The late Irving Kristol once defined a liberal as someone who, upon witnessing a fourteen-year-old girl engaging in a live sex act, worries about whether she is getting the minimum wage. It was the same Kristol who described a neo-conservative as a liberal who has been “mugged by reality”. Kristol himself is widely regarded as neo-conservatism’s foremost intellectuals, if not its actual founder.
The reaction of many to the recent arrest in Switzerland of filmmaker Roman Polanski echoes a lot of what Kristol, I think, was getting at. One sees all too clearly from this unfolding saga the propensity of certain self-defined liberals to turn a blind eye to glaring social evils when it suits them.
For the liberal-left intelligentsia, particularly in the artistic community, Polanski is being portrayed not as a man who notoriously drugged and sodomised a thirteen-year-old girl and then fled to France to escape the consequences. Rather he is being presented as a victim of middle-American vindictiveness, a real-life version of Victor Hugo’s saintly Jean Valjean hounded by the implacable inspector Javert. Was it not punishment enough, they argue, that the gifted Polanski was unable to receive his 2003 Best Director Oscar in person for fear of arrest? Has he not suffered sufficiently from his ‘mistake’ by all the notoriety he has attracted, the lawyers’ fees he has paid, and the fact that he has been unable to visit Hollywood to direct or cast a film?
Father Thomas Reese, a Jesuit, asks how the same outraged voices would have responded had Roman Polanski, distinguished artiste, instead been Monsignor Polanski, Catholic priest. He writes: “Imagine if the Knights of Columbus decided to give an award to a paedophile priest who had fled the country to avoid prison. The outcry would be universal.”
Neo-conservatism (before it so lamentably became an excuse for an aggressive foreign policy aimed at forcibly imposing democracy on others) was, and still is, a powerful intellectual force. It confronted and exposed the blinkered double standards of those who ignored (and frequently even championed) the world’s most human rights delinquent nations whilst depicting the Western nations, particularly America, as the epitome of evil.
The special pleading on Polanski’s behalf seems to me to be reminiscent of the same kind of excuses that were routinely made for the emergent post-colonial countries and communist regimes. In his case, the fact of his being a great filmmaker is seen as a good enough reason to judge him according to a different, less stringent, standard of behaviour.
This reasoning is pernicious in the extreme. When standards of behaviour are not consistently imposed but rather selectively applied, or not, according to one’s ideological proclivities, they become a hollow mockery good only for smearing others. If the passage of time does not lessen the imperative of bringing a felon to justice, why are so many apparently reasonable voices being raised for Polanski to be let off?
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27 Responses to “Kaalgat pseudo-liberalism and the Polanski affair”
Perhaps then, we should ask the death tolls in the various communist countries, from their regimes, and from the western regimes that attacked them.
Example: How many people were killed by the Vietnamese communist government? USA is generally estimated to have killed 3 million (mainly South) Vietnamese - and they still have horrendous birth defects there due to the chemical warfare.
How about Pol Pot? The scholarly evidence points to about 750 000 people - maybe 200 000 by the Vietnamese trying to stop him - and 2 million by the American carpet bombing.
Saddam Hussein? Any claim above 300 000 would require heavy demographic citations (no, the USA govt said so does not count); USA sanctions plus invasion: 2-3 million dead.
Lamumba: Is any one pretending that he killed people in any great numbers? USA/Belgium/Mobutu - we know that Mobutu killed 1 million of his own ethnic group, but the total is hard to find.
China? The number 100 million gets thrown around quite a bit, but citations are always hard to find. Of course, life expectancy got rather high rather fast under Mao (likewise under Pinochet, for the same reasons) - moderate starvation aka caloric intake limitation boosts life expectancy. Then again, prior to Mao’s takeover, they had Zim style hyperinflation, and a life expectancy of 32 (as did India).
We can play this game all day, if you’d like.
And people comparing USSR to USA are laughable - USSR should be compared to Brazil - same developmental level c1917,,,
Was the act not cosentual? I see it as abominable for an adult to engage in sexual acts with someone that young, but if it is consentual, it is not rape. The problem is with America’s atrocious social immaturity that prevents it from judging the case in its true light. Punishment must fit the crime after it has been judged correctly. I don’t condone what the man did for a minute but he did it in America and that is why he ducked. What about all these religious sickos that take 10 and 11 year old brides, and nogal with the consent of the parents?
