Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard writes of his experience shooting an appparently abortive Bloggingheads.tv segment with Malou Innocent of the Cato Institute, in which Goldfarb compared the War in Afghanistan in the naughts, with the War in the Pacific of the 1940s — in other words, comparing the GWOT with WWII:
As soon as I started comparing the war in the Pacific with the war in Afghanistan, Innocent jumped all over me. “You’re not comparing Imperial Japan to al Qaeda?” she asked. “No, of course not,” I assured her. Respectable people can’t compare the wars America is fighting now with the Great and Good War America fought against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.
But, you know what? On second thought, Imperial Japan and al Qaeda have a lot in common — and so do the Second World War and the war in Afghanistan. The Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor, killing more Americans than any attack on U.S. soil until al Qaeda launched its own sneak attack on 9/11. The Japanese and al Qaeda also share the same fanatical devotion to their “cause.” The Japanese had kamikazes and al Qaeda has kamikazes — with hundreds of passengers on board. Our enemies in both wars shared a suicidal commitment to an impossible delusion of world domination. The war in the Pacific was a bloodbath as a result. Women and children threw themselves off of cliffs on Saipan rather than surrender to U.S. Marines. Only 1,000 Japanese surrendered on Iwo, the other 22,000 died fighting or were buried or burned alive in the island’s caves. On Okinawa the Japanese sacrificed 100,000 men in the service of a lost cause.
The American people braced for the invasion of Japan, but Truman wasn’t prepared to see a million Americans killed or wounded when there was a chance to end the war quickly with the Bomb. Truman would use nuclear weapons against civilian populations, so committed was his government to total victory and so costly would that victory have been if it was pursued by conventional means.
In Afghanistan today, against a fanatical enemy who attacked the United States and murdered 3,000 civilians, the president and his party seem to be looking for a way out. No more pay any price, bear any burden. They would have us surrender rather than spend another $50 billion to provide McChrystal with the troops he needs. They would have us leave Kandahar and Kabul to the Taliban and their al Qaeda allies rather than lose hundreds, maybe thousands, more American soldiers in the mountains of Afghanistan.
Maybe the great mistake in Afghanistan was to treat it like it was a different kind of war than World War II. If there was a chance to get bin Laden in the caves of Tora Bora, we should have sent in the Marines with flame-throwers just like we did on Iwo. Now the President of the United States considers abandoning the fight against an enemy that attacked America and is determined to attack America again. We could leave and hope for the best, but Truman could have done the same in June of 1945. ‘We’ll contain them from Okinawa, Iwo Jima and the Philippines, we’ll use airpower to disrupt their operations, we’ll send the boys home and maintain a flexible, over-the-horizon strike force,’ Truman might have said — and that’s essentially what the Democrats are proposing, and Obama is now considering.
One big difference between the GWOT and WWII of course, was how the left responded. At the start of WWII, the American left, following Stalin’s orders, were effectively in agreement with the isolationist right that America should stay out of the war, though needless to say, for different reasons. It was only Hitler invading Russia that caused the American left — again, based on Stalin’s orders — to support the war, causing some amusing pivots along the way, perhaps most visibly by screenwriter/novelist Dalton Trumbo and proto-folkie Pete Seeger.
In contrast, during the 1990s, in terms of Afghanistan, American feminists appeared to be united that something should be done about the perilous conditions of women living under the Taliban. And the American left and right were in agreement that in Iraq, Saddam Hussein should be isolated from the world stage and removed from if it all possible — and indeed, Al Gore, Bill Clinton and the rest of their administration sounded remarkably hawkish during that period:
Of course, once somebody actually did do something about Saddam and the Taliban, support from the left began to evaporate, in contradistinction to their pivot in the 1940s:
“I’ll tell you my impression. We really in this last election, when I say we…the Democrats, I think pushed it as far as we can to the end of the fleet, didn’t say it, but we implied it. That if we won the Congressional elections, we could stop the war. Now anybody was a good student of Government would know that wasn’t true. But you know, the temptation to want to win back the Congress, we sort of stretched the facts…and people ate it up.”
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The Democrats backed themselves into defending the idea of Afghanistan being The Good War because they felt they needed to prove their macho bonafides they called for withdrawal from Iraq. Nobody asked too many questions sat the time, including me. But none of us should forget that it was a political strategy, not a serious foreign policy.
There have been many campaign promises “adjusted” since the election. There is no reason that the administration should feel any more bound to what they said about this than all the other committments [sic] it has blithely turned aside in the interest of “pragmatism.”
