One of the best articles I’ve read. Thank you! By illuminating the temperament of today’s conversation with a historic event, participants might recognize their folly. Now, as then, the discussion needs to focus on the deception and lies by our governments, that are advancing their own personal gains and cover ups, at our expense, using truth to unite the global populous.

It’s a good job today’s social media were not around more than a century ago. Think of the passions inflamed by hash tags. Think of the opportunities to supress by ‘fact checking’. Think of the people being ‘absolutely convinced’ by posts unrelated to actual truth.
Or you could equally argue (as in the article) that those injustices back then were merely the political world playing out in years rather than days.

Zola knew the difference between the truth and My Truth.

Ms. McGregor is quite right. This is a superb piece. It uses the Dreyfus Affair to illustrate the point Camus made.
It is the unhappy lot of rebels to be shot at by both sides. More than that, rebels have to resist the temptation to belong to the tribal groups who embrace and protect their own, whilst making war on the enemy tribal groups.
How can democracy survive in such an environment? Only if there are sufficient rebels in every generation who are are willing to suffer the discomfort of never being ‘one of us’, and are willing to put in the intellectual spadework of thinking for themselves.

I’ve come late to this article, but worth the wait. A brilliant example of history, reportage, social sabotage and artistic endeavour realised in public action and most of all, relevance to the world today.

Without doubt, one of the best i’ve read on Unherd.

Edit: and the Comments too!

At last, confirmation that I am indeed a rebel!

The radical centre – a memorable description. Radical in its refusal to submit to the disembodied dictates of ideology (in whatever form) and in its fidelity to what is actual and true. This was the great discovery of Orwell in the 1930s, having experienced how the ideology of the extreme left overlapped with that of the extreme right, and neither cared about justice or the freedom of the individual. As always, the real nature of ideological extremism is made manifest in the poor quality of the individuals who espouse it – here in Britain we need think only of those who gave presided over our precipitous decline in recent years – and I refer to ideological extremism of the right as well as the left.

Agreed. A concise, well written article. We see many parallels today in the way so called democratic governments pursue whistleblowers and how defamation laws can muzzle those calling out the dubious activities of the rich and powerful. The pursuit of Julian Assange by the US government and the willingness of the UK government (and to a degree our previous Australian government) to go along with it. Clichéd though it may be, there’s the old Edmund Burke quote about evil triumphing when good men do nothing.
As for antisemitism at the centre of the story, it is indeed the devil that has never gone away. It changes its names and faces and re-emerges in new guises, like, for instance, the conspiracy theories of Q Anon and others that lure people of the left and right down rabbit holes, and the supporters of the BDS movement who proclaim that it’s nothing to do with the antisemitism.

Is this writer trying to say that the left was as Anti-Semitic and authoritarian as the right? If so, it is a misuse of the Affaire. Anti-Semitism on the left disappeared in the early 20th century, partly as a result of the Affaire’s exposure of the nature of Anti-Semitism. The French left and liberals, exemplified by Clemenceau and Jaures, were the linchpins of the struggle against authoritarianism in the Third Republic.