Counterpunch
November 14, 2005
Kulturkrieg in Journalism: Using Emotion to Silence Analysis
THE ORIGINS OF THE GUARDIAN'S ATTACK ON CHOMSKY
By Diana Johnstone
Last Halloween, The Guardian ran an attack on Noam Chomsky that amazed many
readers who had considered The Guardian to be one of Britain's more serious
newspapers. The attack took the form of what Alexander Cockburn described in
his article on this CounterPunch website as a "showcase interview"--"a
showcase for the interviewer's inquisitorial chutzpa". In this art form, the
interviewee is simply the prey for the interviewer who plies him with trap
questions and then rewrites the whole thing to make him look like an idiot
compared to her clever self.
The interviewer was a young Oxford graduate named Emma Brockes who is making
a name for herself in the genre. Ms Brockes obviously had scant familiarity
with Chomsky's work. For all one can tell, her sole background preparation
for this assignment was an article written by her colleague Ed Vulliamy and
published by the Balkan Crisis Report of International War and Peace
Reporting (IWPR, an outfit heavily subsidized by NATO governments) on August
27, 2004. Vulliamy's article, "We Must Fight for Memory of Bosnia's Camps",
calling for monuments to perpetuate the memory of the 1992 Bosnian Serb
detention camps which he visited as a reporter (but not, of course, the
Muslim and Croat camps which he did not visit), includes an attack on me
which is echoed very precisely by Ms Brockes, even to misspelling my name in
the same way.
The entire background for her attack on Chomsky seems to be drawn from two
paragraphs of Vulliamy's article:
Revisionism over the carnage in Bosnia is rampant and persistent. It has
been ever since Thomas Deichmann and his group in London, under the auspices
of a circle called "Living Marxism", claimed the camps found by ITN and
myself were fabrications. They adopted the Serbian term "collection
centres", claiming their inmates were there of their own volition.
Deichmann's charges were ruled by a jury as being in breach of civil law in
the London High Court when they were legally challenged by ITN. Successive
verdicts in The Hague have rendered them ridiculous as well as poisonous.
One could be forgiven for thinking that once the Bosnian Serb co-president
Biljana Plavsic had pleaded guilty to the entire hurricane of violence
unleashed on her authority, the revisionists would go to ground.
After all, who would know best: they or the woman (and her peers and
subordinates) on whose orders the pogrom was carried out? But no. In Sweden,
here they come again, through the pages of a magazine called Ordfront, or
Word Front. Last year, it carried an interview with the author Diane
Johnstone, about her book Fool's Crusade, which expresses doubts over the
number of victims of the Srebrenica massacre; the authencity of the Racak
massacre in Kosovo; the use of systematic rape in the war in Bosnia; and the
true figure of Bosnian war dead (the official estimate is more than 200,000
- Johnstone claims 50,000). And just as before, members of the chattering
classes, unbelievably, have hailed this poison as "outstanding work", in a
letter signed by, among others, Noam Chomsky, Arundhati Roy, Tariq Ali, John
Pilger, <et.al>.
In her write-up of the interview, Ms Brockes interprets Chomsky's defense of
publication of my book as a "defense of those who say the Srebrenica
massacre was exaggerated" and drags in the ITN-Living Marxism (LM)
controversy, confusing the facts just as in Vulliamy's article. She lauds
"my colleague, Ed Vulliamy", as one of the "serious, trustworthy people" who
disagree with Chomsky. So it is not far-fetched to see Vulliamy's influence
in the Brockes hatchet job.
The above citation from the Vulliamy article misrepresents the ITN-LM case,
as does Ms Brockes. The issue raised by LM had to do with the way
photographs taken at Trnopolje camp, by focusing on a thin man on the other
side of a wire fence which in reality did not surround the Muslim inmates,
but rather the ITN crew itself, was used to create the impression that what
was happening in Bosnia was a repetition of a Nazi-style Holocaust. I
corrected that misrepresentation in my reponse to The Guardian, which was
published by CounterPunch, but not by the Guardian. I pointed out then that
the judgment of the court was based solely on the subjective issue as to
whether or not the ITN journalists "deliberately" set out to deceive the
public.
