Edward Snowden and the Dreyfus Affair [View all]

[WilliamPitt]

So Edward Snowden absconds with the "crown jewels" of the NSA and begins leaking portions of his cache to the Guardian in order to let people know about the depth and breadth of surveillance overreach in America.

He is vilified by some, championed by others...but in the fullness of time, it is generally agreed upon that we needed very much to know what Snowden was trying to tell us. The president's own NSA review panel, by announcing today that serious and substantive changes need to be made, has simultaneously agreed with and absolved Edward Snowden.

Mark Twain once said that history does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme. In Edward Snowden, I see the outlines of a similar affair involving a French soldier named Alfred Dryfus, who became the fulcrum of far larger forces within French society.

Historian Katrin Schultheiss: "The enduring significance of the Dreyfus Affair as a subject of historical inquiry lies in its manifest embodiment of multiple narratives and multiple strands of historical causality. It shows how longstanding beliefs and tensions can be transformed by particular circumstances and by particular individuals into a juggernaut that alters the political and cultural landscape for decades. In the interest of increasing our understanding of both past and present, the complexities of that transformation should be recognized and analyzed rather than packaged for moral or political usefulness."

Thoughts?

For reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreyfus_affair