There is an odd parallel to the U.S. mission to pluck Osama bin Laden from Pakistan and the New York arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, one of France’s most powerful and successful politicians. While the French, like Pakistan, are aghast at how the presumed wrongdoer was ‘detained’ – they both also assert disgust with the crimes they are – or were – charged with.
To say that the French are shocked with the way Dominique Strauss-Kahn has been treated by the U.S. justice system would be an understatement. But Olivier Picard, columnist for France’s Les Dernières Nouvelles d’Alsace, writes that while U.S. justice may seem rough – the aloof behavior of France’s elite may have taken a blow.
For Les Dernières Nouvelles d’Alsace, Olivier Picard writes in part:
That night, DSK’s [Dominique Strauss-Kahn] hands cuffed behind his back, in the glare of flash photography – the scene irresistibly evokes that of Kennedy’s assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, flanked by two FBI agents shortly before his own assassination. The parallel is obviously not a flattering one, but it reveals a lot about the downfall of one of the planet’s most powerful men. The meteoric trajectory that has brought the director of the International Monetary Fund down to the ranks of a common criminal has forcefully collided with the global imagination. Who hasn’t feared, deep down in one’s soul, the cruelty of a fate that in 48 hours, destroys what it has taken a lifetime to build?
Since yesterday evening, the man, who on Saturday morning was still the front-runner in the 2012 presidential election, has become a man like any other, at the mercy of proceedings he can no longer control. Justice must punish and put right; that is its raison d’etre. But for anonymous defendants and VIPs alike, after a court appearance and subsequent detention, there is no call for the added punishment of humiliation. Yesterday, the spectacle broadcast across the world was both fascinating – almost hypnotic – and deeply nauseating. There was something both primal and sacrificial in the self-satisfied exhibition of a person ravaged by his own history. And please don’t try explaining to us that the demands of the law are hardly compatible with respect for defendants!
At the end of the day, the risk of catastrophe was knowingly taken. That catastrophe has now fully destroyed a contender for the presidency, and no one, it seems, had the courage to protect from himself. It should come as no surprise if his astonishing fall smashes along with it a little more of the country’s confidence in a political elite that lags behind the people.”
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