[PEN-L:5012] Diana Johnstone and ITT

To: <pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [PEN-L:5012] Diana Johnstone and ITT
From: "Josh Mason" <Jmason@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 08 Apr 1999 20:22:01 -0400

I'm not sure this is a discussion that needs to take place on PEN-L, but just to clear up a couple of points:

1. The decision to stop publishing Diana Johnstone was not made by James Weinstein, but by ITT's editorial staff--at
that time, Deidre McFadyen, Dave Mulcahey and me. (All three of us have since left.) Weinstein agreed only reluctantly.

2. We felt we couldn't publish her stuff not only because she was insisting that there was no Serb role in the slaughter
of Muslims in Bosnia after the facts were long in, but because her friendship with Milosevic's wife Marjana Markovic,
going back to her time as student in Yugoslavia in the '60s, colored her writing to the point of dishonesty. For instance,
in a piece on the Serbian opposition, she presented Ms. Markovic's party as Serbia's main democratic opposition.

Does this mean that everything she writes about Yugloslavia is false? Of course not. But it does mean, as I originally
wrote on LBO-Talk, that it should be approached with great skepticism.

For whatever it's worth, I am absolutely against the bombings. I don't believe that either their intent or their likely
outcome is the slightest improvement in the lives of anyone in the Balkans. But the pro-bombing arguments are made much
easier when their opponents deny or downplay the atrocities committed by Milosevic's government against the Kosovars.
Johnstone, whose article in the current CAQ avers that "in probably no country on earth are minority rights better
protected, both in theory and in practice, than in Yugoslavia," definitely falls into this category.

I agree with Jim Devine's bar fight analogy here and with almost all of Angela's thoughtful posts on LBO-Talk.

Josh

Originally posted at http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/pen-l/1999m04/msg00337.htm