Prison Planet.com » Is Zimmerman America’s Dreyfus?

I’ve been tracking the George Zimmerman case and it does seem to have some surface parallels to the infamous Dreyfus Affair.

For those of you who may not know, Dreyfus was a Jew who was accused of passing French military secrets to the German Embassy in Paris. He was declared guilty and sent to Devil’s Island in French Guiana where he spent almost five years.

In 1896, evidence was unearthed that a French Army major named Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy may have been the one passing information but that evidence was suppressed and Dreyfus’s conviction was sustained.

It took many more years but Dreyfus was eventually set free. He was reinstated as a major in the French Army and served throughout World War I, eventually reaching the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.

Regardless of whether Esterhazy was an agent of a greater power or whether the affair itself was orchestrated, the controversy surrounding Dreyfus was surely indicative of larger issues surrounding France at the time.

The issue then was anti-Semitism. And while modern France has in a sense moved on, it remains a society riven by class conflicts and economic inequalities that are either glossed over or sanctioned by law.

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via Prison Planet.com » Is Zimmerman America’s Dreyfus?.

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