* * *
“I assumed that because we elected Obama to end the war in Iraq that it went without saying that the war in Afghanistan would be ended as well. Apparently not so.”
Well, to be fair, the jury’s still out on the second half of that last equation.
Apparently, in Rich’s mind, because conservatives thought — accurately as it turned out — that Dede Scozzafava, running for Congress in New York’s 23rd District was a Republican in Name Only, and they preferred a more conservative candidate, that made them…Stalinists!
On the other hand, it was rather refreshing to see a journalist with the New York Times use the word pejoratively. Needless to say, that hasn’t always been the case, as we’ll explore in the latest edition of Silicon Graffiti, including:
Thomas Friedman’s love for Big Brother in China and Cuba.
Headline via Paul McCartney and John Lennon, the flaming statue of Obama on cover of Time magazine by way of the an enthusiastic Chinese sculptor. I’m sure the mullahs in Iran are ordering copies of this satue, and plenty of lighter fluid for their offices:
The Chinese have learned English from his speeches and celebrated the way he rolls up his sleeves . [Only Nixon could to China, only Obama could go to Van Heusen--Ed] Now President Barack Obama is finally coming, and he’s being greeted with “Oba Mao” T-shirts and a statue of him that bursts into flames.
Oba Mao?! I’m sure Obama will pick a few of those for Anita Dunn and Ron Bloom. More from the AP:
Sunday’s arrival of a U.S. president admired for his charisma is already a source of profit and brief fame for some Chinese.
Strangest is the burning Obama, tucked away in a Beijing warehouse. Artist Liu Bolin hopes Obama can take time from his visit to drop by.
“He’s so hot right now, so I wanted to translate that through my work,” said Liu, who was inspired by the idea of the first black U.S. president.
The bronze Obama bust is modeled on Time magazine’s “Man of the Year” cover and is speckled with holes for gas that ignites every couple of minutes.
It’s a positive work, Liu said.
“Yes, setting something on fire can have negative connotations, but this piece represents energy and life that Obama has given to the world,” said the 38-year-old, who made a similar piece for former revolutionary leader Mao Zedong.
“We’re eager to see what he can do for China and U.S. relations.”
Stalin goes Meta! Washington University inadvertently stumbles onto the perfect meme to celebrate the end of the Cold War — they airbrush a makeshift Gulag setup by the students right out of history.
Hey, all you haters trashing Obama for sending a video of himself to the ceremonies memorializing the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, just remember one thing, maaaan:
A Newsweek.com article on Tuesday celebrated historic speeches by U.S. Presidents at the Berlin Wall, somehow ignoring the fact that Barack Obama has decided not to go to Germany to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the collapse of communism. At the same time, the piece, by Anita Kirpalani, pretended that President Obama has made such a trip.
The article, entitled, “Ich Bin Ein Speechmaker: Historic speeches by visiting American presidents have left an outsize footprint on Berlin,” listed visits by John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Obama’s entry insisted, “President: Barack Obama- Date: July 24, 2008.” This was prior to his election and was only in the city of Berlin, not at the wall. The article notes these facts, but why list him as President when he wasn’t? The rest of the piece is vague on this point.
Kirpalani began, “Five American presidents delivered addresses at the Berlin Wall and, 20 years after its fall, the city is still considered a prime venue for American presidents to deliver important speeches.” No mention is made of the President’s decision to snub German President Angela Merkel and not attend the upcoming 20th anniversary ceremonies.
Further, Kirpalani asserted, “…[Obama’s] plea for the fall of all walls echoed every earlier presidential speech, and the crowd of 200,000 was more than four times the number that attended Reagan’s 1987 speech.”
However, in a November 3 column, National Review editor Rich Lowry pointed out:
Obama famously made a speech in Berlin during last year’s campaign, but at an event devoted to celebrating himself as the apotheosis of world hopefulness. He said of 1989, “a wall came down, a continent came together, and history proved that there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one.”
The line was typical Obama verbal soufflé, soaring but vulnerable to collapse upon the slightest jostling from logic or historical fact. The wall came down only after the free world resolutely stood against the Communist bloc. Rather than a warm-and-fuzzy exercise in global understanding, the Cold War was another iteration of the 20th century’s long war between totalitarianism and Western liberalism. The West prevailed on the back of American strength.
President: Barack Obama
Date: July 24, 2008
Obama hadn’t even been elected when he went to Berlin during his 2008 campaign. For that reason, the Germans did not allow him to speak at the Brandenburg Gate—they reserve it for presidential speeches. But his plea for the fall of all walls echoed every earlier presidential speech, and the crowd of 200,000 was more than four times the number that attended Reagan’s 1987 speech.
