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lot of all those charged with a crime, but which, given the identity of
the accused in question, could only degenerate into globally observed
torture—high punishment for a crime, which no one, at that point,
knew whether or not he had committed.
This vision of Dominique Strauss-Kahn humiliated in chains,
dragged lower than the gutter—this degradation of a man whose
silent dignity couldn’t be touched, was not just cruel, it was
pornographic. And it was at least as pornographic (because, I repeat,
it’s the same thing) as attorney Kenneth Thompson’s visible glee in
expounding on the state of his client’s “vagina” [sic] before the entire
world.
2. The Robespierrism of this judicial sideshow.
What is Robespierrism? It’s a word taken from the French
Revolution, of course, one that describes the way those behind the
terror at the time took hold of a man of flesh and blood and
dehumanized him by transforming him into an abstract symbol, and,
as the literal incarnation of that symbol, tailored his person to fit the
skin of all they had decided to purge from society of the Ancien
Régime.
Well, we are compelled to observe that, regarding the Strauss-Kahn
affair, America the pragmatic, that rebels against ideologies, this
country of habeas corpus that de Tocqueville claimed possessed the
most democratic system of justice in the world, has pushed this
French Robespierrism, unfortunately, to the extremes of its craziness.
In this case, Dominique Strauss-Kahn was no longer Dominique
Strauss-Kahn. He was no longer a singular man gifted with a
singular word, one whose version of the facts should have been
carefully heard in order to compare it with that of his accuser. No. He
was the symbol of arrogant France. He was the emblem of the world
of the privileged, odiously sure of their own impunity. He was the
mirror of this world of white global bankers that constitutes Wall

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