Fools' Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions

"Fool's Crusade" is a masterful deconstruction of the largest and most elaborate propaganda war ever witnessed in modern times. In the wake of the Cold War, the destabilization of Yugoslavia provided Western elites (including the so-called "liberal Left" )with an opportunity to rehabilitate war as an instrument of policy. As a hysterical anti-Serb narrative emerged, the number of Western journalists able to cover the conflict with any degree of impartiality or objectivity could be counted on one hand.

But here, Diana Johnstone provides a powerful corrective to the self-serving mythology that obscured the West's true motives in dismantling multinational Yugoslavia.

Readers will be impressed by the sheer breadth and depth of historical research in this work, and 'though Johnstone does not attempt a comprehensive history of Yugoslavia (difficult in a book this size), she does focus in on the country's historical fault lines in some detail. At no point, however, does the narrative flag or lose relevance. We learn about Croatian and Slovenian seccessionists secretly nurtured by the Vatican and the German BND years before open hostilities broke out. We learn about the deep roots of Albanian irredentism and its cynical manipulation by NATO powers. Most usefully of all, the role of sinister war-mongers such as Bernard Kouchner and Joska Fischer is laid bare for all to see.

With the same balkanist meltdown currently being engineered in Iraq, journalists, policy-makers and activists would all benefit enormously from this clear-headed sobre analysis of ugly realpolitik in action. Presenting arguments that are hard to ignore, "Fool's Crusade" sets the standard by which future accounts of the balkan conflict will have be measured.

Chetnik Crusade: Yugoslavia, the Nazis and the Western Far Left (9/22 people found this helpful)

This work takes a rather different approach from those of left-wing writers who have traditionally admired Tito's `Brotherhood and Unity' state. She believes "Tito deliberately played down the role of Serbs and Serbia in an effort to placate the nationalist feelings of the Croats and Albanians, exploited by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy to dismember the country during World War II." Johnstone ignores the role played by Tito in the crushing of the Croat Spring in 1970-71 and in the Rankovic regime in Kosovo until 1966. She may not be aware that when World War II broke out, Albania was already under Italian occupation. Kosovo was handed to Fascist Italy, not to the Albanians in the carve-up of 1941. In dealing with Kosovo, Johnstone is sympathetic to Cosic's view that Kosovo should be partitioned between Serbs and Albanians. This has been done before - in 1941, between the Nazi puppet state in Serbia and the Italian Fascists occupying Albania.

The author believes that "the ethnic Albanians who had converted to Islam by the 19th century gained privileges (to bear arms, serve in the administration, and collect taxes) denied the Christian population." and that "when Albanian feudal lords did revolt, it was rather to try to retain these privileges than to achieve an independent state of equal citizens." This is set against Serbs who "adopted an egalitarian political philosophy". Quite apart from the concept of distinguishing one people's political motives from another's on the grounds of their ethnicity, Johnstone has nothing to say about the large number of Catholic and Orthodox Albanians, some of whom were the architects of progressive Albanian nationalism. She appears not to have heard of the League of Prizren, the revolts led by Isa Boletini or Haxhi Qamili, or even Ismail Qemali and his comrades who brought about the independence of Albania in 1912.

The Muslim-Croat Federation is assailed as "inevitably reminiscent of the Nazi-backed Independent State of Croatia set up in 1941". Or it would be, were it not for a few details, not least that the Muslims were the largest force in the Federation and that the 1941 state ruled all of Croatia and Bosnia whereas the Federation covers less than half of Bosnia alone.

Johnstone makes further comparisons between the Croats and the Nazis, stating that in 1990 they "rapidly restored the symbols of the dread 1941 state - notably the red and white checkerboard flag, which to the Serbs was the equivalent of the Nazi swastika". As the red and white checkerboard flag was in constant use during the communist period, this seems a little odd.

By contrast, Johnstone claims that Draza Mihailovic formed "the first armed guerrilla resistance to Nazi occupation in all of Europe." This shows just how far we have come from the socialism of `Brotherhood and Unity'. This was a myth much beloved of anti-communist Serbs during the Tito years. Firstly, Draza Mihajlovic was a collaborator with the Nazis. Secondly, after the German invasion in 1941, the Chetniks counseled holding back attacks to await an Allied invasion; the Partisans got on with fighting the Nazis.

Given Johnstone's associations of all and sundry with the Nazis - the USA and the press in modern Germany are two other notable targets - one would think that she would be particularly sympathetic to evidence of mass killings. One would be wrong. Despite the voluminous data on the massacre at Srebrenica, its thorough examination by the ICTY and accounts from survivors and perpetrators, Johnstone cannot believe that any more than 199 Muslims were "executed" - as if they were condemned prisoners - a little over 2% of the bodies exhumed. Johnstone fails to tell the reader that Serbian forces had by then murdered and expelled Muslims from most of Eastern Bosnia, the reason why Srebrenica was an enclave in the first place.

This is not the worst book to have appeared on Yugoslavia in the 1990s; it occasionally refers to works of scholarship, though there are no references in Serbo-Croat, Slovenian or Albanian, either as primary or secondary sources. This puts severe limits on the value of this book as a work of reference. Whatever worth this book has nothing to do with the Balkans, but rather as a document of the Western extreme left's rejection of `Brotherhood and Unity' in favour of the cold steel of Karadzic and Seselj.

Clear, meticulous, well-documented, highly readable ... and devastating. (10/16 people found this helpful)

Diana Johnstone's account of Yugoslavia's dismemberment is remarkable by any standards. I had tried several times before to get a handle on this extremely recent history, via such (to a Brit) obvious references as Misha Glenny, but found nothing comprehensible. This book is a model of truthful, factual exposition. It contains much which some people have spent a lot of energy to render obscure and its author has been attacked by some of them for 'denying genocide' or similar hysterical formulations. In February 2007 the international tribunal at The Hague also formally declared that Serbia was never engaged in genocide, but perhaps even this inconvenient fact will fail to deter her critics, whose agendas 'Fools Crusade' explains rather too clearly for their comfort.

This book belongs to the rare category of those which actually help an averagely informed and interested reader to understand not only its core topic but the world we live in today in fresh and unsettling ways. Above all, it enhances understanding, it illuminates, it teaches and it does so simply, gracefully and concisely. I would recommend it to anoyone who lived through the 90s and found Yugoslavia's descent into hell inexplicable (or only explicable by resort to idiotic stereotypes of Balkan incorrigibility, backwardness etc).

This book has permanent value. Lovers of truth owe Diana Johnstone a debt of gratitude for her fine and unassuming work.

superlative book (16/25 people found this helpful)

This is a very important book because it elucidates the reasons Yugoslavia was torn apart and why the US was so eager to cripple Serbia. A country with many ethnic groups trying to coexist was torn into petty little states run by some of the most reactionary political forces. Ethnic groups not belonging in a given statelet were ethnically cleansed – even with US military and logistical support. And to boot an entire nation was demonized.

Before Europe is dragged along into another American war, it is important to understand what happened here. Diana Johnstone’s book is important to give us some perspective.

Fools' Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions

Diana Johnstone

Reader Reviews:

necessary historical revisionism (2/3 people found this helpful)

Chetnik Crusade: Yugoslavia, the Nazis and the Western Far Left (9/22 people found this helpful)

Clear, meticulous, well-documented, highly readable ... and devastating. (10/16 people found this helpful)

superlative book (16/25 people found this helpful)

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