There is a difference between justice, and pedantic application of whatever the law happens to be at a given point in time. Your analogy is wrong. Polanski should be compared to Jean Genet, not Jean Valjean.
As for the comparison between Peodophile catholic priests and Polanski, that is laughable. Polanski doesn’t - literally - preach fidelity, family values, and claim to know any claimed revelation. He’s human, he’s an artist and he pushes our boundaries of tolerance as artists are meant to do. This tolerance of such people sometimes results in behaviour which is outside of what accepted at a given point in time, but in the long run the human race is better for it.
Your religious self, have your conclusions decided before you even ‘reflect’ upon an argument. I would hardly expect someone like that to understand why passion and art are sometimes delicate and harsh, but in the long run necessary. Lock up Polanski and we lose a lot.
As for your defence of middle-America, if we listened to them Sara Palin would be president slavery would have lasted much longer.
The fact that standards of behavior are not consistently imposed is exactly why many people support Polanski’s release. How many men were routinely being prosecuted for statutory rape back in 1977? Wasn’t it the famous name on the police report that got this case going? Even today we regularly discharge underage girls from the hospital with their newborn babies and never even bother to ask the name or age of the father. Why aren’t we prosecuting those men? After all, the reason we have statutory rape laws is to prevent teenage pregnancy.
Polanski’s conduct is indeed despicable, as is the outcry to defend him. The outcry is mostly coming from the artistic community (generally considered an extreme element within the liberal community), and does not reflect how the vast majority of liberals feel about him.
The outcry among the arts community has more to do with the fact that Polanski is one of their own than any larger political struggle. Much as soldiers will tend to sympathize with other soldiers who crossed a moral line (even serious ones such as rape and torture), the arts community perceives Polanski as a sympathetic figure in a grand, dramatic tragedy. Obviously this is a perversion of the reality of the situation, and does not excuse his actions or those who defend his evasion of justice. However, it does illustrate the fact that this outcry is not motivated by the liberal community at large or the values it cherishes, but rather is coming from a small minority of people far more radical than the democratic party.
It is incomprehensible that so many idiots support this rapist. He must be sent back to the USA and sentenced just as someone would be had they committed this crime today. The USA should be castigated for taking so long to nail him.
A. Sevillano - in this case, the sex was certainly not consensual, with the girl repeatedly saying ‘no’. But even if she hadn’t it would’t make much of a difference. The point of laws against sex with minors is that it recognises that such people don’t have the emotional tools to freely give or withhold consent when pressured to do so by an adult.
Jean - the Valjean comparison was not made by myself, but others. I agree with you that a priest who commits paedophilia is even more guilty than someone like Polanski because he is going against the very standards he claims to uphold. However, I find rather shocking your apparent endorsement of different standards of moral behaviour for those considered ‘artists’, and belittling of child rape as being simply “behaviour which is outside of what accepted at a given point in time”.
LD - Agreed. I think your comment is helpful in putting the matter in its correct perspective.
Perhaps your quoted comparison with a Catholic priest is a tad colourful. Priests claim the moral high ground. They present themselves shamelessly as examples of good, clean biblical living, above reproach for all of us to follow. It is doubly shocking, therefore, when one of them engages in something contra his belief system, especially when that priest happens to be Catholic and celibate and the incident is sexual in nature.
Polanski claimed no such high ground. In fact he was judged to be a psychologically damaged individual at the time of the incident. His wife and unborn child had been slaughtered by serial killers a few years earlier. I think that this and many other details regarding the nature of the incident, far more than his fame, are the reasons for the lenient outlook.
If anything, his fame has made this into a circus and made it far more difficult for him to get a fair trial.
I can’t believe you haven’t yet moved on from this. Could it be simply that men like to protest too much? Leave the man to justice and worry about some of the things that go unpunished on your own doorstep, in your own street, town and country. The man had no right to do as he did, it’s true, but why wasn’t the girl’s mother looking after her? All men get out of hand when the goods look too good. As do all women. Women just tends to look at other goods more often!
