It is not surprising that the state, the government, the top ranks of the military, and the powers associated with them can all be contributing factors to wrongful convictions. When state power or government power deliberately concocts wrongful cases or deliberately covers up wrongful cases that have already been cast, it also eliminates or reduces the illusory sacred color that has long been formed in society.
The Dreyfus case was originally made out of a misjudgment. Except for the perjury of someone who committed the case, the entire case became a case of wrongdoing, including those senior officers who were responsible, and no one did it intentionally. Honestly admit that a blunder has been made, and its guilt can be forgiven. When new evidence and facts gradually reveal that the case may be a wrongful case, it is no longer forgivable for those in power to deliberately conceal the terrible fact that this is a wrongful case.
In fact, we can let go of our naivety and realize this problem: the people who make up the government and the upper echelons of power are, to put it bluntly, people who have seven emotions and six desires and can do good or evil. In this case, they should be restrained like ordinary people. Those who hold great power can easily be deified. To put it bluntly, they are human beings, not gods, just like us. A basic understanding that we should gain from cases like Dreyfus is that the abstract and sacred terms of state and government conceal that those who make up the state and government are ordinary people, not angels, just like everyone else.
Perhaps, even recognizing this from cases like Dreyfus, we may be reluctant or unconscious to think about it, and thereby remove these abstract and sacred concepts from their illusory aura. In fact, if some abstract and seemingly sacred concepts are reduced to human beings, one will find that their sacredness cannot stand dissection and scrutiny. As Tolstoy said: "People feel that it is not people who make these demands on them, but some kind of special life, which they call a boss, a government, a country. But once they ask themselves, this boss, the government , who the country is, will understand that these people are just ordinary people like everyone else, and it is not others who compel others to carry out all their orders, but those who are equal to those who are subjected to violence."
When the people who constitute the government are a group of political hooligans and rogues, and when the power of the government is abused arbitrarily, its sanctity is even more shrouded in black smoke.
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