When I read the news on Twitter, I first thought it was a joke, what? Bob Dylan sued for racism? By a Croatian group of all ethnic groups that exist? Dylan the author of so many songs whose lyrics are social commentary, Dylan who wrote songs that became anthems for the US civil rights and anti-war movements, Dylan whose political commitment and civil rights activism is a secret for nobody, Dylan whose career has been discussed ad nauseam and shouldn’t be introduced anymore (I mean by that everyone knows what I have just said),… so how such a thing is possible?
Dylan is sued by a Croatian group based in France, over a super long interview he did with Rolling Stone in September 2012 after the release of his album ‘Tempest’. This is a seven-page piece, but this is the excerpt that made the Croats mad (Dylan was asked about parallels between the 1860s and today America):
‘The United States burned and destroyed itself for the sake of slavery. The USA wouldn’t give it up. It had to be grinded out. The whole system had to be ripped out with force. A lot of killing. What, like, 500,000 people? A lot of destruction to end slavery. And that’s what it really was all about.
This country is just too fucked up about color. It’s a distraction. People at each other’s throats just because they are of a different color. It’s the height of insanity, and it will hold any nation back – or any neighborhood back. Or any anything back. Blacks know that some whites didn’t want to give up slavery – that if they had their way, they would still be under the yoke, and they can’t pretend they don’t know that. If you got a slave master or Klan in your blood, blacks can sense that. That stuff lingers to this day. Just like Jews can sense Nazi blood and the Serbs can sense Croatian blood.’
Vlatko Marić, the secretary of the council of Croats in France has declared that this last line was ‘an incitement to hatred’, adding ‘you cannot compare Croatian criminals to all Croats. But we have nothing against Rolling Stone magazine or Bob Dylan as a singer.’
This is so ridiculous, Dylan was not pretending to give a history lesson, it was a generalization as we all do! But I like to go back to the hard facts, the facts that Jasenovac a concentration camp, where the majority of victims were ethnic Serbs, was established in Croatie during World War II, the fact that Croats and Serbs have been in conflict for a very long time, and were engaged in a 4-year war in 1991-95, leading to the end of Yugoslavia. This wasn’t such a long time ago, I remember seeing some really awful pictures of these refugee camps. The hatred between the two ethnicities was real at the time and I would be surprised if there wasn’t any leftover,… Dylan’s sentence wasn’t offensive at all, may be it wasn’t exactly politically correct but it resonates with history. Dylan, who recently received the French ‘Legion d’Honneur’, should be alright, France doesn’t have exactly the same laws about free speech than the US, but, honestly, who is going to take this seriously?