“Polanski claimed no such high ground. In fact he was judged to be a psychologically damaged individual at the time of the incident. His wife and unborn child had been slaughtered by serial killers a few years earlier. I think that this and many other details regarding the nature of the incident, far more than his fame, are the reasons for the lenient outlook.
Except, not so much really. Have you seen the Pianist? Some rather angering scenes of victimization and the powerful using the non-powerful for their own whims. Sound familiar?
Polanski ha made it his duty to show society its evils through film. Yet he is too self-ignorant to see it in himself.
Christina: “The fact that standards of behavior are not consistently imposed is exactly why many people support Polanski’s release. How many men were routinely being prosecuted for statutory rape back in 1977?”
–If you’d like to bring this up as a point of debate, how about showing some stats to refute?
“Wasn’t it the famous name on the police report that got this case going? Even today we regularly discharge underage girls from the hospital with their newborn babies and never even bother to ask the name or age of the father.
Why aren’t we prosecuting those men?”
–Because the girls did not bring charges. Statutory rape is regularly prosecuted (in the U.S. anyway)when charges are brought up. Otherwise it falls under right to privacy.
“After all, the reason we have statutory rape laws is to prevent teenage pregnancy.”
–Do some research. Statutory rape laws are based on the concept that a young person lacks the experience possessed by legal adults to make a mature decision as to whether or not to have sexual contact with a particular person.
Sorry, to clarify re: Christina’s comment: modern statutory rape laws are based on other things besides pregnancy. They were updated along the lines of modern drinking age laws.
Part of the problem here is that by politicising it (i.e., saying that “liberals don’t care about child rape”, whereas in the real world it was the liberals who got the laws on the books) Saks is massively weakening his case. It seems unlikely that if instead of Polanski it had been a famous right-winger, Saks would be raising such a fuss.
The essence of the issue: does charging Polanski after all this time improve the legal situation? (We know that the victim of the crime doesn’t want him charged, so that issue is irrelevant.) Does it make it more likely that average people will be charged with committing such crimes? Or is this just a celebrity stunt, in which case it is trivial?
What exactly are the ends justice is supposed to seek. For me it’s closure for the victim, and ensuring that offenders to not repeat. The victim in this case does not want Polanski charged, if anything hauling him back to court will be more distressful for her.
Will Polanski do it again? I doubt, but we cannot be sure. On the whole, this would serve no end other than to satisfy simple-minded american’s whose idea of justice is to simply lock ‘em up or gas ‘em.
As to my point above, Mr. Saks, consensual sex with a thirteen year has not always been illegal in society, nor will it be in the future. Thus my reference to it being intolerable only at a given point in time. Maybe I should have said at a given location as well.
Jean:
Somehow I don’t think that jailing a man who raped her, then bragged about it to Martin Amis, then whined about how everyone was being so unfair to him by not letting him back in Hollywood like any garden-variety sociopath does, (and EVERY time he opened his mouth the media hounded her) would cause her to lose much sleep. As a woman, (and someone who could have gone through what Polanski’s victim did) it will certainly make me sleep better knowing that rape charges are taken seriously, and their revocation is not a reward for successfully evading justice because the rapist has the money to do so.
“Will Polanski do it again? I doubt,”
Would the Nazi camp guards do what they did again? Probably not.
“On the whole, this would serve no end other than to satisfy simple-minded american’s whose idea of justice is to simply lock ‘em up or gas ‘em.”
too ridiculous to respond to.
“consensual sex with a thirteen year has not always been illegal in society,”
–it wasn’t consensual. But sure, if you want to argue about archaic stuff, beating your wife was once not illegal as well. As to your assertion that it will not be illegal in the future. Please put forth some reasoning for this claim.
As I see it the law is supposed to reflect society’s wisdom with regard to protecting individual members of society from harm. It is nevertheless a blunt instrument that is why it is necessary to have courts of law in which the judiciary tries to tailor the punishment to fit the circumstances. It is in my view right therefore that Polanski should be brought to trial.
She has publicly stated that she does not want the trial to happen. It’s the trial that will probably cause her to ‘lose sleep.’
As for you, this trial is not about what will make you sleep better.
