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ALL QUIETED ON THE WORD FRONT

ALL QUIETED

ON THE WORD FRONT

Notes on the abuse of power and

the stifling of dissent by Swedish progressives

AL BURKE

NORDIC NEWS NETWORK


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That was especially the case during theperiod when Olof Palme dominated Swedishpolitics as Social Democratic prime minister or

opposition leader. His eloquent denunciationof the war of aggression against Cambodia,Laos and Vietnam provided inspiration to theanti-war movement and, as a corollary, led tothe suspension of diplomatic relations withthe United States of Richard Nixon (who hon-oured Palme by referring to him as thatSwedish asshole).

In a fairly typical assessment, WarrenWitte of the American Friends Service Com-mittee, once observed that, Sweden has long

provided the U.S. peace movement withmoral leadership, a sense of hope and an in-valuable alternative to the often short-sightedand militaristic policies of our government.I think particularly of Olof Palmes entirelycorrect criticism of the Vietnam War andSwedens emphasis on the issue of equity innorth-south relations an area in which ourown government has stubbornly persistedwith narrow, self-serving and often aggressivepolicies.

But much has changed in Sweden sincePalme was assassinated in 1986. His currentsuccessor as Social Democratic prime minister,Gran Persson, has transmuted Sweden intoa vassal state of the U.S. empire. That reversalis reflected in the mainstream press which, inits reporting on global issues, functions moreor less as a cog in the U.S. propaganda appa-ratus. [For details, see endnote 1.]

There is little to choose from otherwise.Among the parliamentary parties, only themarginal and chronically fragmented Left

(former Communist) Party offers a consistentalternative to Perssons abject foreign policy.

The alternative press is generally as insignifi-cant as one would expect in a country with apopulation of only nine million.

The one promising alternative to the main-stream press has been Ordfront Magazine,whose circulation increased from a few thou-sand in the 1980s to roughly 30,000 in 2004.That may not seem like much; but proportion-ately it is a much largerthan the circulation ofanalogous publications in larger countries,such as The Nation in the United States or TheNew Statesman in the United Kingdom.

Democracy and free expression

The magazine is one main component of anon-profit organization called Ordfront, whichmeans Word Front. The other two compo-nents are a book-publishing division and anadult education network entitled DemocracyAcademy. The stated purpose of the organi-zation is to promote democracy and free ex-pression and, in particular, to provide a forumfor the discussion of information and ideasthat are ignored or suppressed by establish-ment media and institutions.

Although there is no explicit ideologicalstance, both the magazine and the organiza-tion as a whole are widely regarded as left-oriented. Subscription to the magazine confersmembership, and the majority does appear toqualify for the leftist label which inSweden may be applied to everyone fromMarxist-Leninists to right-wing Social Demo-crats such as Prime Minister Persson.

Due to the rapid expansion ofOrdfrontMagazines readership, it was beginning tooffer a moderately influential alternative tothe establishment consensus. It is likely, for

ATTACK OF THE ZAREMBITES

FOR THE PAST CENTURY OR SO, Sweden has been widely regarded as an oasis ofrationality, social justice and enlightened foreign policy in a world plagued by perni-cious dogmas, gross inequity and appalling international crimes. Among other things,it has been admired for its independent approach to global issues, based on principlesof solidarity and human dignity, and its consistent opposition to abuses of great power.


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example, that it played a small but significantrole in Swedish voters rejection of the Euro-pean Monetary Union in a referendum held inSeptember of 2003 [2].

But less than two months after that display

of enlightened citizenship, the mainstreammedia launched a concerted attack on Ord-front, setting off a chain of events that has leftdeep divisions among the membership andcompromised the integrity of the entire or-ganization. In the process, the organizationsleadership has betrayed fundamental idealsof democracy and free expression, and hasgrossly abused its power in order to fend offthe inevitable revolt of outraged members. Forthat purpose, it has formed an alliance of con-

venience with none other than the mainstreammedia.The following account of those events con-

tains numerous details which, at first glance,may seem extraneous;. But especially for thosewho are unfamiliar with the events in ques-tion, that background information is essentialto an understanding of the issues and thekinds of behaviour involved.

It should also be noted that I am not aneutral observer, having played an active (butmarginal) part in efforts to preserve the integ-rity of the organization and its stated ideals.However, it would be difficult to find anyonein Sweden who has followed developmentsfrom the start and remained neutral. In anyevent, the principal arguments of the oppos-ing side in the controversy are presented here,in most cases with direct quotations. For any-one who wishes to check the accuracy of thequotations or pose other questions, a list ofrelevant names and e-mail addresses is in-cluded as the final item of the Appendix.

Unconventional wisdom

The Ordfront scandal is an unpleasant busi-ness which says much about the current stateof Swedish society and its presumptive in-telligentsia. It began quietly enough in thesummer of 2003, when Ordfront Magazine pub-lished an interview with Diana Johnstonewhich focused on her book,Fools Crusade, adevastating and well-documented critique of

the conventional wisdom on the most recentBalkan wars (see A Simple Tale of Good andEvil, page 10), and the interview conducted

by managing editor Bjrn Eklund elicitedstrong reactions, both positive and negative.

Finally, wrote one reader, after a longperiod of lies or at best, silence somethingsensible has been written about NATOs ag-

gression against Yugoslavia.

Another wrotethat, I almost choked on my morning coffee.A truth other than the prevailing one was al-lowed to pop up. Wow!

Others were highly critical. In your wildcharge against America and your blind at-tempt to nail the U.S.A., read an accusationdirected at Bjrn Eklund, you run roughshodover thousands of human beings who in facthave suffered, and you belittle their sufferingin a way that is shameful. A paediatrician

who had worked with victims of the war inBosnia recounted his grim experience and an-grily cancelled his subscription: I want to beliberated from my membership immediately,so that I do not have to feel ashamed the nexttime the magazine drops into my mailbox.

Delayed attack

One positive and four negative letters werepublished in the following two issues of themagazine, along with responses by Johnstone

and Eklund who attempted to clear up someof the more glaring misconceptions. Eklundnoted, for example, that the interview in-cluded several references to the sufferingwhich undeniably did take place. Johnstoneexplained at some length why the iconic mas-sacre at Srebrenica, which she has never de-nied, was far from the simple incident that has

been repeatedly invoked by the mainstreammedia.

In a separate note, Chief Editor Leif Ericsson

pointed out that, Over the years, OrdfrontMagazine has published many articles on thewars in former Yugoslavia, several of whichhave painted a picture that differs from that ofDiana Johnstone. With controversial issues, itis important that divergent views can be pre-sented and tested in open debate.

And that was the end of it. . . until a monthor so later, when a university student, havingdecided that the Johnstone interview was anabomination, urged the editors ofDagens

Nyheters culture/debate section to do some-thing about it. They responded by launchingan attack on Ordfront, ensuring a disgraceful

2 ATTACK OF THE ZAREMBITES


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outcome by delegating the task to MaciejZaremba, a sort of journalistic attack dogwhose previous targets have included Swe-dens general-welfare system and its once en-lightened foreign policy.

U.S. foreign policy is evidently much moreto Zarembas liking, and he appears to havelittle sympathy for anyone who opposes it. Heonce used the pages ofDagens Nyheter (abbrev.DN) to characterize Ben Linder, the cheer-

ful solidarity worker who was mutilated andmurdered by CIA-contras in Nicaragua, asan odd duck and nothing else. As far asZaremba was concerned, that was the sumtotal of what DNs readers needed to knowabout the presumptively misguided youngman from Oregon.

Zarembas method is based largely on dis-tortion, innuendo, false or misleading cita-tions, highly selective evidence, and otherstandard tools of the eager propagandist. The

results are usually so warped that it is not atall certain that he can be held responsible forthem. But the editors who have unleashedhim on an unsuspecting public certainly can;in this particular case, their names were LarsLinder and Ola Larsmo.

Naturally, Zaremba has received severaldistinguished awards for his service as a tellerof bold truths. Among the truths with whichhe favoured DNs readers in the initial attack,published on 3 November 2003, were that:

Ordfront denies genocide in the Balkans[headline]. . . . It has been possible to read sucharticles [as the Johnstone interview] for years

on the web sites of Serb fascists. . . . The articleconsists mainly of an interview with a certainDiana Johnstone. Do not the advocates ofthose who perpetrate genocide also have theright to tell their stories?. . . Ordfront must beaware that, apart from the violation of pressethics, the article was a gross offence to all thevictims of massacres and rapes in the Balkans,comparable in its impact on the survivors withdenial of the Nazi Holocaust. . . . Ordfront

must know that the information it publishedwas false. . . . [Ordfront] now allies itself withthe fascist Left, commits an outrage againstthe war victims, and risks being sued for defa-mation. The readers protest, but the magazinesticks to its guns.

