Diana Johnstone

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Diana Johnstone (born June 23, 1934 in Minnesota ) is an American journalist and author .

Life

Johnstone studied Russian Area Studies (BA) and French at the University of Minnesota ( BA 1962, MA 1964), where he also taught French as an assistant teacher and received his doctorate in 1970 under Armand A. Renaud with a thesis on André Malraux ( Malraux and the Ethical Novel ) to Ph.D.

She was active in the student anti- Vietnam war movement and later in the European peace movement.

From 1979 to 1990 she was co-editor of the American weekly magazine In These Times . Around 1990 she moved to Paris, where she still lives today.

From 1989 to 1996 she was press spokeswoman for the group The Greens (GGEP) in the European Parliament .

She writes regularly for Dialogue (Paris, 1996-2000), for the CounterPunch newsletter and has published several articles in the Middle East Report of the NGO Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP).

Positions and controversies

Genocide Denial

In her publication "Fools' Crusade: Yugoslavia, Nato, and Western Delusions" from 2002, Johnstone claims that there is "no evidence whatsoever" that the Srebrenica massacre was genocidal in nature are war crimes .

Publication of the book was rejected by publishers in Sweden; This prompted an open letter in defense of the book and the author's rights, signed by Noam Chomsky , Arundhati Roy , Tariq Ali and John Pilger , among others . The letter contained the statement "We consider Diana Johnstone's Fools' Crusade to be an outstanding work in a great tradition that deviates from the mainstream view, but relies on fact and reason". Ed Vulliamy , who reported for The Guardian on the Bosnian War, called Johnstone's book “poison” in his response to the open letter.

In her defense, Johnstone pointed out that her critics would "reduce (her) book to a series of notorious atrocities, how they reduced the Balkan conflict to stigmatizing anything that deviates from their own dualistic interpretation."

Richard Caplan described the work in his review in International Affairs as “a revisionist and highly controversial representation of Western politics and the dissolution of Yugoslavia. [... It] contains insights, but is overzealous [...] worth reading - but for the critically discerning eye. "

In July 2015, Johnstone denied in a Counterpunch interview that the Srebrenica massacre was a systematic genocide by the Serbs against Bosniaks . She saw this classification as a pretext for NATO intervention . The reason for the interview was Russia's veto against the term “genocide” in the UN Security Council's declaration on the 20th anniversary of the massacre and the reaction of Samantha Powers . In the interview, Johnstone stated that there was a war crime, a massacre of prisoners, but not women and children. To construct a genocide of a patriarchal society from this sociologically, as the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia is doing, is far-fetched, contrary to the general sense of the word. She saw behind the conflict the US's interest in weakening Serbia as a possible Russian ally by supporting radical Islamic forces in Bosnia.

Front National

In April 2012 she described Marine Le Pen from the right-wing extremist Front National on the one hand as "demagogic" and on the other as essentially left-wing . In addition, Marine Le Pen is in no way anti-Semitic .

The Chaos Queen 2016

Her book Die Chaos-Königin , published in 2016, was reviewed by Deutschlandradio Kultur as a sourceless, one-dimensional and “furious condemnation of Washington’s foreign policy” and an indictment against the “ military-industrial complex ”. They even make Slobodan Milošević , Muammar al-Gaddafi , Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin the good "only because the Americans are meant to play a bad role". Johnstone serves all European prejudices against the USA, whether left or right of the political center. In Germany, for example, supporters of Die Linke and Pegida parties would be addressed equally.

The Friday also criticizes a lack of “sense of proportion” . The author does not twist any facts, but argues "selectively and imprecisely". So facts that do not fit into the author's worldview would not be taken into account.

Armin Pfahl-Traughber thinks that the author can refer to the dubious views and actions of Clinton in the past with well-founded reasons, but that she works too much with exaggeration and exaggeration for a differentiated and serious criticism. In retrospect, it becomes clear that Clinton is based on old interventionist doctrines, but the book cannot be used as good evidence of this assessment, neither formally nor in terms of content.

Publications

Monographs
  • The Politics of Euromissiles: Europe's Role in America's World (1984)
  • Fools' Crusade: Yugoslavia, Nato, and Western Delusions (2003)
  • Queen of Chaos: The Misadventures of Hillary Clinton (2015)
    • German: The Chaos Queen: Hillary Clinton and the foreign policy of the self-proclaimed world power . Westend, Frankfurt am Main 2016, ISBN 978-3-86489-135-9
Articles (selection)
  • Greens in the European Parliament. A New Sense of Purpose for Europe. Records and Prospects of the first Green Political Group in the European Parliament. GGEP, Brussels 1994.
  • Hiroshima: the Crime That Keeps on Paying, But Beware the Reckoning , Counterpunch, 2016 ( German translation published in Junge Welt, 181/2016)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Inventory in the catalog of the University of Minnesota University Libraries
  2. ↑ Articles for the Middle East Report , MERIP.
  3. ^ Diana Johnstone: Fools' Crusade: Yugoslavia, Nato, and Western Delusions . NYU Press, 2002, ISBN 978-1-58367-084-2 ( google.de [accessed January 4, 2017]).
  4. ^ FrontPage Magazine - Chomsky's Genocidal Denial. (No longer available online.) In: archive.frontpagemag.com. Archived from the original on October 19, 2017 ; accessed on January 4, 2017 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / archive.frontpagemag.com
  5. ^ Ed Vuillamy "Comment: We Must Fight for Memory of Bosnia's Camps" , BCR [ Balkan Crisis Report ], Issue 513, February 21, 2005, Institute For War & Peace Reporting website
  6. ^ Diana Johnstone, "The Bosnian was brutal, but it wasn't a Holocaust," The Guardian , November 23, 2005
  7. ^ "Denying" the Srebrenica Genocide Because It's Not True: an Interview with Diana Johnstone , Counterpunch, July 16, 2015.
  8. ↑ Diana Johnstone, “Disillusion With the Euro and Europe,” Counterpunch, April 24, 2012; “French Elections: Cracks in the Neoliberal Consensus,” Znet (reprint), April 28, 2012.
  9. ↑ Alexander Cockburn: "Who are the real fascists: Marine Le Pen - or the United States?" The Week , May 3, 2012.
  10. ↑ Michael Groth: Diana Johnstone: "The Chaos Queen" - Evil, Evil, Hillary Clinton. In: deutschlandradiokultur.de. April 16, 2016, accessed August 13, 2016 .
  11. ↑ Lukas Latz: Fits into the worldview , review in: Der Freitag , March 30, 2016.
  12. ↑ Hillary Clinton as the foreign policy "Chaos Queen" . ( hpd.de [accessed on January 4, 2017]).
personal data
SURNAME Johnstone, Diana
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American journalist and author
DATE OF BIRTH June 23, 1934
PLACE OF BIRTH Minnesota , United States