Diana Johnstone, Circle in the Darkness, Memoir of a World Watcher (New York: Clarity Press, Inc. 2020). 435 pages. $24.95.
Lawrence Wilkerson, War Is Not About Truth, Justice and the American Way (New York: The Real News Network, 2015). 210 pages.
By Michael F. Duggan
The Internet Age is also the Age of the Corporate Media and the Age of Political-Propaganda-as-Entertainment. The first encourages a solipsistic existence of self-reinforcing delusions that may further radicalize upon meeting kindred spirits. The second lulls us into a fool’s paradise of consensus by offering something like an official or “mainstream” version of events, and in dark times, pulls us back from the brink with manipulative feel-good segments at the end of their nightly broadcasts. These are “news” segments complete with soft focus piano or guitar background music for atmosphere and feature heartwarming stories that no decent person could oppose.
The third, political propaganda and entertainment cable networks are an amalgam of the first two: they offer clearinghouses for the “news” that true believers select on the basis of ideology and temperament and embody the seeming legitimacy of a big network newsroom/anchor desk format. They also may reflect the myriad of subdivided views found on smaller online outlets. Cable TV offers corporate mouthpieces for angry right as well as networks presenting an ideological standard line for what passes for the mainstream left and center these days: heavy on social issues, light on economic progressivism.
The irony of all this is that the Internet—the technological communication and information miracle that provides a virtually limitless array of perspectives and news outlets—has rendered Americans more intellectually provincial and divided than ever before (more so than the 1790s, 1960s, and perhaps the 1850s). Cable television and opinion programing on local AM radio stations have only reinforced the anger and chaos.
Obviously, none of this is healthy. The amalgamated effect of these things is a synergy that drives division and a kind of mass psychosis. It is an open question about whether or not a large and diverse liberal republic can coexist with such powerful and ubiquitous tools of manipulation (of course it is also an open question about whether a large, diverse, and overpopulated nation can exist as all as a social democracy).
In our time of the Three Ages of Mass Communications, rational people have to select news sources and individual commentators judiciously with an eye to the truth rather than just a desire to have their own perspective affirmed and spoon-fed back to them. Sometimes the truth must be found among independent voices outside of the mainstream (but not on the extremes), both left and right. In an age of neoliberal predominance and a lockstep corporate media on the one hand, and angry cranks and insurgents on the other, I feel that we must look to reasonable independent commentators, whether it is, for instance, a self-described conservative like Andrew Bacevich, or an old school independent journalist of the left, like Chris Hedges.
Below are reviews of two books by very different authors who fall into the category of honest brokers, of truth-tellers who call it like they see it. They are voices that are not owned by anybody but the author. One of these was a part of the antiwar movement of the 1960s, the other fought in the Vietnam War. These are the journalist, Diana Johnstone, and Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, Colonel Larry Wilkerson.
Diana Johnstone, Independent
The journalist, Diana Johnstone, has written a fascinating memoir. Her reputation as a radical should not put off non-radicals; it makes no difference who delivers the truth. We all have assumptions, but Ms. Johnstone—who certainly has a point of view—writes with a clarity and insight that rises above the clichés of ideological orthodoxy. In my opinion, she is too smart, her perception too acute and nuanced to accept any packaged outlook whole cloth.
Although not resembling it in any literal way, Johnstone’s memoir is reminiscent of The Education of Henry Adams in that the author is a good writer and chronicler of her time with a distinctive point of view. Although you will likely not agree with all of her opinions, the book is rich and rewarding.
The memoir takes us from Jonstone’s youth in Minnesota and Washington D.C. (as a child her family lived immediately behind the Supreme Court building, and Johnstone recalls a “lively little friend” shouting “Resign!” to passing justices during Roosevelt’s battle with the Court), to the American antiwar protests of the 1960s, to the May Revolution of Paris in 1968, and then down to the present day by way of events in Yugoslavia and Libya. She has spend a large portion of her long career in France working as a correspondent for In These Times and as press officer for the Green Group in the European Parliament. She is a perceptive reporter of events, although her nuanced understanding of French political and intellectual affairs may be of limited interest to some American readers.
