Christopher Hitchens despre unele din scrisorile lui Emile Zola, ocazionate de afacerea Dreyfus. (..) People forget that, before he addressed his most celebrated letter, J’Accuse, to the president of the Republic, Zola had also issued open letters to the youth of France, and to France itself. He did not confine himself to excoriating the corrupted elite, but held up a mirror in which public opinion could see its own ugliness reflected. To the young people he wrote, after recalling the braver days when the Latin Quarter had been ablaze with sympathy for Poland and Greece, of his disgust with the students who had demonstrated against the Dreyfusards: "Anti-Semites among our young men? They do exist then, do they? This idiotic poison has really already overthrown their intellects and corrupted their souls? What a saddening, what a disquieting element for the twentieth century which is about to dawn. A hundred years after the Declaration of the Rights of Man, a hundred years after the supreme act of tolerance and emancipation, we go back to religious warfare, to the most odious and the most stupid of fanaticisms!" Describing the sick moral atmosphere, Zola used a striking image: "A shameful terror reigns, the bravest turn cowards, and no one dares say what he thinks for fear of being denounced as a traitor and a bribe-taker. The few newspapers which at first stood out for justice are now crawling in the dust before their readers . . . " He returned to this theme in his letter to the French nation, asking his fellow citizens to consider: "Are you aware that the danger lies precisely in this somber obstinacy of public opinion? A hundred newspapers repeat daily that public opinion does not wish the innocence of Dreyfus, that his guilt is necessary to the safety of the country. And do you know to what point you yourself will be guilty, should those in authority take advantage of such a sophism to stifle the truth?" Never one to be abstract in his analysis of society, Zola exposed the almost sadomasochistic relationship that existed between insecure mobs and their adulation of “strong men” and the military: "Examine your conscience. Was it in truth your Army which you wished to defend when none were attacking it? Was it not rather the sword that you felt the sudden need of extolling? At bottom, yours is not yet the real republican blood; the sight of a plumed helmet still makes your heart beat quicker, no king can come amongst us but you fall in love with him. . . . It is not of your Army that you are thinking, but of the General who happens to have caught your fancy." Finest of all in my opinion was Zola’s direct and measured indictment of the complicity of the Church: "And do you know where else you walk, France? You go to the Church of Rome, you return to that past of intolerance and theocracy against which the greatest of your children fought. . . . Today, the tactics of the anti-Semites are very simple. Catholicism, seeking in vain to influence the people, founded workmen’s clubs and multiplied pilgrimages; it failed to win them back or lead them again to the foot of the altar. The question seemed definitely settled, the churches remained empty, the people had lost their faith. And behold, circumstances have occurred which make it possible to infect them with an anti-Semitic fury, and having been poisoned with this virus of fanaticism, they are launched upon the streets to shout “Down with the Jews! Death to the Jews!”. . . When the people of France have been changed into fanatics and torturers, when their generosity and love of the rights of man, conquered with so much difficulty, have been rooted up out of their hearts, then no doubt God will do the rest." - Christopher Hitchens, "Letters to a Young Contrarian"
Posted on: Tue, 09 Jul 2013 15:37:23 +0000
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