aside about "nationalist dissidents who had been jailed under Tito" who joined the ruling coalitions; in Slovenia's case she names the previously mentioned Janez Jansa; in Serbia's--Vojislav Seselj. Nice equivalence there. Of all the things I can think of to call Seselj, "dissident" is pretty low on the list. Technically true or not, it is clear that is yet another example of her ceaseless efforts to create false equivalences.

Another insinuation she makes--both Milan Kucan and Janez Drnovsek were former Communists, yet nobody in the West complained about this like they did with Milosevic. The point, of course, is to imply that the real problem with Milosevic was that he was a socialist; a common Bosnian revisionist theme.

The next trivia she throws out is the case of Andrej Bajuk, the Argentine expat brought in to be part of the new Slovene government. After noting his right-wing credentials (ties to the Junta in Argentina; ties to conservative Catholicism), she briskly notes that the government he was to join after gaining citizenship was voted out of office, and he was gone. No matter--she gets to smear the Slovenes as fascists by proxy. Or so she seems to believe.

The final two pages concern Slovenia's involvement--led by Jansa, the former anti-militarist turned defense minister--in arms smuggling and covert arms sales to the Croats and Bosnians. The Slovenes apparently made out like bandits. It's not the most inspiring reading; but one wishes Johnstone could summon a fraction of the outrage she displays at Slovenia profiting from violating the UN arms embargo against all of the former Yugoslavia (which, naturally, benefited the well-armed Serbs at the expense of the ill-prepared Bosnian government; and which was applied to all the former republics even after the breakup of Yugoslavia, to which it was originally applied) when she discusses moral outrages like Srebrenica. I have remarked on this many times before, but it bears repeating--for all her pretensions to sophistication and hard-headed thinking, Johnstone consistently displays a naivety about international relations which makes her very hard to take seriously.

As for the snideness I mentioned above, here is the closing paragraph of this section:

"Slovenia, reported the New York Times in March 2000, is described by experts as "a jewel," "a chocolate box," or "Eastern Europe's best-kept secret." Indeed, Slovenia has its secrets, and if they are the best kept, it may be that interest is widespread in keeping them."

Thus Johnstone takes a parting shot at a sinister conspiracy which exists only in her own mind. The hyperbole is laughable.

"Fools' Crusade" Chapter Three [19]

CHAPTER THREE: COMPARATIVE NATIONALISMS

2. SLOVENIA: THE END OF SOLIDARITY

I can't shake the feeling that this review has become bogged down; perhaps this is because I'm trying, and failing, to get to the core of Johnstone's argument against Slovenia. I have concluded that there isn't much of an argument to detect. In the interests of moving on, I'm going to summarize the remaining four pages of this section in a more perfunctory manner than I have been. Johnstone has her criticisms of the Slovene leadership and the Slovene people in general, but they are, frankly, mostly petty gripes which fail to add up to a coherent, believable critique. Therefore, I won't quote much, either.

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Janez Jansa, a leading Slovenian opposition figure from the late 1980s, is introduced in a short paragraph which Johnstone seems to have written so she can point out how he tried to have the word "socialist" dropped from the name of the "Alliance of Socialist Youth of Slovenia." Jansa's claim to fame, at least here, was his involvement in the theft of a secret military document. Johnstone has nothing to say about the document or the case against Jansa and his colleagues; she only wants you to know that their cause was taken up by Western human rights organizations. She notes that their anti-militarism was certain to be popular in "the atmosphere created by Germany's big 1980s peace movement," which performs the neat trick of damning the Slovenes for being too pro-Western and she gets to bring the evil Germans on stage as well.

The Slovene complaints that wealthier, more free-market oriented Slovenia was being stifled and exploited by the centralized economic system, and that its wealth was being siphoned off to fund underdeveloped regions in the south are worthy of discussion--one could argue that while those complaints might have been legitimate, such an imbalance is inevitable in a large nation. Some regions are going to do better than others. Most Americans realize that Montana gets more in federal tax dollars than it pays in. Needless to say, Johnstone is not interested in a sincere discussion of the pros and cons of the Slovene argument.

