by Joseph W
BHL on Polanski, October 2009:
I want to say again, once more, why this affair is shameful.
It is shameful to throw a 76-year-old man into prison for unlawful sex committed 32 years ago.
It is shameful that, in countries where, like in Europe, you can bump off an old lady, torture your fellow man, mutilate him, and know that your crime, like all violent crimes, will be commuted after 10 or 15 years, everybody acts as if Polanski’s crime should be immune to any possibility of commutation.
[…]
It is shameful to see the intellectuals, whose role should be to calm the frenzy and cool popular anger, ratchet up, like Michel Onfray in Libération, the moment when “the worst are full of passionate intensity” (Yeats) and to indulge, in the name of abused childhood, in the most obnoxious amalgams (why don’t we hear these intellectuals denounce with equal ardor, the limitless outrage that is the martyrdom of child soldiers in Africa, or child slaves in Asia, or the hundreds of millions of children dead of hunger, according to the estimates of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), for the last…32 years?)
BHL on Strauss-Kahn, May 2011:
I don’t know what really happened on Saturday, in the bedroom of the now-famous Sofitel hotel in New York.
I don’t know. No-one knows because nothing has been revealed by the statements. Who knows if Dominique Strauss-Kahn committed the crime he is alleged to have carried out, or if, rather, he was having lunch with his daughter at the time.
I don’t know. But on the other hand, it would be good to know immediately how a chambermaid could have entered the room alone, against the customs which, in most big New York hotels, provide “household teams” composed of two people, in the bedroom of one of the most watched men on the planet.
And I do not want to entertain gutter psychology. The police think they can get into the mind of the person concerned. Note that the number of the famous room (2806) corresponds to the date (28.06) that the socialist primaries begin. People conclude it is a Freudian slip, a suicidal lapse, and so on and so forth.
Still, I know is that nothing in the world allows us to throw this man to the dogs like this.
As I write these lines, there are only suspicions. None of these suspicions should allow the entire world to revel in the spectacle of this handcuffed silhouette, subdued by being held in a police cell for 30 hours. Still proud as ever.
No law in the world should allow Strauss-Kahn’s admirable and courageous wife to be exposed to the salacious and drunken opinions of gossipers, tattle-tales and people seeking revenge.
I know Strauss-Kahn. The Strauss-Kahn whom I have been friends with for 25 years and with whom I will stay friends, is nothing like the insatiable and evil beast, the monster, the caveman that he will inevitably be portrayed as, from now on.
Sure, Strauss-Kahn is a seducer, a charmer, a friend of women (his own wife above all, naturally). But this brutal and violent character, this savage animal, this primate? No. Evidently this is absurd.
This morning, I hate the American judge who, in delivering him to the mob of papparazzi in front of the palace of justice in New York, made it look as if he thought that Strauss-Kahn was an ordinary person subject to trial, like anyone else.
I hate the justice system that discreetly calls him “the accused”, which means that any individual can accuse anyone else of any crime, and it will be up to him to show that the accusation was a baseless lie all along.
I hate this tabloid New York press, a shameful profession indeed, which without the slightest precaution, before even checking the facts, has depicted Dominique Strauss-Kahn as a sick man, a pervert, almost a serial killer, a target of psychiatry.
I hate, in France, all those who have jumped on this occasion to settle their accounts or try to advance their little affairs.
I hate the commentators, political ideologues, and the other foot soldiers of an exalted political class. Without decency, they have, from the first minute, drooled de Profundis about the “redistribution of roles” in society, about the “new deal”, about this and that – I’ll stop here because it really makes you feel sick.
I hate all those who complacently welcome the witness of this other young woman, a French one this time, who claims to have been the victim of an attempted rape in this same way, who stayed silent for eight years; but who, smelling the windfall, brings out her old dossier and comes to sell it on the TV.
[…]
And then I am furious, of course, by the political scope of the event.
If the Left lets Strauss-Kahn slip away, the Left will lose its champion.
Strauss-Kahn is one of France’s most devoted and competent servants of many years.
And then Europe, and perhaps the world, owes him for having successfully led the IMF for 4 years, helping Europe to avoid the worst.
Alan A adds:
I hope that Joseph will forgive me for asking: is it possible that Strauss-Kahn suffers from Prestor Didwick’s congena? At 5:09:
