Mary Riddell…had DSK ‘disgraced’ within 48 hours of his arrest
The pc cadres are convinced DSK is finished. But French research today suggests they’re wrong.
While this site is in danger of turning into the Strauss-Kahn Museum of Stitch-Up Artefacts, I feel I must return to a theme I’ve been trying to develop since the start of this fiasco: the wider issue in terms of socio-political views about sex and gender. (See The PSK after DSK yesterday).
The poor-loser bitterness of those who wanted Dominic Strauss-Kahn flayed alive four weeks ago has been awful to behold since the case of attempted rape against him fell apart last Thursday. Journalist Jon Swaine still has the former IMF boss ‘swaggering into Court in a crisp blue suit’ on Friday, and most Left-leaning papers and journals have indulged themselves in a man-hating frenzy of ‘Well I think he did it anyway, so there’. A major New York hip magazine despised his ‘celebrating in a $300 a head swanky restaurant’. The bloke just got his life back: what do they want him to do, go to Subway for an egg and tomato roll?
A classic example was Anne-Elizabeth Moutet’s piece in the Telegraph this morning – sticking the knife into Strauss-Kahn’s political chances now….and of course headed ‘All smiles in Manhattan but….’. Her point was that DSK was finished in France. But then she would say that – six weeks ago she wrote there that he would prove to be ‘ the first French politician whose career imploded because of a sex scandal, not a financial one’. Well, she was wrong. Any sign of contrition? Not a bit of it. But within two hours of her post, Le Parisien released a survey of attitudes to DSK after last week’s astonishing events. This too showed Moutet’s view was completely atypical.
In a Harris Interactive poll of 1,000 French people aged 18 and over, 60% of left-leaning French voters wanted former IMF chief Strauss-Kahn to return to French politics immediately. Unsurprisingly, attitudes are polarised: among the total sample, 49% want Strauss-Kahn to return to the French political scene, while 45% are against it. But this is within two days of the latest revelations…..before the 36-day stitch up by Cyrus Vance’s office would’ve been known inside France. Sexual misdemeanours are quickly forgotten in France; attempts to frame Frenchmen aren’t. This is hardly a career ‘imploding’: Strauss-Kahn is back big-time, and both Sarko and Lagarde will know this perfectly well.
However, I truly do not believe the significance of this case lies either in Geithner’s geopolitical economic scheming, or internal French politics. Rather, I would refer those educated before 1980 to the infamous Dreyfus case of the 1890s and beyond.
Captain Alfred Dreyfus was a Jewish French general staff officer accused of spying for France’s bete noir, Germany. He was convicted on evidence forged by anti-Semitic fellow-officers and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island. Even though the Government knew the identity of the real spy – a Major Esterhazy – they protected him….because the prevailing ‘pc’ view was that Jews held no real loyalty to any nation.
Today we face a similar madness – a ‘correct’ disease particularly prevalent in New York that I attempted to analyse in an early DSK post. This is the classic herd-instinct of wanting, not to be right, but to be on the winning side: to be ‘not wrong’. Nafissatou Diallo represented, for liberal feminists everywhere, the classic victim: black, a woman, devout Muslim, harmless, forced into sex by a male rapist. Dominic Strauss-Kahn, on the other hand, was the classic preying pervert – white, fat, a Jew, rich, a banker – and the worst kind of exploitative elite sexual predator.
To be honest, you could play out this same mad v sane contest on a dozen Progressive v Conservative issues across the globe. One that particularly springs to mind is the Israel v Arabs shtick, in which liberals will defend the bomb-building mendacity of the headcase regime in Iran as an important bulwark against wicked Israel’s imperial ambitions – such ambitions remaining undefined by a single person I’ve ever engaged in argument about it.
There are significant elements of both Dominic Strauss-Kahn and Israeli policy that I find repugnant. But were you to ask me who I’d rather have as an ally, I would prefer DSK to the US Fed (see Sterling machinations) and Netanyahu to Ahmadinnejhad. Quite frankly, the choice for anyone who understands Realpolitik from a democratic viewpoint is a no-brainer.
The historical significance of the Strauss-Kahn affair will be, I suspect, its role in the beginnings of a backlash against progressive fantasies – and a return to the radical realist empiricism we so badly need as the global economy careers towards disaster. Be it in the fields of social, racial, gender, fiscal, globalist or economic propaganda, the overriding failure of the Establishment since 2008 has been in the ability to have free and fresh thoughts about what to do.
The stale dogma applied to the investigation of the DSK/Sofitel/Diallo encounter has much to teach us. For a while there, the Left tried to depict the former IMF boss as – literally – the King in the Altogether. It is their distorted philosophy which now stands, naked and deformed, before us.
The Slog 