Johnstone has a fearless commitment to the truth as she sees it, and as far as I can tell, she has never backed down from a fight. She has a simple, perhaps naive, confidence in the truth. In this world, telling the truth tends to garner more enemies than friends, and when the truth is particularly inconvenient, it will anger the powerful. Johnstone has angered a lot of people over the course of her long career. Quick to point out flaws and contradictions among those on all sides, she has made powerful enemies on the left, right, and what passes for the center these days. In this sense she has in some circles come to be regarded as an apostate and even a betrayer rather than a straight shooter. A moving target for those of differing perspectives, one senses that she has axes to grind. For those who search her name online, be aware that the Internet is full of ad hominem screeds against her and even seemingly respectable articles may uncritically reference distortions; read everything hostile to her with skeptical eye after researching the specifics of the case in question.
For me, Johnstone is a serious correspondent of the old school. She writes with a powerful and distinctive journalistic style and clarity of voice, vision, and understanding. Because her language is so clear, so concrete, it was equally clear to me to see where I disagreed with her and why (e.g. she makes the case that Nixon was both a “scapegoat” for the “distraction” of the Watergate scandal and an early victim of the deep state, thus downplaying his significant and very real domestic crimes relative to what she sees are the far greater crimes of U.S. policy in Southeast Asia). Unlike so many writers on the academic left, she is a down-in-the trenches journalist and a good writer who does not hide behind neologisms.
I think that Johnstone and her book are important for several reasons. The first is the care she takes in researching accounts of complex events that most Americans either know little about or else misunderstand because of bad mainstream reporting. A paragon example of this is the widespread, uncritical acceptance of the inaccurate reporting of the 1990s Balkans wars by major American and European news outlets. Her chapters on these conflicts, and NATO’s “humanitarian” bombing of Libya in 2011 should be read by all Americans (her 2004 book Fool’s Crusade is the best account of the enormously complex Balkans wars I have read and outlines just how badly the Western media dropped the ball in terms of reporting what happened there).
Her reporting of intellectual trends is also impressive and she gives a lucid account about how the new philosophers of the late 1970s superseded the existentialists of the postwar period (she sees through the Postmodernists as phonies). On the point of French intellectuals (and of death of French intellectualism in general) Judt’s Past Imperfect makes for an interesting cross reference to this chapter in Johnston’s memoir.
But along with her powerful understanding are currents of naïveté and perhaps misapprehension. Again, one senses in her a simple belief in the power of speaking the truth. She also seems to have misjudged the earnestness and motives of the radicals of the 1960s somewhat. Rather than Marxist revolutionaries genuinely concerned with the plight of the proletariat, most seem to have been more individualistic than the Old Left which really was concerned with collectivist economic issues (as Tony Judt has observed in Ill Fares the Land, 85-91). More like self-interested eighteenth-century liberals—libertarians—the hippies of the late 1960s became the yuppies of the early 1980s. A few became postmodernist academic careerists. Others voted for Donald Trump in 2016. This individualism and shifting loyalties is also a source for the antipathy felt by the left of the rising generation for Baby Boomers.
Perhaps this naïveté is the product of Johnstone’s intelligence and clarity of vision: her grasp of the big picture may at time blind her to problematic details. She may report from on the ground, but her ideals are often at 30,000 feet. It is one thing to defend unpopular ideas under a rubric of free speech, but it is also important to call out people when the go too far—Holocaust deniers and bigots masquerading as comedians, for example.
What about Johnstone’s radicalism? Here I can only speak for myself. Even when I have not agreed with them, I have occasionally enjoyed the better writing by some radicals, and Johnston’s book qualifies as good writing. Although it is an important historical text, Ten Days that Shook the World, like the Bible, is bad history because its author is a true believer. It does not attempt to tell the dispassionate truth. I suppose the logic is that value-neutral interpretations in realms where values are at play is for cowards, cynics, and sociopaths. The problem with this perspective is that even extremists can claim earnest efforts at the truth, and Jack Reed’s account of the Russian Revolution is too skewed to be anything other than a perspective of strong advocacy. On the other hand, I enjoyed Witness to a Century, the autobiography of George Seldes, and the gonzo journalism of the late Alexander Cockburn collected in A Colossal Wreck, because these authors were independent thinkers in spite of their strong views.
