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Show Me the Man, and I’ll Show You the Crime
The deepest mystery of the Great Purge remains, in my mind, the eagerness of the victims to confess. What prompted these men to say these things?
“I Kamenev, together with Zinoviev and Trotsky, organised and guided this conspiracy. My motives? I had become convinced that the party’s – Stalin’s policy – was successful and victorious. We, the opposition, had banked on a split in the party, but this hope proved groundless. We could no longer count on any serious domestic difficulties to allow us to overthrow Stalin’s leadership. We were actuated by boundless hatred and by lust of power.”
Gudrun Persson accounts thus for the phenomenon:
There is no doubt that torture was used to force confessions. Though by no means uncommon earlier, torture only became an approved method of examination during the investigations leading up to the first Moscow trial. On 29 July, 1936, an official, albeit secret, document was drawn up, sanctioning the use of “all means” to extract confessions. Krestinsky’s submission was clearly the result of a night of brutal torture. Naturally, psychological torture in the form of threats to relatives and the arrest of family members also played their part in the confessions.
But, important though it was, torture was not the whole explanation. Many of the accused were hardened revolutionaries. Prosecuted and punished by the Czar’s courts, they were themselves advocates of hard methods. Here lies an important part of the explanation: ideological loyalty. …
Bukharin’s statement is interesting in that he denied every particular criminal act he was accused of, among them the charge that he conspired to murder Lenin. Nevertheless he pleaded guilty to the charges:
I plead guilty to being one of the outstanding leaders of this ‘Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites.’ Consequently, I plead guilty to what directly follows from this, the sum total of crimes committed by this counter-revolutionary organization, irrespective of whether or not I knew of, whether or not I took direct part, in any particular act.
In his last plea, he explained:
For three months I refused to say anything. Then I began to testify. Why? Because while in prison I made a revaluation of my entire past. For when you ask yourself: ”If you must die, what are you dying for?” — an absolutely black vacuity suddenly rises before you with startling vividness. There was nothing to die for, if one wanted to die unrepented. And, on the contrary, everything positive that glistens in the Soviet Union acquires new dimensions in a man’s mind. This in the end disarmed me completely and led me to bend my knees before the Party and the country.
Torture, yes; ideology, too. But there is something else. Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria was Stalin’s chief of the Soviet secret police apparatus, the NKVD. It was Beria, infamously, who said, “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” By this I suspect he meant that every man, in his soul, feels guilty. And indeed every man is guilty, or certainly, every man who has been touched by Christian doctrine — even in its most perverted and heretical forms, of which, surely, communism is one — believes it so.
I was thinking of this while reading the story of the downfall of Berkeley astronomer Geoff Marcy:
Geoff Marcy, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley who admitted to violating the university’s sexual harassment policies has decided to resign. …
Marcy, a world-famous exoplanet astronomer and chair of the university’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence apartment, groped, kissed, touched, and massaged at least four students, according to a university report obtained by Buzzfeed late last week. Despite the report’s findings and an admission of guilt from Marcy, the university opted not to discipline him. Instead, the university said it would have zero-tolerance for any future transgressions.
Note: Never did his accusers file a criminal claim. Indeed, it would not seem that he committed anything like a crime:
One of the women, known as Complainant 3, studied astronomy as a graduate student. She spoke on the condition of anonymity because she did not want her involvement in the matter to affect her current job.
According to her account to Berkeley’s Office for the Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination, she was at a post-colloquium dinner with her graduate department at the University of Hawaii when Marcy placed his hand on her leg, slid his hand up her thigh, and grabbed her crotch.
She didn’t register an official complaint until eight years later, by which time she’d left astronomy — in part, she said, because of the sexual harassment she and other female astronomers experienced.
We know nothing else about this incident with Complainant 3. Marcy claims that the accusation is “totally absurd” and “plainly false,” and that he “would never touch the knee of someone I didn’t know.” Well, maybe he would, maybe he wouldn’t; I’m inclined to think that if there’s this much smoke, Marcy’s probably creepy and grabby; and if he didn’t grab her knee, he probably grabbed someone’s. So he’s grabby. Women have a range of tools for dealing with grabby guys, ranging from the cold stare of disapprobation to “I don’t date married men,” to “Get your hands off of me or I’ll break them.”
