Like a Rolling Stone Blowing in the Wind

In France, a country where the hate crime laws are almost a crime in themselves, Bob Dylan has got himself in trouble for comparing Croats to KKK members and Nazis. The sentence that caused the brouhaha was "If you’ve got a slave master or the Klan in your blood, blacks can sense that ... Just like Jews can sense Nazi blood and the Serbs can sense Croatian blood." There are at least two levels of irony here. The first is that someone is being accused of a hate crime for reminding us of racist atrocities committed in WWII by a fascist regime. Sure, he made a serious mistake in saying "Croatian" not "Ustaše" (the Croatian fascists) but that's hardly enough to be taken to court for. If I'm talking about WWII and I say "the Germans", I could be forgiven for not adding "and of course I am exluding those Germans who didn't support the Nazi Party." The second irony is Dylan's using the notion of "blood" in what was supposed to be an anti-racist speech. I was going to say it was also ironic that the writer of some of the greatest lyrics ever should have such problems getting is words right, but then it occurred to me that the fact that Dylan is such a great songwriter may be the problem. If he'd sung that stuff about blood (pronouncing it "bleeerd" in his inimitable way), it might not have been such a problem.

There is also some tragi-comedy to be seen in the debate that immediately sprang up (see the comment section of the article I linked to): specifically, the way Serbs and Croats think they're so different from each other. From the perspective of the rest of the world, what we see here is just an unusually vicious turf war between two micro-nations who have the same language, the same culture and almost the same religion. OK, Croats are Catholics and Serbs are Orthodox, but all that means is that they've been killing each other over some obscure theological dispute which for anyone outside Eastern Europe is about as exciting as the difference between Soto and Rinzai Zen. Or maybe it's the Cyrillic alphabet that's causing all the problems. Or the fact that the Croats got all the good beaches? Beats me.