The flap over IMF honcho Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s apparent rape of a hotel maid has the chattering classes nattering a mile a minute, and I’ve so far resisted the temptation to comment, but what’s interesting is who’s defending DSK. Leading the charge: Bernard Henri-Levy, whose unbuttoned shirts and all-around phoniness have made him the subject of widespread ridicule. His earlier piece is the Daily Beast merely hinted at his evil-ness, which was given full-throated expression in an interview with French radio [translation: hat tip, Harry’s Place]:
Interviewer: “There’s an argument in the United States, that we should treat everyone the same, the powerful like anyone else, what do you say?”
BHL: “Well it’s absolutely disgusting because we know that not everyone is the same. We know that someone like Dominique Strauss-Kahn is obviously treated in a different way. We know that he was photographed in a certain way, in order to humiliate him, looking out for the slightest tremor in his face, blasting him with photo after photo. We know all this. So it’s a false argument. Of course, democracy says that we must treat everyone in the same way, but not everyone is everyone. He’s the President of the IMF, the man who was about to be a candidate to run for the President of the French Republic.”
This puts into perspective BHL’s key role in pushing the French into bombing Libya: the Little People who will suffer the consequences of this murderous — and futile — policy don’t matter, because, after all, “not everyone is everyone.”
Put another way: not everyone is Someone. Our transnational elites can do what they want with us peons, as they jet around the world looking for ways to demonstrate their transcendance of traditional morality. They are beyond good and evil, and the rest of us can go to hell.
BHL is right: it is absolutely disgusting, albeit not in the way he means it.