It sounds as if a maladroit astronomer may have had a few too many drinks at a boondoggle conference in Hawaii and made a crude pass at one of his grad students, does it not? Inappropriate, yes, and vulgar, but hardly a terrifying sexual assault. The normal remedy is to say, “What the hell do you think you’re doing? Knock it off.” A sharp slap across his face, perhaps, if his hand truly strayed above her knee. It hardly sounds like grounds for abandoning your professional aspirations entirely and reposing in silent, quivering trauma for eight years before filing a complaint.
The other charges? Massages and kisses, not rape. Distasteful, yes, given that he’s married. But beyond the pale of normal human experience? What exoplanet are these astronomers living on?
Complainant 4, by the way, was not herself harassed. She saw Marcy getting “inappropriately touchy” with an undergraduate during the American Astronomical Society’s 2010 meeting. (We have no idea what the undergraduate in question thought about this.) The mere sight of this “inappropriate touchiness” caused her so much distress that years later, she anonymously dropped a dime on him. And no one’s spoken to Complainant 1, so we have no idea of what she’s complaining.
But the strangest part of this story is Marcy’s public confession:
“Through deep and lengthy consultations, I have reflected carefully on my actions as well as issues of gender inequality, power, and privilege in our society?”
Why did he humiliate himself like this? Surely he must have known, like Zinoviev, that the ritual of confession would be followed by the ritual of liquidation?
“I would like to repeat that I am fully and utterly guilty. I am guilty of having been the organiser, second only to Trotsky, of that block whose chosen task was the killing of Stalin. I was the principal organiser of Kirov’s assassination. The party saw where we were going, and warned us. Stalin warned us scores of times but we did not heed his warnings. We entered into an alliance with Trotsky.”
It’s genuinely a mystery to me. Why not say, To hell with you? You may kill me, but you will not make me grovel?
What followed was predictable. Anyone who wished to join in denouncing Marcy was invited to do so:
The denunciations poured forth from every corner of the world. “What Geoffrey Marcy did was abominable,” wrote UC Berkeley biologist and hysteric Michael Eisen:
… despicable, predatory, destructive and all too typical. … How on Earth can this be true? Does the university not realize they are giving other people in a position of power a license to engage in harassment and abusive behavior? Do they think that the threat of having to say “oops, I won’t do that again” is going to stop anyone? Do they think anyone is going to file complaints about sexual harassment or abuse and go through what everyone described as an awful, awful process, so that their abuser will get a faint slap on the wrist? Do they care at all?… isn’t the fact that this kind of [thing] keeps happening over and over evidence that education is not enough? There HAVE to be consequences – serious consequences – for abusing positions of power.
I fully agree that there should be consequences — serious consequences – for “abusing positions of power.” But when I consider that phrase, I’m put in mind of something like this, not of an awkward astronomer offering a grown woman a backrub.
Last week, Marcy resigned. Only weeks before, he had been rumored to be in the running for the Nobel Prize. He left behind his reputation, his career, nearly $900,000 in grants from NASA and the National Science Foundation, a million-dollar grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation, and a $100-million dollar private research effort to find civilizations beyond the earth. The project had been expected to generate as much data in a day as previous SETI projects had in a year.
It’s still not enough. “Defeating sexual harassment,” writes fellow astronomer John Asher Johnson,
goes well beyond expunging people like Marcy from our ranks. It will require a fundamental restructuring of the way we do business, and a reeducation of our field—all of us …
Off to the re-education camps with all of you.
The mob then turned on The New York Times. The newspaper’s crime? Interviewing Marcy’s wife and reporting what she said:
Dr. Marcy’s wife, Susan Kegley, a pesticide researcher, said she supported him, pointing out that he had cooperated fully with the investigation and apologized.
She defended her husband, writing in an email, “Others may interpret Geoff’s empathy and interest as a come-on. I can’t change their perspectives, but I think it is worth all of us examining how quickly one is judged and condemned without knowing all of the facts.”
“The punishment Geoff is receiving here in the court of hysterical public opinion is far out of proportion to what he did and has taken responsibility for in his apology,” Dr. Kegley wrote.
