From Dreyfus to Donald: Racism and Public Degradation of ‘the other’

France’s infamous Dreyfus Affair has bearing on Donald Trump’s apparent racism – particularly when comparing the element of public degradation, which was imposed by the French Army at a ceremony on the former Alsatian Jew, and which Donald Trump frequently chooses for his political enemies, notably: the Somali-born Ilhan Omar and Elijah Cummings, who is African-American.

The Dreyfus Affair began in the autumn of 1894 when Captain Alfred Dreyfus was arrested and charged with high treason.  The first Jew to do duty on the General Staff, and likely because of this – and his traits of non-conformity - he was considered the culprit and author of the bordereau (memorandum) containing information on French war plans, secrets that had actually been communicated to Germany.  Two handwriting experts determined that only Dreyfus could have authored the bordereau, and at the court-martial a secret dossier, supported by Commandant Henry, was presented to the jury while the court was adjourned (but not presented to the defendant or to his lawyer).  The Affair did not come into full public light until Emile Zola published “J’accuse” in 1898: the famous writer was quickly convicted of libel, Commandant Henry, who admitted to forging the secret dossier, was arrested and later committed suicide in jail, after slashing his throat, and the true author of the bordereau, Major Esterhazy, fled to England.  In 1899 Dreyfus returned to France from Devil’s Island, off the coast of French Guiana, to face another court-martial at Rennes in August where he was again condemned “with extenuating circumstances” but later pardoned in September of that same year.[1]

The Affair divided the nation – almost to the point of civil war – between Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards.  The defenders of the honour of the Army faced off against the defenders of Truth, for the facts proved an injustice had been done. Below is an excerpt from Alfred Dreyfus’s memoire Five Years of My Life, and I have chosen to focus on the Dreyfus degradation, where he was publicly paraded and stripped of his rank.  The atmosphere in France at the time of the Affair (even before and especially after) was rife with anti-Semitism, and the “howls of a deluded mob” as experienced by Dreyfus in January 1895 compare to the racist pro-Trump rally chanting “send her back” in July 2019. Also at work in each case is the similar effort by ‘official’ dimensions of the respective Republics which are supposed to unite the nation – France’s Army recalling the glory of the Revolution’s levée en masse and the American Presidency as the so-called leading voice of the ‘free world’ – end up dividing the country which is in no small degree pitted against ‘the other’.

Dreyfus’s degradation was made almost complete by five years of solitude on Devil’s Island, baking in the heat of a confined space close to the equator, cooking for himself without proper utensils and eating out of tinned cans, guarded day and night (often immobilized in irons), deprived and censored throughout, a physical and near mental wreck by the end, but he never quite gave up hope – military man that he was - that his honour would be restored to him.  While Donald Trump has not gone this far  in terms of degrading his domestic political ‘enemies’, who tend to be elected Democrats, he is inducing violence and hate crimes against them: most recently, for example, two police officers from Louisiana posted on Facebook suggesting that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez should be shot.[2]  Members of Congress, notably four freshman women of colour known as ‘the squad’, Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar among them, now require extra security precautions because Trump sees ‘white supremacy’ as the path to the White House in 2020.  This pattern continued when Trump called Congressman Elijah Cumming’s constituency in Baltimore in a Twitter rant a “disgusting rat and rodent infested mess” where “no human being would want to live”.[3] This is how the President likes to treat his foes.

In other words, the traditional Left-Right horizontal axis of political competition since the French Revolution is gone, replaced by Populism’s vertical axis with a so-called uncontaminated people standing above ‘the other’ which intrudes from below.[4]  Revolutionary equality has been replaced by the idea of rank, with white men at the top of the hierarchy, and who better to epitomize this shift in mood than a misogynist and racist billionaire President - ‘the lying King’- of the U.S.A. who happened to inherit wealth, as well.  Here is Dreyfus remembering his own very public loss of rank at a ceremony of degradation in fin-de-siècle France well over a century ago.  Just imagine the crowd wanting to chant “send him back” to Alsace, then in German hands, where Dreyfus's father was born:

A Sergeant of the Republican Guard came up to me.  He tore off rapidly buttons, trousers-stripes, the signs of my rank from cap and sleeves, and then broke my sword across his knee.  I saw all the material emblems of my honor fall at my feet.  Then, my whole being racked by a fearful paroxysm, but with body erect and head held high, I shouted again and again to the soldiers and to the assembled crowd the cry of my soul.

“I am innocent!”

The parade continued.  I was compelled to make the whole round of the square.  I heard the howls of a deluded mob, I felt the thrill which I knew must be running through those people, since they believed that before them was a convicted traitor to France; and I struggled to transmit to their hearts another thrill, - belief in my innocence.[5]

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[1] Alfred Dreyfus, Five Years of My Life, 1894-1899. (Cambridge, MA: University Press, nd [Wentworth Press Reprint]), p. 307.  See the Editor’s Preface for a general introduction to the Affair.  See also: Ruth Harris, Dreyfus, Politics, Emotion and the Scandal of the Century (New York: Henry Holt, 2010), pp. 1, 2 ff.  Also helpful is: Roger Soltau, French Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Russell & Russell, 1959), p. 332 ff.

[2] Lawrence Martin, “Trump is in full bigot mode,” The Globe and Mail, Wednesday, July 31, 2019, p. A11.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Marco Revelli, The New Populism: Democracy Stares into the Abyss, tr. David Broder (London: Verso: 2019), p. 15.

[5] Dreyfus, Five Years of my Life, pp. 50,51.