In a 20th anniversary piece on the fall of the Berlin Wall, the very least Newsweek could do is acknowledge the bewildering decision by Obama to turn down an invitation to Germany.
Hey, it may not be that bewildering, given the number of overt Marxists in Obama’s immediate orbit. But in any case, Newsweek’s article also brings into question a piece they ran a month ago, when they asked “Was Russia Better Off Red?” If you’re a publication longing for the days of the Soviet Union, it’s more than a little hypocritical to praise American efforts to liberate East Germany from its oppression.
As I noted back then, Newsweek’s piece ran right around the same time that Thomas Friedman of the New York Times was insisting that communist China was a better governing model than American democracy. But then, this is a surprisingly long tradition for American media, as a new report by Newsbusters’ parent organization, the Media Research Center highlights. Titled “Better Off Red?” It looks back at over two decades of the American media swooning over the Soviet Union, both before and after its fall, communist China, and communist Cuba.
“Tara O’Toole is a name most Americans have never heard before, but on Capitol Hill, she’s causing a lot of problems for Jack Murtha and Harry Reid”, regarding her nomination for “a senior post at the Department of Homeland Security, specifically the Under Secretary for the Science and Technology Directorate”, Michael Goldfarb notes, including this:
Oh, and one more thing: this highly regarded nominee happened to have been a member of a group that “described itself as Marxist.” So if O’Toole doesn’t get confirmed, she at least has all the qualifications for a czar position.
Read the whole thing — or as Goldfarb’s title implies, watch it soon on a segment of Glenn Beck.
Add one more soldier to the Left’s war on Fox News: Oscar the Grouch.
Last week, in a re-broadcast of an episode that originally aired two years ago, Oscar starts his own news network, GNN (Grouchy News Network). An irate viewer calls in to berate him that the news is not grouchy enough:
“I am changing the channel. From now on I am watching ‘Pox’ News. Now there is a trashy news show.”
Later in the episode, Anderson Cooper from 4th place CNN, guest stars as a reporter for GNN. He interacts with “Walter Cranky” and “Dan Rather-Not” — Muppets representing real-life liberal news personalities — and they talk about “Meredith Beware-a” and “Diane Spoiler.” But no affectionate nicknames for Fox News personalities; no Spill O’Reilly or Brittle Hume — nope, and the only disparaging characterization of real-world news is reserved for Fox: Fox is a POX. It is trashy. They didn’t even attempt to try “MessyNBC.”
If Mom and Dad watch cable news, it’s better than 50/50 they watch “POX News.” So what gives? PBS — a network partially funded with my tax dollars — has the right to tell my kids that their parents watch “trashy” news? The message is clear, I can’t even sit my kids in front of “Sesame Street” without having to worry about the Left attempting to undermine my authority. And don’t tell me, “If you don’t like it change the channel.” There are no channels left! It’s everywhere. Just last week I had Obama’s service and volunteerism promoted on every single major network, including Disney and Nickelodeon.
…by the way, why SHOULD I change the channel? This is MY channel, I’m paying for it!
The fact that this is a re-run from an episode written during the Bush Presidency only reinforces that this is nothing new. The Left has been doing this for years now. All of us have seen it and felt powerless to mention it, because if we do, we’re ridiculed and dismissed (thank you, Mr. Alinsky).
No, this is nothing new. In Julia L. Mickenberg’s book “Learning From the Left” the history is plainly spelled out. Radicals drummed out of mainstream culture in the late 1940’s turned to children’s entertainment for opportunities not just to work, but to influence. In her introduction, she quotes folk singer Pete Seeger about those artists: “I think many of them are thinking more on the lines of, ‘If we’re going to save this world, we’re going to have to reach the kids’.”
This process I understand, somewhat. Much of it is Israel-driven. Years of anti-Israel Soviet propaganda did their work, and do it still, even as many of the stars whose light we see at night have actually gone out. The 1967 and 1973 wars were deeply humiliating to the Red Army: all those tanks chewed up by Israeli Shermans. Steps had to be taken, and were. Liberals, for their part, grew conflicted about defending a David that behaved like a Goliath. Was Exodus supposed to lead to Ariel Sharon? Finally, Israel acquired allies that simply embarrassed liberals, especially Jews. Liberty Baptist is a long way from Walter Benjamin.
