It’s just class warfare, I tell you
What unites dashing open-shirted Bernard-Henri Levy and dreary “Expelled” “comedian” Ben Stein? Jason Linkins knows.
Levy and Stein find themselves offering up the same response — two of the World’s Most Interesting Men, defending another Interesting Man, on the grounds that the privilege all enjoy makes the crime inconceivable on its face.
Beautifully put, I think. They matter, so they think their friend, who also matters, must be officially Not Guilty, regardless of what he may actually have done. If he did anything, it was Her fault.
And so while it can be acknowledged that the possibility exists that DSK is the perpetrator of a crime (Levy: “I do not know what actually happened.” Stein: “…it’s possible indeed, maybe even likely, that he is guilty as the prosecutors charge.”), the important thing to do right now is remind the world that in this life, Interesting Men are never supposed to experience shame, let alone experience it publicly. Isn’t that the greater indignity?
Note especially what Stein said:
This is a case about the hatred of the have-nots for the haves, and that’s what it’s all about. A man pays $3,000 a night for a hotel room? He’s got to be guilty of something. Bring out the guillotine.
That’s what it’s all about…Really?
It’s amazing stuff. Polanski syndrome.
Don’t trust myself to type.
Ben Stein can go fuck himself.
And women are the underclass.
It is hard to be shocked by these people now.
Class war with the power elite sounds pretty good when they have Ben Stein as their spokesman.
Why do these cases almost always focus on sexual assault? If Strauss-Kahn had been charged with vehicular manslaughter, would we be seeing the same rush to his defence, besmirching of witnesses, and bizarre conspiracy theories? We saw the same thing with the Assange case (which was handled appallingly by the Swedish prosecutors, btw) where Assange’s accusers were themselves accused of being part of a right-wing conspiracy to manufacture charges against him.
It can play both ways, such as the Duke Lacrosse team. People immediately jumped to the side of the female minority accuser, when the facts turned out to be very very different. (She is now charged with murder in an unrelated case).
The presumption of innocence is as important in sexual assault cases as it is in other cases.
Indeed. At first, Levy’s and Stein’s commentary seems difficult to understand. Regardless whether you’re shocked by the allegation, it is not implausible and, under the circumstances, the actions of law enforcement authorities were justified. And why would Tristane Banon’s story anger you rather than lead you to question your earlier disbelief?
Then you remember these are the sort who rise in defense of the overclass even when the crime is not in dispute.
@jay
Agreed, and perhaps it will turn out that he’s innocent, perhaps not. This in no way gives license to immediately begin impugning the woman in this, or any other case.
It’s not about class. These so-called left postmodernist fuckers have been reading more Nietszche than is good for them and now fancy themselves Übermenschen.
Such hubris,we’ve heard this morally repugnant reasoning before,Roman Polanski was somehow exempt from due process because he’s an ‘artiste’. Just another example of in-group morality.
I’d hate to be so stupid that I thought Ben Stein an “interesting man”.
How divorced from any kind of reality do you have to be to make such a stupid comment. It’s about a possible sexual assault. A true have-not proletariat would not be surprised or much concerned – isn’t this the kind of exploitation the upper classes have always practised?
Stein is nuts. He sounds like a loon with lines like this:
WTF?
Okay, so none of us were there and we cannot know what actually happened and everybody must be presumed innocent until proven guilty.
That said, just where do they get this stupid idea that just because someone is rich and/or famous that it is class warfare to accuse them of something. The rich and famous are human beings, just like every one else, and are just as capable of committing crimes, just like every one else. Let there be a thorough investigation and a fair trial. After that is the time to condemn/commiserate with the person. Making up excuses and taking sides at this point is foolish.
Yes, I agree with the presumption of innocence, but I don’t think that is what these men are doing. As Ophelia puts it rightly, it’s blatant privilege speaking. They’re automatically judging the woman to be at fault, and that is what is despicable.
jay,
The Duke Lacrosse team story was interesting in many ways, but what it wasn’t was an example of a high-profile, powerful man accused of rape by a lower-status female. What I find most interesting is that the villain of the Duke Lacrosse story isn’t really the original accuser, who had mental health and multiple drug abuse problems at the time she made the complaint. The real villains were people in positions of power (Mike Nifong, the prosecutor, and the so-called “Group of 88”, all professors at Duke) vs. the lacrosse players who were privileged in the sense that they were white, well-off, middle class men at a highly-regarded university. That’s what made them perfect targets — those with true privilege (prosecutors and tenured professors) could attack a group of young men infinitely less powerful then themselves in order to puff up their own credentials as critics of privilege.
It is pretty clear, for instance, that the prosecutor (Nifong) thought that he could mobilise the black vote by prosecuting three rich white guys and damn frivolities such as evidence and due process. The proof in the pudding: the poor, black taxi driver who drove one of the accused home gave a police statement that gave the accused a solid alibi. The Durham prosecutor’s response was to prosecute the taxi driver for a 2+ year old shoplifting charge that didn’t have anything to do with him other than that he was the driver of the taxi that took the shoplifter home. So, yeah, the prosecutor didn’t care a damn about protecting a poor, black, working class witness who gave honest but inconvenient evidence.
