Dispatches From Exile Weekly Mind Dump, 8/6-8/12, 2023: Karma Meets Schadenfreude

Sometimes there's no guilt to be felt over others' bad fortune.

I wrote an essay a few years ago titled, “People I’ve Known Who Died Violent Deaths, and Deserved It: Part I.” It describes a man who oversaw the murders of some 1.7 million people. Known as the “Heinrich Himmler of Cambodia,” Son Sen was as evil as they got, in charge of security during the Khmer Rouge’s misrule from 1975 to 1979. I got to observe this devil incarnate up close over a period of a year-and-a-half when we sat across from each other at a negotiating table during UN-sponsored peace talks in the early 1990s.

Son Sen never met legal justice for his crimes. But karma did catch up with him eventually. On June 10, 1997, Son Sen and thirteen members of this family, including women and children, were shot to death on orders from the dying Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot after getting wind his former security chief was seeking to surrender to the central government. The bodies were then run over repeatedly by a truck. Photos were taken of the carnage for Pol Pot to see. The KR leader died apparently of natural causes ten months later, his body appropriately burned on a heap of trash. Literally, the trash heap of history.

Raised a Christian, I was taught to have compassion even for sinners and to forgive them. The Bible tells us, “Do not rejoice when your enemy falls, and let not your heart be glad when he stumbles, lest the Lord see it and be displeased.” The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer admonished, “To feel envy is human, to savor schadenfreude is diabolic.” And then there’s Janis Joplin: “You’re out on the streets looking good, And baby, deep down in your heart, I guess you know that it ain’t right.”

But I could muster no sympathy, much less forgiveness, for the ignominious ends of these two Khmer Rouge tyrants. Son Sen’s family members, of course, were likely innocents caught up in a diabolical act. Karma’s collateral damage, if you will.

You’ll be pleased to know that I have not written a “People I’ve Known Who Died Violent Deaths, and Deserved It: Part II” essay. And given my comfortable post-government career circumstances, am very unlikely to.

To assuage any guilt feelings over schadenfreude, I turn to another ponderous German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote, “To see others suffer does one good.” Well, at least some others. And I have examples.

Russian spy Andrei Lugovoy is wanted by the British government for the 2006 murder in London of ex-KGB turncoat and anti-Putin activist Alexander Litvinenko. Lugovoy’s murder weapon was a heavy dose of Polonium-210 in Litvinenko’s tea. He died a horrible death and had to be buried in a sealed lead coffin to contain the radiation. Litvinenko, 43, left behind a wife and three young children. Lo and behold, Lugovoy is now himself dying of advanced prostate cancer which he developed shortly after poisoning Litvinenko — believed to have been caused by his own exposure to the Polonium he carried.

Karma doing its job.

Here at home, more good news on the January 6 accountability front with karmic fallout.

All those crooked lawyers who helped peddle Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election being stolen are now having their own well-deserved encounters with karma. POLITICO reports:

[Rudy] Giuliani had his law license suspended in New York, and early this month, a disciplinary committee in Washington, D.C., recommended that he be disbarred for “frivolous” and “destructive” conduct. A federal appeals court recently upheld court sanctions against [Sydney] Powell for making “entirely baseless” claims and “frivolous allegations of widespread voter fraud.” And in March, [Jenna] Ellis was censured by a judge in Colorado for making false claims “on Twitter and to nationally televised audiences” that “undermined the American public’s confidence in the presidential election.”

The unofficial advisers to the elite strike force team have not fared much better. John Eastman, the former law professor who tried to get Vice President Mike Pence to effectively throw the election to Trump, is fighting for his law license in California, where bar officials have argued that he tried to execute a “strategy, unsupported by facts or law, to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election.” A disciplinary proceeding in Washington D.C. against former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark, who tried to become acting attorney general in the final weeks of the Trump administration while proposing to throw the department’s weight behind Trump’s false claims of voter fraud, is moving forward despite his objections. Several weeks ago, Georgia lawyer Lin Wood formally retired from the practice of law in an apparent bid to avoid being disbarred.

Rolling Stone reports that Sydney Powell is now in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s crosshairs. She was described in his indictment — though not by name — as “an attorney whose unfounded claims of election fraud [Trump] privately acknowledged to others sounded ‘crazy.’”

As the disbarments and indictments roll in, I’ll have a big smile on my face. Sic semper malefactoribus.

The Karma Super Bowl is the avalanche of indictments now befalling Donald Trump: three criminal indictments encompassing 78 felony counts so far. These numbers will compound themselves in the coming days when Georgia DA Fani Willis files her charges. Convicted of just some of these could entail decades in prison for Trump.

My first Foreign Service posting in Asia was in Laos. The Buddhist monks there taught me many wise things. One that particularly stands out is the axiom, “ເຮັດດີ, ໄດ້ດີ ເຮັດບໍ່ດີໄດ້ບໍ່ດີ” (het di dai di het bo do dai bo di) which translates roughly to, “The reward for good deeds is good fortune; the result for bad deeds is bad fortune.” It constitutes the Buddhist concept of merit. The biblically derived English phrase, “You reap what you sow” captures the essence of this concept.

John Eastman, Jeffrey Clark, Sydney Powell, Jenna Ellis, Rudy Giuliani and all the other handmaidens to Donald Trump’s evil are about to experience a head-on collision with karma and will join Trump for eternity in the pantheon of shame of American traitors. They are reaping what they sowed.

And I’ll confess I’m feeling really good about it. Utterly guiltless pleasure over their self-earned bad fortune.

Karma meets Schadenfreude.