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Rating: 
Summary: most comprehensive and readable book
Review: Diana Johnstone has produced easily the most comprehensive and readable book on the decade long conflict in the Balkans. She examines thoroughly both local and international players and provides a variety of angles and backgrounds to the driving forces behind them. What fascinated me most though is the elegant style and lucidity with which she is able to deal with such a variety of apparently complex issues. An American who has spent much of her life in Europe she is clearly fluent in several languages. Her sources are thus not only from the (often over simplistic) English-speaking world, but also German (she is particularly good here), French, Serbo-Croat and even Italian ones. With that remarkable range of sources and angles the author examines the Western intervention and the dismantling of a sovereign state as well as the Western media reporting to justify it. And she links and references her writings extremely well. It felt as though one had been through two or three comprehensive volumes instead of her highly readable paperback. There appears to be everything in the book. From the history of the region, seen from the vantage point of both the locals as well as the many intervening and occupying foreign powers, to the present day power balances and New World Order agendas. She takes on the Western governments and the corporate media and points out how they, often deliberately, misrepresented the conflict. And how the liberal left was taken in by it all and effectively ended up dancing to the tune of the only remaining superpower. She makes it clear early on where she stands with regard to the officially proclaimed devil of the piece i.e. the Serbs. "I am pro-Serb," she writes, "only if that means that I consider Serbs to be human beings like everybody else, neither better nor worse." Since the whole story propagated by Western reporting relies on the assumption that Serbs are highly abnormal, Johnstone has no problem in taking the overtly racist accusations against them apart. And, of course, once you succeed in taking away the devil away from moralising Western governments, their many NGOs and the mainstream media, the real agendas soon become exposed. Is one to really believe that US-NATO intervened against Serbia on behalf of "peace" and "human rights" or even to "stop genocide" or to build the largest US military base outside the USA, Camp Bondsteel in the Nato occupied Serbian province of Kosovo? Much of that has meanwhile also become clearer to many on the left, except that many still shy away from Yugoslavia, subconsciously embarrassed at having bought the storyline on Bosnia years earlier.
Johnstone deals with the West's most profiled case, Srebrenica, and the universally repeated accusations of "genocide" by focussing on the Western media's own emphasis that Bosnian Serbs had separated the allegedly executed men from their womenfolk. "One thing should be obvious" comments Johnstone, "one does not commit genocide by sparing women and children". She might have gone further and concentrated on the most frequently used figure of 7.000 men estimated by the US to have been executed at Srebrenica. This is routinely referred to as the "biggest war crime since WW2" or even "since the Holocaust" as a BBC Panorama program on Srebrenica would have it. One might of course have taken somewhat lower comparison figures than six million as a WW2 reference. For example the execution of 200.000 at Hiroshima or 130.000 at Dresden, which rate neither as war crimes nor genocides among those accusing the Bosnian Serbs of both. Nor, of course, was there any distinction made between men, women and children in the aforementioned places. Also remarkably, the artillery fire, which the two warring factions at Sarajevo were using against each other, was attributed to one side only and then not compared to bombed cities in WW2, but in several instances no more no less than Auschwitz (!). The author however does not make the mistake of concentrating merely on local sides but looks at the agendas of the major international players, grouped together in their so-called International Community. Their aims are now much more clearly visible over a decade then during their own media blitzes. The bottom line of the superpower agenda Johnstone concludes is "globalisation, and it signifies world economic domination enforced by military means" A highly commendable book to all those who want to understand the techniques and methods which had duped many in the antiwar and antiglobalisation movements as they failed to see the wood for the trees. The fools in the "Fool's Crusade" are certainly not NATO and the Western governments.
Rating: 
Summary: Good learning tool
Review: Everyone should read this book.
It is the prime example of the propaganda that the Serbian gov't used. Texts such as these are taken literally and people do stupid things when they believe them - such as supporting the genocide of a people. NATO and the US had no interests of protecting Bosnians - after all they are much closed to Serbs (they share Christianity).
Perhaps this is a biased review - but that is only because my Serbian family has supported my views, and they have no reason to side with Bosnians, other than common sence.
These claims are as illogical as saying that the Holocaust did not exist. Perhaps Milosevic wrote it under a different name.
THE ONLY REASON IT RECEIVED TWO STARS IS BECAUSE IT IS IMPORTANT TO READ THIS BOOK, NOTICE HOW BIASED IT IS AND THEN THROW IT OUT.
Rating: 
Summary: Insulting to the victims
Review: I don't care what Diane's agenda is, but I do care that to support it she tries to persuade us that the living victims of Srebrenica (i.e. families of the 8,000 "missing" men) are lying, depsite the fact that even the Bosnian Serbs themselves now admit that thousands were slaughtered in what they acknowledge was a horrific war crime. She also denies the fact that Serbs used rape as a systematic weapon against Bosnian women, and finally she thinks that Bosnians made up a figure of 200,000 dead, when she somehow is able to prove that less than 50,000 died.
