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	Workers Vanguard No. 951	29 January 2010

France: Polanski Case Ignites Anti-Gay, Anti-Sex Backlash

Last fall, reviving its 32-year-old vendetta against Roman Polanski, the famous director of Chinatown and The Pianist, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, backed by the Feds and working with Swiss authorities, orchestrated his arrest in Zurich. After being jailed for two months, the 76-year-old Polanski was released to house arrest on $4.5 million bail. He remains in Switzerland, facing possible extradition to the U.S. to be sentenced for having had consensual sex with Samantha Geimer (then Gailey), a precocious, sexually experienced 13-year-old in 1977. On January 22, a Los Angeles judge denied Polanski’s request to be sentenced in absentia, even going against the wishes of Geimer, who has repeatedly requested that the prosecution drop its charges against Polanski.

In 1977, Polanski pled guilty to “unlawful sexual intercourse” with a minor, as a Hollywood show trial with felony charges was hanging over his head. Threatened with more prison time after having already served six weeks in state prison for “diagnostic testing,” Polanski, a Holocaust survivor, fled to Paris in 1978 to escape the puritanical witchhunt. This December, Polanski issued an open letter thanking his supporters for their “messages of support and sympathy,” adding: “I would like every one of them to know how heartening it is, when one is locked up in a cell, to hear this murmur of human voices and of solidarity.”

We have defended Roman Polanski from the onset of the vicious prosecution against him. Tiger Woods has temporarily replaced Polanski as the subject of merciless media pillorying for his affairs, which should be nobody’s business but that of those involved. That so much human sexual activity runs afoul of bourgeois laws and “morals” is further proof that the wretched laws that attempt to control human sexuality—laws that cause so much misery—should be abolished.

The U.S. by no means has a monopoly on such reactionary witchhunting. We reprint below excerpts from an article by the Ligue Trotskyste de France, section of the International Communist League, that appeared in Le Bolchévik (December 2009) along with a translation of Workers Vanguard’s 1978 article, “Stop the Puritan Witchhunt Against Roman Polanski!” (WV No. 192, 10 February 1978) and the introduction we wrote when we reprinted that article in WV, “Stop Vendetta Against Roman Polanski! Free Him Now! No Extradition!” (WV No. 944, 9 October 2009). The LTF article deals heavily with the anti-gay witchhunt against Minister of Culture Frédéric Mitterrand, the nephew of the late Socialist Party (PS) leader François Mitterrand, France’s president from 1981 to 1995.

* * *

Roman Polanski committed no crime! We demand a halt to the legal vendetta against him!

Here in France, the Roman Polanski affair has whipped up an anti-gay and anti-sex reactionary campaign led by an unholy alliance of fascists, feminists, religious fundamentalists and “Republican” social democrats. Their main target was Minister of Culture Frédéric Mitterrand, who is homosexual and who in the immediate aftermath of Polanski’s arrest had taken up his defense. He characterized Polanski’s detention as “absolutely dreadful” for “an old case which doesn’t make much sense.”

Marine Le Pen of the fascist National Front denounced Mitterrand’s “revolting support” to Polanski and exhumed Mitterrand’s fictionalized autobiography, La mauvaise vie [The Bad Life], which was welcomed by critics at the time of its publication in 2005. After reading on television excerpts from the book that spoke of Mitterrand visiting male prostitutes in Thailand, Le Pen demanded that the culture minister resign. After the fascists opened fire, the moral police of the Socialist Party then took up the charge. Their official spokesman, Benoît Hamon, described Mitterrand’s book as a “shocking text,” denouncing the politician as a “consumer minister” and also demanding his resignation. Other PS leaders joined in the feeding frenzy, including after Mitterrand was forced to make a public statement where he acknowledged having paid for sex with men his age. [PS politician] Arnaud Montebourg railed against Mitterrand: “His public and late condemnation of sexual tourism is in contradiction with his writings, which contain no condemnation of this type. If he wasn’t minister, would he have the right to so much consideration and understanding?” Another PS politician, Jean-Paul Huchon, declared that Mitterrand’s acts were “honestly reprehensible,” adding that it seemed to him “difficult to maintain a person in the government who has been so blatantly guilty of acts that are deemed illegal by the government.”

We have defended Mitterrand against this modern-day witchhunt in which reactionaries of all stripes seek once again to set up an amalgam between homosexual or pedophile on the one hand and child-murderer and rapist on the other. Mitterrand’s book has no suggestion that he is a pedophile, i.e., that he is sexually attracted to children. But if he were sexually attracted to young boys, this would be no crime in our eyes. The only guideline that ought to exist in sexual relations is the rule of effective consent—that is, as long as both parties are at the time consenting to the act, nobody, least of all the state, has any right to tell them what they can and can’t do. What matters is whether someone is forcing them to do anything they don’t want to do with their own bodies.

