Return of the Inquisition
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1434867,00.html
Nicholas Lezard finds dark precedents of the horrors of Guant=E0namo Bay
in Norman Cohn's account of medieval persecution, Europe's Inner Demons
Saturday March 12, 2005
The Guardian
Europe's Inner Demons, by Norman Cohn (Pimlico, =A312.50)
A few days ago, I had to excuse myself from a pleasant social occasion
with the words, "I'm sorry, but I have to read a book about church
persecution in the middle ages". For this is indeed what Europe's Inner
Demons is about. It was assumed, when I made my parting remark, that
such a work must be dry, horribly over-detailed and quite remote from
all contemporary concerns.
As it turns out, there is quite a lot of detail here, but not only is
it not dry, these details have quite a startling bearing on what's
going on now. One does not want to force the issue, but it is hard, in
the light of recent events, not to feel a frisson when we read of how
torture was used to obtain the answers required by the powers that be.
When someone in Guantanamo confesses to buying surface-to-air missiles
in Tipton, he is the latest in a long line of precedent whose early
points are witches confessing, under torture, to eating the flesh of
unbaptised babies and kissing the devil's *****. And when we read of
King Philip the Fair of France and his decision to suppress the Knights
Templar (they were too rich and stood in the way of his own imperial
ambitions), we may find ourselves raising an eyebrow at this: "Philip
could not, however, rely on the operation of ordinary criminal law to
produce the desired result; for that, he had to have recourse to the
'inquisitorial' procedure which had been developed for dealing with
heretics and which had been perfected by the Inquisition during the
previous century."
Inquisition
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