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AMERICA'S DREYFUS AFFAIR |
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America’s Dreyfus Affair, Part 4An Essay on Prejudice, Money, and InformationWas Captain Alfred Dreyfus sent to Devil’s Island because he was a Jew? In the wake of the Dreyfus Affair, many a person in France took comfort in repeating the clever retort of the German Foreign Minister to the positive assertion of that proposition: “I don’t know about that, but I know that if he hadn’t been Jewish he would not have returned.”2 What a psychologically satisfying statement to people who have been wrong, and have been parties to the infliction of a great wrong and a great injustice upon another individual! How nice it was to be back on the side of truth, and that statement certainly appeared to have a lot of truth in it to a lot of people. We all know how hard it is for governments to admit that they have been wrong, that they have made an error, much less to admit something so bad as to have framed a man for a major crime that he did not commit and to have inflicted upon him what amounted to a lifetime of torture as a consequence. The recent examples in our own country of this reluctance of governments to admit error, from the county to the federal level, are legion, whether it be in the prosecution of obviously innocent day-care workers for imaginary sex crimes or the immolation of men, women, and children practicing an unorthodox religion. In the Dreyfus case, once the error had been made, with so many reputations on the line, it certainly took some powerful force to overturn it, to bring Dreyfus back from Devil’s Island. What force could that be but one even stronger than the nation’s government? In the eyes of many people, that could only be the force of rich international Jewry working in concert? The explanation directed the focus away from the messy and disturbing facts of the case and allowed those who had now clearly and obviously been wrong all along to say that, in a certain sense, they had really been right all along. The guilt or innocence of Dreyfus, in this view, was really not the important thing. The charge had been made throughout the affair that the whole mess was being stirred up by the powerful and secretive Syndicate, of which Jewish bankers were a major part. What better evidence could there be that they were right than the fact that the (Syndicate-backed) Dreyfusards were able to muster enough power actually to win in the end? This belief also allowed a substantial segment of the French population to keep their fear and detestation of Jews intact even though Dreyfus turned out not to be the rotten traitor selling secrets to the mortal enemy that they had thought him to be. In point of fact, the episode probably intensified their negative feelings, making eventual widespread collaboration with the conquering Nazis just that much easier.
Americans reading this sage observation by Eric Hoffer no doubt immediately find themselves relating it to the attitudes of many of their countrymen toward blacks. Particularly in the turbulent 1960s in the South, many whites confronted with the obvious injustice of the Jim Crow laws, the separate and inferior education provided to blacks, and the widespread denial of their fundamental right to vote, retreated into an attitude that can be described only as “close- minded.” Human nature is very much the same everywhere, and it is not a purely rational nature. Close-mindedness and rationalizing are universal reactions to unsettling hard cold facts that go against the prevailing conventional view or narrow self-interest. As H. L. Mencken put it, “The way to please is to proclaim in a confident manner, not what is true, but what is merely comforting.”4 The German foreign minister, obviously an excellent politician and diplomat, knew well that the truth of his statement was less important than the fact that it was pleasing. How appropriate was his shrewd response to his audience, and how little revered is the triumph of truth and justice when it comes at the expense of fixed beliefs, is shown by the anecdote with which David Levering Lewis concludes his excellent “Dreyfus” book:
We remarked at the beginning of our “Dreyfus” essay on the irony of the reversal of roles of “liberal” and “conservative” between the original Dreyfus Affair and the current American version, the death of Vincent Foster. Certainly no surveys have been conducted, but it is this writer’s perception that there is an even more ironic role reversal with respect to formal education. The eventual exoneration of Captain Alfred Dreyfus was, as we all know, a great triumph for France’s intellectual class and for its men of letters, particularly for its pre-eminent literary figure, Emile Zola (Lewis tells us that for years afterward many Catholic children in France were taught to call a chamber pot a “Zola.”). But with respect to the Foster death, it seems that one is more likely to get a blue collar worker with little formal education to believe the government is covering up than for a member of the intelligentsia to express such a belief. The “experts” that the government has assembled all flaunt J.D.s and M.D.s and Ph. D.s of course, but they were clearly paid to arrive at a conclusion satisfactory to their paymaster, which they duly did. More disturbing has been the performance of the putative independent seekers of truth, the professional writers, and most troubling by far has been the apparent complete complacency on America’s college campuses about this apparent assassination of a high level government official. Those whose education one would have expected to have made more broad-minded and open- minded are, almost to a man, completely prejudiced and close-minded about the Foster death. One might as well expound upon the virtues of interracial marriage with a Klu Kluxer as to suggest to a member of the ivory tower set that Foster didn’t really do himself in. Why, one must wonder, is this so? The first reason that would come to mind in ordinary circumstances is that as generally learned people they know more, particularly about those matters of public affairs that ordinary folks have so little time for, and having studied the matter they have properly come to the conclusion that the official government verdict in the Foster death is the correct one. That explanation one can quickly discard. You won’t find anyone anywhere in the country who will argue that his support of the government in this instance is based upon his having carefully examined the matter; much less is this the case among the professorate. Members of the media also studiously avoid taking this position when confronted directly, no doubt for fear their bluff