Know Your Enemy5 Syys 2025

An Officer and a Spy (w/ John Ganz) [Teaser]

Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy.

Roman Polanski's 2019 film about the Dreyfus affair, An Officer and a Spy, only recently made it's U.S. "premier," running for a few weeks in August at Film Forum in New York City. When it originally was released, it couldn't find an American distributor (and likewise was shunned by streaming services), a consequence of the MeToo moment meeting Polanski's criminal past—in 1978 he fled to Europe after being indicted for the rape of a 13 year-old girl in the United States. Polanski's past is particularly relevant for his film about the falsely accused Jewish officer in the French military, to whom, in publicity materials circulated when An Officer and a Spy came out in Europe in 2019, the director explicitly compared himself.

Of course, we couldn't possibly have had on any other guest than John Ganz to help us understand the politics of the Dreyfus affair, both in 1895 and 2025, and what to make of Polanski's cinematic rendering of it. Topics include: Polanski's life and crimes; Hannah Arendt's treatment of the Dreyfus affair in The Origins of Totalitarianism; anti-semitism in 19th and early 20th century France; the way Polanski largely ignores the political convulsions caused by the Dreyfus affair, instead handling it more as a crime procedural, and why he might have done so; and more.

Sources:

John Ganz, "Reading, Watching," Unpopular Front, Aug 10, 2025

— "Gramscians vs Sorelians," Unpopular Front, Jan 23, 2021

— "The Third Republic and Today," Unpopular Front, Jan 27, 2021

— "The Century of Rubbish," Unpopular Front, Feb 2, 2021

— "From Republic to Reaction," Unpopular Front, Feb 4, 2021

David Bell, "An Officer and a Spy," H-France, March 2021

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)

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The Platner Ordeal (w/ Dorothy Fortenberry) [Teaser]

Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy. Matt and Sam are joined by their great friend Dorothy Fortenberry to discuss the debacle of Graham Platner: the ...

28 Heinä 4min

Gerontocracy in America (w/ Sam Moyn)

Lindsey Graham's death last week at 71 was as remarkable for the senator's relative "youth" as its possible political and electoral consequences, so much so that it actually prompted conspiracy theori...

20 Heinä 1h 8min

Why Patriotism [Teaser]

Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy. This conversation is something of a follow-up to our last episode on Garry Wills's Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Wo...

13 Heinä 11min

Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America

We're ringing in the 250th anniversary of the United States with an episode on Garry Wills's superb, Pulitzer Prize-winning 1992 book, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade the America. It's ce...

6 Heinä 1h 31min

The Left Ascendant in New York City [Teaser]

Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy. In this episode we break down the results from last week's Democratic primaries in New York City, which saw cand...

29 Kesä 2min

Pope Leo XIV's 'Magnifica humanitas' (w/ Jack Hanson)

As promised, here is our episode about Pope Leo XIV's recent encyclical, Magnifica humanitas, in which he brings to bear Catholic social teaching on the perils of artificial intelligence and what they...

22 Kesä 1h 36min

Tucker Carlson and the Anti-Israel Right (w/ Peter Beinart) [Teaser]

Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy. Author and Jewish Currents editor-at-large Peter Beinart returns to "Know Your Enemy" to discuss Tucker Carlson'...

15 Kesä 3min

Leo Strauss's Natural Right and History (w/ Matt Dinan)

Pull up a chair and pour yourself a drink! For the third installment in our occasional series on important conservative books, or important books written by or embraced by conservatives, we take up Le...

9 Kesä 2h 26min