It is not bad to be an original thinker, to advocate unorthodox views that both the Guelphs and Ghibellines frown upon, not to be enslaved to the schemes of either sterile political correctness or simple political incorrectness.
Although we live, globally, in a world of "free information" and even freer opinions, in the end it all comes down to parallel existing bubbles of like-minded people who congratulate each other on being so smart and so right.
To that extent, the remaining original thinkers are even more valuable, precisely because of their ability to surprise and even shock.
Everything is great so far. The trouble is that too many consumers of information and opinions do not have the equipment to recognize and separate an original thinker from, let's say, an ordinary fool. Or worse, from an unusually pretentious fool. Because the latter can be both original and unique, except that his "originality" is ultimately derived only from crazy contradictions and chronic confusion in his head.
Here, then, is the non-reward question for this week: to which of these two groups does the President of Croatia Zoran Milanović belong, otherwise, over the years, he is more and more prone to thought-verbal lupins who alternately delight, shock and embarrass all living things, in breadth and depth, in Croatia and beyond ? If you ask me, there is no precise answer, although it is clear to me which group he is undoubtedly closer to.
In Serbia, Milanović was never respected or popular, and he showed enough times with brutal honesty that he didn't even care about that anyway. Although he is supposedly a leftist and a child of Yugoslavia, for Milanović, Serbia was a kind of proverbial Tungusia, a country that exists in language only as a metaphor for a backward and primitive backwater. No, he never showed hatred towards Serbia and Serbs: rather a kind of patronizing pity, the kind that a well-intentioned European white man in the 19th century showed towards the so-called natives of the African savannas.
And then, lo and behold, in a twist worthy of a thriller, Milanović became the darling of the Serbian public, and precisely that part of it that reserves for itself the attributes of a certain, particularly Serbian Serbianness and particularly patriotic patriotism.
So, what changed overnight? First, Milanović expressed his opinion that what happened in Srebrenica in the summer of 1995 could not have been genocide. If someone accidentally missed the opportunity to be delighted by Milanović's free thinking, the other day they got a new one, even more irresistible.
The president of Croatia now says that Kosovo was "annexed" and that it was taken from Serbia, and that everyone alive participated in it, from the EU to NATO, including Croatia.
Volleys of enthusiasm from the so-called of the patriotic part of the Serbian political-intellectual-media public were heard from Plovdiv to Trbovlje, and Milanović promptly became something between Handke and Chomsky from the neighborhood.
Alas, an original thinker would not be an original thinker if he did not produce controversies, which less original thinkers then interpret as they see fit, or simply ignore them. So is Milanović, along with thoughts that are very pleasing to the so-called Serbian voice, continued to talk about Serbs and Serbia from the perspective of the supposedly superior Other, using the most disgusting possible chauvinistic stereotypes that have already died out and according to the most obscure births of his Dinaric homeland. For him, the Serbs are now "opančari", and even before they are a "handful of misery", and all in all, the incorrigible dregs of the Balkans.
Zoran Milanović is not even a Serbophobe, let alone a Serbophile, and why should he be any of that? He's just a pretentious guy who likes to listen to his own voice while thinking out loud about the so-called. global topics, and the Serbs occasionally come to him as a convenient metaphor for this or that. And the fact that some people here are going crazy with happiness as if a Zagreb fijfirić will really "return Kosovo" to us, even if he showed a little recreational chauvinism along the way, in the end, it doesn't say so much about the rise of his ego as it does about the decline of all local standards.
Bonus video:
