On Dreyfus Affair and Roman Polanski Film

The Dreyfus Affair in France was an amazing event that contained a lot about the past, the present, and the future of France, while articulating some valuable lessons for today's world. It tells us about humanity, its persistent need of scapegoats and self-justification; It also has several dimensions related to all sorts of particular and universal dimensions of culture such as heroism, honor, treason, propaganda, nationalism, duty of intellectuals and the army, anti-semitism and so on.
For starters, this even has split France. There were riots and violence. They were rumors of a civil war. There were cartoons of family dinners, where the family has agreed not to mention "D" word, but ended up beating each other, once the "D" word had been mentioned. The affair has revealed that writers could be heroes, such as Zola, and officers could be cowards and traitors as well as heroes. Journalists were capable of provoking crowds into riots and pogroms, while simultaneously forcing ministers to order re-trials.

The affair has revealed the tremendous power of the state and its institutions, such as the military, Catholic Church, and the press. It also revealed how rotten these institutions were, their rot debilitating the country all the way to the surrender to the Nazis. These guys have declared a Jewish officer a traitor, and then doubled down on their charges, piling more and more lies and mistakes, and pushing further and further, making forgeries, silencing the witnesses, pulling all possible strings, just to prove that they can't be wrong. They also tried the best they could to the prove to any doubter that anyone who challenges the arbitrary assertions of the "Deep State" would be crushed, accused for spying for Germany, serving Jewish capital, and being a traitor and scoundrel otherwise.

All this is as contemporary as tomorrow's newspaper! Think of the total abuse of the State apparatus to prove the phony Russiagate. Think of the total abuse of several state apparatuses to nail Julian Assange. There is tremendous stubbornness of the State, not to acknowledge that its policies can be wrong or misguided, be it militarism, the wars in the Middle East, support of the corrupt and failed Ukrainian state, push for NATO expansion, or even organizing its action in confronting pandemic. You name it... no matter where you turn, the State refuses to back down and eat the humble pie, piling more and more lies, forgeries, suppression, censorship and all other elements at its disposal.

So is it that surprising that an artist of the caliber of Roman Polanski has decided to make a film about it? J'Accuse, or in English translation, An Officer and a Spy?

And now the icing on the cake. You can't actually see this film in the States. You can buy a French version of it, but there are no American distributors of the film, no streaming services, and there are no copies with English subtitles available in this country. Do I hear censorship? The film was shot in Paris; originally Polanski wanted to shoot it in Warsaw, but after the US government put pressure on Poland not to allow it, Poles backed off. State abusing its power, anyone?

I saw the film with Russian subtitles (another paradox, as Russia no longer afraid to air films that exposes the evils of nationalism and antisemitism, the US suppresses them). And it is a masterfully done historical narrative, which is true to the actual events, yet is open to current interpretations. I just could not stop seeing not just the stubborn and arrogant French Generals, but also today's CIA and Democratic top brass, pushing their Russian narrative despite all the evidence to the contrary.

It is not an earth shattering film, but it does not have to be. The events themselves are earth shattering, and Polanski did nothing to distract us from the gist of the story. The film does make you think and compare, and that's what matters.

Of course, nowadays we don't usually have trials when people of different religion or ethnic background are accused of spying. Even though, once in a while, a Muslim or Chinese or Russian would be harassed, arrested, and imprisoned. We also don't usually have the riots and violence provoked by the particular court sentence. Except for the court sentences of some abusive cops. But we still have honest journalists or whistleblowers arrested, dishonored, and abused. We still have blatant manipulation of the public opinion, we still have demagogues whipping people into a frenzy. We still have violence directed against uncomfortable witnesses. In Dreyfus' case, a lawyer was shot by some right winger, and a chimney sweeper admitted fifty years after the fact, that he closed the chimney in such a way, that Zola died in his flat due to the smoke in 1902. (An honorable Picquart died in 1914 as the result of riding accident. Tough military guy and riding accident? Well, lets not get paranoid here.)

But what we don't have, unfortunately, is the people of Zola stature to challenge the corrupt, cheating, and self-protecting military. We don't have honorable military guys, like Marie-Georges Picquart, who stood up against all the top brass in his search for the true spy, and put up with arrest, imprisonment, accusations of working for Jewish syndicate, all because he could not allow his personal and his army integrity to be mired in dirt for the sake of expediency. We don't have people of Edvard Grieg stature, who refused to perform in France, when the country continues to imprison the innocent and stubbornly persist in its misguided self-righteousness. We don't have writers like Anatole France or Marcel Proust, signing with the underdogs against all the might of the military, state, and the church.

But most importantly, while the details of the Dreyfus affair were widely discussed all throughout the world, we now don't even have a chance to discuss them the way the film wants us to discuss them, because there is no film. The film is silenced. The combined efforts of the feminists of the me-too movement, and the state that has its issues ranging from the crime of fifty years ago, to desire to deflect attention from its abuses are such that the film is not to be seen.

The film, which won numerous nominations and prizes in Europe, is doomed to be crippled and silenced, and its potential distributors bullied into passivity.

I can understand that a lot of people have issues with Polanski. But all his other, frequently silly films are available. Frantic? Sure! Bitter Moon? You bet. But why this socially important film that highlights precisely the most sore problem of today: government's overreach and its endless corruption that metastasizes into further corruption?

Why do the idiots from all sorts of progressive movements always come to the State's rescue. Be it in the case of Assange or the case of this film. At least at the time of Dreyfus, it was bigots and proto-fascists that rioted on behalf of the State. Nowadays, it is the progressive forces. How pathetic!

I added a few pictures from the film. The heroic Georges Picquart, testifying on behalf of Zola who was imprisoned for a year for his protests, the copy of Zola's publication, and today's riots of people who want to silence Polanski's film, while accusing him of rape.