Instead, she claims that this complaint applies "primarily to Kosovo," which while possibly true (I wonder about Macedonia as well), ignores the elephant in the room which she never mentions; the seat of the Federal government was in Belgrade, the capital of the largest republic, which was poorer and less dynamic economically than Slovenia.

At any rate, she accuses the Slovenes of duplicity, claiming solidarity with Kosovar Albanians after the unilateral elimination of Kosovos' autonomy by the Serbian Republic while refusing to contribute to the development fund. Of course she portrays Serbian actions at this time as part of Milosevic's "constitutional reforms" while ignoring the gist of Albanian grievances, which she dismisses as "secessionist" without elaboration.

One quote worthy of mention:

"From the Serb viewpoint, the Slovenian support to people in a region they would not even deign to visit on account of its "backwardness" was nothing but a totally hypocritical way to promote Yugoslav disintegration in pursuit of their own narrow interests, which had nothing to do with the Kosovar Albanians."

By this in her book, Johnstone has so deeply drank from the well of collectivism--to the point where she assigns corporate identities to ethnic groups, that she quite naturally, and without explanation or citation, is willing to assign thoughts and prejudices to these collective bodies. And, for the umpteenth time, why the quotes around "backwardness"? It's not a quote. In this case, Johnstone seems to be paraphrasing a collective Serb impression of a collective Slovene inclination.

At any rate--the Slovenes smartly chose Western-friendly tactics while Johnstone makes the following claim:

"...in Serbia the reform movement went into the streets in mass demonstrations supporting Milosevic's program of constitutional reform."

Well, that's one way to put it...

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She goes on to compare the slick, Western-friendly Slovenes playing on Western sympathies while successfully smearing Serbian "reformers" as backward communists and dangerous nationalists intent on subjugating the peoples of Yugoslavia. Which, of course, had absolutely no basis in reality. The most important aspect of this section is that while she attributes all Slovene actions and rhetoric as being directed by a manipulative elite, Serbian actions at the time are portrayed as reflecting grassroots origins. There was a strong and sizable anti-Milosevic and pro-democracy element in Serbian society even during Milosevic's salad days before war and deprivation began to corrode his support, but you wouldn't know it from reading this book. All Serbs think, act, and feel alike--and Milosevic merely followed their bidding.

Meanwhile, the conniving Slovenes portrayed themselves as civilized Catholics against a decadent, oriental/Byzantine East. Not a very flattering aspect of the Slovene struggle, but the former Yugoslavia had no shortage of xenophobic and jingoist rhetoric; while such talk is always regrettable and never desirable, all such comments need to be put in context. The Slovene rhetoric, while distasteful, was merely designed to justify a pulling away. There was no desire for partition of a republic and the concurrent expulsions of populations in Slovene plans or nationalist discourse. Johnstone, of course, has not to this point in the book had a word to say about Serbian nationalist claims of Islamic fundamentalists plotting jihad in the cafes of Sarajevo.

A one-page summary of the Slovene 'war' of independence follows; she mostly sticks to the basic facts and lets Warren Zimmerman make the point that the Slovenes had pulled off an enormous PR coup internationally; the real issue of Slovene culpability for the beginning of the war, and the indifference shown to the fate of the rest of Yugoslavia by their actions, gets no real discussion in Johnstone's book. She merely wants us to know that Slovenes were arrogant, elitist snobs with lots of German friends.

And so the first section of part 2, "Slovenia: the End of Solidarity" comes to a ho-hum conclusion.

The next section, "Success Stories," will be the topic of my next post.