Read the whole thing; for Roger L. Simon’s interview with Norman Podhoretz on PJTV, click here.
Last night I wrote, “Obama has had at least one self-admitted Communist on his payroll in the form of Van Jones, as well as the Mao-quoting Anita Dunn and Ron Bloom.”
And now, here he is, the man, the myth, the audacity, Rev. Jeremiah Wright on “No Nonsense Marxism”:
A new video of Jeremiah Wright has surfaced, showing Barack Obama’s pastor of 20 years praising Marxism and discussing his ties to communists in El Salvador and Nicaragua and the Libyan government. Equally important, Wright is being introduced in the video by Robert W. McChesney, co-founder of Free Press, an organization which has come under scrutiny for its links to the Obama Administration and dedication to the transformation and control of the private media in the U.S.
In an article in the socialist Monthly Review, “Journalism, Democracy, and Class Struggle,” McChesney declared, “Our job is to make media reform part of our broader struggle for democracy, social justice, and, dare we say it, socialism.”
In the video, which captures Wright’s appearance at a September 17, 2009, anniversary celebration of Monthly Review, Wright said that while the “corporate media” provide a “binary lens” of the world, in such terms as “communist versus Christian,” Monthly Review offers what it calls “no-nonsense Marxism.”
He added: “You dispel all the negative images we have been programmed to conjure up with just the mention of that word socialism or Marxism.”
He called America “land of the greed and home of the slave.”
During the 2008 presidential campaign, as Obama was trying to distance himself from figures such as Wright and Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers, Wright gave a speech at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. and repeated a discredited Soviet propaganda claim that the U.S. Government had manufactured the AIDS virus to kill black people.
The McChesney introduction of Wright provides more insight into the political network, based largely in Chicago, that launched Obama’s political career and still influences him.
A professor at the University of Illinois, where Bill Ayers is also employed, McChesney was an editor of Monthly Review but now serves as a contributor to the publication and a director of the Monthly Review Foundation.
Fox News’ Glenn Beck, who has focused critical public attention on McChesney’s influence in the “media reform” movement and on the Obama Administration, has noted that McChesney co-authored another piece for Monthly Review, “A New New Deal Under Obama?,” in which he said, “In the end, there is no real answer but to remove brick by brick the capitalist system itself, rebuilding the entire society on socialist principles.”
Yup, I gotta confess, that now-famous picture of a U.S. marshal in Miami pointing an automatic weapon toward Donato Dalrymple and ordering him in the name of the U.S. government to turn over Elian Gonzalez warmed my heart.
These days, when not praising totalitarian Cuba and China, Friedman has taken to calling President Obama’s efforts to radically reshape the U.S. economy “nation-building” — a word whose traditional meaning that certainly fell into disfavor in the offices of the Gray Lady for most of the naughts:
I am convinced that this kind of nation-building at home is exactly what Mr. Obama is trying to deliver, and should be his unifying call: We need universal health care because it would strengthen our social fabric and enable our businesses to better compete globally. We need to upgrade our schools because no child in 21st-century America should be left behind and because we cannot compete for the best new jobs without doing so. We need a greener economy, not just to mitigate climate change, but because a world growing from 6.7 billion people to 9.2 billion by 2050 is going to demand more and more clean energy and water, and the country that develops the most clean technologies is going to have the most energy security, national security, economic security, innovative companies and global respect.
But to deliver this agenda requires a motivated public and a spirit of shared sacrifice. That’s where narrative becomes vital. People have to have a gut feel for why this nation-building project, with all its varied strands, is so important — why it’s worth the sacrifice. One of the reasons that independents and conservatives who voted for Mr. Obama have been so easily swayed against him by Fox News and people labeling him a “socialist” is because he has not given voice to the truly patriotic nation-building endeavor in which he is engaged.
Obama has had at least one self-admitted Communist on his payroll in the form of Van Jones, as well as the Mao-quoting Anita Dunn and Ron Bloom. But perhaps one reason why Friedman puts scare quotes around the word “socialist” in the above passage is that Friedman is too enamored of the real thing, and Obama, even with his radical efforts, doesn’t go anywhere nearly far enough, fast enough to satisfy the Timesman in his heart of hearts.
Related: The great Anthony Daniels (who frequently writes as Theodore Dalrymple) on “The Costs Of Abstraction”:
My little collection has led me to the conclusion that the Soviet Union was valued by contemporary intellectuals not for the omelette, but for the broken eggs. They thought that if nothing great could be built without sacrifice, then so great a sacrifice must be building something great. The Soviets had the courage of their abstractions, which are often so much more important to intellectuals than living, breathing human beings.