Zarembas piece was illustrated with afamous/infamous photo of what has beendescribed as a concentration camp at Trno-polje. Since the propaganda usage of thatphoto was one of the issues addressed in the

Johnstone interview, Zaremba struggled todocument its authenticity. This was done byimpeaching an article in Living Marxism, anentirely unrelated British journal which hadrefuted the concentration camp interpretation,

based on the reporting of a German jour-nalist. Zaremba wrote that a British courtwhich awarded a fatal libel judgement againstOrdfronts source (it was not) found that thephoto had not been misinterpreted. (In fact,the court actually confirmed that it had been,

but ruled that Living Marxism could not proveits assertion of intent to deceive and wastherefore liable for damages.

3

The Ordfront scandalbegan quietly enoughin the summer of 2003,when the magazine pub-

lished an interview withDiana Johnstone whichfocused on her book ,Fools Crusade, a well-documented critique ofthe conventional wis-dom on the most recentBalkan wars. The head-line is a play on theSwedish verb, to lie.

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(For more on the case ofLiving Marxism, seeAppendix, item 1.)

The non-existent connection with LivingMarxism provided Zaremba with an excuse tofind Ordfront guilty by association with other

standpoints he attributed to that British jour-nal: Child pornography and propaganda infavour of violence should be permitted in thename of freedom, but not gun control. Thatwomen are stoned to death in Nigeria foradultery should be accepted, because to criti-cize Africans would be imperialistic. Also, the

best way to put Africas economy in orderwould be to sell the entire continent to inter-national corporations.

What do Living Marxism, death by stoning

in Nigeria and child pornography have to dowith the Johnstone interview? Not a thing.Zaremba also cited critiques ofLiving

Marxism by George Monbiot and Ed Vulliamyto support his case, while interpreting DorisLessings and Noam Chomskys statements insupport of the magazines right to publish asipso facto confirmation of its wickedness.

The attack concluded with a quotation ofAndras Riedlmayer: Frozen in time, like aninsect trapped in amber by reflexes from theCold War, the unreformed Left remains fix-ated on NATO and western imperialistic war-mongers as the only threat to humanity whichit is prepared to resist. . . . Fifty years afterWorld War II, the Left in its living death is nolonger able to identify either fascists or geno-cides as its enemies. (Retranslated from theSwedish.)

Desired effect

In short, a typical Zaremba job malicious

and grossly misleading. Those readers whowere familiar with his noxious tendencies nodoubt recognized the pattern and shrugged itoff as more of the usual.

But it appears that the average readerseldom pays attention to by-lines, and fewseem aware of the depths to which the oncefairly respectable Dagens Nyheter has sunk inrecent years. It is as though people were stillreading the U.S. weekly, The New Republic,without having noticed the ugly transforma-

tion it has undergone since Martin Peretz tookover. (Not so incidentally, Swedish public tele-visions premier news magazine has referred

to The New Republic as the established andrespected voice of the left wing in U.S. publicdebate and one of President Bushs toughestcritics.)

Accordingly, Zarembas diatribe had the

desired effect. Otherwise sensible peopleswallowed the smelly thing whole, without somuch as wrinkling a nostril or raising an eye-

brow. It may be assumed that many of Ord-fronts roughly 30,000 members were amongthose affected, but not all were impressed.

According to BjrnEklund, Most of thereactions that cameinto Ordfront werecritical of Zaremba

or positive towardmy interview. The re-actions in some me-dia were hysterical,

but Ordfronts mem-bers seemed to takeit calmly. That was

only a small sample, of course; the reaction ofthe membership as a whole was not known.

There was certainly cause for concern, asDN continued to whip up hysteria. An edi-torial published three weeks after the initialattack explained that the main problem was asmall group of people and their nostalgia forthe days of the Vietnam War. That period, sosimple in memory, when the U.S. representedall evil in the world, when U.S. imperialismwas the framework within which everythingin the world could be observed and under-stood. It was essential, argued the anony-mous editorialist, to get rid of everyone asso-ciated with Ordfront Magazine who was criti-cal of U.S. war policy and imperialism, andwho was not able to keep on course in pub-lic debate.

Possibly by pre-arrangement, DNs cries ofoutrage and offended decency were taken up

by most other major media, including the so-called and highly influential public service TVand radio. The hunt was on.

Appropriate response

The initial reaction of Ordfronts leadership

to all this was precisely what it ought to havebeen to defend the magazines right andresponsibility to publish unpopular views,


Maciej Zaremba


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5ATTACK OF THE ZAREMBITES

. . . For the Left, Kosovo was the good warthat Clinton fought for human rights. Forthe Right, despite some chafing at the timeabout bombing Christians on behalf ofMuslims, Kosovo is the handy precedentfor bypassing the authority of the UnitedNations. . . .

The weapons of mass destruction fiascohas turned Iraq into yet another humani-tarian war, leaving only Iraqi freedom as a

justification, even though the Iraqis seem tothink freedom is now a question of riddingthemselves of the American occupation. So,even though its impossible to write fastenough to keep up with American war-making, Diana Johnstones account of theBalkan Wars, Fools Crusade: Yugoslavia,NATO and Western Delusions, is very timely.It is also a very remarkable book. . . .

The book is an antidote to hawks of theboth the Left and Right, because their en-

thusiasm for military interventionism,despite the huge price in life and limb, isshown to have depended on a string ofmyths adding up to a simplistic Good vs.Evil characterization of the Balkans worthyof George W. Bushs speech-writers. A Naziequation in which the Serbs were the Nazisand the Muslims the Jews so that the onlysolution was the one that just happened to

best suit the various hidden agendas of theNATO countries, namely war against the

Serbs.Johnstone does not so much demolish the

myths as hold them up for a patient, seriousexamination that leaves one wonderinghow anyone could have got away with sell-ing them in the first place: the myth of theSerbs as the inventors ofethnic cleansing;of the Serbian Academy of Sciences Nazi-style elaboration of the theory of ethniccleansing; of Milosevics notorious racistspeech at Kosovo Polje; of the campaign for

a Greater Serbia. Recently in The Nation,

Milosevic was once again accused, this timeby Samantha Power (who won a prize forher book on genocide), of having beenresponsible for some 200,000 deaths inBos-nia. Johnstone does a superb job in thedelicate task of unpacking the meagre evi-dence for claims like this, or more generalones ofgenocide and Holocaust in bothBosnia and Kosovo. Its a delicate task be-cause anyone who dares to question these

things is inevitably branded a Holocaustdenier, even though its a grievous insult tothe victims of the real Holocaust to use theword to describe even the wildest claims thehave been made about the Balkan Wars. . . .

Its hard to come away from this bookwithout the conviction that the Serbs wereas much sinned against as sinners and thatthe West was highly complicit in the manysins on both sides. Only a vast and complexpublic relations campaign could have made

the world think otherwise. This involvedthe usual cast of PR firms deployed to greatadvantage to make the anti-Serb case, butalso an ambitious new breed of NGOs, theAmerican group Human Rights Watch, forexample, French and American intellectuelsengags, and venerable institutions such asthe UN Secretariat. . . . Johnstones analysisof the disgraceful behaviour of the Interna-tional Criminal Tribunal for the former Yu-goslavia is so incisive for a non-lawyer as

to make a lawyer blush. . . . Fools Crusade is not only the definitivework on the Balkan Wars, it is also an inspir-ing example of how to rescue truth from the

battlefield when it has become war s firstcasualty, an important lesson these days.

Excerpts from review ofFools Crusade in theCanadian Jewish Outlook, Vol. 42, No. 1,

Jan./Feb. 2004, by Prof . Michael Mandel,Osgoode Hall Law School,York University,

Canada

The definitive work on the Balkan wars

Canadian law professors view of Diana Johnstones book


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and to accuse Dagens Nyheter of attempting tostifle debate. These and related self-evidentpoints were made by Chief Editor Leif Erics-son, Chairwoman Christina Hagner and Ex-ecutive Director Gertrud strm. But they

were also careful to distance themselves fromthe interview with Diana Johnstone, referringto serious flaws that were never specified.

Of course, this only stimulated DagensNyheter to further excesses, including yetanother lengthy diatribe by Zaremba whichconcluded with the pronouncement that,Freedom of expression is not a goal in itself.He would later expand on that theme in arevealing radio interview (see p. 15).

Other media chimed in on the same wave

length. Public televisions

Culture News

programme, for example, broadcast a reporton the controversy which was so blatantly bi-ased and intellectually dishonest that it mighthave been comical were it not for the gravityof the issues involved (see Immoral Jour-nalism, p. 13).

The role of the indignant man of honour inthis spectacle and others like it was eagerlyplayed by Gellert Tamas, an Ordfront authorand charter member of the bombing leftistswho have dominated the Swedish publicdebate on the Balkans. The Culture Newseditor, Peter O. Nilsson, is associated with themore noisome of the two major evening tab-loids, Expressen, which has long striven to dis-credit Ordfront and is owned by the samemedia conglomerate as Dagens Nyheter. It is allrather incestuous. (For additional examples,see Appendix, item 1.)

Capitulation

Meanwhile, by her own account, ChairwomanHagner was under siege by the predatorypress in one of its feeding frenzies. Othersources close to her have said that she was alsosubjected to a sort of shunning process by in-dignant colleagues at her place of work, theSwedish chapter of Save the Children. LeifEricsson was (not for the first time) beingcalled upon to do the decent thing and resignas publisher and chief editor of the magazine.

