Summary

Alfred Dreyfus was a French Jewish artillery officer whose trial and conviction in 1894 on charges of treason can easily be seen as a precursor to the Kavanaugh trial--yes, trial.  And it is past time that those of us on this side of the Atlantic know of this willful travesty of justice. Known today as the Dreyfus affair, the incident eventually ended with Dreyfus's complete exoneration. No, this podcast is not simply about drawing a parallel between what France did to Dreyfus and what our country is trying to do to Brett Kavanaugh; it goes far beyond that.

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Life Improving Dramatically; Protests Expanding

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Transcript

Alfred Dreyfus was a French Jewish artillery officer whose trial and conviction in 1894 on charges of treason can easily be seen as a precursor to the Kavanaugh trial--yes, trial.  And it is past time that those of us on this side of the Atlantic know of this wilful travesty of justice. Known today as the Dreyfus affair, the incident eventually ended with Dreyfus's complete exoneration. No, this podcast is not simply about drawing a parallel between what France did to Dreyfus and what our country is trying to do to Brett Kavanaugh; it goes far beyond that.

Emile Zola, a contemporary of Dreyfus and a French writer and playwright, published an open letter, “J’Accuse…!”, a bitter denunciation of the heavily biased trial and foregone conclusions in France in January of 1898. In the letter Zola addressed President of France Félix Faure and accused the government of anti-Semitism and the unlawful jailing of Alfred Dreyfus, a French Army General Staff officer who was sentenced to lifelong penal servitude for espionage. Zola pointed out judicial errors and lack of serious evidence. The letter was printed on the front page of the Paris newspaper and caused a stir in France and abroad. For his accusations against the false accusers, Zola was prosecuted for libel and found guilty in 1898. To avoid imprisonment, he fled to England and continued to defend Dreyfus.

Captain Dreyfus was guilty of nothing more than being a convenient target, but he suffered greatly by being disgraced and imprisoned in a penal colony. Zola was guilty of nothing more than attacking the indefensible and defending the unpopular and vulnerable; he also suffered.

That sort of thing can’t happen here, can it? After all, we have this centuries-old judicial system that, if anything, is overly protective of the accused. But aren’t we all too capable of attacking targets of convenience in the pursuit of an agenda--exactly what France did to Alfred Dreyfus over 100 years ago?

When conservative Justice Clarence Thomas was similarly accused by Anita Hill in 1991, he made it clear that his impassioned denials had less to do with possibly of being on the Supreme Court than his personal reputation and dignity. “This is not an opportunity to talk about difficult matters privately or in a closed environment. This is a circus. It's a national disgrace. And from my standpoint, as a black American, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree.”

Justice Thomas quite understandably saw this as a race issue. Perhaps it is more about gender and politics. Anita Hill,