(And of course, while Scozzafava’s views were certainly to the left of mainstream Republicanism, it seems a bit unfair for Rich to call her a Stalinist…)
In the Wall Street Journal, Marcus Walker writes, “The Collapse of Communism Marked an Ideological Victory, but Some Wonder If China Now Has a Competing Autocratic Model:”
To many observers, the fall of the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9, 1989, symbolized the triumph of liberal democracy and free markets over their last serious ideological rival.
Two decades and one financial crisis later, a new debate is growing over whether that assessment was premature.
Some Western thinkers now argue that democracy is in a new competition with unexpectedly robust authoritarian regimes over which form of government can better deliver prosperity, security and national strength.
Critics of that view argue that democracy has far better serviced the needs of people and greatly boosted living standards through much of Central and Eastern Europe. They add that it remains to be seen whether autocrats anywhere can satisfy people’s aspirations in the long run.
In the summer of 1989, American political economist Francis Fukuyama foresaw the “End of History” in a landmark essay, meaning that no credible alternative had survived to political and economic liberty as practiced in the U.S. and Western Europe. All that remained, he argued, was for other countries to catch up.
Today, history is back, according to writers such as Israeli military historian Azar Gat. In his new book, “Victorious and Vulnerable,” he says that although democracy is the most benign system in history, it will have to demonstrate its advantages all over again in the face of its latest rival: authoritarian capitalism, as practiced by self-confident powers such as China and Russia.
The former is much beloved by Thomas Friedman at the New York Times (and deserves special praise for its remarkable environmental achievements); the latter’s antecedent just won strange new respect atNewsweek, in-between both publications’ fawning over Obama’s revival of corporatism.
“I thought that this must be some kind of grotesque conservative exaggeration, but no, White House Communications Director Anita Dunn really did tell a graduating high school class to emulate Mao Tse-Tung’s bold and imaginative attitude during his takeover of China. Most of us look at the tens of millions who died and maybe think twice about trying to imitate the late Chairman, but hey, think different!”
Glenn Reynolds adds, “The White House has long since outrun conservatives’ powers of exaggeration.”
Indeed, particularly since fighting hasn’t subsided on all fronts: “Democrats to Curtail Free Speech”, as Power Line notes, and California outlaws mail order ammunition purchases, and requires “handgun ammunition vendors to obtain a thumbprint and other information from ammunition purchasers.”
And then there are the environmentalists’ rage for the dying of the light: “In 1879, Thomas Edison perfected his most iconic invention, the incandescent light bulb. It was nice while it lasted.”
Why do these backwards trends linger to this day? Blame the Frankfurt School, Bill Whittle says.
Back in 2005, I explored the desire among many Russians and Germans to return to the “glory” days of their totalitarian pasts and wrote:
Part of the challenge of freedom is that it involves the messy vitality of individualism. And a big part of the attraction of totalitarianism is its order. Long before he entered the Oval Office, Ronald Reagan knew the Soviet Union was a third world economy hiding behind an enormous and powerful military. It’s easy to look at millions of hulking men in black boots and assume that their force equals the sum total of a nation’s vitality. And there’s obvious order in those images (see: Riefenstahl, Leni).
They’re seductive surfaces, even though what was under them was so rotten. And its obvious that even as the former Russian, East German–and even West German people and their leaders struggle with moving forward, their dark, but ordered pasts can be an awfully attractive alternative.
But they’re also remarkably attractive to the American left as well, as Scott Whitlock of the Media Research Center writes:
Proving yet again how out of touch the publication can be, the October 12 issue of Newsweek seriously asked the question: “Was Russia Better Off Red?” The “Back Story” page of the magazine featured a graphic comparing life under communism to now and bizarrely asserted: “Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia has seen an increase in oligarchs and Louis Vuitton outlets. But by many other measures, Russians are worse off.”
Yes, despite the fact that 20 million people were murdered in Soviet Russia, this unsigned feature in Newsweek contrasted the crime rate under communism, the number of hospitals and the total number of cinemas (among other factors) to those in the country today. Sadly, there are only 1,510 movie theaters today. Under the brutal repression of communism, however, there were 2,337.
* * *
The magazine did not ask: Are more people being murdered and being sent to the gulag now than they were under communism?
Newsweek’s Web site no longer includes most of the printed magazine and so this page is not online. But, readers can find it on page 62 of the October 12 edition — or click on the jpg link above for a scanned image.