"Fools' Crusade" Chapter Three [18]

CHAPTER THREE: COMPARATIVE NATIONALISMS

2. SLOVENIA: THE END OF SOLIDARITY

The previous post closed with a quote regarding the importance of the military as a unifying institution in communist Yugoslavia. Although one might question the legitimacy of a tradition of "brotherhood and unity" being held together by a very large and well-armed military, Johnstone's point is not baseless. Every institution has an institutional culture, and the JNA was largely staffed by officers who truly believed in Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav ideal. And military service was one way in which Yugoslavs of different national groups were mixed together and forced to interact without the familiar comfort of their homes and 'their people.'

However, if one is to turn to the military as the sole defender of national unity when the leaderships of the different geopolitical units are intent on breaking up and separation, not 'brotherhood and unity,' is the direction the political winds are blowing, then what response to the crisis can one legitimately expect? It is one thing to turn to the military as an institution capable of reinforcing and indoctrinating a sense of unity during peacetime or when such unity is a realistic political possibility. It is quite another to turn to the military to hold the country together when it is breaking apart.

Which is not to say it would always, in all cases, be wrong to use the military to hold a country together. But Diana Johnstone implies these issues without actually addressing--or even acknowledging--them.

Furthermore, she ignores the other half of the Yugoslav military system--the territorial defense forces, which did NOT encourage inter-republic mixing, and which, much more than a standard standing army, did have the potential to militarize society.

At any rate, the important point, for Johnstone, is that the Slovenes were insincere and dangerously anti-unity. Also, and most ominously from her point of view, they were pro-Western. As we will see in the next post.

"Fools' Crusade" Chapter Three [17]

[Well, after a too-long break, I have another copy of Ms. Johnstone's magnum opus, and I'm feeling well enough to do more than lay on the couch watching movies and sports, and taking my supper through a straw. It hasn't been a banner year so far.

At any rate, let's pick up where we left off...]

CHAPTER THREE: COMPARATIVE NATIONALISMS

2. SLOVENIA: THE END OF SOLIDARITY?

When we left off, we were considering the following quote:

"In the late 1980s, attractive young Slovenian intellectuals toured Western European capitals to alert human rights activists and anti-militarist journalists to the dangers of Yugoslav militarism. These youthful Slovenes spoke in terms of the values shared notably by German Greens, such as pacifism and human rights."

You can almost hear her sharpening her knives, can't you? Those "attractive young" intellectuals just must have been too good to be true, don't you think? And those Greens they allegedly resembled the most? Cue the orchestra--GERMANS!

She elaborates on this theme a little more; pointing out how the anti-militarist youthful idealists of Slovenia appealed to Western liberal sentiment since they seemed so 'like us.' They said all the right things, opposed all the same evils (death penalty, nuclear power, etc.), and so forth. Most notably, they opposed the militarization of Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav People's Army, the prime instrument of that process. The reliance on localized militia units and the ability to mobilize enormous numbers of soldiers--this was the fourth-largest army in Europe, remember--is not news to any regular readers of this blog, I'm sure.

Let's see what devious undercurrents Johnstone has detected:

"In Yugoslavia, anti-militarism had implications not necessarily obvious to foreigners, since it was aimed at an army that was the last strong Federal institution holding the country together..." "Universal military service was the principal "melting pot" in multinational Yugoslavia, the guardian of the spirit of "brotherhood and unity," the repository of the anti-fascist tradition going back to the wartime partisan struggle."

The image of "brotherhood and unity" being defended by the fourth-largest army in Europe is a curious one, but we should resist the urge to be too glib in dismissing Johnstone's reasoning here. There were many generals in the JNA who truly believed in Tito's vision and who, therefore, had to be removed so that Milosevic had a mainly Serb--and nationalist Serb, at that--leadership at the helm.

We will consider this quote further in the next post.

"Fools' Crusade" Chapter Three [16]

CHAPTER THREE: COMPARATIVE NATIONALISMS

2. SLOVENIA: THE END OF SOLIDARITY

The fourth paragraph ostensibly describes the process by which Slovenia established and strengthened ties to Austria and Italy in the late years of the Yugoslav period; it actually serves to insinuate that the Slovenes were conniving capitalists and snobbish elitists who sought to break up Yugoslavia in order to distance themselves from the non-Catholic riff-raff to their south.

