By Andrea Widburg
In 1894, Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, was convicted of treason – despite it being obvious that he was not guilty but was being railroaded. Four years later, once the facts were fully known, Émile Zola, the famed novelist, famously wrote an open letter under the headline “J’Accuse,” accusing the French military of a deliberate cover-up. I can’t help but see parallels to that in Derek Chauvin’s railroading in a Minneapolis courtroom.
As French Jews discovered when the Nazis invaded, while many French people disliked the Nazis, they disliked the Jews even more. From the collaborating Vichy government on down, a disgraceful number were happy to connive with the Nazis to get rid of the Jews in their communities. The Jews should have expected this because they had a foretaste of French antisemitism in 1894 with the infamous Dreyfus affair.
The bare bones of the story are that Alfred Dreyfus was born into an affluent and assimilated Jewish family. He attended the famed École Polytechnique and, after graduating, joined the military. He achieved the rank of captain and ended up serving in the War Ministry.
In 1894, Dreyfus found himself accused of selling military secrets to the German military attaché. He was arrested in mid-October and, by mid-December, he’d been convicted and given a life sentence. Four months later, he was off to the heinous penal colony on Devil’s Island, in the waters off French Guiana, which had a mortality rate that reached 75%.
Dreyfus’s conviction and imprisonment might not even have made the local papers were it not for the fact that the entire case was driven by virulent anti-Semitism, which was the Critical Race Theory of its day. It was obvious to all involved in the case that the evidence introduced against him was always weak and often implausible. Even the meanest intelligence could see that he was being railroaded because he was Jewish. Britannica sums it up thusly:Although he denied his guilt and although his family consistently supported his plea of innocence, public opinion and the French press as a whole, led by its virulently anti-Semitic faction, welcomed the verdict and the sentence. In particular, the newspaper La Libre Parole, edited by Édouard Drumont, used Dreyfus to symbolize the supposed disloyalty of French Jews.
Almost immediately after Dreyfus’s conviction, it became apparent that the real culprit was Major Ferdinand Walsin-Esterházy, who was distantly related to the prominent Esterházy family, although through an illegitimate branch. (He had no right to the Esterházy name but tacked it on for the cachet.) It was he who wrote the damning letter offering the German Embassy various confidential military documents.
Although Dreyfus’s handwriting was allegedly similar to Esterházy’s, the reality – and everyone knew it — was that the drive to convict Dreyfus came about because he was Jewish and, therefore, genetically guilty.
As I noted above, most knew that Dreyfus wasn’t guilty of anything other than being Jewish. However, it took another four years before people of goodwill finally accepted that Esterházy was the guilty party and that the military had long known the truth but covered it up.
Armed with that knowledge, Zola wrote his famous “J’Accuse” letter, in which he informed the world that the French military had covered up its knowledge about Esterházy’s guilt, going so far as to acquit him of espionage charges when he was finally tried. Zola was indicted and found guilty of libel but the truth was out. Many French people rallied to Dreyfus’s cause.
Dreyfus was re-court martialed, found guilty again (another stain on the anti-Semites in the military), but a new ministry pardoned him in 1899, releasing him after five years imprisonment. In 1904, a civilian tribunal tried him again and, in 1906, his conviction was finally reversed. Dreyfus died in 1935. The French army waited another sixty years for its official declaration that he was innocent.
(As a coda, the Dreyfus case deeply divided France’s Third Republic. In 1899, the hard left gained power and purged the French military. This fatally weakened the military, making it an easy mark for Germany in 1914. After quickly losing 250,000 military men in WWI, France was again vulnerable in 1940.)
The parallels between Dreyfus and Chauvin cry out for justice.
Convicting Chauvin, to continue the analogy, is like Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler with Czechoslovakia. Chauvin’s conviction only convinced the racist left that they can use this formula to promote their racist agenda. He was convicted (and there was never any possibility he wouldn’t be) to shut up the racists screaming for punishment for a police officer doing the job of suppressing a criminal that happened to be black. As a result, suppressing black criminals, no matter how violent their violations might be, is discouraged and, in many liberal cities, actually been made illegal.
But the racists are only emboldened and we see the scourge of CRT spreading across the country.
There are no “parallels” between the Chauvin trail and that of Dreyfus.
The thug criminal Floyd killed himself. Chauvin just happened to be there.
Derek Chauvin was the sacrificial lamb given up to the SJW gods in expiation.
Chauvin slowly murdered a man who was handcuffed and helpless face down on the sidewalk as he begged for his life, while bystanders warned him the guy was dying. It was all recorded on video.
He is NOBODY’S “sacrificial lamb”. He’s a convicted murderer.
Chauvin happened to be present when a career criminal ate his entire stock of fentanyl when cops showed up after he passed a counterfeit $20 bill. Fentanyl, if you haven’t heard, kills and Floyd had three times the amount it would take to have killed him in his system.
Bystanders are neither police nor doctors. They are partisan racists (as many proved with their testimony) that hate police and, as long as it doesn’t affect them, want to see crime permitted. That pretty much describes the entire Democrat party.
To keep leftists from burning down cities, Chauvin was found guilty. PERIOD.
Amazing how leftists worship at the feet of a career criminal but have no questions about who murdered David Dorn, isn’t it?
Lead a criminal life and the left canonizes you when you die.
Lead a good life and the left doesn’t give a shit about you when you’re murdered.
They don’t care about anything unless it serves a political purpose.
Lead a criminal life and the left canonizes you when you die.”
A man was publicly murdered, face-down, helpless, and handcuffed on the sidewalk, while begging for his life. THAT was a criminal act. If you can’t figure that out, you can’t be relied upon to correctly figure out much of anything.
Yeah, he was murdered by his own drugs, at his own hand. But he was just the kind of scumbag the left idolizes.
“A man was publicly murdered, face-down, helpless, and handcuffed on the sidewalk, while begging for his life. THAT was a criminal act.”
Odd, I don’t remember you commenting on Tony Timpa, a white man, who was “publicly murdered” by a Hispanic (not white) cop in the very same way you claim Floyd was “publicly murdered.”
No surprise. Timpa’s life didn’t matter to you. He was white. And gay. Nor did David Dorn’s life matter to you. He lead a useful life as a police officer, mentor to young fatherless boys and the entire community loved him. To be admired by the left, you must be a law breaking scum bag.
But we do remember him jumping on the racist left bandwagon denouncing and attacking Sandman and the Covington kids for not being intimidated by racists, so there’s HIS judgement and sense of justice.
Bystanders are neither police nor doctors.”
I seem to recall that doctors and trained medical technicians testified at the trial. So did a number of law enforcement officials.
Your need to always be right no matter what does not alter the reality of what happened. People who heard and understood the testimony have a very clear idea of what happened. As with January 6th, there’s a lot of unambiguous video footage that SHOWS intelligent people what happened. You might not be able to figure it out owing to your bias that seems to extend to all things, but the jury had no difficulty.
But they weren’t bystanders. And, yeah, some did. Some said Chauvin did nothing wrong. Some said ingesting enough fentanyl to kill three people might be enough to kill one.
Floyd was a criminal. He was violent, with a violent past. He was a drug dealer. He fought the cops and had to be restrained and he had eaten a LOT of drugs. He killed himself and Chauvin was sacrificed to try to satisfy the unholy gods of left wing death and destruction.
In 2021, the hard left gained power and purged the American military. This fatally weakened the military, making it an easy mark for China in 2024.