Read the whole thing. As Jonah Goldberg noted recently, when another elite liberal journalist looked to the east — and the bloodiest portions of the 20th century — for inspiration:
If only America could drop its inefficient and antiquated system, designed in the age before globalization and modernity and, most damning of all, before the lantern of Thomas Friedman’s intellect illuminated the land. If only enlightened experts could do the hard and necessary things that the new age requires, if only we could rely on these planners to set the ship of state right. Now, of course, there are “drawbacks” to such a system: crushing of dissidents with tanks, state control of reproduction, government control of the press and the internet. Omelets and broken eggs, as they say. More to the point, Friedman insists, these “drawbacks” pale in comparison to the system we have today here in America.I cannot begin to tell you how this is exactly the argument that was made by American fans of Mussolini in the 1920s. It is exactly the argument that was made in defense of Stalin and Lenin before him (it’s the argument that idiotic, dictator-envying leftists make in defense of Castro and Chavez today). It was the argument made by George Bernard Shaw who yearned for a strong progressive autocracy under a Mussolini, a Hitler or a Stalin (he wasn’t picky in this regard). This is the argument for an “economic dictatorship” pushed by Stuart Chase and the New Dealers. It’s the dream of Herbert Croly and a great many of the Progressives.
Of course, in one sense, you can’t fault Newsweek for being inconsistent — this is the opinion magazine that in February believed that, with the coming of President Obama, “We Are All Socialists Now.” Fortunately, thousands upon thousands of Tea Partiers across the country have said nyet to that idea, much to the left’s consternation. Where have you gone, Joe Stalin? Our nation’s liberal pundits turn their lonely eyes to you!
As we’ve been documenting here since Sunday, “Hollywood Self-Implodes over Polanski” as Roger L. Simon describes in his latest post. Of course, one doesn’t expect any sense of conventional morality from Tinseltown. But two previously well-respected authors who established their reps as moderate or (more or less ) conservative figures coming to grips with the Cold War have done a fair amount of damage to their reputations — at least for the moment — by attempting to defend Roman Polanski.
First up, Anne Applebaum, the author of the justly-celebrated Gulag, doubles down in her continued defense of Polanski, which you can read at Hot Air, along with Ed Morrissey’s response:
Applebaum crosses the line into some despicable territory here. She argues that once someone gets into a jacuzzi, regardless of their protestations and their refusals, that a girl is fair game for a rapist no matter what her age. No no longer means no if the shameless hussy leads on the poor, victimized male.
Meanwhile, Robert Harris, the author of two Cold War-oriented novels, FatherlandandEnigma, the former adapted to the small screen by HBO, the latter to the big screen, defends Polanski in the New York Times because of the director’s work in helping to craft an ultimately unproduced screenplay of another of Harris’s works:
I make no apology for feeling desperately sorry for him. The almost pornographic relish with which his critics are retelling the lurid details of the assault (strange behavior, one might think, for those who profess concern for the victim) makes it hard to consider the case rationally. Of course what happened cannot be excused, either legally or ethically.
But Ms. Geimer wants it dropped, to shield her family from distress, and Mr. Polanski’s own young children, to whom he is a doting father, want him home. He is no threat to the public. The original judicial procedure was undeniably murky. So cui bono, as the Romans used to say — who benefits?
In 1978, when he was brought to trial, Polanski fled because he believed the judge sentencing him was not going to accept the plea bargain he’d agreed to, a 90-day mental evaluation at Chico State Prison. In 2008, filmmaker Marina Zenovich—who had no prior relationship with Polanski—released a documentary, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, that corroborated Polanski’s fear that his plea bargain wouldn’t have taken effect. Polanski tried to use the information presented in the film to get his case dismissed. Even the prosecutor from the original trial said in the documentary that he didn’t think the judge, who is now dead, had been fair to Polanski.
And for a while, it seemed as if Polanksi’s strategy might work. Earlier this year, a new judge was willing to consider dismissing the case against him. But first, he wanted Polanski to show up in court. Polanski, however, would not appear.
This is Polanski’s biggest problem: The judge’s terms were reasonable. He gave Polanski three months to surface in L.A. and even hinted that the director would probably not serve jail time if he appeared. And yet Polanski refused. From the point of view of prosecutors, Polanski practically dared them to act.
And after over 30 years of being a fugitive from justice, they did. Fatherland’s chief protagonist is a policeman doggedly investigating a series of crimes involving his colleagues, some of which date back to World War II; in real-life Harris wishes the repercussions of the most notorious acts of a friend would simply vanish.