I think that Johnstone’s intellectual DNA comes less from Marx and his acolytes and more from the tradition of crusading journalism and scholarship trying to set the record straight. In this she is like contemporary scholars like Stephen F. Cohen and Alfred W. McCoy, and the ideologically very different Andrew J. Bacevich (the works of all three have been reviewed on this blog). I also see her as heiress to the proud muckraking tradition of Upton Sinclair and Lincoln Steffens. One also senses something of the serious expatriate journalist—the in-country foreign correspondent as truth-seeking adventurer—about her, like Stephen Crane, Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gelhorn, Clare Hollingworth, Chris Hedges, and the photographer, Frank Capa. I might be mistaken in this perception in that her earnestness and cerebral nature seems fundamentally at odds with the designation of “adventurer.”
Perhaps the greatest importance of this book is Johnstone’s analysis of the failure of the Left in recent decades. It is how she concludes her memoir and reading the final chapters it becomes clear how her honesty has made her seem like an apostate to more rigid progressives and radicals. She calls out the hypocrisies of false progressives such as their embracing of war as a basis for foreign policy. She is also highly critical of their support of neoliberal open border policies and the abandonment of organized labor in favor of immigration and identity issues (which go a long way to explain the outcome of the 2016 election). She sees liberal support for immigration as the product of guilt and a rejection of the Westphalian nation state that gave rise to liberalism and democracy. It is not clear whether or not she sees the immigration crises as the inevitable byproduct of the interventionism she deplores.
Having herself been been denounced by Antifa (and there is apparently a distinction to be made between American and European Antifa), Johnstone sees much of today’s radical left as zealous dupes of the real enemy, the neoliberal mainstream, as they attack an unsavory but equally marginalized far right. Division is good for politics. On this point, I think a another distinction is in order: an argument can be made in favor of Antifa in a proximate sense: if Germany during the 1920s taught us anything (other than not to debase a national currency), it should have been that when the Nazis show up, they must be strongly opposed, that you cannot concede the streets to them. However, in terms of the big picture about the failure of the left in our time relative to the neoliberal establishment, I think that Johnstone’s critique has some validity.
But what exactly is the soft authoritarianism that she describes as having undermined the Left? According to Johnstone, it goes beyond neoliberal policy and includes the Internet and entertainment industries as parts of a rotten overarching status quo. She disparages the name-calling on the left amounting to the reduction of this state of affairs to “fascism.” Such epithets are both too easy and inaccurate. She writes:
“The contemporary West combines a mood of ‘anything goes’ with a new sort of nameless tyranny. The term ‘fascism’ is misleading. Fascism historically involved a strong charismatic leader of a disciplined, armed party, imposing unity and order on the basis of a clear (however erroneous) program commanding mass support. Today, whatever leadership there is lies behind the scenes, promoting chaos and disorder. Today’s strange tyranny is something new, without a name of its own. In the ‘information society,’ it has no clear doctrine but rather a fluid and often contradictory set of beliefs circulated by the information industry. This is a media-message tyranny, and it is significant that the most important stance of government repression has concerned not some act of violent rebellion but the peaceful revelation of facts that the public was not supposed to know. Treated by U.S. leaders as Enemy Number One, Julian Assange was not building bombs to attack Washington but was simply conveying significant information to the public.”
I’ll leave it at that, other than to say that I recommend the book.
The Reluctant Insider, Larry Wilkerson
I have always liked the idea of the “good” government official and as a historian, have taken joy in each example I have happened upon: Stephen Mather, Harry Hopkins, Harold Ickes, Frances Perkins, George C. Marshall, George F. Kennan, Sargent Shriver, Brent Scowcroft, etc. It is always a pleasure to come across a new one.
Even if you follow foreign affairs, you may not know of Lawrence Wilkerson. To the extent that he is known outside of military and government circles, it is for his role as Colin Powell’s chief of staff and speechwriter when Powell was Secretary of State. Increasingly he is known for his frank criticism of the administration for which he worked. Even if his name is not familiar to you, you still know him—he was one of the people who helped put together Powell’s fateful presentation at the United Nations during the run up to the invasion of Iraq, a performance about which Wilkerson has been completely candid and brutally honest. Were it not for this performance, Powell, in a more moderate administration, might have become the George Marshall of the twenty-first century.
Colonel Wilkerson is one of those people who seem to have been everywhere and understood everything that was going on in a time of momentous events as something more than a fly-on-the-wall, an insider. He is a moderate in the high-minded, traditional sense of the word and a military intellectual and patriot in the best sense of these terms.