Clearly, the situation called for steady

nerves and stout hearts, as Ordfront Magazineseditorial advisory board tried to impress uponEricsson at an emergency meeting. But the

very next day, he capitulated to the journalisticmob, announcing on the main private televisionchannel that he had now readFools Crusadeand regretted publication of the interview.This was followed by a statement of regret in

Dagens Nyheter which asserted that,John-stone is telling lies. Rebuttals by Johnstone

and Prof. Edward S. Herman were refused byDNs editors (see Appendix, items 2 4).

The board of directors followed Ericssonslead in the name of the entire organization,proclaiming in an open letter that it waswrong to publish the interview with Diana

Johnstone. We feel that the article was not ade-quately documented and was too uncriticaltoward her point of view. The vote was

unanimous; but three board members laterclaimed to have consented under duress inorder to prevent an even more ignominiousstatement from being issued.

Double standard

In what was to become a consistent pattern, noexamples of the allegedly inadequate docu-mentation were provided by the board. Fur-thermore, the implicit norm that everyonewho is interviewed in the magazine must be

subjected to some sort of adversarial processwas clearly an ad hoc construction: No suchrule has ever applied to any other author, be-fore or since. Subsequent to the Johnstone in-terview, for example, Leif Ericsson conducteda lengthy interview with George Monbiot (awriter approved by Zaremba) which was every

bit as uncritical; but there were no com-plaints and, when the glaring double standardwas pointed out, it was simply ignored.

Norm or no norm, there was hardly any

need to balance the viewpoint of DianaJohnstone with yet another recitation of theUSA/NATO propaganda which has domi-nated news reporting and public debate inSweden from the start of the Balkan wars.Bjrn Eklunds accompanying text explainedthat the interview was intended as a responseto that propaganda. Such responses were (andare) so rare that many readers, as noted above,were delighted that one had finally appearedin Ordfront Magazine.

An unusually large number of membersreacted strongly to both the witch hunt of themainstream press and the capitulation of the



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Ordfront leadership. A statement of protestsigned by 39 writers and other interested parties(myself included) was circulated within theorganization, and worried reactions streamedin from the provinces. The impression was

widespread that the leadership had betrayedOrdfronts most fundamental principles itsvery raison dtre by meekly submitting tothe media mob.

But Chief Editor Ericsson and the boardrefused to admit error and declined to open adialogue with worried and disgruntled mem-

bers. Then the two junior editors of the maga-zine were laid off on purported grounds ofeconomic necessity an explanation that wasinevitably greeted with suspicion, given the

timing and context of the dismissals, plus thefact that they came with no prior warning.Their immediate superior, Bjrn Eklund, wasnot consulted as prescribed by Swedish labourmarket norms and Ordfronts professed ideals.

That left Eklund and Ericsson to producea monthly magazine of considerable length,circulation and quality. When the trade pub-lication of Swedish journalists asked Eklundabout the feasibility of the new regime, henoted that it would be difficult to maintain the

magazines quality with such a minusculestaff. He also intimated that the dismissals had

a political dimension. For that hardly surpris-ing assessment, he was accused ofdisloyaltyand issued a formal warning by ExecutiveDirector Gertrud strm.

Now it was Eklunds turn to be shunned,by his fellow workers at Ordfront around 35altogether in the administrative, book publish-ing and adult education departments and aconsultant was called in to investigate the dis-

tressed work environment. According toEklund, the interview sample was drawn upby strm and consisted almost entirely ofindividuals from other divisions who weremobbing Eklund, while excluding nearlyeveryone who had worked with him on themagazine, several of them for ten years ormore.

Of the eight people who Eklund named asreferences, only one was interviewed and her(positive) comments were omitted from the

written summary of the

findings

whichwas written by strm, not the consultant. Sheincluded only the negative opinions attributed

to five individuals who, she asserted, hadcomplained that he was difficult to work with.The object of their alleged displeasure was notgranted an opportunity to respond to the ac-cusations against him.

But even within that highly skewed con-text, employee relations were apparently notas strained as strm made them out to be.On the basis of subsequent conversations withthe interviewees, Eklund states that, One ofthem, a person with whom I had previouslyworked closely almost every day for sevenyears, said that she had told the consultantthat she had experienced our co-operation aspositive. Another reported saying that she hadme to thank for everything she had learned

about her job.

None of this was mentioned instrms written summary or during Eklundsdiscussions with strm and the consultant.(The consultant has declined an invitation tocomment on this account of the proceedings.)

The whole business thus appears to havebeen a charade, and the consultant duly re-commended that Eklund should be got rid of.(He also recommended the departure of Erics-son; but that has yet to occur.) The reasonscited by strm in her dismissal notice weredisloyalty and co-operation difficulties .

Not surprisingly, strm long refused tomake her written account public, on thegrounds that Eklunds dismissal had becomethe subject of legal proceedings even thoughhe declared his willingness to have it released.

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Bjrn Eklund


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Finally, over a year later, it was made availablefor scrutiny in connection with an appeal ofthe dismissal which is scheduled to be heardthis October in Swedens Labour RelationsCourt (see page 59).

From the documentation submitted to theCourt, the case against Eklund appears to bebased largely on petty, mean-spirited gossipby individuals who in most cases have hadlimited experience of working directly withhim but who are in various ways depend-ent on strm and Ericsson. By comparison,writers and others who have worked withEklund for many years have unanimouslyattested to his excellent qualities as an editorand as a human being (no dichotomy in-

tended).All of this took place at the end of 2003,and it naturally caused great turmoil withinthe organization. Of course, the level and in-tensity of concern was greatest among thosewho had been most actively involved as

book authors, contributors to the magazine,members of local chapters, etc. But that wasonly a minor portion of the total membership.Nobody knew what the majority of the roughly30,000 members knew and felt about thesedevelopments.

For the moment, at least, Ericsson, Hagnerand strm were in control of the magazine,the administrative apparatus and the money.In addition, having confessed the error of theirways and having joined the attack on both

Johnstone and Eklund, they could now rely onthe support of their new or rediscovered alliesin DN, public broadcasting and most othermainstream media.

The growing opposition within Ordfronthad no such media channels at its disposal.

But alarmed and outraged members through-out the land, having been denied the possibilityof constructive dialogue with the increasinglyautocratic leadership, began to meet and dis-cuss the crisis among themselves. This waslabelled as factionalism by strm andHagner.

Prior to these developments, the involve-ment of Chief Editor Leif Ericsson in themagazines production had been somewhatlimited. His main contributions had consisted

of an occasional veto and the odd article on asubject of special interest to him. One such

was the plight of a lawyer and fellow bomb-ing leftist who was sentenced to prison formisuse of funds in connection with a Swedishaid project in Brazil. Ericsson published several

bizarre defences of his comrade in bombs in

the process exposing the organization to therisk of a potentially devastating libel suit bymaligning the Swedish woman who had

blown the whistle on the financial irregulari-ties. Fortunately for him and Ordfront, she didnot pursue the matter.

Now, Ericsson asserted his authority overthe magazine and began to use it as a platformfrom which to continue his assault on Diane

Johnstone and to justify his capitulation to themedia mob. The January 2004 issue featured

a lengthy special section with several articlessupporting Ericssons perspective on the Bal-kan wars. It was introduced with a two-pagephoto spread depicting grieving relatives ofvictims of an alleged massacre at the Kosovotown of Racak, and yet another evocation ofNazi genocide: Not since the Holocaust andWorld War II has Europe been devastated bysuch brutality as the systematic ethnic cleans-ing and persecution of several million peoplein former Yugoslavia.

One mans common narrative

The featured item of the special section wasEricssons essay, Denying Guilt, in which hecalled for agreement on a common narrative[of the Balkan wars] . . . . Such a narrativemakes reconciliation possible. It becomes acommon memory of mankind, which can helpus understand ourselves and how we canavoid similar human catastrophes (see Ap-pendix, item 5). Needless to say, the common

narrative he seemed to have in mind foreveryone was something very like his own.Ericsson also expounded on the same themein a page three editorial.

Ironically, the cover story was an homageto Sara Lidman, a wonderful and recently de-ceased Swedish writer who, for her eloquentdenunciations of the Vietnam War, South Af-rican apartheid and other abominations, hadoften been subjected to the same kind of abusethat has been heaped upon Diana Johnstone

although her words were never censored orsuppressed in the same fashion.

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Johnstones rebuttal came two monthslater, but was tucked away at the back of the

book under the nondescript heading, Debate,along with a piece by Edward Herman and yetanother rejoinder from Ericsson. Both John-

stones and Herman

s rebuttals were trun-cated; readers were referred to a web site for

the rest (see Appendix, items 6 7). This time,there was no front-page announcement, nospecial box on the contents page, no pagethree editorial, no two-page photo spread, etc.

