Then she invented ' people's diplomacy', organizing a group of 30 widely diverse Americans to go with her to her already beloved Paris in 1970 to meet with the South Vietnamese provisional government and the North Vietnamese, hoping to take the message of peace back to the US.
But, like most genuine efforts in the quest for peace, they were met by a deafening silence from the mainstream media ( International Herald Tribune : It's only a local story. Go to your home town for a human interest piece.) The Cold War Deep State had taken the US empire's foreign affairs off the table, made it 'bipartisan', which with the rise of the powerful Israeli lobby, made the empire a US-Israeli empire, even more a captive of Eisenhower's nemesis, the military industrial complex.
Speaking of arresting, her own arrest in Paris at a Vietnam rally during the chaotic summer of '68 was the essence of civilization. She explained to the French policeman when they reached the police station that she had to pick up her daughter from school, and he let her go. She realized he was against the Vietnam war, as were virtually all the French, and admired her courage.
There is much of interest both to historians and activists. Johnstone is a master of cutting to the quick, Occam's razor. Most world events are so complex, assassinations in particular, that they remain a matter of conjecture. But she was on the spot for such events as the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in 1981, and the 'successful' one of Olaf Palme, and followed the 'investigations'.
I'm ashamed to say, if you had asked me before Circle about JPII's almost assassination, I would have said, 'Supposedly a Bulgarian assassin.' Our brains work 'Last in, first out.' It is sooo hard to stay ahead of the game. It turns out Agca was a disciple of Nazism, but that's not how we remember him, given how the mainstream media portrayed him.
This legacy of the Nazis was also behind the assassination of Palme. The pompous New York Times investigation took months (and lots of mullah), and turned up nothing. But plucky Diana, on a shoestring, went to Lund University to learn of the independent investigation by historian Wilhelm Agrell, who dismissed attempts to pin it on Kurds or South Africa. 'He settled on the 'patriotic' motive: the explanation that Palme was eliminated by elements within Swedish security or armed forces that considered him a threat to the nation.'
In the 1930s, Swedish fascists in the military supported Hitler, Sweden remained neutral, useful to Germany in its occupation of anti-fascist Norway, and that legacy remained. The Germans were replaced by the Americans after the war, with the common enemy, the Soviet Union, still in place.
Palme was hated by the right, especially the military, who were becoming irrelevant to Palme's vision of Sweden as a haven of peace, a friend to (peace loving) Soviet Union. His assassination, done from within, could be kept under raps, unsolved, but attributable to nasty apartheid South Africa, which certainly loathed Palme too. Agrell, a prominent expert on Swedish military doctrine and (from 1990) a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of War Sciences, and his claim disappeared from view, mentioned, it seems, only by Diana at ITT . Agrell's wikipedia page makes no mention of what surely is his 'finest moment'. How the mighty have fallen.
I could go on with many more beautifully written, barbed Occam's razors, but I will end on some morsels of inspiration of my own, courtesy of Johnstone. Diana disclaims labels, but her analysis is Marxist in the best sense of the word, not the eurocommunist, 'cultural Marxist' which neoliberalism produced as a distraction from the remorseless destruction of all that's good, which capitalism thrives on.
This is the subtext of Star Wars ' Doomsday Machine ' (1967), where Kirk destroys the alien robot planet-eater, left behind by warring civilizations but still roaming the universe in search of planets to destroy and eat, long after its 'masters' have killed each other and the machine has eaten up their planet. To kill the beast, Kirk feeds it a tasty H-bomb, a version of Earth's very own quaint 20th century doomsday bomb, 'the f irst time it has been used constructively.' The Doomsday Machine, of course, is capitalism/ imperialism, and its avatar today US-Israel, seizing whole nations, eating up the Earth's treasures, a doomsday machine to kill us all.
My other 'morsel' recalls The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State (1993) , where author Benjamin Ginsberg, concerned with an Israel already out of control in 1990, argued that for their own purposes, rulers often were happy to accommodate Jews in exchange for their services, resulting in "the rise to great power by Jewish elites, but creating conditions for their subsequent fall." They made alliances "responsible for the construction of some of the most powerful states of the Mediterranean and European worlds, including the Hapsburg, Hohenzollern, and Ottoman empires." This led to the paradoxical situation where some Jews were ministers or viziers while the majority of them were oppressed and rebels, a foretaste of the twentieth century Great Games.*
Johnstone witnessed three examples of these latter day 'viziers' during the 1980s:
*adviser to Sartre ( Benny Le'vy, a Maoist in ' 68 ) ,
*adviser to Mitterand (Attali),
*destroyer from within of the Green Party of France (Cohn-Bendit).
Sartre's friends were appalled when an attractive young Svengali (Levy) mesmerized him as he lay dying, inducting him into Kabbalah mysteries. Levy himself had shifted from Maoism to Judaism , or 'from Mao to Moses', i.e., fill the spiritual gap of dying atheist Sartre with harmless Jewish mysticism, ignoring the Zionist monster at work in the real world.
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