The facts are not spectacular or amazing; one is almost tempted to conclude "Nothing to see here," except for Johnstone's trademark sinister tone. Having established that the decline of Federal power, combined with communist Yugoslavia's relatively open borders and openness to trade with the West, she describes Slovenian participation in this process thusly:

"In 1978, neutral Austria sponsored the foundation of an association called Alpen-Adria to foster such exchanges between provinces within Italy, Yugoslavia, and Austria, which had all formerly belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Cross-border regional groupings were promoted as a way of overcoming outdated nationalisms and ideological differences in the interests of the environment, trade, and cultural exchange. In theory, they were apolitical; in reality, with the benevolent encouragement of Otto von Hapsburg, heir to the throne of the defunct empire, and the blessings of the Catholic Church, Alpen-Adria promoted a strong sense of the superiority of "civilized" Mitteleuropa over the "backward, barbarous" Balkans."

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

What's interesting about this passage is how little of interest there really is, despite Johnstone's obvious attempts to imply underhanded and elitist motivations to the Slovenes. Their leadership took advantage of open borders to develop ties with regional economies? These ties had a strong religious, cultural, and historical basis? This organization was patronized by an heir of the former nobility? And there was a chauvinist slant to this organization? Oh, the horror...

I'm sure there were some insufferably elitist and smug Slovenes looking down at their poorer, less-educated countrymen down south. I'm not defending elitism; I am saying that such an attitude is a pretty lame scapegoat for a war that would tear a country apart and leave tens of thousands dead. The Slovenes were snobs who preferred the company of Catholic, formally Hapsburg peoples. That seems to be Johnstone's case against them.

One last point of interest, in the final sentence--yet another example of her use of quotes when she is neither quoting anyone OR using words or phrases in an unconventional manner. Why is 'civilized' in quotes? Who, exactly, described the Balkans as "backward, barbarous"? She doesn't say.

She goes on to describe a Western left that had lost interest in working-class interests to "issue-oriented" advocacy; that is, for what it's worth, a fair assessment. She claims that this signaled a broader rejection of support for socialism in any form, in exchange for the idealization of "civil society."

So we learn that:

"In the late 1980s, attractive young Slovenian intellectuals toured Western European capitals to alert human rights activists and anti-militarist journalists to the dangers of Yugoslav militarism. These youthful Slovenes spoke in terms of the values shared notably by German Greens, such as pacifism and human rights."

Sounds great, doesn't it? Not if you're Diana Johnstone. Tune in next time...

"Fools' Crusade" Chapter Three [15]

CHAPTER THREE: COMPARATIVE NATIONALISMS

2. SLOVENIA: THE END OF SOLIDARITY

The third paragraph kicks off with this odd claim:

"The 1974 Constitution had increased the independent decision-making powers of all the republics except Serbia."

Johnstone does not explain what she means by this. It may be that she is correct; she provides no examples or explanations of how Serbia's ability to function as a republic was hampered by the establishment of the two autonomous regions within Serbia. This is not to ignore the fact that the granting of autonomy to Kosovo and Vojvodina did diminish the area that the republic government in Belgrade controlled. Cutting Serbia down to size was certainly one of the primary motivations for the creation of the autonomous areas, but it wasn't just Serbia that went from having one out of six seats at the table to one out of eight, after all.

The paragraph continues:

"Because of the veto powers of its two autonomous regions, Serbia was almost as hamstrung as the Federal government, also located in the Serbian capital, Belgrade. The Serbs sought a constitutional revision that would reverse the trend and enable Belgrade to carry out policy in an effective way."

This 'veto power' remains unexplained. Veto power over what, exactly? Over the internal affairs of Serbia proper? Not at all--the provisional government in Pristina had absolutely no authority outside of Kosovo. Over Serbia's voice in the Federal government? No--the other five republics faced the same reduction of the relative strength of their votes as well, as noted above.