Ericsson also refused to publish BjrnEklunds rebuttal of the charges against him.So, in the publication that I had served forsixteen years, observes Eklund, I was notgranted a single opportunity to respond to all

the accusations against me.

With publication of his Denying Guiltedition, Ericsson declared that the debatewas concluded in the magazine, but thatOrdfront was planning a seminar at which theissues would be further discussed. No suchseminar ever took place.

In April of 2004, Ericsson announced hisintention to resign as publisher and chief edi-tor at the end of the year, thereby eliminatingthe main source of the conflict for whichEklund had ostensibly been fired. But aswriter Eva Moberg has observed: Clearly, itwas more important to get rid of Eklund thanto solve the problems at the workplace.*

When he shut down the debate in themagazine, Ericsson left unpublished a numberof letters and essays that had been submitted

by various members and writers, includingseveral long-time contributors. With all estab-lished channels blocked, these and related

materials were published on the web site ofwriter Erik Wijk, which served as a sort ofpublic archive for the debate. Informal e-mailgroups coalesced, small groups of concernedindividuals and some local Ordfront chaptersheld meetings to discuss the issues. In theseand other ways, a diffuse and unco-ordinatedopposition began to form.

The annual meeting, which according toOrdfronts by-laws, is the organization shighest decision-making body, promised to

be an interesting event. Nothing if not con-sistent, Dagens Nyheter and kindred mediaattempted to influence the outcome by run-ning a spate of worried analyses in the daysrunning up to the meeting.

Gellert Tamas was allotted the better partof a full page in DN to reiterate his indictmentagainst Eklund and Johnstone, warning thecomplacent that, Since only some 80 of

Ordfronts 30,000 members usually participate[in the annual meeting], there is a real risk thata few dozen Johnstone supporters will suc-ceed in pushing through their line. . . . Thequestion is whether Ordfront is to be a broad,open, searching, progressive, radical force orif the organization will be taken over by dog-matists in whose black-and-white world com-plex issues such as the wars in former Yugo-slavia shall be decided by the establishment ofa single right and correct ideological stance. If

the latter faction wins, Ordfronts existence isprobably at stake. And it will not only beOrdfronts members and staff to feel sorry for,

but also in a wider sense a defeat for freedomof expression.

All that and more, without the merest hintof irony or self-awareness.

ATTACK OF THE ZAREMBITES 9

*Eva Moberg was a long-time contributor toOrdfront Magazine and a member of its editorialadvisory board, which unanimously supportedEklund and publication of the Johnstone interview.The board was disbanded after the special annualmeeting in September 2004 because, as Ericsson ex-plained, What is the point of having an advisoryboard if all it ever does is criticize everything I do?.

In the publication that I had served forsixteen years, I was not granted a singleopportunity to respond to all the accu-sations against me.

Bjrn Eklund


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The most horrendous episode of moderntimes was the slaughter of a million or moreSerbs and members of other ethnic groupsduring World War II by Croats, Muslims andAlbanians allied with Hitlers Germany andMussolinis Italy. Not surprisingly, the historicalmemory of that genocidal process many ofthe survivors are still alive is as crucial forSerbian psychology and politics as is the Holo-caust for the Jewish people.

That and other disturbing memories wereinevitably aroused when Yugoslavia began tounravel following the end of the Cold War.Once again, the intervention of external powersplayed an important role. Among the first tointrude was Germany, which sought to re-establish its influence in the region and in sodoing helped to revive the Croatian Ustasja, aterror organization that had committed theworst offences against the Serbs during WorldWar II.

As predicted

Succumbing to heavy pressure from Germany,the European Community recognized theindependence of Croatia and Slovenia in

January of 1992. Predictably, and as widelypredicted, that decision set loose the dogs ofcivil war. Swedens consent to the unanimousdecision was granted by the government ofCarl Bildt, a Conservative who would laterserve as the ECs envoy in a largely futile at-tempt to clean up the awful mess that he andhis colleagues had helped to make.

The United States, apparently motivatedby a desire to ensure the dissolution of Yugo-slavia, also invested substantial economic and

military resources in Croatia. It would later dothe same in the provinces of Bosnia andKosovo, supporting terrorists and instigating

secession in a way that it would never tolerate,for example, in the state of California with itsgrowing population of legal and illegal Mexi-can immigrants. The U.S. sabotaged one peaceagreement for Bosnia, and purposely de-signed another for Kosovo so that the centralgovernment of Yugoslavia would be forced toreject it thus providing a pretext for theUSA/NATO war of aggression. [3]

Demonization process

All of this and more was added to the volatilemix of ethnic tensions and regional conflicts inYugoslavia, ensuring and severely aggravat-ing the civil wars that raged throughout the

1990s. Atrocities were committed on all sides,and it remains far from clear who did what towhom, and to what extent.

Very little of this complex story has beenthoroughly conveyed to the outside world. Asso often in the past in other settings, most ofthe news from the Balkans has originated withthe propaganda agencies of the Westernpowers, often assisted by public relationsfirms such as Ruder Finn, and filtered throughtheir mainstream media. What has emerged

from that process is a simple tale of good andevil, with the Serbs cast in the role of bad guysand other ethnic groups Bosnian Muslimsand Kosovo-Albanians, in particular asmore or less hapless victims.

The demonization of the Serbs was accom-plished with the endless repetition of a few

basic themes. One linked the Serbs rhetoricallywith Nazi Germany. Especially useful for thatpurpose was the massacre of several thousandMuslim men at the Bosnian town of Sreb-

renica, an undeniably terrible event that wasendlessly cited as the worst crime in Europesince the Nazi Holocaust.

A SIMPLE TALE OF GOOD & EVIL

THE FORMER NATION of Yugoslavia was a federation based on a delicate balanceof ethnic groups which have been plaguing each other for centuries, often as a director indirect consequence of intervention by great powers such as the Ottoman andHabsburg empires.

10


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Likewise, Yugoslavias President SlobodanMilosevic was portrayed as a Hitler-like figure

bent on establishing an expansive Serbianempire by means of systematic terror andethnic cleansing.

There is a cruel and obvious irony in thisdramaturgy, given that it was the Serbs whowere the principal victims of the atrocitiescommitted in the Balkans by Hitler s Nazisand their allies among other Balkan ethnicgroups.

Neglected crimes

Conversely, abuses committed against Serbsby the designated victims have been down-played or ignored. Thus, the first and only

genuine ethnic cleansing to take place in theregion, that of an estimated 250,000 Serbsfrom the Krajina area of Croatia, has seldom

been mentioned and even less often treated asa significant event. That was also the jour-nalistic fate of the prelude to the Srebrenicamassacre a series of murderous raids onnearly 200 Serbian villages in the surroundingarea, conducted by Muslim forces from theshelter of Srebrenica. The crimes of the dicta-torial Franjo Tudjman, the democratically

elected Milosevics counterpart in Croatia, aswell as the depredations ofUstasja terroristswere treated with a discretion appropriate toclients of the United States and Germany.

With some variations and the usual honour-able exceptions, this was the general impres-sion of the Balkan wars conveyed by Swedishmainstream media, including the two mostinfluential the public broadcasting systemand the daily newspaper, Dagens Nyheter.Those two sources are roughly comparable to

Englands BBC and the United States

NewYork Times, but probably even more influential

within their limited spheres due to a dearth ofalternatives.

To note but a few examples: Swedishpublic radio habitually referred to Milosevicas the man who started four wars, appar-ently all by himself. Public televisions mostrespected news reader, Claes Elfsberg, led offa discussion of the impending USA/NATO

bombing by posing the question: What else

to do [except bomb] when Milosevic refuses tosign the peace agreement? (This was a refer-ence to the so-called Rambouillet Accord

which, as U.S. officials have admitted, wasspecifically designed so that Milosevic would

be forced to reject it.)Dagens Nyheters coverage of the Balkans

was conducted mainly by Christian Palme, a

distant relative of Olof Palme who was chris-tened with the same first name but changed itin order to avoid what he regarded as troub-ling confusion. No-longer-Olof Palme haswritten that, since childhood, he has been con-sumed by a sort of holy rage against the injus-tices of the world; and in Slobodan Miloseviche appears to have found a suitable object forhis righteous vengeance. His account of Milo-sevics entrance into the kangaroo court at TheHague [4] reads like a scene out of Bram

Stokers Dracula, complete with a witheringglance of the demons evil eye which sent

shivers down the spine of the intrepid reporterfrom Dagens Nyheter.

This is the kind of stuff that consumers ofSwedish mainstream news have been fed forthe past decade or so, and it has been rein-forced by the ignorant or disinformativepronouncements of Prime Minister GranPersson who can usually be relied upon to saynothing that might displease the U.S. govern-ment although his foreign minister did oncecomplain that the bombing of Belgrade cametoo close to the Swedish embassy and broke afew windows.

Thought police

There were some exceptions, of course. Swedenis blessed with a number of journalists andacademics who are well-versed in Balkanhistory and politics. Through their efforts,alert readers and listeners were able to catch

an occasional glimpse of the complexities ob-scured by the simple morality tale spun by themainstream media.