“Effective consent” applies no less to prostitution. Just as the anti-sex warriors have conflated crimes of horrific violence against children with homosexuality and pedophilia, they have also set up an equation between real crimes against prostitutes, such as debt bondage, sexual assault, forced prostitution and rape, and the consensual act between a prostitute and client, exchanging money for sex.

In an editorial published in L’Humanité [newspaper of the French Communist Party (PCF)] under the title “Let’s Get Back to the Substance of ‘The Polanski Affair’” (15 October 2009), leading women members of the PCF, including Marie-George Buffet, as well as Left Party leader Martine Billard and petty-bourgeois feminist luminaries such as Maya Surduts signed a common statement accusing those defending Polanski and Mitterrand of “a criminal trivialization” of violence against women, adding, “One cannot speak of sexual freedom without condemning rape and prostitution.” Such statements are intended to invite more state legislation, which would necessarily be repressive against prostitutes and their clients. We stand for the decriminalization of prostitution, which we regard as a “crime without a victim,” like drug use, gambling, pornography, homosexual sex and “statutory rape”—activities that are generally illegal or heavily regulated under capitalist law.

The conditions faced by prostitutes, whether men or women, vary greatly according to time, place and class. But we recognize that more often than not, working as a prostitute is exploitative, dangerous and degrading. Criminalization of prostitution, however, generally forces the prostitute into a lumpen milieu where access to even the most meager social and health services becomes more difficult to acquire, rendering the prostitute more vulnerable to organized crime and violence by pimps. This has exactly been the outcome of [current French president Nicolas] Sarkozy’s 2003 “Internal Security Law,” which created a new offense of “passive solicitation” carrying a two-month prison sentence and heavy fine, all in the name of combating “trafficking in human beings.” The organization “Rights and Prostitution” powerfully described the impact of the law on prostitutes’ lives:

“The criminalization of public soliciting, passive as well as active, was officially intended to combat trafficking in human beings. In practice, while the arrests of prostitutes have greatly increased, no sentencing for trafficking has taken place….

“In actual fact we suffer more acts of violence than before, particularly from the police…. A strategy of harassment is even adopted sometimes in order to increasingly force us to go underground. In addition, some police officers insult, beat, gas and rob us, confiscating our preventive materials, our money and personal belongings. We are humiliated in the police stations, made to strip naked and suffer unjustified body searches. Some of us, transvestites or transgender, are placed in male cells at risk of physical aggression from the other inmates.”

—Letter to Representatives and Senators, 15 October 2007

Any intervention by the capitalist state in the name of “protecting” prostitutes will necessarily intensify misery for all involved, including notably more deportations of immigrant women after being “rescued” by the police in anti-trafficking raids. The Ligue Trotskyste de France calls for full citizenship rights for all immigrants! No deportations! The state is not a neutral arbiter; it is an instrument for the suppression of the exploited and oppressed by the exploiters. The social-democratic organization from which Olivier Besancenot’s New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) comes, the former Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire, has for years campaigned for a “law against violent abuse of women,” the effect of which was in fact to increase illusions in the capitalist state and pave the way for the repressive laws of Sarkozy & Co. As we wrote in “Anti-Immigrant, Anti-Woman, Anti-Sex: U.S./
UN Crusade Against ‘Sex Trafficking’”:

“The ‘sex slavery’ crusade is a cynical and dangerous business because it both legitimizes government persecution of immigrants and invokes state authority to intervene as moral arbiter in our most intimate affairs. It bolsters the anti-sex witchhunt as a whole and deflects attention from the real violence perpetrated every day against women and children under this class system….

“The liberation of the prostitute can’t be separated from the liberation of women as a whole, and prostitution will die only as the institution of the family is replaced. For women’s liberation through socialist revolution!”

—Spartacist (English-language edition) No. 58, Spring 2004

Anti-“Pedophile” Witchhunts and the State

The supposed mortal threat to children from “pedophiles” has been a central theme of repeated moral crusades in past decades. The Outreau witchhunt and show trial [in which 18 people were sent to jail for sexual abuse of children for several years based on the accusations of one woman who later confessed to having lied] was set in motion by the [popular front] government of [Socialist prime minister] Jospin in 1997, under the instructions of then-family minister Ségolène Royal. Royal instructed all teachers, school nurses, etc., to report in writing any allegations of sexual fondling, however incoherent or absurd, to the district attorney.