This is not meant to paint the accused as saints. Even their own admission of what transpired that night makes them scummy and misogynistic. And one of them had a prior conviction for assaulting a man and yelling anti-homosexual slurs at him.
Another interesting point is that Nifong was eventually stripped of his position, debarred, convicted of criminal contempt and spent a day in prison. And this is where I believe the lacrosse boys’ privilege does come into play. There are many prosecutors and DAs in the US who have done much worse than Nifong — Project Innocence is one giant roil call of prosecutorial malfeasance — and they never seem to lose their licences. The Duke Lacrosse accused had enough power to make the blighted prosecution fall apart and see reprisals against the prosecutor (but not the professors). Falsely accused paupers rot in jail, sometimes for years after the DA becomes aware of their innocence, and not a damn thing happens to the fucking DAs. So I guess there is some privilege in being white and well-off even in the Duke case.
There’s a distinction between the presumption of innocence and the presumption than the accuser is lying, because the latter is just a presumption of guilt levelled at someone else.
“Interesting” or not, Judgement Day is coming up in 2 days’ time (May 21).
Then they’ll get theirs.
This is completely about class warfare… and the ‘haves’ are winning easily. After all, we ‘have nots’ have blogs and Twitter, and the ‘haves’ get to defend their fellow rich guy from high-profile media outlets. The ‘have not’ accuser gets whatever prosecution the DA’s office can afford, and the ‘have’ accused gets unlimited legal assistance from the best lawyers his nearly limitless money can buy.
You’ve got to love Stein’s formulation of proof of innocence: rich and important people virtually never get convicted against crimes against poor people, therefore those crimes don’t exist. DSK is a very rich and important man, therefore it is virtually impossible for him to be guilty. The fact that money shields you from consequences and not guilt never crosses Stein’s mind. That’s to be expected from a former Nixon speech writer, isn’t it?
Spot on, Shatterface. Also Joe – “The fact that money shields you from consequences and not guilt never crosses Stein’s mind.” V. good.
Whether or not he “did it”, my money’s on him being found “not guilty” in a court of law — if it indeed goes that far.
He said, she said.
He: rich and powerful with enough money to buy every defense attorney worth his salt –think “Dream Team 2”.
She: a non-person, a literal nobody with no clout, no respect … and even no identity (except “the accuser”).
If there’s anything we’ve learned from high-profile cases of this sort — OJ Simpson, Kobe Bryant — is that the prosecutors will be working with both hands tied behind their backs.
Indeed, all the defense team needs to look at is the Kobe case. Heck, the man got bailed out of jail in time to play a basketball game!
Presumption of innocence means it’s reasonable to say “I’m waiting for the evidence.” Or even “I’ve known Dominique a long time, and I find this very hard to believe.” We all make judgments like that, and want to think our friends are good people. What presumption of innocence doesn’t mean is “He’s head of the IMF, so nothing he does to a woman can be a crime,” which is his friends’ position.
That reminds me of a number of other things:
Driving while black.
Maybe the black guy didn’t commit this particular crime, but he must have done something we need to punish him for.
The white guy couldn’t have done it.
A white guy did it (so said those ‘profiling’ frauds in the case of Lee Malvo’s killing spree).
Personally, I think one of the most embarrassing things is the cover-up and apologetics the last time that creep in the IMF was exposed. I hope he has to pay his victims huge sums of money and serve a few years in prison as well.
There is something odd about the crime. I want to hear more details before I make up my mind. But the fact that the alleged perpetrator resigned from IMF is suggestive of guilt, not innocence.
Want to be more disgusted? The papers in France are printing the accuser’s name:
This is a good spoof on the savant and philosophe’s position on this matter. http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2011/05/levy.html
If I was looking for conspiracy theories, I’d say Henri-Levy has been kidnapped and a satirist wrote the piece to exacerbate the sometimes fractious relations between the USA and France. From cheese-eating surrender monkeys to chambermaid-raping chimpanzees. The self-contradiction in his piece, and the fancy flouncing.
I’ve said this on other threads but I’d bet about a generation or two ago in the USA a black immigrant woman would have been far too frightened to accuse a rich important white guy of assaulting her. Her employers would have tried to hush it up and perhaps would have sacked her and the police would have ignored her.
Perhaps it hasn’t occurred to these fine gentlemen that a bunch of privileged men dismissing rape allegations made by a poor non-white woman is class warfare. If there’s class warfare going on, they’re firing the first shots.
Also, I would like to applaud everything Chris Lawson said about the Duke case. Spot-on, and debunks a lot of false narratives about that whole debacle. It’s particularly worth underlining the fact that a very important reason that we NOTICED that case as a miscarriage of justice is because the falsely-accused were young upper-class white men.
I have to admit, I’m somewhat impressed at the police response. I shouldn’t be, because it should be normal, but there you go. Yes I think it’s fair to say that not long ago in the US an immigrant woman from Guinea would be pretty terrified about accusing Mr Rich and Important of raping her.
Nice catch, James. I’m not American but I have a feeling that ‘criminals’ is meant to be pronounced ‘blæks’.
Levy;
How could anyone let their fingers type those words without hacking them off in disgust?
Francis, that’s just wrong. It’s pronounced “darkies”; can’t let those job stealing mexicans off the hook!
/bitter sarcasm
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