Our not-so-benign Dictatorship: A Response to Stephen Harper and Tom Flanagan on the Vote Subsidy

As Stephen Harper eliminates the voter subsidy, what goes next ... the ballot box? A government notorious for its abuse of power continues on its merry way, unchallenged, and there is not one iota of consideration (despite generous attestations to the contrary on election night - when Harper actually smiled) for the 60% of Canadians who voted distinctly otherwise on May 2nd.  One reason given for Harper’s elimination of the voter subsidy is that he was “tired” of so many elections in such a short period of time.  Is four years from now really not enough time to rest up for an election?

So it looks like we will not have competitive politics for quite a spell because Harper actually likes tampering with how we individual citizens support the parties for which we vote.  The Conservatives call it, according to their marketplace model (and soma-induced mantra) “freedom of choice” - a ruse, as if democracy were based on some form of consumerism, you get what you pay for.  I call it the stepping stones to a not-so-benign dictatorship because the party playing fields are nowhere near level without the subsidies.  Instead of four or five federal parties, we may now (possibly) have only two, at best – how is that for “choice”? What masquerades as “individualism” manifests as illiberalism.  And this was not necessarily a “public” subsidy (and by the way what’s wrong with the word “public”?).  This was not a “tax” on my vote, and Harper really is fiddling with nickels and dimes here – remember the cuts to GST? (Quite the big thinker, he is!)  No, this was “my” subsidy, a toonie from “my” taxes to support “our” democracy (what’s left of it), and it was conceived in the interest of electoral fairness, to minimize the undue influence of big corporations and unions, nothing otherwise.

In taking away the subsidy Harper is subtracting from the dignity of my vote, your vote and everyone else’s vote – and he is at his partisan, malfeasant worst. Two dollars per voter is mere pocket change, but multiply that several election times over I am sure we will come close to another billion dollars, or so, just enough to hold another G20 Summit with possible occasion to bludgeon ordinary Canadian urbanites ... again.  Shall we all rest easy, now?  My guess is that Harper will eventually become tired of pesky and annoying elections altogether (far too much chatter, to which his Cabinet is surely unaccustomed), so in the end he will appoint himself Governor General and then usurp the powers of the Prime Minister – something akin to Putin.

Just because Harper “won” (read: spent far more money on) the election (with the last-minute help of bin Laden’s sudden demise) does not justify the proceedings of his “government,” regardless of so-called party pronouncements prior to the vote.  Not everyone who supported the Conservatives will sit comfortably with the move to eliminate the vote subsidy. Oliver Cromwell and the experiment with Republicanism is an important episode in British constitutional history (with which we should all be familiar, for King Charles I did lose his head), but it does not necessarily deserve our respect.  There are certain parallels with today (though not quite in the same sequence): for example, the truly unprecedented accumulation of unrivalled power (outside of Parliament), the air of “Puritanism,” the emphasis on the army, and the promotion of “religious liberty” at the expense of political liberty.

There are other precedents for Harper – mostly in third-world countries.  And as the Prime Minister is busy ensuring that the likes of Gadhafi not get overthrown by his very own people, he continues with intense bombing missions, as if Edmund Burke can double as a fighter pilot.  He confuses his affections for Marie Antoinette with the dark figure behind Lockerbie.  As well, I am reminded of the right-wing figure from turn-of-the-century France, Charles Maurras, who opposed freedom for Jewish Captain Dreyfus (falsely accused of treason), thinking he should remain on Devil’s Island even if innocent, because releasing him would be a stain on the French State (and Army).  Similarly, the (once teenaged) – and only Canadian - Muslim Omar Khadr languished in Guantanamo, implicated by his father’s apparent relationship with bin Laden (and former Prime Minister Chrétien), a hand grenade, and a U.S. military court that cried bloody murder in war.  True to his Machiavellianism, Harper calculated that he would get more votes (and money, let’s face it) from his evangelical base (otherwise known as the PM’s “conscience”) if he kept Khadr in Guantanamo’s gulag than if the boy received due process in Canada. 

A century ago the Dreyfus Affair split France in two, and the French government apologized to the family only in 1998, on the anniversary of Zola’s J’Accuse, but the truth was that Dreyfus was innocent.  The truth in Harper’s Canada is that Khadr’s rights as a human were grossly violated, but then again, the evidence shows that we cannot get habeas corpus right in downtown Toronto (another development in the Britain’s early pre-Civil War period). I see at least one apology generations in waiting (for “policing errors”), assuming we still have our sovereignty as a nation.

Eventually Mr. Harper will lose, and his luck will fail.   Even the voters will tire of their captivity.  Maybe there will be one too many wars.  In the future, there will be no earthquake in Haiti to save him, no late-night, James Bond- type assassinations of the world’s most-wanted criminal mastermind, and possibly (recalling Mr. Dion’s failed interview) fewer unethical decisions by our news networks to stir the public imagination ...  all again, last-minute.  No, as I am fond of saying: Oliver Cromwell was followed by his son Tumble-down Dick.

Because of Harper, we have already fallen far.  Now the view looks precipitous: it is not so much the dearth of Liberals as the apparent death of liberalism (originally formed as opposition to the abuse of power – epitomized by the “voter subsidy”) ...  that is what worries me most.  Canada will, however, “Rise Again” (following Stan Rogers' song "The Mary Ellen Carter").  And then will begin the job of undoing Harper’s nefarious consequences, if possible.  The first order of business will be to restore the “Harper Government” to its original nomenclature (“Government of Canada”); then, to pull down the statues of he-who-shall-not-be-named.