Outstanding Robert Harris, author: 'An Officer and a Spy'

How do we humans get ourselves into such a pretty pickle?

This novel is so carefully researched that although it is fiction as regards conversations and many personal details, every major character is correctly named, dates and all major events seem to be historically accurate and, at the outset in an 'Author's Note', Robert Harris makes clear this:

"None of the characters in the pages that follow, not even the most minor is wholly fictional, and almost all of what occurs, at least in some form, actually happened in real life."

How do supposedly professional and well-trained soldiers and officers get themselves into such a state of prejudice, of careless practice verging on outright incompetence, of hatred for colleagues, that one of their own gets picked out as being a spy?  As a result, the totally wrong man has everything, supposedly, pointing at him when there is a much more likely candidate anyway!  This, even when they know their colleague will, with 99% certainty, be found guilty and it will culminate in a horrific death sentence or, solitary confinement for life on a tiny rocky island in the South Atlantic, guarded by a dozen prison guards.  READ THE BOOK to get the correct picture over what happened!  (I read the 600 pages, from the library, in four days!)

This is the Dreyfus affair of 1895 in Paris.  The victim was a Jew.  Centuries of Christian persecution of Jews when these Christians knew that the founder of their faith was himself a Jew and, a man of non-violence, too!  But worse was to follow, of course, from a supposedly Christian nation.  Then, in 1948, the tables were turned but, not on a Christian nation but on a mainly Muslim one and, a tiny one at that!

At the end of the following century in Birmingham, England we have our own affair/scandal.  We get two mainline railways (and nearly a third) turned into tramways and even a dog walkers' paradise of a 16 Kms walkway.  How absurd is that?  And continuing into the following century to the present day!!

When God knew how we would turn out, like the above, it does make me wonder what on earth is going on, not just on earth but in heaven, too.