This prompted 276 astronomers and physicists to send a letter of protest:
Re “Astronomer Apologizes for Behavior”, October 11: By emphasizing Geoff Marcy’s apology and his wife’s opinions, this article champions the voice of a sexual predator and minimizes the continued trauma of his targets. Overbye’s piece repeatedly sympathizes with Marcy, portraying him as a misunderstood, empathetic educator who was “condemned without knowing the facts” and given punishment “in the court of hysterical public opinion”. Furthermore, given Overbye’s long history of sourcing Marcy, the piece lacks the objectivity it deserves.
We do know the facts of this case. Berkeley undertook a formal investigation and found Marcy guilty of repeated sexual harassment of students spanning almost a decade. Marcy abused his position of power, betrayed his responsibilities as an educator, and caused profound damage. By overlooking the gravity of Marcy’s predatory behavior, this article discourages women from speaking out and undermines the safety of students.
This story deserves national coverage because it demonstrates an extreme yet persistent problem on college campuses. However, sympathy and support should be given to the survivors, not the perpetrator.
The survivors? Of an unwanted back rub? Since when are women profoundly damaged because a man they didn’t fancy tried to kiss them? You’d think he ravished Tess of the d’Urbervilles. They know the facts of this case? How? From a series of anonymous tipsters, a trial conducted in secret by a body with no legal authorization to conduct a trial, and an article in Buzzfeed?
But The New York Times wasted no time; public editor Margaret Sullivan went straight for the ritual confession:
I also agree with the critics that Mr. Marcy’s wife’s commentary was out of place in this news article; as readers have noted, she’s hardly a credible source here. That was particularly objectionable because Mr. Marcy’s response and his wife’s defense were given priority over the voices of female scientists and even over quotations describing the university’s censure. Meanwhile, the victims’ experiences were given shorter shrift.
In other words, for a number of reasons, the focus in this initial article was off. If The Times continues reporting on the larger topic (a worthy one), there should be no further emphasis on the “troubles” of harassers.
I’m left as baffled by this as I am by the accounts of the Moscow Trials.
Why do they confess?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zW_2YUo_UC4
Published in Education, General, Science & Technology
Front Seat Cat: #56 “Look at the abuse during the crash of 2008. How were banks, insurance companies, stock brokers, mortgage lenders, etc. punished for selling confusing bundled risky assets, weird things called derivatives that no one knew what they were comprised of, making risky loans, etc. punished for nearly causing the demise of our financial system? They were rewarded with bailouts – few were prosecuted. Sometimes it’s not about money, but sometimes it is all about money.”
One might remember that the political class created a buffer to justify banks making dicey loans to people who might not be able to pay those loans back. The Democrats expected to get voter traction by pushing this effort through Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac.
Because the loans were backed by the US Government, only the taxpayer would suffer and we know how highly the US Government rates the American taxpayer.
This is also the formula undergirding the Ex/Im Bank. Its all okay, the taxpayer is on the handle for this.
Vote for me!
62 continued
Obama’s health care system is predicated on the same position but a bit advanced. You pay your outsized premiums which include things you don’t want or need, and some of that excess is used to prop up poorer people who cannot afford the outsized premiums with things that they don’t want or need.
And a part of the overpayment is used to control the healthcare insurers and big health care providers whose earnings are beginning to spike with unexpected financial success.
United Healthcare found itself exceeding its expected and forecasted earnings this month. Obamacare is operating and the IRS is here to collect if you fail to buy approved insurance. The businesses with a vested interest in the success of Obamacare will reap the windfall.
The lesson of these experiences (Hunt, Watson, Marcy) is that grovelling admissions of guilt do not spare the victim from the maximum punishment available for the crime. It’s the same lesson to glean from Kamenev and Zinoviev. For the latter, death for them and their loved ones was the punishment. For Hunt, Watson, and Marcy, there is as yet no death penalty for sexual harassment so career death is the maximum. It’s in this sense that the parallel is apt. People who find themselves in this situation should act accordingly.
Marcy is likely guilty of at least some of the transgressions but the punishment is not commensurate with the crime. Faced with the likelihood of excessive punishment, Valiuth’s approach is morally preferable, even though it is not morally pure: deny. It worked for Clinton(s).