When it comes to obscene child abuse, the capitalist system and its governments are the main culprits—from locking up babies and children in immigration detention prisons to deporting them to war zones, such as Afghanistan where they risk being butchered under imperialist bombs. Or there is the fact that today nearly one in five (18 percent) of all children live below the official poverty line, a rate which is close to 50 percent among minority youth in the ghettos.

The Outreau case was in no way an aberration; this scandal laid bare the horror of capitalist “justice” and if anything, the scaremongering and reactionary anti-sex campaign has picked up momentum since then. Back in October, Sarkozy declared his support for “chemical castration” to combat “pedophiles” and rapists. This new barbaric measure, which would also return someone to prison after they have served their sentence if they refuse to continue taking the drug, is currently under debate in the National Assembly.

In the wake of the Mitterrand affair, the government has tightened the screws even further on minorities and immigrants—not only in its everyday business, but also to neutralize the fascists ahead of the regional elections in six months. The government’s right-wing constituency was not happy that the government refused to fire Mitterrand and that foreign minister Bernard Kouchner asked his American counterpart, Hillary Clinton, to leave Polanski alone. The government has now gone on the offensive with its announcement of a three-month-long “debate on national identity” to reappropriate “Marianne [the female figure that symbolizes the French Republic], the flag and the national anthem” from the fascists. This “debate” is aimed at scapegoating immigrants and youth in the banlieues [suburban ghettos] as lying at the root of insecurity in this country.

To fight against racist oppression and the oppression of women, gays and minorities, we must build a revolutionary workers party independent of the bourgeois parties and the social democrats, who are wedded to upholding and defending the oppressive capitalist system. The working class has the social power to mobilize in defense of all the oppressed. But to convince workers that they have a stake in defending Mitterrand or Polanski, it is necessary to fight against our reformist opponents in the workers movement, such as the PS, PCF and Alternative Libertaire, which fully participated in the campaign against Mitterrand and Polanski.

Olivier Besancenot’s NPA refused to join this campaign, but, at the same time, its position had nothing to do with Marxism. As usual, it distinguished itself by voicing varying positions on the question. In its weekly newspaper, distributed mainly to its members and periphery, the NPA ran an interview with an academic who had studied the Thai homosexual milieu and who took on the attacks against Mitterrand, describing them as “dubious” (Tout Est à Nous, 22 October 2009). But it was the NPA’s official spokesman, Olivier Besancenot, who laid out the NPA’s real line: the refusal to defend Mitterrand against the homophobic campaign. Besancenot declared in a television interview: “I must admit that I am deeply troubled. I must confess that I haven’t read the book and haven’t listened to all his explanations…. I’ve of course read the excerpts [of Mitterrand’s book] and it’s true that they are super-ambiguous when we know what sexual tourism and pedophilia are…. I’m neither his lawyer nor his judge and I prefer to judge on the basis of his politics, on his job as Minister of Culture.”

As far as we know, Lutte Ouvrière (LO) has not said a word on Polanski’s arrest. In their weekly paper, which is addressed to workers, LO has not mentioned the anti-homosexual witchhunt against Mitterrand either. LO’s silence is itself a capitulation to anti-homosexual bigotry, which is propagated in the working class by the homophobic campaigns of the bourgeoisie. However, LO mentioned the Mitterrand affair in their monthly “theoretical” journal Lutte de Classe (November 2009). In an article on the debate on “national identity,” they give a series of reasons why Sarkozy recently “angered part of his right-wing constituency,” and, notably, “the fact that he chose as a culture minister, one Frederic Mitterrand, who does not hide his homosexuality, and that he defended him when the media were full of confessions by the latter for his taste for Thai ‘kids’.” LO knows full well that Mitterrand, far from having “confessed” his “taste for Thai ‘kids’,” stated the exact opposite during his October 8 television interview, insisting that he only had relationships with people “of my age” (Le Figaro, 9 October 2009). And in his book, he speaks only of pubescent teenagers, for instance, students.

LO makes these statements using the sensational language typical of the gutter press without even pretending to defend Mitterrand. LO implicitly peddles the accusations against Mitterrand by the fascists, PS and others about his supposed “sex tourism” with Thai children. Thus LO plays its hypocritical little role in this homophobic campaign.

When even the “far left” capitulates, at least by omission, to the moral order campaign against Mitterrand, it is because they seek to reform, not overthrow, the capitalist order and therefore cannot challenge the institution of the bourgeois family. Capitalism is not only exploiting workers by appropriating the surplus value they produce with their sweat and blood. It also discriminates against various layers of the population for their skin color, gender, sexual practices, etc. This should rather be an opportunity for the working class to lead all the oppressed in a revolutionary struggle to overthrow the oppressive capitalist system.