“How flimsy it is!” wrote Emile Zola in his public letter to French president Félix Faure. “The fact that someone could have been convicted on this charge is the ultimate iniquity. I defy decent men to read it without a stir of indignation in their hearts and a cry of revulsion, at the thought of the undeserved punishment being meted out.”
The year was 1898. The man convicted of espionage was Alfred Dreyfus, a French Army General Staff officer who was then rotting away on Devil’s Island to which he had been sentenced for life. The evidence of Dreyfus’s guilt mattered less to the French military establishment than did the need to feed the anti-Semitic mania then sweeping the country.
Upon Derek Chauvin’s conviction for the murder of George Floyd, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris unwittingly laid bare the equally racist mania sweeping America.
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