So now Polanski is being equated to Nazi death-camp guards. Are these the ones that slaughtered his parents do you think? Nice.
On the question of whether he will do it again, you think he will I think he probably won’t. It’s been thirty years, and no other accusations have surfaced.
As for satisfying simple-minded Americans, that’s all it is. They have no sense of justice, only punishment.
“consensual sex with a thirteen year has not always been illegal in society,”
–it wasn’t consensual. But sure, if you want to argue about archaic stuff, beating your wife was once not illegal as well. As to your assertion that it will not be illegal in the future. Please put forth some reasoning for this claim.
It was consensual. It was rape, because she was under-age and because he peppered her with drugs and alcohol. Anyway, sex with people of that age is not archaic, nor equated to wife-beating. Read Tolstoy, look at the age of consent in Europe, Europe today. You are the archaic, reactionary pedant on this particular question. The guilt is relative to time and location.
Julie - Perhaps Polanski is showing society its truths through film, as he perceived and liveed them, and you are classifying them as evils when viewed through your judgmental lens.
You also seem to think that I have just developed my own theories about Polanksi’s psychological state which you refute with throw away phrases such as ‘not so much’. I would draw your attention to the fact that those opinions were those of pschologists at the time and are not mine at all. Yours, on the other hand are drawn from your irrational, militant feelings on this issue and based on nothing close to science or fact.
I therefore suggest, humbly and for the second time this week, that you review your outbursts and comb them for rational arguments or facts. I predict that neither will be discovered. I did not respond before because there was nothing new to respond to.
You may also want to delve deeper and ask yourself why this discussion threatens you so much and why you can’t approach it with rationality and distance; why you can’t entertain the POSSIBILITY that what happened does not fall into the convenient boxes of good and evil and may lie in a convoluted tangle somewhere inbetween.
Grant, do not take this so personally. “Not so much” is not a personal jibe. I think you are getting a little ahead of this debate and turning it into some vendetta. I see how you would confuse “Outburst” with “a different opinion from yours” when this issue is an emotional one for you. I will keep responding as I want to.
Jean: “It was consensual. It was rape, because she was under-age and because he peppered her with drugs and alcohol.”
So it was “consensual rape?” I see.
“So now Polanski is being equated to Nazi death-camp guards.”
Yep. When we are talking about crimes that happened years ago and the worth of bringing them to justice, it is relevant. You are incorrectly interpreting this as calling Polanski a fascist. That is not the point here. But for all the accusations of fascism toward people who do not agree with the Polanski supporters, I don’t feel much of a need to explain.
“She has publicly stated that she does not want the trial to happen. It’s the trial that will probably cause her to ‘lose sleep.’”
Please don’t be so arrogant as to say that YOU know why she wants this to end. You have no idea of what she wants or what she’s been going through.
“As for satisfying simple-minded Americans, that’s all it is. They have no sense of justice, only punishment.”
As for satisfying simple-minded Polanski fans…. well, you could say they have no sense of justice, only sycophancy. You see, your invective comments go both ways.
I’d like to point out to everyone that that “outburst” of mine that Gran was referring to is this :
Grant:“Polanski claimed no such high ground. In fact he was judged to be a psychologically damaged individual at the time of the incident. His wife and unborn child had been slaughtered by serial killers a few years earlier. I think that this and many other details regarding the nature of the incident, far more than his fame, are the reasons for the lenient outlook.
Julie: “Except, not so much really. Have you seen the Pianist? Some rather angering scenes of victimization and the powerful using the non-powerful for their own whims. Sound familiar?
Polanski ha made it his duty to show society its evils through film. Yet he is too self-ignorant to see it in himself.”
You ask me, Grant “You may also want to delve deeper and ask yourself why this discussion threatens you so much and why you can’t approach it with rationality and distance; why you can’t entertain the POSSIBILITY that what happened does not fall into the convenient boxes of good and evil and may lie in a convoluted tangle somewhere inbetween. ”
And I would ask the same of you.
“I did not respond before because there was nothing new to respond to.”
–I asked you to explain why you think bringing up a rape victim’s sexual history is OK for the defense counsel to do.