Wilkerson was born in Gaffney, South Carolina in 1945, and his life is an interesting chronicle of events as lived by an American of the postwar period. A philosophy major, he dropped out of Bucknell to volunteer for service in Vietnam, where, by his own account, flew observation helicopters “low and slow” at treetop level as live bait to draw fire. He saved Vietnamese civilians from massacre by landing his craft between them and the soldiers about to fire upon them.
It was through his experience in Vietnam that Wilkerson came to realize that the real reasons for war are generally not the stated ones. It marked a sea change from a simple patriotic view of “good” American wars being fought on principle to, the realist Clauswitzian perspective that war is about power and interests, and in recent times, bad ideology. This view further gelled during his time as a student at the Naval War College, a point in the careers of many officers when they “Peter Principle out” (i.e. when a person recaches the level of his/her incompetence and/or a level of understanding that they cannot accept without risking a kind of fundamental cognitive dissonance). Not only is Wilkerson a policy Clauswitzian, but he also realizes the sociobiological fact that human beings are naturally aggressive creatures.
In 1989 Colin Powell noticed Wilkerson and called him in to interview for an open slot as his chief of staff. Wilkerson aced the interview and got the job after the frank admission that he didn’t want it, that he would rather continue teaching.
Now that the events of the George W. Bush Administration have passed into history—even though their dividends are still prominent in the news—books like this are important in setting the record straight. This one corroborates and goes beyond recent works dealing with the ugly behind-the-scenes reality of the Bush II White House that lay the groundwork for what is likely the most catastrophic period in the history of American foreign and military affairs.
Notable are Wilkerson’s descriptions of the internal power struggles of the Bush II years and his discussions of where the power really resided. Cheney and Rumsfeld are obviously major players. By now it will probably surprise few people that the first term of the second Bush Administration was the de facto the Cheney Administration.
Wilkerson details the abuses of power that continue to this day. In this he is nonpartisan in his criticisms and notes the unsettling trend characterized by the ratcheting-up of illiberal policies (e.g. the dramatic increase of drone strikes in the post-G.W. Bush years). He presciently observes that all administrations willingly accept the increased power inherited from the previous administration as well as the abuses of that power.
According to Wilkerson, this trend goes far to explain why the Obama Administration never pursued charges of alleged war crimes by the previous administration. The excesses and errors of the Bush Administration are well publicized, but the following administration cemented earlier policies in place, and in many cases expanded them and made them respectable for moderates and progressives to embrace. Wilkerson sees the policies of the Obama Administration as being more “draconian” than those of the administration that preceded it.
Wilkerson is honest, and smart—an idea man with a keen analytical mind and a forthright, no-nonsense military style. He is smart in a decent, commonsensical way and has a powerful, disillusioned ability to see through cynicism and frauds. He is completely open about his views and is courageous in speaking the truth. Just as two-time recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor, Smedley Butler realized that the Banana Wars of the early twentieth-century were about corporate interests, Wilkerson knows that our involvement in the Middle East is in large measure about oil.
The format of the book takes a little getting used to. As its back cover describes it, the book is “A collection of interviews conducted by TRNN Senior Editor Paul Jay with Wilkerson.” The interviews were conducted between 2008 and 2015, and so there is no comparisons of the first two administrations of the present century with the current one. Except for Wilkerson’s address “The Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex,” delivered at the American University in 2009 (which serves as an introduction), the format is essentially that of a raw transcript that can be a little difficult to read at first. The text is therefore not a structured monograph by a single author but rather an unscripted dialog and one has to get used to Wilkerson’s rhythms and informal speaking patterns.
At 210 pages (with no table of contents), the book covers a vast territory of topics from torture of terrorist suspects to how the destruction of Iraq made Iran the hegemon of the Gulf region, and this review in no way does justice to its scope. The tone and expanse of topics make book an excellent compliment to parallel writings of other former military men like Andrew Bacevich (both of whom are members of the nonpartisan think tank, the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft), and perhaps Anthony Zinni, and can be a cross reference for histories on the post-2000 administrations and their various foreign adventures (e.g. the chapters on the second Bush Administration in Bartholomew Sparrow’s biography of Brent Scowcroft, The Strategist).
I recommend this book, but you might have a hard time finding it. You will likely not find it on the shelves of any bookstore when they reopen (assuming that there still are bookstores after the pandemic). I don’t use Amazon, and I couldn’t find it elsewhere, so I just emailed The Real News Network and they kindly sent me a copy.