As for why Marcy confessed, the answer is simple. He’s likely a man of the Left, thus accepts the tenets of the narrative, including that sexual harassment is a crime deserving of the most severe punishment. He’s ashamed of his own failure to live up to his avowed values. Kamenev and Zinoviev undoubtedly were also true-blue (true-red?) communists – another reason Ms. Berlinski’s parallel is an apt one. It takes a person of Clintonesque fortitude and duplicity to espouse the values of the narrative while denying their own guilt in violating them. Marcy is not at that level; few are.
Thanks Donald – I should know this – the novel I’m reading about Hitler talks about national socialism, but I find it confusing to think that most of Europe is socialist, and Bernie Sanders calling himself a Democratic socialist. as a desirable system considering history. Did it not lead to fascism and communism?
Related thoughts from sociologists Campbell and Manning: Honor Culture, in which wrongs must be personally avenged, evolved into Dignity Cultures, in which people are assumed to have dignity and don’t need to earn it, forswear violence, turn to courts when faced with major transgressions and deal with minor transgressions either by ignoring them or dealing with them by social means. (No more dueling.) These cultures in turn have now evolved into a “culture of victimhood in which people are encouraged to respond to even the slightest unintentional offense, as in an honor culture. But they must not obtain redress on their own; they must appeal for help to powerful others or administrative bodies, to whom they must make the case that they have been victimized. It is the very presence of such administrative bodies, within a culture that is highly egalitarian and diverse (i.e., many college campuses) that gives rise to intense efforts to identify oneself as a fragile and aggrieved victim. This is why we have seen the recent explosion of concerns about microaggressions, combined with demands for trigger warnings and safe spaces” (Jonathan Haidt)
Communism, socialism, and fascism—there is a lot of overlap, both in terms of philosophy and in terms of the psychology of the believers, but basically Marxism is a bastard child of the Enlightenment, whereas Fascism is counter-enlightenment.
There’s a very interesting 1932 piece by Joseph Goebbels in which the pillars of Naziism: nationalism, socialism, “a workers’ party,” and anti-Semitism…are concisely explained:
http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/haken32.htm
A depressingly apt comparison, Claire. When I was a grad student,a very long time ago, my department had its very own womanizer (married, of course). None of us female students even thought of lodging a complaint. We had the usual ways of fending him off, and looked upon him as pathetic. Meanwhile his wife patiently got her law degree and filed for divorce.
What happened to Marcy, and his responses, are, indeed, the result of an enormous change in ideology, including an ongoing effort to emasculate men. I note that there were no charges that Marcy attempted to threaten these womens’ careers if they did not surrender to his advances, which would surely have been a problem. No, they just could not handle male advances that went over the line. That is pathetic, too.
We’ve got no idea what really happened to Marcy or these women, since all of this has been conducted by anonymous complaint, secret trial, and leaks to the press. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the real story is entirely different from the one that made it into the media. (Who leaked this story to Buzzfeed, and why?) The amount of rage that his colleagues seem to feel for him makes me wonder if quite some number were deeply envious of his success and popularity. Academia has always been known for the sheer vindictiveness of the petty feuds. (As Kissinger said, academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small.) But who knows.
The point is that no matter what really happened, it seems to make sense to many people to frame the story these terms: He committed the abominable crime of unwanted massage. And the story is being reported as his punishment were a salutary development for women — finally, science is cleaning up its act and punishing these abusers! — when in fact this is terrifyingly retrograde. We’re hurtling back toward a conception of women as so delicate, so unable to fend for themselves, and so powerless that it is normal for them to end their promising careers because of “harassment,” which is defined in this story as:
All of this adds up to “abominable,” and reasonable grounds for a young woman to end her career in astronomy — a highly competitive academic discipline that makes quite pressing intellectual demands, at least compared to many others, so one would assume a certain amount of confidence, toughness and aggression is required to succeed in it. The message of the story as it’s been recounted in the media is that it’s perfectly obvious why women who had what it took to get themselves into an exceptionally competitive graduate program in astronomy collapsed, withered, and almost died upon exposure to a bit of awkward male sexuality. If I’d grown up believing that I should feel traumatized because an older man or a man in a position of power made a pass at me, I’d have never left the house. It has happened to me literally more times than I can count, and I wasn’t remotely traumatized.