OK, I’ve been lurking on the Polanski comments on this site, but I feel the need to pipe up. First: Wow, Grant, getting testy there. I think the point was a good one, and quite fair in response to yours. I don’t think it advisable that we hold different standards for different rapists (if Polanski is a rapist in a sense other than statutory, but for the sake of he argument at hand I will assume that.) That is, we cannot arbitrarily apply consequences according to individual’s arbitrary morals. We cannot say “well, this person has spoken out against rape, so if they rape they should be held accountable” while to the other we say “this person, on th eother hand, made no such admonition about rape, so the laws about rape do not apply.” This really isn’t about priests’ moral grandstanding anyway. I think the issue has to do with people in authority doing these things not being able to escape the law because of time passing. We would never say, for instance “That 13 year-old boy didn’t speak up then, doesn’t that imply something about consent? And that boy had sex previously, so, YOU KNOW… and so much time has passed, let’s just sweep this under the rug and have done with it, shall we?” No, the different standards are shameful.
Grant, are your feelings hurt? Do you REALLY have to whine about a poster saying “not so much” in response to your post? Because honestly, the rest of us don’t care. That is getting just a little petty, don’t you think?
“I would draw your attention to the fact that those opinions were those of pschologists at the time and are not mine at all. Yours, on the other hand are drawn from your irrational, militant feelings on this issue and based on nothing close to science or fact.”
Um, the subject at hand I believe was priests and Polanski, and whether different ideas of morality play into whether each should be charged the same for teh same crime. Could you please point out the scientific reports and such that you mention that address this?
Jamie, I know my “irrational militant feelings” about Polanski’s The Pianist might be coloring my opinion here as Grant asserts (!) but the point about psychology is really on the same level of morality I think. As has been said, you cannot apply “arbitrary” laws according to morality, OR psychology. If a rapist takes cocaine s/he is in another mental state, isn’t s/he? Look at the histories of any given rapist in prison, and you will see a pattern of parental abuse, neglect, murder, etc. The only difference is they didn’t direct “Knife in the Water.” Sounds simplistic, but I don’t think that can be denied.
For thousands of years we Jews were giving our sons Bar Mitzvahs at the tender age of thirteen and then marrying them off to girls the same age. For thousands of years thirteen year old Jewish girls were being married off to men much older than Polanski, by their own fathers! (And then getting sodomised)… The author is using his rather selective morality to comment on what he believes to be the usefulness of religion… Here we have an orthodox Jew defending a Christian clergyman who’s defending Christian pedophiles. Laughable really…
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David Saks has worked for the South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD) since April 1997, and is currently its associate director. Over the years, he has written extensively on aspects of South African history, Judaism and the Middle East for local and international newspapers and journals.
David has an MA in history from Rhodes University. Prior to joining the SAJBD, he was curator -- history at MuseumAfrica in Johannesburg. He is editor of the journal Jewish Affairs, appears regularly on local radio discussing Jewish and Middle East subjects and is a contributor to various Jewish publications.
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Perhaps then, we should ask the death tolls in the various communist countries, from their regimes, and from the western regimes that attacked them.
Example: How many people were killed by the Vietnamese communist government? USA is generally estimated to have killed 3 million (mainly South) Vietnamese - and they still have horrendous birth defects there due to the chemical warfare.
How about Pol Pot? The scholarly evidence points to about 750 000 people - maybe 200 000 by the Vietnamese trying to stop him - and 2 million by the American carpet bombing.
Saddam Hussein? Any claim above 300 000 would require heavy demographic citations (no, the USA govt said so does not count); USA sanctions plus invasion: 2-3 million dead.
Lamumba: Is any one pretending that he killed people in any great numbers? USA/Belgium/Mobutu - we know that Mobutu killed 1 million of his own ethnic group, but the total is hard to find.
China? The number 100 million gets thrown around quite a bit, but citations are always hard to find. Of course, life expectancy got rather high rather fast under Mao (likewise under Pinochet, for the same reasons) - moderate starvation aka caloric intake limitation boosts life expectancy. Then again, prior to Mao’s takeover, they had Zim style hyperinflation, and a life expectancy of 32 (as did India).
We can play this game all day, if you’d like.
And people comparing USSR to USA are laughable - USSR should be compared to Brazil - same developmental level c1917,,,
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