The only veto power I can imagine she means would be over Serbia's control over those regions. This is not an unreasonable point--since Kosovo and Vojvodina were still autonomous regions within Serbia, certain issues internal to those two areas were certainly relevant to Serbia's larger interests. Infrastructure issues and other concerns would have been harder to coordinate once the autonomous areas were established, no doubt.

However, I doubt that this is what she means. She has not once mentioned the fact that Serbia was, by far, the most populous republic in Yugoslavia. And the fact that the Federal Government was located in Belgrade was an advantage to Serbia, even if Johnstone chooses not to acknowledge this.

I could get bogged down in trying to figure out what Johnstone is driving at here. Instead, I'll move on--but first, note that in the final sentence of the above quoted passage, it is somewhat unclear whether she meant for "Belgrade to carry out policy in an effective way" at the Federal, or Republic, level. The ambiguity might be unintentional, but I hardly think it's meaningless.

"Fools' Crusade" Chapter Three [14]

CHAPTER THREE: COMPARATIVE NATIONALISMS

2. SLOVENIA: THE END OF SOLIDARITY

This section starts off reasonably enough; the first paragraph plausibly states that Serbia and Slovenia were the two republics most inclined to push for reforms after Tito's death. It is true that there was strong criticism of the mismanagement of the economy coming from both Slovenia and Serbia; her claim that these two republics also were ahead of the others in their criticism of the "political restraints" under the old system is, on some level, true, but would need some serious qualification if the author were at all interested in an honest analysis. I'm not necessarily pointing fingers at Serbia's leadership--Tito's death preceded Milosevic's rise by a few years, for example.

The paragraph concludes with the following quote:

"The political polarization between Serbs and Slovenes which dominated Yugoslav politics throughout the 1980s may be considered the most lethal blow dealt to Yugoslav unity from within."

So much for the promise of the first few paragraphs. Johnstone is attempting to turn a genuine contributing factor--the increasingly independence- and separatist-minded actions of the Slovene leadership--into the key factor in the breakup of Yugoslavia. I'm not suggesting that this was not a contributing factor; but compared to the rise of Milosevic, and the rise of Serbian nationalism, the restlessness of the Slovenes can hardly be considered decisive. One must be willing to overlook the revocation of autonomy for Kosovo and Vojvodina, for example, to consider the Serb-Slovene rift the "most lethal blow dealt to Yugoslav unity from within."

And note the "from within" qualifier; suggesting that external factors might have been even more decisive. The 'suggestion' will become stronger later in this chapter, and is explicit in Chapter Four.

The second paragraph concerns the frequency with which the Yugoslav constitution was revised during the forty-five years of communist rule. Johnstone makes the argument that the defining trend of this ongoing "permanent revolution" was to weaken the federal state while strengthening the republics. Not a baseless claim, although Johnstone as usual ignores concrete reality in favor of the purely (heavily biased) abstract--the reality was that, whatever the various constitutions said, Tito held the reins at all times. The problem with the communist system in Yugoslavia is that it completely relied on Tito, who simply could not give up absolute power, even in death. The absurdly cumbersome rotating presidency almost seems to have been his attempt to prevent anyone from replacing him in status and power even after he died.

Despite my above-mentioned reservations, Johnstone has at least brushed against some valid concerns so far. In paragraph three, as we shall see, she begins to, predictably enough, go off course.

"Fools' Crusade" Chapter Three [13]

CHAPTER THREE, SECTION 1--A POSTSCRIPT

One quick note from the previous section on Serbian nationalism before moving on. I had touched on this point in passing, but it was only when rereading the section in question that this quote struck me:

"To prevent any return to Serbian predominance, the country was divided administratively along geographic lines into republics that enlarged the "home republics" of the non-Serb nationalities while reducing the Republic of Serbia, notably by creating the Republic of Macedonia in what had been southern Serbia and recognizing a new "nationality," the Macedonians, whose Slavic language resembles both Bulgarian and Serbian."

