A Profile of Slobodan Milosevic
![handle is hein.journals/fora72 and id is 567 raw text is: A Profile of
Slobodan Milo'evi6
Aleksa Djilas
BANALITY TRIUMPHANT
IN 1989 A COLLECTION of speeches and interviews of Slobodan
Milogevi6, the president of Serbia, was published in Belgrade. His
narrow intellectual horizons and limited vocabulary were obvious;
the chapter tides, in their arrogant and hollow simplicity, were rem-
iniscent of Mao Zedong's Red Book. (The difficulties are neither
unexpected nor insurmountable; The difficulties should not be a
reason to demobilize, but to mobilize ourselves; The future will still
be beautiful, and it is not far away; etc.)
MilogeviCs dry, overcompressed sentences and his frequent use of
ritual formulas made his style mechanical; the use of military vocab-
ulary (mobilization, battle, war) gave the prose a rigid and belliger-
ent tone. This ponderous text seemed to be very much in harmony
with the author's large photograph on the book's cover. He appears
stiff, inhibited, hierarchical-almost robot-like.
Yet the book was an instant success. A Serbian reading public that
considered itself discerning had been seduced by a simplistic, almost
naive book, whose author seemed incapable of presenting a genuine
vision of political and social life. To understand why a crude propa-
gandistic tract became a national best-seller is to begin to understand
ALEKSA DJILAS, a Fellow of the Russian Research Center at Harvard
University, is the author of The Contested Country: Yugoslav Unity and
Communist Revolution, I9r9-953.
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A Profile of Slobodan Milosevic
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