This Junior Anti-sex League universe populated by adult women so helpless and fragile that they need be protected from unwelcome kisses lest they be professionally and emotionally destroyed by them is utterly unrecognizable to me. It’s not the human world I’ve always lived in, and it’s not the world I want to live in.
I’ve also been harassed, in the clear and definable sense that were I to recount the experience, you’d be in no doubt I was dealing with a deranged stalker. The last thing I’d want under those circumstances is the intervention of a team of sexual-harassment specialists from UC Berkeley. I wanted real police, real laws, real restraining orders, and real courts — as well as real locks on the door, real well-lit streets, real friends who walked me to my car, real varied routes, and real firearms.
Nope. No one said that this had happened. Perhaps it did — but it certainly hasn’t been reported. Perhaps Geoff Marcy also murdered his victims and stuffed them in the trunk of his car. After all, the man was spotted making out with an undergrad in the lab: He’s obviously capable of anything.
Odious as the SJWs are, your experience is also deeply disturbing. Clearly we need a way to discourage this repulsive behavior strongly without descending into mob rule. It’s good that you and your colleagues were able to fend him off, but why should you have to?
This is good food for thought. At least until now, the greatest mystery for me has been the need for the left to extract these confessions. I don’t seem to have all my old e-mails about this topic, but I have this bit from 2001
Here from the Georgetown Law Review is another example of the leftwing obsession with confessions.
Emphasis added by me.
Claire, did you edit your article after posting it, perhaps deleting a phrase or two? I was going to offer a quibble but first went to the trouble of re-researching, and now don’t find the bit I thought you had written.
I didn’t, no.
In an ideal world we shouldn’t have to, but that’s not what we will ever have and we now see the results of trying to get to some utopian condition in which there are no such men, and in which women are let completely off the hook. I learned, as most women did in those days, that–surprise!–some men behave badly, and that there are usually simple ways to deal with this. As Claire has pointed out, this may involve getting help from friends and family or, in the worst cases, the authorities. C’est la vie.
Socialism does not mandate that a deity not exist. Several of the socialist countries of Europe have state churches, albeit largely empty state churches as the states no longer are able to compel participation in those churches.
What does seem to happen is that, under socialism, people make the most of the here and now and are content to ignore the eternal. The here and now exists for a while, but the eternal is not measurable by minutes and seconds.
Atheism, the straight out and out belief that there is no deity, that we are accidents in time, mandates a disbelief in any kind of god, including manifestations such as the miraculous.
The belief structure offered by Hitler and his cronies involved racial beliefs where Germans were the descendants of heroes of yore, the Aryans. The Germans were a chosen people, and given what happened to Germany and Germans at the end of World War II, it is a kind of choosing one would not want for one’s people, ever.
Anyway, I think the point was that communism is a twisted line of thought, not that it was a version of Christianity.
I could be wrong.
Claire,
I didn’t want to push this but I see the discussion seems to require some further comment. Aside from the obvious perversity of Bill Clinton and the complete hypocrisy of the left on his behavior, there is another very relevant issue.
Clarence Thomas after lengthy public examination was accused by no one else but Anita Hill. Clarence Thomas never responded to the charges in any way. Certainly no apology but also not even his own version of what happened just total silence. The only things we know happened are what Anita Hill said happened. This was under sworn Senate Hearing testimony. Available for all to see. Here is my synopsis of her testimony.
First, she thought he was a very good administrator. He hired her for a top position at an important Federal Regulatory Agency. He was 31 she was 27. Both had been to top law schools. She was single. He was recently separated from his wife. They worked well together for six months. Then she said he “asked her out to dinner”. She said “I turned him down.” She said he was OK with it and nothing happened for about a week. Then he came up to her “over the water cooler” (a phrase used in legalese to describe any non business conversation at a work environment) and made a strange comment in which she remembers he said “I must be Long John Silver” a reference to a male porn star. After that comment “over the water cooler” nothing else happened. When asked how the comment made her feel she said “It made me feel bad for about a week”. When asked if she had told anyone about the incident, friend, co-worker, family member..etc. she said “no”. When asked if he had changed to her in any way as far as the work relationship she said “no”. When asked whether he didn’t recommend her properly for the law school faculty position she desired she said “no, he gave me a good recommendation”. When asked considering she was a top EEOC lawyer whether she thought this constituted sexual harassment she said “no”. When asked would she recommend changing the law so it would constitute sexual harassment she said “no”.
cont.
cont. from #79
Finally, when the chairman of the Senate Judiciary committee asked her in obvious exasperation “Well then Ms Hill, why are you here?” She stared at him blankly for five or ten seconds and said “because you (meaning the committee) asked me to be here”.