By and large, however, the news from theBalkans was controlled by a corps of well-placed, self-appointed thought police whokept to the basic script and were quick topounce on anyone who strayed from thedesignated path the path that led straightto the illegal bombing of Yugoslavia, and fromthere to the preventive wars of aggression

against Afghanistan, Iraq and whichevertargets are next on the list.Among those who have felt the wrath of

11A SIMPLE TALE OF GOOD & EVIL


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the thought police is Saam Kapadia, a reporterwith Swedish public television who visitedBosnia with a colleague in 2001 (i.e. after theshooting had stopped) and readily gatheredinformation of which I, as a media consumer,

was not aware. . . . Our report showed thatthere were preceding events which, given theterrible logic of the war, could explain theSerbs criminal actions in Prijedor.

Although the report emphasized thatthose explanatory events could not justify thecrimes that followed, The result was a stormof criticism and the filing of complaints withthe Swedish Broadcasting Commission [a

journalism review board]. We were accused ofbeing historical revisionists, of running the

Serbs

errands, and told that we had dishon-oured the memory of the victims. The samethemes would later be employed in the attackon Ordfront.

Peculiar logic

Among the most outraged was Expressen, a(by Swedish standards) odious tabloid owned

by the same media conglomerate that pos-sesses Dagens Nyheter. An Expressen editorialposed the question: Do the Swedish TV re-

porters mean to say that the massacre of 7000men at Srebrenica is less serious because theyhad participated in nightly raids on Serbianvillages in the surrounding area? Rather anodd question in the circumstances, whichwere that the offending report had not evenmentioned Srebrenica, and explicitly rejectedthe exculpatory logic ofExpressens rhetoricalquestion. (Note: The exact number massacredat Srebrenica remains uncertain. But anydoubts, no matter how well-founded, are

invariably attacked by the thought police asthe work ofhistorical revisionists. . . deniersof genocide, etc.)

Two months later, notes Kapadia, theattack continued when Expressen devoted itsdebate page to a lengthy indictment in whichwe were lumped together with all sorts of so-called historical revisionists. Given the source,such criticism must be regarded as a probablesign of integrity. Kapadia notes, however, thatSwedish public TVs own coverage of the

Balkan wars had been generally inadequate. [5]The editor ofExpressens culture/debate

section is Per Svensson, one of the most

fanatical of the thought police, who employedsimilar illogic in the subsequent attacks onDiana Johnstone and Bjrn Eklund. An Ex-pressen editorial writer, Anna Dahlberg, hasaccused a Social Democratic MP of acting asMilosevic

s mouthpiece

because she, almostalone among her colleagues, dared to question

the conventional wisdom on the Balkans.A different sort of sanction appears to have

been applied to Fredrik Braconier, for manyyears the chief foreign affairs expert of Swedenssecond most influential newspaper, the con-servative daily Svenska Dagbladet. Throughoutthe Cold War, his perspective on events almostalways coincided with that of the UnitedStates. But for some reason, he began to devi-ate from that pattern when the Balkan wars

broke out. He was one of the few mainstreamjournalists, for example, who wrote of the noc-turnal raids on Serbian villages that precededthe Srebrenica massacre. Not long afterwards,he was moved to a more subordinate positionin the financial section and has not been seenin his former area of expertise since.

As for the thought police, there is nothingto indicate that they are united by any deeperpurpose than to combat the forces of evilwhich they feel entitled to identify, and to sup-

port wars of aggression by the United Statesin such noble causes all in the name of humanrights, and in disregard of international law.Their motives appear to be rather diverse, andalmost certainly have more to do with as-sorted personality traits than with any coher-ent ideology. Christian Palme has his holyrage to grapple with. Per Svensson andMaciej Zaremba, to judge from their writtenand spoken words, suffer from limited and/or impaired mental capacity.

Reporter Kjell-Albin Abrahamsson, whohas accounted for the worst excesses of Swed-ish public radio, gives every appearance of

being a self-inflating buffoon whose primaryjournalistic ambition is to dispense what heevidently regards as clever remarks. Report-ing on the show trial of Slobodan Milosevic,for example, he noted that the former Yugosla-vian president intended to call a large numberof supporting witnesses, adding gratuitouslythat, It is not known whether Bjrn Eklund

will be among them.Whatever the emotional and intellectualproblems involved, they have not hindered a

12 A SIMPLE TALE OF GOOD & EVIL


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number of such people from rising to loftypositions within Swedens most influentialmass media. In the case of the Balkan wars,they have consistently misled and misin-formed their audiences, and perhaps them-

selves. It is a journalistic calamity that hasbeen noted by many, including Brigadier BoPellns of the Swedish army, who has servedin the Balkans as an observer and peace nego-tiator for the Organization for Security andCooperation in Europe (OSCE).

Pellnss analysis, which correspondsquite well with that of Diana Johnstone, high-lights the uncritical acceptance of propaganda

by mainstream media to justify flagrant vio-lations of international law, with the war

against Serbia as a prime example.It would also appear, he writes, thatSwedish media have raised surprisingly fewquestions about all this. Their great willing-ness to accept and pass on U.S. (and, later,Swedish) government claims that the waragainst the Serbs was a response to the ethniccleansing of Kosovo-Albanians ought to berather embarrassing for a number of Swedisheditors.

That assessment is part of a remarkablyfrank critique of the USA/NATO war againstYugoslavia and occupation of Kosovo, whichappeared in by far the most influential debateforum in Sweden the commentary/op-ed

section ofDagens Nyheter. [6]Given that sort of prominent display, incombination with the brigadier s impeccablecredentials and extensive first-hand experi-ence, one might assume that his demolition ofthe conventional wisdom would have had aninvigorating effect on public debate. But itpassed with barely a ripple of attention dueperhaps in part to the fact that it came ratherlate in the game, i.e. in February of 2004.

But the main reason for the seemingly in-

explicable lack of interest was that the mostimportant channels of debate have remainedlargely under the control of individuals whohave too much too lose politically, profes-sionally and psychologically from an openand honest discussion of the issues.

And so, the good brigadier s analysis waskilled with silence, which in Sweden is aprevalent and usually effective technique fordisposing of disagreeable intelligence.


Immoral Journalism

Among the media attacks on Diana Johnstoneand Ordfront were at least two reports broad-cast by the Culture News programme ofSwedish public television, which is required

by law to remain impartial when dealing withcontroversial issues. In this case, however, itsreporting was entirely one-sided; only the

views of the misinformed or the disinformingwere presented.

They included Slavisa Slucur who wasdescribed as a Serbian Social Democraticmember of parliament in Bosnia-Hercevo-gina. Having read a translation supplied by

Johnstones critics, he observed: It is veryimmoral to pick a couple of details from thewar and try to prove that everything that has

been said about the war is a lie. . . . What I findencouraging is the reaction this article caused

in Sweden in your media. The good, healthysociety always has to react to this kind of jour-nalism and this kind of distorting of the facts.

Also permitted to speak was GellertTamas, a Swedish writer published by Ord-fronts book division, who explained thatthere was no longer any doubt that the Serbshad committed genocide (a concept which helater equated with both ethnic cleansing,and crimes against humanity). Among

other things, Tamas claimed that the Bosnia-Hercevoginan government has acknowledgedthat [the Serbian military campaign in Bosnia]was a planned genocide. This was said to bean acknowledgement by Serbs; but Bosnia-Hercevogina is a Muslim-Croat entity. Heprobably meant the Bosnian Serb Republic;however, there is no record of that govern-ment making any such admission. [7]

Whatever the facts of the case, it was allmade to look and sound very convincing in

Culture News. Tamas concluded by liken-ing Diana Johnstone with historical revision-ists who deny the Nazi Holocaust: Her line


16/92


the one side tried to expel the other. Thesewere very serious and unfortunate events.(See also Appendix, item 6.)

In any event, the stated intent of the bookis not to catalogue and apportion guilt for the

horrors that inevitably took place once thedogs of war were set loose. Rather, it is pri-marily concerned with the origins and drivingforces of the Balkan wars the political, eco-nomic, cultural and geopolitical context. Theobjective is not to recount the whole story(impossible in a book of this length), but toput the story in perspective, explains theintroduction.

Among other things, that meant analysingthe propaganda campaign used to demonize

the Serbs and justify the USA/NATO war ofaggression. Hence, the furious response ofthose who, like Gellert Tamas and his friendsin public broadcasting, have helped to spreadthat propaganda. As Bjrn Eklund observed inhis interview with Diana Johnstone, So manypeople have invested so heavily and for solong in the conventional wisdom on the warsthat every questioning of them is perceived asa threat to credibility, careers or prestige.

That has been more than amply demon-strated by the assault on Ordfront. The examplesofDagens Nyheter, Culture News and manyothers like it all serve to support Mr. Slucurscontention that, The good, healthy societyalways has to react to this kind of journalismand this kind of distorting of the facts.