might be called and they would be asked how Vince Foster could tear a note into 28 pieces without leaving any fingerprints or how he could drive himself to Fort Marcy Park without keys for the car, or how he could end up dead there before his car even arrived, or any one of dozens of possible questions about unexplainable inconsistencies in the official story. Michael Barone, senior writer for U.S. News and World Report, all-purpose pundit on CNN, and co-author of the voluminous and impressive annual Almanac of American Politics when asked at a presentation at the American Enterprise Institute in 1996 what he thought about the Foster death responded that he did not know enough to have an opinion6. The unfortunate thing is that one can say the same thing about virtually every news commentator and college professor in America, though many will, when pressed, nevertheless, offer an opinion in support of the government. Mark Twain once observed that we are all ignorant, just ignorant of different things. But why would those whose job it is to be informed about the workings of our government so that they might teach our young people remain so ignorant about something so important as the suspicious death of a high-level government official? There are several possible explanations. The first that springs to mind is that, as many surveys have shown, most college professors are liberal Democrats, and the Democrats are in power and would stand to lose the most if the official story were revealed to be untrue. But liberals, especially educated ones, pride themselves in their open-mindedness, or at least they used to, and the position adopted by most educated liberals in the Foster case is, as we have noted, an out-and-out, old-fashioned close-minded one, as bad as any traditional French hard-head in the Dreyfus Affair. Though a couple of liberal writers, Roger Morris and Sam Smith, have blazed a trail showing that one can be aware of apparent high-level crimes in a Democratic administration and still keep ones liberal credentials, virtually no one from the Left has followed them. We might also point out that conservative intellectual leaders have performed no better than liberal ones when it comes to the various Clinton scandals, particularly the Foster death. The only attempt at a serious Clinton expose from the Right, Boy Clinton by R. Emmett Tyrrell, doesn’t begin to measure up to Morris’ Partners in Power, the Clintons and their America; and conservative organs like Tyrrell’s American Spectator, The Washington Times, National Review, The Weekly Standard, and The Wall Street Journal have led the way in praising the findings of Kenneth Starr on Foster and in attacking Christopher Ruddy, the one American journalist raising questions. Another argument that might be made is that, dependent as they are upon the printed word, academicians have had difficulty learning anything about the Foster case. Following on the heels of the writers of the first draft of our history, as journalists are often called, the compilers and interpreters in academia have been very poorly served by the draft writers. There is certainly no doubt about that, as we have made clear in this essay. Until the recent publication of the books by Ruddy and British journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, there was simply no information available in the usual opinion-molding sources, either books, journals, magazines, or newspapers. The high-brow magazines usually read by college professors and equivalent professionals have been the absolute worst, as we pointed out earlier, in playing down the Clinton scandals. Still, this is a poor excuse for the degree of ignorance that exists. College professors are supposed to go beyond such secondary sources. I have interviewed a community college criminal justice major in the Washington, DC area who did just that, writing a first-rate research paper disputing the government’s conclusions on the Foster death using government documents available in the George Mason University library. He did it, furthermore, without any assistance from the Foster researchers in the area, being unaware at the time of our existence. In the process he also demolished the argument that academicians might use for avoiding the subject, that is, that this is a topic of little general interest. In the last presentation in his public speaking class the assignment was to give a speech to persuade. With the topic already in hand from the paper he had written for another class and with what he figured was already an assured “A” in the course from his accumulated record, he decided to risk trying to persuade the class that Vince Foster was murdered. Actually, as he told me, the risk was not with the fellow students, whose vote would determine half his grade, but with the teacher, whom he had pegged as a “liberal” who wouldn’t like the topic. He didn’t know how right he was on both counts. The students not only gave him an “A” for his presentation, but also chose his as the best speech given, while, as he put it, the teacher distracted him with her look of absolute disgust throughout his speech. “You could almost see the smoke coming out of her ears,” he said, and as he took his seat she said, “You know I don’t agree with any of that.” She then put her grade where her mouth was, giving him a “C” on the presentation. That combined with the student assessment, fortunately, still gave him a “B” on the speech and an “A” for the course. We have heard so many stories in recent years of the sort of ideological purity being enforced on campuses these days, one could imagine this little scene being played out almost anywhere in the country. In fact, one might more readily expect it at one of the elite universities instead of at a suburban community college. By happenstance there was more than ideological blindness at work in this instance, and I tell it because it is one of those cases where truth is sometimes stranger than fiction, not because of any larger point that it supports. In the small world that is metropolitan Washington, the speech teacher happened to be the wife of Robert Bryant, currently second in command in the FBI and their spokesman at the joint Park Police, Justice Department, FBI press conference in which the initial Foster “suicide” conclusion was announced on August 10, 1993. The student had not been aware of the fact, and I took some pleasure in breaking the news to him. This student’s resourcefulness in preparing a persuasive case against the government in the Foster death demonstrates convincingly that the failings of the faculty are more of will than of means. Surely, unless they are hopelessly behind the times, many of them must have also discovered by now what a magnificent