Like David Irving, she uses suprious techniques to cast doubt on what she regards as the "official" story of the war, but she neglects the fact that the Western powers she opposes did nothing to help Bosnia defend itself when under attack, and their intervention was only to create a country divided along ethnic lines (as indeed the Serbs wanted).
Rating:
Summary: Ver well researched work of excellence
Review: It is not common to see 500 references in a book of 280 pages, and most of them are easy to check through major libraries or even the internet. Johnstone builds her case with undisputable documentation of the available evindence of massive propaganda that was much more successful than in the case of Iraq, since there was tacit approval among all Western countries and nobody was willing to rock the boat. Those who dispute her evidence should check the references, one by one. Perhaps they will learn something new. Nash, Canada
Rating:
Summary: Orthodox Christian Fundamentalism
Review: Johnstone asserts in her book that the massacre in Srebrenica never occurred. According to Johnstone, there is no evidence of a massacre in Srebrenica in which approximately 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were slaughtered in one of the worst massacres in Europe since World War II. According to BBC News:" an official Bosnian Serb investigation into the Srebrenica events of July 1995 has found that several thousand Muslims were murdered by local Serb forces. It is the first time the Bosnian Serb authorities have admitted the killings which The Hague war crimes tribunal has declared an act of genocide". (...)
Rating:
Summary: Truth unveiled
Review: Johnstone methodically obliderates the credibility of the "international community" i.e., US, Germany, England and NATO collectively, with countless citings from articles and books from a vast array of countries, view points & time periods. As a result, this erudite discertation on the events "motivating" humanitarian intervention comes along with a bibliography that could stop a bullet. The defense of her thesis was water-tight in demonstrating that on the surface the victims are the Serbian nation, left with the tattered remains of an underservedly devasted land and economy, and, ultimately, the people of the world that are unwittingly being crushed under the force of the one super-power world and its minions (Germany, England) into conformance with the NEW WORLD ORDER. A paradigm is being established that all countries and peoples not on the side of the US will be considered enemies of the US and its interests. Yugoslavia was not allowed to maintain its independence from alignment with the US. ALL measures, overt but mostly covert, were taken to disintigrate that country by means of dispicable racism of a fascist archtype nation of Croatia, fundamentalist Muslims in Bonsia, remnants of Nazi racial superiority over the European continent, terrorist KLA who, like the Muslims of Bosnia, killed even their own out of expediency, and then portraying the Serbs as the rascist purveyors.
Do yourself a favor and research WWII archives on the genocidal mania of the Croation Ustashe, Nazi puppets, and the SS division of Bosnian Muslims from Handzar upon the Serbs. Pernicious Croation ambitions for an independent and an ethnically pure state, provided by US auspices, were orginized by the same WWII war criminals. Read about the heroic homecoming these lascivious murders received. Would you be surprised in knowing that the Croation flag today proudly wears the red and white checkered symbol of the Ustashe murders? Imagine what Jews would feel if Germany was to insert a swastika onto its flag?
The evidence is damning against the "international community's" true intensions in Yugoslavia. Ultimately, as citizens of the world powers we are culpable for our credulity in the face of such spurious evidence.
Rating:
Summary: Collective guilt
Review: Much has been said in times recent about the need for Serbs to come to terms with their collective guilt over the extreme violence surrounding the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. This book makes it abundantly clear that, as far as collective guilt is concerned, it's not the Serbs that should be in the dock. The litany of lies and misinformation that was used to convince the clueless masses of the righteousness of the case against 'the Serbs' is quite astounding. The big lie technique to justify war is well known, and has been documented extensively elsewhere. However, this wasn't the case with the Balkans, where instead many many small lies were used effectively to create a smoke screen around the reality of the situation. These lies were, and still are, constantly and persistently perpetuated by a subservient media and presscorp, hungry for the gratuities earned from deceptions as gratuitous as the carnage they portray. Reports every bit as bad as that last sentence. The small lie that convinced the world that the Serbs were the new Nazis, the so-called 'concentration camp' picture from Trnopolje. The small lie, the Srebrenica massacre, that diverted the worlds attention from a massive piece of cognitive dissonance, the ethnic cleansing of Serbs from the Croatian krajina. It's over 8 years now since the alleged genocide occured, and still the media persists in stating as fact, every time Srebrenica is mentioned, that 7000 Muslim men and boys were slaughtered by Serbs, despite the evidence which is at best inconclusive, and at worst indicative of a grand deception. On the other hand, the media never seems to mention the krajina at all. The small lie about the Croatian and Bosnian leaderships. Would the anti-Serb rhetoric have been so easily swallowed if we had known the truth about Tudjman and Izetbegovic? All of these small lies worked so well because the vast majority of us corn sucking westerners have been so thoroughly depoliticized that we can only see conflicts in terms of human rights violations. Any political context goes straight out the window. This is a bizarre situation, because the first thing defenders of Empire say when confronted with western power atrocities is 'you've got to consider the political context.' And when you only see, and are only told about one sides human rights violations, what else are you going to think. Another irony to come from the Balkans conflicts is the ICTY, and it's relationship to the ICC. The US rejects the ICC because it believes that it will be used for political purposes. Well, duh! That's exactly the precedent set by the ICTY. The whole Milosevic situation, from indictment right through to the trial has been a string of political manipulations. My favourite one is the externally driven kidnapping of Milosevic, and extradition to the Hague, to undermine Kostunicas' credibility, and allow Djinjic (who never was concerned with credibility) to take the power. This book, as the author states, is not the whole story, but it is a good primer. From this and several other books, and numerous essays on the subject (some of the most damning being from Bosnian Muslims and Croats), I'd say that interventionist westerners need to come to terms with their collective guilt.
