The man born Robert Zimmerman may still be making music and innovating at the ripe age of 72 (need proof? Check out the awesome interactive video for ‘Like A Rolling Stone’), but Bob Dylan still isn’t above scrutiny.
The legendary singer-songwriter is being targeted over some spurious comments he made in a recent interview which has led to both Dylan and the French edition of Rolling Stone coming under legal attack over allegations of racism.
A Croatian community association in France is suing Dylan for comments he made in a cover story for the iconic music publication from September 2012, as Business Insider (via Slate.fr) reports.
The Rolling Stone interview covers the release of Dylan’s 35th studio album, last year’s Tempest, during which he’s asked about the parallels between the Civil War-era America of the 1860s and today, Dylan – once a major figure for the Civil Rights movement of the 60s – remarking that “the United States burned and destroyed itself for the sake of slavery.” Before responding:
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.”
It’s that final line that France’s Croatian community association has taken serious offence to, especially given the tension between Croatians and Serbians, which reached a bloody peak in the mid-90s over Croatia breaking away from Yugoslavia. The Croatian group has taken umbrage enough to take both the legendary singer-songwriter and the magazine to court.
“It is an incitement to hatred,” says Secretary General of the organisation, Vlatko Marić, according to International Business Times. “You cannot compare Croatian criminals to all Croats. But we have nothing against Rolling Stone magazine or Bob Dylan as a singer.”
Free speech laws are much stricter in Europe than in America, as Business Insider points out, and the lawsuit has been accepted on formal grounds but could still take up to 18 months before it is evaluated to go to trial, particularly given when it involves a non-French citizen. If found guilty, Dylan and the French edition of Rolling Stone would face a fine and formal sanction.
The lawsuit also seems doubly bizarre given that it follows shortly after the singer-songwriter was bestowed the Legion of Honor, France’s highest military and civil decoration. Though his Honor was initially blocked by some officials over concerns of Dylan’s anti-war sentiments and history of drug use, as TheLocal.fr reports.