Alas, his approbation is misplaced, asthere is no reason to be encouraged by the re-action of the Swedish mainstream press. Onthe contrary: Its behaviour in this affair is aclear indication that there is something aboutthe current state of Swedish society which isneither good nor healthy.

of reasoning is identical. It is precisely thesame arguments. One gets stuck on detailsand uses them as a pretext for [asserting that]nothing happened.

These and similar statements were accom-

panied by scenes of intimated horror in whatwas presumably Bosnia, although no detailswere given. Thelast word went toMr. Slucur and wasillustrated by thecrown of a humanskull protrudingfrom the groundsomewhere.

In response to

a complaint aboutthe extreme biasof this segment,editor Peter O.Nilsson replied:What we tried to do was to follow up thedebate by letting two people with different

backgrounds comment upon it.If Johnstone or someone familiar with her

work had been allowed to speak, the audienceofCulture News would presumably havelearned that, far from comprising a couple ofdetails,Fools Crusade is based on a large bodyof well-documented information from a widevariety of sources.

Nor has Johnson ever claimed that noth-ing happened, or attempted to prove thateverything that has been said about the war isa lie. That ought to have been apparent froma reading of the scandalized interview inOrdfront Magazine: Of course there wereabuses in Bosnia and Kosovo, she was quotedas saying. but outrages were committed byall sides. In order to gain control of territory,

A SIMPLE TALE OF GOOD & EVIL

Gellert Tamas

14


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One of the few exceptions to the mainstreammedias assault on Diana Johnstone was a pro-gramme of media news and analysis which isa regular feature of Swedish public radio. Inearly February of 2004, Maciej Zaremba, LeifEricsson and other interested parties were in-terviewed by Bjrn Kumm, a widely respected

journalist of the old school i.e. with exten-sive knowledge and experience of foreign

policy issues, and a willingness/capacity tocope with their complexities.

Although the programmes audience isonly a fraction of that exposed to the wide-spread attacks on Johnstone and Eklund, it didprovide a public forum in which some of theprincipal actors in the drama displayed theirmodes of thought. The following are excerptsfrom responses to the interviewer s questionsand observations (in italics).

Last summer, Diana Johnstone was interviewed inOrdfront Magazine by its managing editor, BjrnEklund . . . . Then nothing happened, and thenagain nothing happened. But three months afterpublication of the interview, there began what inmedia circles is usually referred to as a drivehunt. . . .In the ensuing debate, Dagens Nyheterrefused to publish a number of contributions. In asecond article, Maciej Zaremba explained that

freedom of expression is not unconditional or self-evident.

Zaremba: [My second article] was a reaction tothe editors at Ordfront who defended publi-cation of the Johnstone interview with the ar-gument that it is important to have a diversityof voices. I dont think it is enough to say thatit is important to have a diversity of voices. Asso well-formulated in our constitutional law,the function of freedom of expression is toenable citizens to become enlightened andwell-informed. Thus, a freedom of expressionwhich is used to confuse us contradicts the

purpose of freedom of expression.

A SIMPLE TALE OF GOOD & EVIL 15

She questions NATO policy in the Balkans

Zaremba and Ericsson explain the need to support preventive wars of aggression

and to protect Swedes from freedom of expression which is used to confuse us

Who decides if it confuses us?

Zaremba: I think that is something which everywell-read citizen can do. If there is a findingof genocide by the Hague Tribunal which can

be read on the Internet, and it says in Ordfrontthat no one has been found guilty of or eveninvestigated for genocide, then it is a lie thatis so blatant and easy to check that one can say

that it is intended to confuse

or at least hasthe effect of confusing. Maybe there was nointent. Maybe it was just ignorance or stupid-ity, I dont know. [Note: Here, again, Zarembadistorts Johnstones position. What she actu-ally wrote about the Hague Tribunal and thequestion of genocide can be read in her book,

Fools Crusade.]

But it is preferable not to publish certain contri-butions to the debate because they might confuse

people?Zaremba: No, but lets keep to the subject. Ofcourse, I would never have published the

Johnstone interview if I were the responsibleeditor. Likewise, I would never publish an ar-ticle which stated that the Chernobyl accidentnever took place. All newspapers receivenumerous texts of this type from confusedpeople every day. We do not publish them inour newspaper. This is not a print shop. Ourtask is to assess the quality of what we pub-

lish, and for which we also assume responsi-bility. Space must also be provided for upset-ting interpretations and events. But when itcomes to facts, one must be very strict. In myview, one may not publish facts that are un-true and present them as true.

Very strict, says Maciej Zaremba. After severalweeks of devastating attacks against the editors ofOrdfront Magazine, the criticisms had an effect.The magazines chief editor, Leif Ericsson, pub-

lished an apology with extensive self-criticism in


18/92


Dagens Nyheter. . . . How would you summarizeDiana Johnstones argument?

Ericsson: She has written a book in which shequestions NATO policy in the Balkans, whicheventually led to several military interven-

tions. She states that much of the picture thathas been painted in the Western press is false,and is intended to legitimate NATOs policy.That is how I interpret her standpoint.

Is it wrong to say that?

Ericsson: What I think is wrong is. . . on anumber of points. . . I have not closely ana-lysed all of her arguments, and there are cer-tainly grounds for some of them. I havefocused on 5-10 main points, including what

she has stated about the massacres at Racakand Srebrenica, and about the Hague Tribunaland some other points, and have concludedthat she suppresses a large number of factswhich speak against her standpoint.

Does she deny [the massacre at] Srebrenica?

Ericsson: She expresses herself in a rather slip-pery fashion. . . . She says that Srebrenica has

been used only to exaggerate and to justify theNATO attack, and that no one has been inter-ested in finding out who were killed [atSrebrenica]. That sweeping statement is com-pletely wrong, for there are incredibly manyorganizations which have worked year afteryear to trace victims and find relatives andsurvivors. [Note: The reader is advised tocompare Ericssons interpretation with what

Johnstone actually wrote inFools Crusade. Seealso Appendix, item 4.]

So, she does not question that a massacre occurred

at Srebrenica?Ericsson: No, she does not. But she has a ten-dency to constantly reduce the number ofvictims. . . . .

Did you [Zaremba] know of Diana Johnstone priorto this affair?

Zaremba: I had heard the name. She is part ofsome sort of international Balkan revisionistnetwork. You can surf the Internet, via Serbian

web sites or these British revolutionaryMarxists. . . .

Have you read her book?

Zaremba: No!

You say that with great emphasis. Do you recoilfrom touching it?

Zaremba: Her interview [in Ordfront Magazine]is enough to know where she stands, what shemeans to say.

Where does she stand?

Zaremba:She has decided to show that therewas no reason to intervene in the Balkans. Imguessing as to how she thinks. And the restmerely follows from that standpoint, which isprimary. It is all based on the notion that the

United States, Great Britain

the imperialisticpowers, as they are called cannot under anycircumstances carry out a reasonable or hu-manitarian military action. If they send theirtroops somewhere, it must be the devilswork, it must be an expression of imperialism.That is the point of departure. Therefore, it isnecessary to prove that none of the grimevents in the Balkans have taken place. I thinkit is completely transparent in the interview.That is roughly how it is done.

* * * * *

Also interviewed in the same programme wasSren Sommelius, culture/debate editor at amedium-size daily newspaper, who has longexperience of the Balkans and written several

books on related issues:

Interviewer: One of several whose contributionshave been rejected in the storm that followed MaciejZarembas first article is Sren Sommelius, who atleast got to write something in his own paper,Helsingborgs Dagblad.

Sommelius: I think that it has been an utterlydeplorable debate. It is pitiful when two ofSwedens leading culture/debate sections,those ofDagens Nyheter and Expressen, allowonly one point of view in the discussion of anextremely important issue, and more or lessreject outright all other perspectives on the

Yugoslavian wars.

16 A SIMPLE TALE OF GOOD & EVIL


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Your own submissions have been rejected. . .

Sommelius: . . . By all of the Stockholm dailies.I am, after all, someone who has followedevents in Yugoslavia throughout the 1990s.I also reviewed Diana Johnstones book in

Helsingborgs Dagblad last July, and felt that itwas an important book especially impor-tant, given that NATOs bombing in Kosovoin 1999 was portrayed as a so-called humani-tarian intervention, as the good war thatwould be followed by new good wars againstAfghanistan and Iraq. If one is to understandthe new world order after the end of the ColdWar, with the U.S. as the only superpower, itis important to study what happened in Yugo-slavia in 1999 when NATO went in. Johnstone

does not possess the final truth, but she haswritten a book that presents arguments and aline of reasoning in a very competent manner.

But it has been said that she denies that genocidehas taken place in Yugoslavia.

Sommelius: That is not my impression. . . . Inmy view, she absolutely does not deny thatoutrages have been committed by Serbians.But she places them within a context; she pro-vides a comprehensive picture. In the Yugosla-

vian wars, everything was connected. . . . It

had to do with politics, economics, history,outrages committed during World War II. . . .It is no coincidence that the [Bosnian-Serb]camps at Trnopolje and Omarska were locatednear Jasenovac, which during World War II

was a horrific concentration camp run by the[Croatian] Ustasja fascists. . . .