research tool the Internet is. Anyone employing the usual search engines on the Net would quickly discover that the view contrary to the official one is thoroughly dominant (even the legions of government disinformationists on the Net have to endorse it to retain any credibility at all) and that the traditional scholarly sort of documentation supporting that view can be found on the Net in abundance. How can so many people with a pretense to being intelligent and/or learned remain completely oblivious to that fact? Let us take a couple of more shots at why the less formally educated seem to be more skeptical of the government in the Foster case than are those more formally educated. Many of the less formally educated work in jobs that put a premium on horse sense where there is a serious penalty for being wrong. A car cannot be persuaded to run. To be repaired properly, its failings must be properly diagnosed. The same can be said for household plumbing, wiring, or appliances. I still recall the words of a former chicken-farming Mexican-American friend of mine in the Army who absolutely could not stand the Army’s bureaucratic ways: “The thing I like about chicken farming,” he said, “is that you can’t bullshit a chicken.” People engaged in such activities in many ways keep their critical faculties sharper than do those who only need to keep up the proper front. University people are also less likely to be a part of the national gun culture. They are not as likely to have had military service nor do they often engage in hunting for recreation. They don’t know what a .38 caliber revolver sounds like when fired and they know nothing of its recoil or the damage that it or a similar weapon would do firing a high-velocity bullet through the skull of a living person at point-blank range. Anyone with gun experience would be much more likely to be skeptical of the government story in the Foster case if he had heard anything at all about the relative tidiness of the body and the position of the gun where the body was found. That better educated people are less likely to question the government than less educated people in the Foster case might also be a reflection on our education system and on our society. Those who make it over the educational hurdles increasingly do so not because they are more intelligent but because they are more willing to play the game and do what it takes to please those with authority over them. Similarly, those in the professional classes need to be more careful about having and expressing political opinions that might rub those with authority over them the wrong way, whereas a mechanic or a truck driver, say, can say or think pretty well what he wants and no one will care. It is also a tribute to the effectiveness of the propaganda job that the mainstream press has done in the Foster case that the general impression seems to exist among the timid professional classes that having doubts about the official line somehow makes one a wild- eyed extremist. A while back I put these observations in verse form in a commentary on a well- known scholarly book. The book, by an Ivy League psychologist and a former social worker turned conservative activist, smugly posited that because there is, as they claim almost as an article of faith, greater equality of opportunity than ever in our society the ones who “make it” are increasingly those in the right or superior tail of a normal curve of a distribution of human attributes. Those who fail and end up poor and miserable are, as they see it, from the left or inferior tail of the normal, bell-shaped curve:
Columnist Joseph Sobran put it this way in a December 2, 1997, article on education in The Washington Times entitled, “Up to Speed on Conformity”:
These developments are dangerous for the future of freedom in the country, and Sobran has only partially diagnosed the malady. The tenure system was created for the purpose of buttressing freedom of thought and freedom of expression. The university would be the one place where one could pursue truth without fear or favor. If a professor’s pursuit of truth were to lead him into dangerous waters, he need not, like so many of his fellow citizens, fear for his job because he would be protected by tenure. Unfortunately, if the extreme reticence of the academic community in the face of not just the Foster scandal, but a host of others related to the presidency and the federal government in general, is any indication, the tenure system is not working as intended. The problem, it would appear, is that the habits of mind and behavior developed to achieve tenure are very difficult to break once tenure is achieved. The supreme irony here is that those achieving tenure, then, are precisely those least fit to make proper use of the privileges thus granted. The Power of MoneyAt bottom, though, is the corruption of money. The old saying, “He who pays the piper calls the tune,” has not lost any of its force in modern times, and increasingly, the payer of the piper in higher education in America has become the government. Private colleges, almost more than directly state-supported institutions, depend heavily upon the ultimately federally-funded research grants that their faculty can attract and their students more and more need federal grants and loans to foot the burgeoning higher-education bill. We hear a lot of talk, especially from “mainstream conservative” sources about “1960s radicals” now running the show on college campuses, but what there is of it is mainly a safe form of social radicalism of the “make-love-not- war” variety, as though sexual license were the antithesis of and the antidote for the creeping militarization of our society and all that that entails. One important part of that militarization is a “don’t-make-waves” careerist mentality that has spread from uniform to gown. We are also well aware of how much of academia, with their anti-war “teach-ins,” turned against the government as our nation’s leaders seemed to be the last ones to figure out that our Southeast Asian venture was a bust. But they were not alone. Major news organs like The New York Times and The Washington Post, which had been enthusiastic supporters of the anti- communist crusade in Vietnam duing the early stages of the war also came out strongly against the government policy in the later stages. Perhaps what we were witnessing was nothing more than the temporary interruption of a trend that was set strongly in motion during World War II, no less for higher education than for the major news media, and now that their failing students no longer run the risk of being drafted to die in pointless battle, college faculties are back on the trend line:
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