So much to ponder there. For one thing, Johnstone conveniently ignores the fact that Macedonia was "part of Serbia" by virtue of having been conquered by force.

Also, her dismissal of the Macedonians status as a nation isn't surprising in and of itself--we already know that Bosnian Muslims (and, she once insinuated, Montenegrins) are "really" Serbs--except her admission that the Macedonian language is closely related to both Serbian and Bulgarian. So if "Macedonian" isn't a legitimate nationality by her standards, that begs the question--are they "really" Serbs, or are they "really" Bulgarians?

I don't think you'll be surprised in the slightest to learn that she ducks the question entirely.

"Fools' Crusade" Chapter Three [12]

CHAPTER THREE: COMPARATIVE NATIONALISMS

2. SLOVENIA: THE END OF SOLIDARITY

Johnstone's scorn for nearly all the non-Serb peoples of the former Yugoslavia takes many forms and adopts a wide variety of tactics. She sets up her assault on Slovenia and Slovenes at the end of the section on Serb nationalism. Having claimed that the vagaries of the 1974 constitution empowered increasingly nationalist elites in each of the republics at the expense of the Federal government (an argument that is not without merit), she turns her attention to the elites in each republic--rather selectively.

Having argued that secession was nothing more than a continuation of the breakdown of the Federal center after Tito's death (not a word about the rise of belligerent Serbian nationalism, or of Slobodan Milosevic at all in this chapter), she makes the further claim that the republics weren't fleeing from oppression or inequity but towards Western European markets and capital. The leadership of the individual republics scrambled to be first in line to suck up to the European Community (this was before the switch to the EU). This, essentially, is the core of the Michael Parenti the-West-destroyed-Yugoslavia-because-it-was-socialist delusion.

Since all the nations of the former Eastern Bloc were also jockeying for a piece of the pie, the republics of Yugoslavia had to find their own trump cards in order to play on western capitalist sympathies. Their answer, Parenti and Johnstone want you to believe, was to cynically claim they were fleeing Communist oppression from Belgrade.

It's an interesting theory, hampered somewhat by its complete disengagement from reality, but we'll let that pass. Our concern here is the uses to which Johnstone puts this interpretation:

"Throughout East-Central Europe, the light at the end of the tunnel of the Soviet Bloc was the prospect of membership of [sic] the European Union. Far from contributing to a sense of solidarity in the region, this shared ambition often took the form of a race between leaders of East-Central European countries to win the favor of the Brussels institutions by demonstrating that they were more "Western" and "European" than the others."

I always thought that the criteria the EU was looking for involved things like free markets, judicial transparency, human rights records, functioning infrastructure, and so on--maybe Johnstone knows something that the rest of us, including diplomats, economists, and government officials are somehow unaware of.

At any rate, she's established her sordid picture of desperate post-Communist nations scurrying to prove their "Europeaness" to the powers that be in the West (jettisoning a unity that she wants the reader to believe would have otherwise existed between these varied states with often contentious histories) not only to paint a scornful general picture of the immediate post-Cold War aftermath. This is, as I said, a very deliberate segue to the section on Slovenia. The above-quoted paragraph--the end of section 1--concludes thusly:

:As the richest, most northern and most western of the federated republics, ambitious Slovenians (with encouragement from Austria in particular) saw their republic as most eligible to jump the Yugoslav ship and get aboard "Europe." This prospect was by far the most powerful incentive to Slovenia's political class to secede. Slovenia's declaration of independence in June 1991 was the immediate trigger for the disintegration of Yugoslavia."

I don't think I need to point out to an even moderately informed reader that she's got the cart so far ahead of the horse it almost would be better to look for a new horse entirely. What is most aggravating about the above statement is that it is almost true. But not quite. Milosevic had already concluded that Yugoslavia could get by without Slovenia--there were no Serbs there.

But Johnstone wants us to believe that tiny Slovenia and it's lightly-armed troops, on their own, were sufficient to instigate the process by which Yugoslavia feel apart. We will examine her case for this rather startling claim in the next few posts.