* * * * *

THE RADIO PROGRAMME had no discernibleeffect on the one-sided public debate. But itdid lead to the selection of Bjrn Kumm towrite the foreword to the Swedish version of

Fools Crusade, in which he observed:In Sweden, historical memory is light as

a feather. Kilometres of news columns havebeen devoted to the wars in what is nowcalled former Yugoslavia, but the perspectivehas been very short. Antagonisms within theregion have been described as though theyemerged from a vacuum when the Cold War,already shrouded in memory, came to an end.The evil in the human spirit was seen as theorigin of the conflicts. . . .

Diana Johnstone has done somethingunforgivable she has complicated that

picture.



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interesting and enticing; but so far, those ef-forts have not had any effect on the number ofparticipants. That so few members attend theannual meeting means, at best, that membersare largely satisfied with the organization;I hope that is the case. At worst, it means theydo not believe that they can have any influ-ence, and therefore decline to attend.

From that point of view, the 2004 annualmeeting was an answer to a chairwomansprayer. Whereas attendance in previous yearshad normally been at the level of around 30-40, some 200 members showed up this time.Oddly or symbolically enough, the meetingwas held at the headquarters of the Bonniers

publishing conglomerate whose holdingsinclude Dagens Nyheter and Expressen.

Most likely due to the unusually largeattendance, the meeting was somewhat dis-organized but only somewhat, and mainlytoward the end when the allotted time hadalready been exceeded by several hours andimportant matters remained to be dealt with.Otherwise and as usual, the well-manneredSwedes comported themselves reasonablyand democratically, despite an occasionally

heated discussion.One source of confusion was the failure of

the nominating committee to present its can-didates for the board of directors by the dead-line specified in the by-laws, i.e. three weeksprior to the meeting. That has been the rulerather than the exception, but the customarylapse would later be cited as grounds for nul-lifying the proceedings. Since the committeewas dominated by supporters of Ericsson,Hagner & Co., that was an unusual instance

of Swedish chutzpah, or of the pot calling itselfblack.

According to one member of the nominat-ing committee, the main reason for the delaywas its determination to persuade Hagner tocontinue as chairwoman. She was said to have

been reluctant, due to the unpleasantness sur-rounding the Johnstone interview, but finallyconsented on the day before the meeting.

It was no doubt a comfort to Hagner thata large majority of the board candidates putforward by the nominating committee could

be counted upon as allies. The opposition thathad formed in reaction to the submissive be-haviour of the old board had proposed othercandidates, but none of them was mentioned

by the committee. It was therefore necessaryto nominate them from the floor, a commonpractice that was nonetheless challenged ontechnical grounds that were readily dismissed

by the majority. The disappointed minority,the Ericsson-Hagner faction, would later char-acterize the election of five floor nominees tothe 18-member board as a coup.

Baffling incomprehension

Naturally, the debate centred on the events

surrounding the Johnstone interview, includ-ing the dismissal of Bjrn Eklund and his twocolleagues in the editorial department. In per-haps some of the harshest terms ever heardfrom the mouths of Swedes, whose speechnormally tends to the diplomatic, the leader-ships capitulation to the mainstream mobwas denounced as a betrayal of Ordfrontsmost essential function to promote anddefend freedom of expression, especially on

behalf of controversial and unpopular ideas.

The lengthy parade of speakers whohammered in that theme included ordinary

OUT OF CONTROL

PRIOR TO ORDFRONTS annual meeting of 2002, Chairwoman Christina Hagnerpublished the following exhortation in the magazine: In a democratic movement, itis essential that the decisions which are made actually reflect members views; other-wise, they will sooner or later turn their backs on the organization. And without its mem-

bers, Ordfront is nothing. . . . We have tried to make our annual meetings exciting,

18


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members, representatives of local chaptersand a number of prominent figures includingseveral well-known Ordfront writers. Most ofthe speakers emphasized that they were notdefending Diana Johnstones analysis or the

interview with her in the magazine. Indeed,several made a point of expressing their dis-approval (again, without specifying thegrounds for disapproval).

Principles reaffirmed

The general drift of the arguments is reflectedin Motion 16, which was approved by a size-able margin and concludes: It is the opinionof the annual meeting that it was wrong of theorganizations board to repudiate publication

of the interview with Diana Johnstone. Inkeeping with the organizations stated pur-pose, the board should instead have defendedthe provision of a public space for critical de-

bate on controversial issues. (For the com-plete text of the motion, see Appendix, item 8.)

The capitulators had very little to offer intheir defence, and what they did say tendedto confirm the general impression. Hagnerand a few members of the old board openlyacknowledged that they had succumbed to

the media pressure. But they apparently ex-pected their audience to accept that as a validreason. The attitude seemed to be: Of coursewe caved in. After all, we were under a lot ofpressure, what with reporters constantly pes-tering us on the telephone and writing nastyarticles about us, work mates giving us dirtylooks, etc.

They did not appear to grasp why so manymembers were distressed or outraged by theirsubmission on behalf of the entire organiza-

tion. This baffling incomprehension, whethergenuine or disingenuous, would persist longafterward and contribute to the weird happen-ings that followed the annual meeting.

The other main item on the agenda wasthe dismissal of the editorial staff, which waswidely interpreted as directly related to the

Johnstone controversy. The economic ration-ale for laying off the two junior editors wasquestioned, and the reasons given for Eklundsdismissaldisloyalty and co-operation

difficulties were rejected as unfounded,punitive and hypocritical.

It was pointed out that the annual meetingof 1997 had awarded Ordfronts DemocracyPrize to three ambulance drivers who had also

been dismissed for disloyalty when theycriticized their private-sector employer.

In her statement explaining why the prizewas awarded to the ambulance drivers, Chair-woman Hagner had written that they havewith great courage defended freedom of ex-pression and the right to express criticism atthe workplace. . . . They have also focused aspotlight on the clearly undemocratic condi-tion that employees freedom of expressionshall be regarded as a favour granted by theemployer only when it does not conflict withthe demand for loyalty.

Citing these brave words, journalist DanJosefsson observed that, if Ordfront were to goahead with the dismissal of Eklund on thestated grounds, it would be honour-bound torevoke the Democracy Prize to the now cer-tifiably disloyal ambulance drivers andapologize to their employer for the misguidedcriticism. [8]

Bad sort of fellow

Once again, the leaderships defence of its

actions was less than convincing. ExecutiveDirector Gertrud strm, who had formallywielded the axe, assured those present thatEklund was, indeed, a bad sort of fellow butregretted that she was prevented by legal con-siderations from discussing the nature andextent of his transgressions.

strm was firmly supported by a protege,the manager of the book club who assertedthat she and others had found Eklund to be avery difficult person to work with. But, again,

no concrete examples of his alleged disloyaltyor social impediment were provided.

The insinuations ofstrm and the un-substantiated complaints of her angry youngsubordinate were emphatically contradicted

by a number of writers and editorial staffersof both genders who over the years hadworked closely with Eklund. They all attestedto his exceptional competence, both social andprofessional.

The main justification for the dismissal of

Eklund and his colleagues, however, was thatthere was no need to provide one. It was argued

OUT OF CONTROL 19


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that such decisions were purely administra-tive matters and no business of the annualmeeting. That argument was rejected by ref-erence to the by-laws which state that theannual meeting is the organizations highest

decision-making body

, without exception.There is no modifying clause stipulating thatthe meeting is supreme, except in mattersdeemed by the executive director and/orchairwoman to fall solely within their spheresof authority.

In addition to the by-laws, there are formalguidelines which proclaim that, Ordfront ischaracterized by an open and searching atti-tude. . . . Freedom of expression has always

been one of Ordfronts defining issues, and

Swedish legislation on free expression isamong the most far-reaching in the world. Butdespite the formal right to express oneself,much of Swedish society is silent. It is a silencethat needs to be broken. Greater attentionmust be paid to this growing silence andthe lack of worker influence at Swedishworkplaces.

Heart of the matter

Thus, the issue of Eklunds dismissal went to

the heart of Ordfronts principles and pur-pose, as subsequently pointed out by Chris-tina Garbergs-Gunn, a board member whowas not able to attend the annual meeting:This is not about an isolated personnelmatter, but an important question of principlewhich deeply concerns Ordfronts funda-mental purpose, i.e. to contribute to criticaland independent thought, to promote demo-cracy, to protect human rights and, not least,to defend freedom of the press and the right

of free expression.An overwhelming majority of those whospoke at the meeting shared that view andwere highly critical of the leaderships hand-ling of the two main issues the capitulationto the mainstream press, and the seeminglyarbitrary dismissal of (especially) Eklund.

In response, the leadership generally side-stepped the issues by changing the subject orcomplaining of unfair treatment. Several sup-porters defended Hagner by praising her

sound fiscal management as though thatsomehow outweighed the little matter of be-traying the organizations basic ideals. It was

the sort of praise which, in other contexts, hasbeen bestowed upon Mussolini for the punctu-ality of Italian trains, or upon Pinochet for theChilean economy which began to boom afterthe United States stopped assaulting it. [9]

Echoing Zaremba, a former board membernamed Edna Eriksson argued that there arelimits to free expression which may not becrossed, as (implicitly) in the case of the

Johnstone interview. Ingegrd Waarenper, afounding member who also happens to be areporter with Dagens Nyheter, accused thegathering ofdemonizing the board, thusrendering it incapable of providing effectiveleadership.

