Diana Johnstone, Ordfront and the “bombing left”
Posted to www.marxmail.org on
In her Counterpunch article dealing with the Chomsky-Guardian controversy that involved her as a principal player, Diana Johnstone addresses an earlier such attack from the Guardian, this time by Ed Vulliamy, a member in good standing of the Cruise Missile left, who wrote:
In
Johnstone responds to Vulliamy as follows:
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
This shameful campaign
was used to bring to heel Ordfront, which until then had been the most
important left-oriented alternative to
Full: http://www.counterpunch.org/johnstone11142005.html
Unfortunately Burke’s introduction to this very important
struggle cannot really convey the magnitude of what took place, which can only
be described as a full-tilt attack on democracy and the left. By the same
token, the linked pdf document is about the size of a book, so I am not sure
how many Counterpunch readers took the trouble to plow through it, especially
since much of it is taken up with internecine struggles on the Swedish left. It
is almost like inviting people in
Since I have committed a fair amount of time and energy in
debate with people like Michael Bérubé on the liberal left and the Australian
DSP on the extreme left over such issues, I decided to read the entire pdf and
prepare a summary of the issues. Put succinctly, the article reveals that the
Guardian/George Soros/Hitchens crusade on
Subscription to Ordfront makes you a member so people feel
that they have a stake in what appears in its pages, just as
In the summer of 2003, Ordfront ran an interview with Diana
Johnstone which focused on her “Fools’ Crusade.” A month or so later, Dagens Nyheter, the NY Times of
Sweden, opened up a full-scale assault on the magazine for having the temerity
to interview Johnstone, which in their eyes was tantamount to interviewing
David Irving. Leading the attack was one Maciej Zaremba, a transplanted Pole and fan of
When Zaremba was interviewed on Swedish public radio some time later, he confessed to not having read “Fools’ Crusade.” He also stated that Ordfront did not have the right to give her a hearing because “freedom of expression which is used to confuse us contradicts the purpose of freedom of expression.” Despite his anti-Communism, one imagines that Zaremba learned a few tricks from a Stalinist hack like the former dictator of Poland Edward Gierek. Eventually Zaremba’s crusade was joined by Gellert Tamas, an Ordfront author and, as Burke puts it, a charter member of the “bombing left.”
The pressure mounted by Dagens Nyheter eventually forced the editorial board of Ordfront to cave in and they published a ‘mea culpa’ open letter in that newspaper that charged Diana Johnstone with holocaust denial. Dagens Nyheter refused to publish rebuttals by Johnstone, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, which do however appear in the pdf. Eventually Björn Eklund, who had interviewed Johnstone, was fired. His reply to the charges against him were not published in the magazine. He had become an “unperson.”
After Eklund’s departure, the
magazine deepened its support for NATO’s war in
The assault on Diana Johnstone eventually spilled over into
Outraged Ordfront subscribers came to the 2004 annual meeting with a determination to reorient the magazine away from Serb-bashing and to restore free speech. In the past 30 to 40 people would show up. This year 200 did! By a sizable margin, the body approved a motion that stated, “It is the opinion of the annual meeting that it was wrong to repudiate publication of the interview with Diana Johnstone. In keeping with the organization’s stated purpose, the board should instead have defended the provision of a public space for critical debate on controversial issues.” They also repudiated the firing of Björn Eklund.
The next day Ordfront editor Christina Hagner,
a “bombing leftist,” took to the pages of Dagens Nyheter to denounce the unruly mob that insisted on
democracy at the annual meeting, which she characterized as being “completely
out of control.” She eventually brought in a professor of commercial law from the Swedish equivalent of the
For me the biggest revelation in Al Burke’s article was the
degree to which
It is also of some note that some of the most outspoken ‘bombing leftist’ members of the Ordfront board and staff were, as Burke puts it, “reformed veterans of the lunatic Left of the 1960s and 70s.” (I myself prefer to remain an unrepentant Marxist, even if people like Marc Cooper or Leo Casey think that I am a 60s style lunatic.) His following words seem most apt in describing the “repentant” nature of such people.
The theory is that,
having in middle-age joined polite society, they have been battling with their
inner demons from the past by projecting them in some strange and destructive
way upon the democratic majority which dared to challenge their embrace of
USA/NATO propaganda, their submission to the mainstream press, etc. That
explanation may appear a bit weird; but it is certainly no weirder than the
behavior in question.