Moreover, in reality, nobody denied the "existence" of the camps, which
Vulliamy claims to have "discovered", although he was led there by Bosnian
Serb guides. There are other misrepresentations in his article. For example,
I have never made any claim as to the number of victims in Bosnia, but
simply pointed to the fact that among various estimates, the media has
preferred to accept and repeat the highest, which was offered without any
evidence by the information ministry in Sarajevo. Since my book was
published, a serious study by Norwegian experts for the Hague Tribunal has
estimates the overall number of casualties of the Bosnian war at 102,622
persons, of which 55,261 were civilians and 47,360 militaries at the time of
death (no ethnic breakdown). That is a lot, but it is not "over 200,000", as
Vulliamy and others go right on repeating, usually with the implication that
all were Muslims
>From this citation, it emerges that the Brockes interview was a continuation
of the vicious attack on me and the managing editor of the Swedish magazine
Ordfront, Björn Ecklund, following his long article in the July/August 2003
issue on "lies about Yugoslavia" which featured an interview with me and
excerpts from my book, "Fools' Crusade".
The first shots in that assault were fired by Maciej Zaremba, an ex-Maoist
of Polish origin turned ideological watchdog, in a flailing article
published by Sweden's leading mainstream daily, Dagens Nyeter. Zaremba's
sloppy attack (he admittedly never read my book, and seems not even to have
read the Ordfront piece carefully) was thereupon echoed by mainstream
Swedish media, in a campaign absurdly called a "debate", although replies
from those being attacked (myself and others) were excluded. Among the
uncorrected lies was the statement that I was a "pillar of LM", a magazine
with which I have never had the slightest contact.
This shameful campaign was used to bring to heel Ordfront, which until then
had been the most important left-oriented alternative to Sweden's mainstream
press. It is an amazing story, excellently recounted by Al Burke, a
(formerly U.S.) Swedish citizen who is well-acquainted with the Ordfront
scandal and its broader political context. His document, "All Quieted on the
Word Front", deserves to be read carefully by all who are concerned by the
growing threats to freedom of political expression in the "democratic West".
See www.nnn.se/n-model/foreign/ordfront.pdf. For starters, there is an
introduction on Al Burke's web www.nnn.se/n-model/foreign/ordfront.htm
Ms Brockes colleague Ed Vulliamy is a proud practitioner of what is called
"advocacy journalism", a reporter who openly and passionately takes sides in
conflicts he covers. I would prefer to describe it as sort of literary
journalism, where phrase-making and emotional arousal take precedence over
reason, or even, on occasion, facts. The striking feature is the
unrestrained use of a florid style, reflected in his choice of adjectives.
In the article cited above, for instance, he speaks of the "putrid
afternoon" when he had "the accursed honor" of seeing "heinouswalls", etc.
As to content, in the case of the Yugoslav disintegration wars, the
emotional approach works best by reducing events to a certain number of
notorious atrocities, proper to chill the blood and close the mind to
contemplation of political complications.
Beyond advocacy, he writes as a sort of professional mourner and literary
avenger. Now, that is his right and suits his talent. I make no attempt to
interfere with his mourning and his advocacy. But I do object when his style
of journalism is used to condemn a quite different type of journalistic
writing: one that attempts to be analytical and fair to all sides. I readily
acknowledge that emotional commitment is probably the most powerful motor
for even the most analytical writing. But the difference is the attempt to
be dispassionate, to exercise a certain self-control over the emotional flow
of words. The watchdogs condemn efforts to be fair to all sides in the
Yugoslav conflicts as "inflicting new pain on the victims"; Vulliamy wrote
that "Johnstone's book has inflicted new pain on those who matter the most:
those who underwent endless days of mindless torture and survived; on the
brave and almost forgotten women of Srebrenica who are still desperately
searching for their loved ones; and dishonours the memory of the victims."
In short, I am accused of being a sort of torturer, and Vulliamy is no doubt
able to round up some poor Bosnian Muslim victims of his acquaintance, wave
my book at them, and tell them that they have been dishonored and that he is
busily defending them from the pain I am inflicting. This does not really do
much for the victims, but it does serve to preserve the Bosnian conflict as
a purely emotional issue, a issue of good versus evil, which keeps it firmly
on the terrain commandeered by Vulliamy himself, and the likes of Zaremba.
It enforces the notion of a cartoonbook world, in which all is either black
or white, good or evil, and anyone who tries to understand all sides of an
issue is condemned as an appeaser, a coward, and perhaps even a handmaiden
of the Devil.
In reality, trying to be fair and analytical does not at all preclude
feeling sympathy for victims, and other human emotions. But for some
writers, their emotional commitment seems to exclude all fairness and
reasonable analysis. Whatever the political aims of such writers, a matter I
cannot judge, their militant rejection of dispassionate analysis can only
play into the hands of political powers who cloak their military
interventions in the rhetoric of humanitarian imperatives.
Diana Johnstone is the author of Fools' Crusade: Yugoslavia, Nato, and
Western Delusions published by Monthly Review Press. She can be reached at:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Serbian News Network - SNN
[email protected]
http://www.antic.org/