A board member named Staffan Myrberg,

who is purported to be some kind of jour-nalist, liked the sound of that and launchedinto a series of whining self-justifications, inthe process displaying an impressive failure tograsp the complexities of the Balkan wars orthe arguments of Diana Johnstone neither ofwhich was on the meetings agenda.

In the end, all of these entreaties andlamentations failed to persuade a majority ofthe delegates, who voted by a substantialmargin to adopt the motion condemning theleaderships capitulation to the media on-slaught. A large majority also voted for a mo-tion which: rejected outright the notion ofdisloyalty as grounds for the dismissal ofany Ordfront employee; rescinded the dis-missal of Bjrn Eklund; and instructed thenew board to investigate the accusations ofco-operation difficulties made against him.

Out of Control

As noted, the new board included five mem-

bers from the opposition who, together withthe three holdovers from the old board whohad reluctantly consented to its discrediteddecisions, formed a fragile majority of one ortwo votes.

The oppositions candidate for chairpersonwas withdrawn as a gesture of reconciliationand good will, after Hagner had assured themeeting that she would devote herself to heal-ing any wounds left over from the conflict andearnestly co-operate with the new board,

whatever its composition.On that harmonious note, Hagner was re-

elected by acclamation and then proceeded

20


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to fire off a discordant acceptance speech inwhich she declared that her handling of the

Johnstone/Eklund controversy was entirelyfree of error and, confronted with the sametype of situation again, she would behave in

exactly the same way. She expressed strongdisapproval of the decisions that had just beenmade, regretted the departure of supporterson the old board, and expressed doubts thatshe would be able to work with the new one.I am very worried about the future of theorganization and my ability to function prop-erly as chairwoman, she forewarned.

The next day, in the pages of DagensNyheter, Hagner launched what was to be-come a sustained attack on the democratic

majority.I think the annual meeting got com-pletely out of control, proclaimed Hagner in

DNwith a style of argument similar to thatof Henry Kissinger when he explained that theremoval of Allende was necessary in order torectify the irresponsibility of the Chileanpeople in electing him.

Hagner shifted the focus to a theme thatwould prove to be useful in the ensuing effortsto wrest control of the organization from itshighest decision-making body: I feel enor-mous solidarity with Ordfronts personnel,who today are extremely unhappy over thedecisions that were made. . . . I can resign to-morrow, in a month or a half-year from nowif looks as though the situation is becomingimpossible.

In a small leftist weekly she asserted thatthe meeting was packed by a Stockholm-

based cultural elite loyal to and mobilized byBjrn Eklund, implying that the decisionsreached were therefore suspect or illegitimate.Naturally, this theme of an arrogant culturalelite imposing its will on the salt of the

earth

shades of Nixons

silent majority

was then parroted by her soulmates in themainstream press.

Chairwoman Hagner also suggested thatconciliatory gestures by the cultural elitewere not to be trusted. Asked by the weeklysreporter if the fact that she was unanimouslyre-elected as chairwoman did not indicate awillingness to compromise, she replied: Idont know what it indicates. You will have toask them.

Needless to say, Ericsson, Hagner & Co.had laboured to mobilize their own sympa-thizers, and had far greater resources at theirdisposal to do so not only those of theOrdfront organization, but also of their alliesat Dagens Nyheter and other powerful mediawho published agitated pre-meeting alarmsabout the impending disaster, in an obviousattempt to influence the outcome.

In any event, attendance at the annualmeeting was five times greater than normal,precisely because ordinary members from allover the country were so concerned about thedecisions of the leadership that they were will-ing to sacrifice a day or more for a journey toStockholm. A large contingent from Gteborgtravelled the breadth of the country to bethere. There was at least one member from thenorthern city of Ume, near the Arctic Circle.

Chairwoman Hagneronce lamented, in Ord-

fronts magazine, the

typically low turnoutat annual meetings.But when five timesthe usual number ofmembers chose to par-ticipate in 2004, theoutcome was not toher liking. The votershad got out of con-trol, she proclaimed,and set about organiz-

ing a coup against thedemocratic majority.

OUT OF CONTROL 21


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The most brutally frank condemnation of theformer board was delivered by a chap fromNorrkping, some 100 miles to the south.Etc., etc.

Such facts did not get past the watchdogsof the mainstream press, however. Swedish

public radio, probably even more influentialthan Dagens Nyheter, placed itself at the dis-posal of the offended leadership. It broadcastat least two lengthy segments which faithfullyreproduced the managements line, while to-tally excluding the democratic majority.

In one segment, Gertrud strm relatedthat she had received some very unpleasantthreats via e-mail and telephone prior to theannual meeting: We have our eyes on you,something might happen to you, that sort of

thing. She allowed that none of the threatscame from the dreaded cultural elite. Butthe implication was nonetheless clear: Thoseopposed to her, if not directly guilty, hadallied themselves with some very nasty typesa classic smear technique.

The reason for Bjrn Eklunds dismissalwas now delicately referred to as personalwork-related reasons presumably becausethat formulation sounded more neutral andless suspicious than disloyalty and co-

operation difficulties

.strm and the reporter explained at somelength that the decision to protect the workers

rights of Bjrn Eklund was. . . a devastatingattack on workers rights. The entire remain-der of the Ordfront staff, it seemed, was fairlyparalysed with anxiety over the possibilitythat a future annual meeting might arbitrarilyorder the dismissal of some hapless employee.

We are going to fight this!

proclaimedthe belligerent strm, in much the same

strident tones with which she had vainly at-tempted to enlighten the annual meeting. Wewill not submit to this!

One subject that did not come up duringstrms radio performance was her other jobas head of a public inquiry. She had her ownoffice, telephone and e-mail address, withinthe government. It is as though the chief ex-ecutive ofThe Nation or The Progressive had a

well-paid consulting job with an office in theWhite House.In short, the methods chosen by the Erics-

son/Hagnerites to hold Ordfront togetherwere not quite what the democratic majorityhad envisioned when it re-elected Hagner inthe spirit of reconciliation which she thenrefused to acknowledge.

After the first week of the anti-democraticoffensive, Ordfront author Bim Clinnell posedthe obvious question: How in the world is it

going to be possible to have confidence in achairwoman who vilifies the organizationsannual meeting and attacks employees, board

OUT OF CONTROL22

Due to the actions of the board followingpublication of Bjrn Eklunds interview

with Diana Johnstone, I became actively in-volved in Ordfront for the first time. Wentto the annual meeting, listened and stayedalmost to the end. From having been a con-tributor and reader, I had become an activemember of the organization an involve-ment which has now become the object ofinsulting texts that I have read!

I was very pleased by the calm andrational atmosphere of the annual meet-ing, and by the fact that so many partici-

pated. So admirably patient everyone wasin conducting the lengthy meeting. Howwell the association democracy functioned

an organizational knowledge and wisdomthat has been developed over centuries

by founders of folk movements, union ac-tivists, advocates of democracy. It is ademocratic process that has often beenridiculed as association Sweden, andwhich now is also being attacked fromwithin ORDFRONT!

So now the leadership of this importantand excellent organization is demolish-ing, in the most appalling manner, the de-cisions made in good democratic order!Remember what it was that triggered this

conflict! Torsten Jurell, illustrator/author

Appalling demolition of decisions made in good democratic order


25/92


members, and members in the media, or achief executive who proclaims in the mediathat she is not going to accept the decisions ofthe annual meeting?

Voiceless majorityThe answer, while equally obvious, did notseem to matter very much. For, the democraticmajority was given virtually no opportunity

by the mainstream media to explain its posi-tion or refute the preposterous accusationsmade against it.

Otherwise, it would have been possible toexplain that strms line of reasoning had

been presented to the annual meeting andbeen rejected because it was clearly strm

and associates who had violated the rights ofat least one and possibly other employees, andhad done so in such a way as to make a mock-ery of Ordfronts professed ideals. It couldalso have been noted that, according to the by-laws, the annual meeting is the organizationshighest authority not strm, Hagnerand/or Ericsson.

But since no one from the majority wasallowed to be heard on that or numerousother occasions, that sort of information was

never conveyed to a wider audience. Cover-age of the Ordfront scandal by the mainstreampress was even more restrictive and one-sidedthan its highly selective coverage of the Balkanwars.

Consequently, the intransigent leadershipwas able to mount a coup against the demo-cratic order which the by-laws ordain. It wasa coup conducted with the complicity of thesame mainstream media that had launchedthe attack against Ordfront in the first place.

In other words, Ericsson, Hagner & Co. notonly capitulated they joined the enemy,eagerly accepting its support for their revolt-ing project and taking the resources of theorganization with them.

Given Hagners words and actions beforeand during the annual

all quieted on the word front - nordic news network

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