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We are all Dreyfusards
Topic Started: Mar 8 2014, 08:04 AM (197 Views)
Quasimodo


Note and apply the following parallels to the lax case:



Quote:
 


http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/03/french_profiles_in_courage.html

March 8, 2014
French Profiles in Courage
By Michael Curtis


This 100-year anniversary of the start of World War I reminds us of the human errors and the nationalist sentiments that were responsible for that great tragedy. It is also an opportunity to remember the contribution to humane values and the fate of two Frenchmen who died a few weeks apart in 1914, individuals who exemplified courage in their devotion to truth and justice and in challenging the virus of anti-Semitism.

(snip)


At the time the left was divided into at least seven factions, some of which were Marxist, and which differed on political and parliamentary tactics as well as on policies. Many of those factions in the French left, especially the leaders Edouard Vaillant and Jules Guesde, did not want to be involved in the Dreyfus Affair. Most of the leftist factions regarded the Affair as an internal problem within the bourgeois class of which Dreyfus was a part.

They never joined the small number of believers in the innocence of Dreyfus, but adopted a stance of neutrality in a matter that they considered did not concern the proletariat. They were not concerned with the hatred and bigotry expressed in the anti-Semitism rampant in France at that time. For them socialism must be concerned with class struggle. It was Jean Jaurès who, after some hesitation on the issue, saw this refusal of socialists to speak up for an innocent man as insufficient. Defense of the wronged man who was suffering and of fundamental principles were both important and the two were interrelated.

[How many were silent when it was people from the wrong social class who were being accused in Durham?]

What was at stake were the principles of the French Revolution and the fundamental rights of man, as expounded in the Declaration of the Rights of Man of August 1789. Dreyfus was a victim of injustice, of unjust and false condemnation. Even though Dreyfus was a member of the bourgeois class, he deserved to be treated with humanity and dignity.

[See above.]

Jaurès cleverly associated the case with socialist objectives. The fight to save Dreyfus was not only a service to humanity; it was also directly serving the interests of the working class to protest against illegal behavior by the military generals.

(snip)

In 1910 Jaurès took the lead in defending a working-class coal miner, Jules Durand, accused of complicity in and condemned to death for the murder of a labor leader. As in the Dreyfus Affair, a false dossier had been used to convict Durand. Jaurès proclaimed it was the memory of the Dreyfus Affair that saved Durand. The case was the Dreyfus Affair of the working class.

[How much will the memory of Nifong help to save future falsely-accused defendants?]

(snip)

Péguy was the most prominent Catholic to support Dreyfus. He was a philo-Semitic who saw and believed in Jews and Christians living together. For him, the two categories of people that were important were Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards, the just people and the unjust. Péguy was a fighter for the just cause. His words written in 1905 are appropriate to the contemporary politically correct leftists eager to boycott Israel. He wrote in Notre Patrie, “It will never be known what acts of cowardice have been motivated by the fear of not looking sufficiently progressive.”

[How many political and social leaders refused to defend the players because to do so might have made them appear to be on the wrong side of "progressive" politics? How many of these same people would have rushed to defend them had any aspect of their makeup been different--gender, class, ethnicity, race?]

Péguy saw the Dreyfus affair not simply as a question of injustice towards an innocent Jew but also as an attack on the true values of society. It was not only an insult to justice and right but also a crime that ruptured the entire social compact and dishonored an entire people.

[How many of us believe in the social compact and our institutions after observing how they responded during the lax case? The DOJ would have been defending its own integrity if it had intervened in the lax case; it didn't, and so lost that integrity in the eyes of many watchers.]

The Dreyfusards were defending the honor of the French people, its citizens and forefathers. The Affair stained the honor of the entire French people. He refuted the claim of the anti-Dreyfusards, most prominently Charles Maurras and Maurice Barrès, who spoke the “language of reasons of state, of contemptible political interest,” that they were champions of patriotism, tradition, and religion.

[The champion of Duke University: "Sometimes individuals have to suffer for the good of the organization."]

It is here in unusual fashion that Péguy, with his concept of “mystique” differed from Jaurès and other Dreyfusards, and indeed with a normal understanding of political behavior. For him, support for Dreyfus was a religion, a religious upsurge, a religious crisis. That mystique involved passion and self-sacrifice. Dreyfusards were heroes. He wrote that the Dreyfus Affair could only be explained by a need for heroism that periodically seized France and an entire generation. It involved a need for sacrifice up to and including martyrdom, perhaps a need for sanctity.

For Péguy, the Affair meant a movement, both profoundly revolutionary and traditionally Christian. Dreyfusards had a passion for the eternal salvation of the French people; anti-Dreyfusards were men of temporal salvation. France must reject the injustice so that it will not be seen as being in a state of mortal sin.

(snip)

Whatever the differences in approach between the spiritual Péguy and the rationalist Jaurès, they were both for a brief time the conscience of humanity. They deserve to be remembered for two reasons: their fight against injustice and anti-Semitism, and their exhibition of courage.

(snip)


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Quasimodo

Quote:
 

Once, when someone was making a point, he [Peguy] interrupted: “You’re right, but you have no right to be right unless you are willing to pay the price of demonstrating the rightness of truth.”




Quote:
 
"He who does not bellow the truth when he knows the truth makes himself the accomplice of liars and forgers."
--Peguy



Edited by Quasimodo, Mar 8 2014, 08:19 AM.
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Quasimodo



Recall that during the Dreyfus case, one of the myths which was circulated was that
there was a vast (and in this instance Jewish) conspiracy, backed by unlimited funds,
which was supporting Dreyfus.

In fact, the early Dreyfusards were all rather short of funds, and counted no "big names" among their number.

In the lax case, there were claims (by Nifong among others) that outsiders with their considerable
funding were attempting to thwart the course of justice. And later, that it was only because
vast sums were expended by the defense (not the evidence), that the players got off. (And that they were
somehow still tainted by this, as if less than innocent.)

I think we may see replays of that claim be reasserted, as there is very little else the "anti-laxards"
can hurl at the falsely-accused.

And that, after all, would be a rather damning comment, not about the lax defenders, but about
the state of NC justice.


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cks
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It is good to remember the case of Dreyfus and those like Peguy and Jaures who could see that failure to speak and act to truth was a testament to the rot that infected France.

They are the people who should be held up to young men and women as people to emulate - so to Hans Dohnanyi and Bonhoeffer - the subjects of a very moving book recently written by Fritz Stern and Elizabeth (?) who is the granddaughter of Niemoller.
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Quasimodo

"The only shame is to have none."
--Pascal



Perhaps also applicable to the Duke Admin., department heads, 88 of the faculty, the law school, the divinity school, etc.



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Quasimodo

POSTER COMMENT in another forum on another topic, but applicable here, too, I think:

Quote:
 


When you don't speak up, the other side sets the agenda and wins by default.

You'll never win an argument you don't make.
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