I’ve always held that feminism, as a political and academic direction (rather than simply the defense of human rights), is backwards and conservative. And who should it be than so-called feminists who are now in one boat with the extreme right-wing, jointly hunting down their new favourite toy: Roman Polanski.
Polanski’s crime (which, in legal terms, was sex with a minor, not rape – and we’re talking about the law here, right?) is now being compared to those of Nazi mass murderers. People are openly saying he should be shot.
(Quotes from “The sordid coaliting pursuing Roman Polanski.”)
Columnist Christopher Caldwell, a senior editor of the ultra-right Weekly Standard, writing in the Financial Times, fantastically asserts that the case “of the late Maurice Papon has much in common with Mr Polanski’s.”
As secretary general for police in Bordeaux, Maurice Papon participated in the deportation of 1,600 or more French Jews to Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz—where Polanski’s mother was murdered, as it happens. Papon was eventually brought to justice for his role during World War II, after years of delays, and convicted in 1998.
Throwing in Communist Party officials in Stalinist Poland for good measure, Caldwell continues, “The crime of which Mr. Polanski stands accused is not less serious than theirs, nor is his case for mercy stronger.” Has Caldwell lost his mind? Collaboration with the Nazis and complicity in mass murder the equivalent of sex with an underage girl?
The derangement of the arguments should set off alarm bells. The Polanski affair is being used to stoke law-and-order hysteria and neo-puritanical witch-hunting. ABC journalist Cokie Roberts declared on the television network’s “This Week,” “He raped and drugged and raped and sodomized a child. And then was a fugitive from justice. As far as I’m concerned, just take him out and shoot him.”
Not having had an issue into which they could sink their teeth in years, feminists have jumped on the anti-Polanski bandwagon, oblivious to the implications of their comments.
Writing in Salon, for example, Kate Harding fulminates, “Roman Polanski raped a child. Let’s just start right there, because that’s the detail that tends to get neglected when we start discussing whether it was fair for the bail-jumping director to be arrested at age 76, after 32 years in ‘exile.’”
Harding, along with Roberts, accuses Polanski of “drugging and raping a child.” This is now repeated as fact throughout the tabloid and “liberal” media alike. Mary Kate Cary, on a US News & World Report blog, writes that “Roman Polanski was a 43-year-old man who admitted to drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl.”
What we’re seeing here is the death of civilization. When the entirety of the media are essentially calling for a lynching and ignoring all the most basic facts of the case (which have been thoroughly documented), and when there is so little opposition to this kind of barbarism from groups that claim to be “progressive,” civilization is tottering. We have lost sight of what is important, and are inches away from becoming a historical curiosity for future archaeologists to dig up and say “Why the hell did they behave like that?” Think about it:
Again, we will point out, the outraged middle class feminists and liberals demand their pound of flesh from Polanski while the real criminals in America—CIA and military torturers and killers—go free.
Twenty-six CIA agents and a US Air Force lieutenant colonel were charged in absentia in Italy with the abduction of an Egyptian imam, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, later sadistically tortured in an Egyptian prison, because American officials declared they would never allow the alleged perpetrators to be extradited to Italy to stand trial.
The US government refused to hand over to Venezuela Luis Posada Carriles, the anti-Castro Cuban terrorist who planted a bomb on a civilian airline that killed 73 people. Posada Carriles, held on minor immigration charges, was set free from a New Mexico jail in 2007.
But Roman Polanski! Here is a genuine threat to the social fabric!
This is where we are: the United States are involved in two wars and occupations, and supporting a whole lot more. Unemployment has reached new highs. Homelessness has reached new highs. World-wide hunger is now over a billion people, more than ever before in human history. We’re a few years away from climate catastrophe. All the major governments of the world have given themselves the legal ability to circumvent the legal system and torture people without even a shred of evidence. We have concentration camps. Real criminals, who destroyed thousands of lives, who tortured and murdered, go free. But a man who fled from a judge who was breaking every rule, a judge whose behaviour has been described as illegal by the victim and her lawyer, a man who faced some of the most traumatic events you can imagine and nevertheless ultimately managed to create meaningful art, and who ultimately got married and raised a family… the lynching of this man is our highest priority.