Rating:
Summary: Complete nonsense.
Review: Please, do not waste your money on this book! The author has some kind of strange agenda...to convince her readers of a pack of lies. In this book, and in various other articles she's written, she claims that ethnic-cleansing did not occur against the albanians by the serbs. There was no invented morality play: people were systematically and brutally wiped out by the thousands. The woman who wrote this, you can easily see, if not Serbian, has some background or Serbian blood. The massacres by the Serbians, in all, killed hundreds of thousands of people in Bosnia, Croatia, and later in Kosovo because they dreamed of the "grand Serbia". She forgot to write about the 600,000 Albanians from Kosova who were forced from their homes by the Serbian military and Police and to travel into northern Albania, and the systematic rape of ethnic Albanian women and girls by the same forces. She calls those people who were forced to take up arms against that violence to defend their lives and livelihood terrorists. This author is a type of holocaust denier...the proof is there that massacres did occur. I have seen with my own eyes what happened after the war in that time. You can see for yourself what happened in video and photos. I think in the burned houses and bodies, the mass graves that were uncovered, and the lists of thousands that were never found you will then see why the U.S. went to Yugoslavia. If the author thinks that the war in Afghanistan (and now Iraq) are the same as the war in Yugoslavia, she is sadly mistaken.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant
Review: This book is by far the best ever written on the Wars in Yugoslavia. The Author has obviously travelled a lot through out the region and has impeccable knowledge of Balkans. This book separates propaganda from facts and even in the case of the Srebrenica massacre it puts up the real number of victims provided by the UN (and not media figures pumped up by different lobbies). This book will not be liked by Croats or Bosnian muslims, since it portrays Croatian and Bosnian leadership in their real light.Therefore you might find some reviews of this book very disapointing....They are usually written by Croats or Bosnians in exile, who were born abroad and have little or no knowledge of the real situation in Balkans.You can easily recognize them, since they are the only ones who could rate this masterpiece with only one star. Lord Carrington and Lord Owen are often featured in this masterpiece that stands up to the propaganda machine and all the lies we were fed with. A MUST READ!
Rating:
Summary: The most realistic book on Wars in Ex-Yugoslavia
Review: While I disagree with many of Jonhstone's conclusions, the information and viewpoint she provides is water in the desert for those trying to grasp the issues surrounding the collapse of Yugoslavia. To understand any complex conflict, one must attempt to understand what the antagonists are arguing, evaluate ALL facts, and attempt to synthesize this information in a meaningful and useful way. While most books on the subject are written without challenging the basic assumptions we have been taught through governmental and non-governmental agencies and the media, Johnstone focuses on the Serbian perspective, which few in the West have heard. This viewpoint is vital to any student of Yugoslavia, whether studying Croatian, Slovenian, Albanian, or any other former Yugoslav national group's history or anthropology, since it provides rare but crucial keys to understanding why Yugoslavia failed after the fall of the Soviet Union. I would certainly not read this book in a void of other detailed information. Ms. Johnstone herself limits the scope of the book to the Serbian perspective and to challenge the assertion that NATO's intervention was just (see page 14). She achieves her objective in well documented and easy to read prose. I would also suggest "Neighbors at War: Anthropological Perspectives on Yugoslav Ethnicity, Culture, and History" published by Pennsylvania State University Press. In a conflict where Western society has received a simplified version of a complex conflict, Johnstone provides enough information to empower the reader to challenge and test generally accepted assumptions about the conflict.
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