If you follow clearly what the Hill testimony (the only evidence against? Clarence Thomas) implies, Hill is admitting that there was nothing she thought Thomas had done wrong and was just taking the opportunity to smear someone who was on the other side politically.
Aside from this complete travesty against Thomas by the total misuse of the proceedings there is still the personal individual question of what actually happened.
Of course, I can only speculate. So here is my speculation. Thomas is looking for a wife and mother of his children. He has no objection if his wife is successful and has a career of her own. He perceived Hill as a good possibility after six months experience working with her. They were both of very similar backgrounds, from poor large families in the south going on to prestigious law schools. Hill, on the other hand, was an intensely ideological person. She perceived him with suspicion as he was a conservative. She didn’t reveal in any way that she perceived him so. Thomas had increased the efficiency of EEOC and had doubled the number of lawsuits. However, he was unwilling to expand the scope of the law. Thomas, as reflected in his confirmation testimony, considered the quota based affirmative action of the time already over the line into reverse discrimination. He felt that going further in scope would not only be unjust but totally counter productive. Instead he enforced existing law with vigor.
I believe that in a completely legitimate adult dating situation Thomas offered an appropriate dinner invitation with the motive of marriage in mind. Hill responded with an ideological tirade accusing him of sexually predatory motives. Hill did this as a automatic response to anyone who might have a conservative point of view or her version of what she thought a conservative must be. As Thomas had no advance warning and Hill appeared by any standard to be someone who was a reasonable possible partner he was very surprised. He did not act rashly at that moment showing no inherent animus. However, over the next week he did what might be called a “slow burn” over the incident. He realized what had transpired and recognized that whatever she was she was not someone that he wanted. Unfortunately, (for him) he responded by a piece of retaliatory sarcasm. Other than the sarcastic comment, something that most objective human observers would have thought Hill deserved, Thomas’s behavior was exemplary. This was confirmed by every other witness from that work environment. Hill’s stubborn and difficult nature was confirmed by a number of witnesses from her law school days.
cont.
cont. from #80
All of this would be a mountain made from a mole hill if not for the fact that it was dragged in front of over 200 million viewers in a confirmation hearing of the U.S. Senate for the position of Justice of the Supreme Court.
A stranger thing has never happened.
Regards,
Jim
Small correction, James: Clarence Thomas divorced his first wife, and they had only one child.
Some research of the effect of apologies suggests that they cause the individual to be viewed *less* favorably than the individual who does not apologize. Not a strong effect, based on this research, but interesting:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2015/10/21/donald-trump-never-apologizes-for-his-controversial-remarks-heres-why-he-shouldnt/
Sandy,
Correction noted, verified, and made.
Regards,
Jim
Sandy,
I have tried for about an hour to find on Google evidence of who Anita Hill’s life partner is. If the details of Clarence Thomas’s personal life are relevant to the discussion of a situation that involves nothing but a sarcastic remark 30 years ago, then I would think that Anita Hill, his sole accuser, ought be scrutinized equally. It might suggest an agenda on her part other than sexual harassment.
Amazingly, I can’t get any confirmation. Or given the fabulous current climate of left wing bias it really isn’t that amazing is it.
Regards,
Jim
I don’t think people like to hear this–at any rate, not decent people–but who taught people about the equality of man trumping political rules? Christianity. Soul, dignity, & soon enough rights, & then, doncha know, those rights are multiplying endlessly. I’m not saying you have to blame Christ. But let’s not kid ourselves about our basic ideas.
There is something else, too: Remember those pesky first American colonies, one of which tried communism? They backed out promptly after enough people starved to death, but conservatives like to point that out now & then, at least Mr. Limbaugh, although he does not seem to grasp quite what that means about American Christianity…
Anita Hill served her purpose. Having served that purpose, she was easily dispatchable, hence easily dispatched. Probably some sinecure was provided for her valuable but failed service. Better not to have her around as a symbol of that particular failure.