23, history student, Catholic convert, northwesterner, nerd. I like: The X-Files, 30 Rock, Spaced, Arrested Development, medieval history, art and iconography, ecclesiastical architecture, children's literature, Catholic novels, and all kinds of books.

Ask Me Archive

the difficult minute

Torturer’s Apprentice →

medieval:

This is so disturbing.

The new science of interrogation is not, in fact, so new at all: “extraordinary rendition” and “enhanced interrogation” and “waterboarding” all spring directly from the practices of the medieval Roman Catholic Church. The distance, in both technique and ideology, between the Inquisition’s interrogation regime and 21st-century America’s is uncomfortably short—and provides a chilling harbinger of what can happen when moral certainty gets yoked to the machinery of torture.

Ohhhh give me a BREAK! This article is not good history. It cannot even describe the phenomena of medieval torture or the “ideology” of medieval interrogation and juridical process, let alone its supposed “closeness” to 21st century torture.

As a reader, ask yourself. Why do we as a society need to turn to the middle ages (the article even uses “Dark Ages,” oh my goshhhhhh) or “the Inquisition” (which did not exist as such) to talk about the immorality of torture? Non-Western and non-Christian rulers used torture as a part of their juridical process in many different periods. The Soviets used torture. There are many more examples, and many more modern ones, which we would do much better to pay attention to, since we are much closer to them in situation and outlook. This article uses medieval torture as a scare tactic. You know medieval people were horrible because you have been told they were horrible - because whatever we do that is horrible has been traced back to them by people with a vested interest in drawing lines where they want them drawn: to attack Spaniards or Germans or Russians or Poles, to attack Catholicism, to attack supposed anti-intellectualism or supposed over-intellectualism, to serve social or economic or religious or political agendas, to promote nationalism, racism, socialism, capitalism, and any number of other modern preoccupations.

So yes, oppose the use of torture. But don’t bring the medievals into it. They have nothing to do with it.

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