Caryl Chessman and the Triumph of Evil

"Telephone callers from Western Europe, Latin America, Africa and Australia have importuned Governor Brown to spare Chessman's life. Brown has received save-Chessman pleas from Belgium's Queen Mother and from the Social Democratic members of Italy's Chamber of Deputies.

Secretary of State Christian Herter told his press conference last week that the Chessman case had stirred up "quite a surprising amount of interest" in South America. In Brazil, circulators of a save-Chessman petition claim more than 2,500,000 signatures. In The Netherlands, record dealers are profiting from brisk demand for a new platter, in Dutch, called The Death Song of Chessman.

The London News Chronicle recently editorialized that "the great American nation is humiliated because of the agony of Chessman," and the London Daily Herald added that the day Chessman is executed "will be a day when it will be rather unpleasant to be an American." Buenos Aires' Critics called the Chessman case "the most terrible case that has faced the world in recent history." - Time Magazine, Mar 21, 1960

Who was Chessman that America should want to condemn him and the entire world should so hysterically agitate on his behalf and what is his connection to the War on Terror?

Caryl Chessman was a robber, rapist and murderer who dragged women out of cars and sexually assaulted them. He was convicted of kidnapping and sentenced to death. He was held on death row while every goodhearted liberal demanded his release.

Caryl Chessman was to liberals what the terrorists of Guantanamo Bay are today. Imagine Tookie Williams and multiply him a thousand times over and that was Caryl Chessman. Liberals contended he was the victim of a cruel and unfair justice system. They wrote books about him, they made two movies about him, they published the books he wrote and the essays condemning his imprisonment. Ronnie Hawkins wrote "The Ballad Of Caryl Chessman" and Phil Ochs wrote "The Iron Lady" in sympathy for him.

E. A. Poe, Henri Rousseau
Sholom Aleichem and Caryl Chessman
Alan Freed and Buster Keaton too
And each one there
Has one thing shared
They have sweated beneath the same sun
Looked up in wonder at the same moon
And wept when it was all done
For bein' done too soon
For bein' done too soon
For bein' done

Neil Diamond - Done Too Soon

There were no ballads or songs written about Caryl Chessman's victims. One of those victims remained in a schizophrenic state for as long as Chessman remained on death row. But there was no pity for her or for any of them.

No singer worried how much they ached or sweated or how they lived their lives. The liberals ranging from Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, Aldous Huxley, Norman Mailer (who himself nearly murdered his wife), Robert Frost (who had also obtained clemency for Nazi propagandist poet, Ezra Pound) to those letter writers sending in a 1000 letters a day cared very much about them.

What all those great men and the everyday liberal had in common was that they gave nearly as much of a damn for Caryl Chessman's victims, as today's liberals bleeding their little hearts all over Abu Ghaib and Gitmo, have for the victims of September 11th and the victims of Islamic terrorism all over the world.

They liked and like to believe that they're enormously sensitive people full of love for mankind, yet that love seemed to best express itself toward murderers and rapists. After Caryl Chessman would come Eldridge Cleaver who would boast of his rapes and of practicing on "little black girls in the ghetto" before using the white women who were the racial enemy. There would be Che Guevara whose murderous visage still adorns millions of red t-shirts.

There would be Adolf Eichmann, who despite carrying out the genocide of millions, was the subject of pleas from all over the world for forgiveness. There was Yasir Arafat whose terrorist thugs carved a brutal trail of terror and death across Israel, Jordan and Lebanon. There would be Tookie Williams and there would be Hicks and the terrorists at Gitmo. The cycle of sympathizing with the criminal and transforming him into a victim, of sanctifying his bloodiest deeds in the name of his victimization by the system and the United States, dated long before Islamic terrorism even reared its ugly head. It was an ugly foulness that was always in our culture and always nesting in the rotting heart of that brand of liberalism which is attracted to the dirty bloody hand and repulsed by the waving flag.

In the death row waiting for their turn
No time to change, not a chance to learn
Waiting for someone to call
Say it's over after all
They won't have to face the justice of the chair

The Iron Lady - Phil Ochs

Aren't you sad now? Can you feel empathy for what he's going through? Poor dear Caryl Chessman. Note the overflowing well of pity for a man who had none for anyone else but himself. Caryl Chessman spent years waxing outraged about his treatment and his abuse by the criminal justice system, even as he concocted more and more outrageous lies in his own defense. And his defenders lapped up every one of them.

Chessman's methods and techniques would inspire hero worship in the Hillside Stranglers who would go on to kidnap, torture and murder a number of women. Even after they were arrested, they nearly got off for it, but for the insistence of the trial judge on refusing the prosecution's motion to withdraw the case and prosecuted it instead.

Chessman is mainly forgotten today, perhaps out of embarrassment. He was sent to the gas chamber from where he never returned. Liberals have found new murderers to idolize. Monsters who make Caryl Chessman or the Hillside Stranglers look like amateurs.

Why remember Caryl Chessman at all? Because he is an example. He is the sham that exposes the fraudulent feminism of liberals who tirelessly defended rapists like him or Eldridge Cleaver. Hunter S. Thompson, that great inspiration to gonzo journalism, who all but celebrated the gang rapists of the Hell's Angels.

It exposes the love that liberals hold for criminals, but never for their victims. Their willingness to identify with and weep over the sufferings of a condemned criminal, without caring a whit for those people whose lives were ruined in his aftermath.

It exposes the fact that modern day liberal sympathies for terrorists is not the product of a more enlightened global worldview. Why after all did Caryl Chessman hate the people he assaulted? He didn't. He wasn't the product of America's policies in the middle east or the ghetto or anywhere else. He was a sociopathic monster in a line of sociopathic monsters whose magnetism and charisma would captivate liberals leading them to make their pilgrimages to Fidel Castro or Yasir Arafat or Ahmadinejad.

When the world wails over Gimto or Hicks and liberals condemn Bush and churn out petitions, there is nothing new under the sun. It has all happened before. It will all happen again.

"One atrocious but clever criminal called into question our judicial system and brought discredit to our laws...Then ... he intimidated the Governor of California and drove the timorous U.S. State Department to declare him an international issue. And finally, he beheld the legislature in a session specially called to change the law so that he could be saved from execution . . . What will happen now? They would not change the law for Chessman, but it would be unwise to give odds that he won't beat it again." Los Angeles Times

Does this sound familiar? Think of Arafat brandishing a gun at the U.N. Think of Ahmadinejad smirking at Britain as he seizes hostages, negotiates an exchange and then sets them free. This is what happens when civilizations give in to thugs. This is what happens when a nation bows its head to a monster.

This is how evil wins, whether it is the evil at the heart of the USSR or Iran or in Ramallah or thugs and murderers smirking their way through sessions with their lawyers. Evil does not merely win when good men do nothing. It wins when the supposed good men do their utmost to fight fiercely on its behalf.