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Europe

Chirac to pay homage to Dreyfus (!)

2006-07-13

President Jacques Chirac of France on Wednesday leads a ceremony in honour of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish army captain whose dismissal more than a century ago on trumped-up charges of spying triggered a protracted national crisis. To mark the hundred years since Dreyfus' final rehabilitation, Chirac will conduct a service of homage at the "École Militaire" or Military Academy in Paris - the very place where in 1895 the artillery officer was publicly disgraced before a crowd of 20,000. "The president will pay homage to the man, to the soldier, to the patriot who fell victim to an appalling judicial error. He will also explain how via the Dreyfus affair the republic and its values became rooted in French society," an aide said.

Dreyfus - a Jew from the Alsace region of eastern France which was at the time occupied by Germany - was found guilty in 1894 of passing secret information to the German military attache in Paris and sentenced to life imprisonment at the Devil's Island penal colony. But it emerged that the evidence against him was false, and for years a bitter row over the "affair" pitted liberal and left-wing supporters of Dreyfus against opponents on the Catholic right - many of whom made no secret of their anti-Semitism. In 1898 the writer Émile Zola published his famous 'J'accuse' letter attacking the president of the day for siding against Dreyfus, and the next year he was brought back for a second trial and then officially pardoned - though not cleared of the charges. Dreyfus was not fully rehabilitated and restored to his rank in the army until July 12 1906, when the high court of appeal overturned the original verdict.

Chirac has decided not to heed calls for the remains of the officer to be brought to the Panthéon, the former church in central Paris where the nation's heroes - including Zola - are interred.

I thought not.

At the 1895 ceremony - known as a "parade of execution" - Dreyfus' epaulettes were ripped off and his sword was broken in two to the words: "Dreyfus - you are not worthy of bearing arms. In the name of the president, we degrade you." The ritual was witnessed by Theodor Herzl, a young journalist who was later father of the Zionist movement that led to the creation of Israel.

Posted by:Seafarious

#4 Thank you for your commentary, JFM and A5089. I always appreciate your insight. This article surprised me, but now I see that it fits into the Greater Arabian Co-Prosperity Sphere (ie Eurabia) narrative quite nicely.

I'll be sending a courrier électronique to both of you on a different matter sometime this week.

Posted by: Seafarious 2006-07-13 10:20

#3 I might add that in his first mandate, shiraq paid hommage to the Vél d'Hiv jewish deportees, and said guilt was on France itself (while the socilaist president Mitterrand always said, rightly IMHO, it was a crime of the Vichy collaborator gvt).

True, France collaborated, and went beyond the nazi calls with its law on jews, deporting children, etc,... but it was official France, with most high-level collaborators being LEFTWING, with the "french hitler" Doriot being n°3 of the french communist party (PCF being the first and main collaborator party before Barbarrossa btw), with true ideological collaborator PM Laval being a socialist, with Pétain having been nominated by the 1936 leftist Popular front parliament, after France had been military defeated (it DID NOT "surrender", it was beaten fair and square, and so were the british btw...).
French people collaborated, denounced jews, resistants, and all, but many more also protected jews, hid them, helped them pass to spain, or simply stayed silent and let them merge into the population... this was the common people's doing

BUT the major success of post WWII communist propaganda was to associate the Right with collaboration (in the brilliant "nazism and fascism are rightwing" genius stroke).

So, when "conservative" shiraq denounces the Vél d'Hiv as a spot on France's History, he is simply using the holocaust as a tool in the culture war : you are guilty, you must pay, you must attone,...
Anyway, Pétain's National Revolution was an attempt at "restoring" french identity over "republican identity", and given the collaboration context, it was in fact its deathblow. Thus, anything remotly linked with France (patriotism, nationalism, loving its history, its heritage,...) is suspect, or even downright evil. This is today's France, still held hostage by WWII, by the heirs of the gaullist-communist takeover of the country after liberation, and shiraq ids a wonderful example of that french symbiosis between these two statist ideologies, with the addition of the leftist cultural subversion since the 60's.
In that regard, dead jews killed by the "rightwingers" are a God-given gift. And this doesn't prevent him from pursuing Eurabia, propping up the hizbollah, preventing Israel (with 1/3rd of french speaking citizens IIRC) from entering the french speaking organization, while letting in sudan (I think),...

Posted by: anonymous5089 2006-07-13 06:26

#2 Seafarious, why the "!"???

Shiraq LOVES WWII dead jews, and by extension all jews victims of western antisemitism (though this is not the case in the Dreyfus case, this was a State affair/cover up in a climate of a culture war which ended in quasi civil war, with antisemitism in the background), since he and his ilk have based their "legiticimaty" on the whole rejection of "the darkest days in our History" (IE everything the tranzis reject, nationalism, self-identity, christian heritage,...).

So, this is not paradoxal at all. The Dreyfus affair is a corner stone of the republican myths, with the good republicans, and the evil "rightwingers" (while antisemitism was a staple of the republican left).
French Republic is built in opposition to France, and has been founded on rejection of it from the start, substituting a new patriotism, a new identity,... and has been drenched in blood from the Vendée genocide (whose perpretators names are engraved on the Arc de Triomphe) and the Terror.

Shiraq may actually excuse and facilitate muslim antisemitism on french soil and enable would-be genociders abroad with all his influence and France's money and foreign policy (french Arab Policy = Eurabia), BUT he thrives on denouncing western antisemitism BECAUSE it helps culpabilizing the french people... and remember, either we are ruled by our Betters, the Enlightened Elites, or we fall back into our own perverse ways, and we become nazis again.
So, it's for our own good if we're being dissolved into a new socialist utopia, 'coz we're GUILTY and we're not worth living anymore as a Nation.

Posted by: anonymous5089 2006-07-13 05:51

#1 Plenty of sterotypes. There were Jews in the anti-Dreyfus side (ie the nati-Dreyfus were not automatically anti-semite, many of them were simply fearful that this would weken the army) and most of Vichy's ministers had been as young men in teh pro-Dreyfus side (did I mention the strong ant-semitism in the left) so there were anti-semites in the pro-Dreyfus side.

In fact the atheistic left used Dreyfus to come to power and to begin the decade-long process of atheisation of the French society along with the purge of Catholic officers and promotion of agnostic and atheist officers even when mediocre: in the six first months of WWI Joffre was forced to fire half of the French generals for gross incompetence. At least one hundred thousand French soldiers paid in blood the religious purges carried by the left.

Posted by: JFM 2006-07-13 02:12

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