From Abu Ghraib to Ionesco, and Beyond
During a recent brief exchange in the "Rook's Rant" weblog, I was informed by several people that I was badly uninformed about the horrors of the Inquisition.
The proprietor of that weblog had kicked off things. As a lot of people justifiably are -- except those on the side of Russ Limbaugh, who said that it was merely a case of some young Americans having "a good time" -- Rook was extremely disgusted by the extreme mistreatment of their Iraqi prisoners by the American military police at Saddam Hussein's old torture prison in Abu Ghraib. Rook said that it was as bad as the Inquisition, and his commentors mostly agreed with him.
But I said that I thought that, though I didn't excuse the actions of the MP's, the doings at Abu Ghraib fell far short of the misdeeds of the Inquisition, where sheer horror is concerned and in terms of the kinds of torture used, and in their capability for producing incredible pain, and in the number of deaths that had resulted, which I said had, over the several centuries, run up into the millions.
Not so, someone said. While the exact number is impossible to know, the total deaths in the Spanish Inquisition ran from 3,000 to 6,000 at most. And someone else set aside the concept of torture entirely and made it sound as if the prisoners were instead merely left to languish for various lengths of time in dark, dank dungeons to meditate on their sins.
I was surprised to hear that, and I am still suspicious that I fell afoul of a whitewash. I've been around long enough to have seen lots of cases where things that were taken as solid fact 50 years ago have, through careful scientific investigation or scholarly research, been shown to be mere myths. But those assertions just fly too much in the face of what I have always heard about the Inquisition.
I suppose I was prompted to take my point of view so quickly because I had just finished reading the current best-seller called "The Da Vinci Codes," by Dan Brown. Though it is fiction it contains hundreds of very interesting verifiable facts, such as the layout of Paris and the dimensions of the Louvre. But also it makes statements that the author passes off as fact that are in fact unverifiable, and some are just plain wrong, especially where Leonardo da Vinci is concerned, in my quite unhumble opinion in this matter.
As a painter, I have read a lot of stuff about Da Vinci, and I feel that I have a pretty good handle on where that bird was coming from. So I refuse to believe that he was the grand master for many years of a secret society pledged to protect the relics of the Holy Grail that the Knights Templar had dug up from under a temple in Jerusalem centuries earlier. I think of him as having been strictly a loner instead, concerned only with all his genius investigations into first one thing and then another.
Brown said that Da Vinci had had "hundreds" of commissions from the religious authorities, but it's my impression that a great number of those commissions came instead from varous noblemen and that he was often in trouble with those authorities -- one reason that he stayed on the road so much and eventually ended up dying not in his native Italy but in France.
Most egregious of all, Brown kept referring to "The Last Supper" as a fresco, when it is in fact -- or least was, before it had to be restored so many times due to floods, bombs, and what-not -- a tempera wall painting, done on a base of mastic and pitch, not on damp plaster that has to be applied fresh on the wall each and every day, as in fresco.
So I suppose it would be easy for one to similarly discount Brown's assertion a hundred or so pages into his bestseller that over its 300 years of existence, the Inquisition tortured and killed five million women accused of witchcraft.
I did a couple of quick searches on Google -- the Inquisition is too hard on my increasingly squeamish stomach for me to be interested into looking into it thoroughly -- and I found that it is indeed an indigestible can of worms. The wide range of estimates of the deaths from a few thousand to as much as 68 million is just one aspect of that.
It appears that the Inquisition has fallen into the center of an intense religious fight, with those of the side of the Catholics (who have good reason to be highly dissatisfied with Brown's book) struggling hard to refute the attacks from anti-Catholics who are using the Inquisition as a weapon against them.
I noticed that none of the people in "Rook's Rant" tried to deny the existence and use by the various Torquemadas of various unspeakable instruments of torture, such as the bastinado and the rack. But as to the number of deaths that ensued, it looks as if we have to resort to a line from Eugene Ionesco's "The Bald Soprano," a play from the Theatre of the Absurd that I much admired when it was first published, back in the 1950's. This line has the peculiar property of not sounding like much when taken by itself, but it is hilarious when you hear it during a performance of the play.
"The truth must lie somewhere between."
The proprietor of that weblog had kicked off things. As a lot of people justifiably are -- except those on the side of Russ Limbaugh, who said that it was merely a case of some young Americans having "a good time" -- Rook was extremely disgusted by the extreme mistreatment of their Iraqi prisoners by the American military police at Saddam Hussein's old torture prison in Abu Ghraib. Rook said that it was as bad as the Inquisition, and his commentors mostly agreed with him.
But I said that I thought that, though I didn't excuse the actions of the MP's, the doings at Abu Ghraib fell far short of the misdeeds of the Inquisition, where sheer horror is concerned and in terms of the kinds of torture used, and in their capability for producing incredible pain, and in the number of deaths that had resulted, which I said had, over the several centuries, run up into the millions.
Not so, someone said. While the exact number is impossible to know, the total deaths in the Spanish Inquisition ran from 3,000 to 6,000 at most. And someone else set aside the concept of torture entirely and made it sound as if the prisoners were instead merely left to languish for various lengths of time in dark, dank dungeons to meditate on their sins.
I was surprised to hear that, and I am still suspicious that I fell afoul of a whitewash. I've been around long enough to have seen lots of cases where things that were taken as solid fact 50 years ago have, through careful scientific investigation or scholarly research, been shown to be mere myths. But those assertions just fly too much in the face of what I have always heard about the Inquisition.
I suppose I was prompted to take my point of view so quickly because I had just finished reading the current best-seller called "The Da Vinci Codes," by Dan Brown. Though it is fiction it contains hundreds of very interesting verifiable facts, such as the layout of Paris and the dimensions of the Louvre. But also it makes statements that the author passes off as fact that are in fact unverifiable, and some are just plain wrong, especially where Leonardo da Vinci is concerned, in my quite unhumble opinion in this matter.
As a painter, I have read a lot of stuff about Da Vinci, and I feel that I have a pretty good handle on where that bird was coming from. So I refuse to believe that he was the grand master for many years of a secret society pledged to protect the relics of the Holy Grail that the Knights Templar had dug up from under a temple in Jerusalem centuries earlier. I think of him as having been strictly a loner instead, concerned only with all his genius investigations into first one thing and then another.
Brown said that Da Vinci had had "hundreds" of commissions from the religious authorities, but it's my impression that a great number of those commissions came instead from varous noblemen and that he was often in trouble with those authorities -- one reason that he stayed on the road so much and eventually ended up dying not in his native Italy but in France.
Most egregious of all, Brown kept referring to "The Last Supper" as a fresco, when it is in fact -- or least was, before it had to be restored so many times due to floods, bombs, and what-not -- a tempera wall painting, done on a base of mastic and pitch, not on damp plaster that has to be applied fresh on the wall each and every day, as in fresco.
So I suppose it would be easy for one to similarly discount Brown's assertion a hundred or so pages into his bestseller that over its 300 years of existence, the Inquisition tortured and killed five million women accused of witchcraft.
I did a couple of quick searches on Google -- the Inquisition is too hard on my increasingly squeamish stomach for me to be interested into looking into it thoroughly -- and I found that it is indeed an indigestible can of worms. The wide range of estimates of the deaths from a few thousand to as much as 68 million is just one aspect of that.
It appears that the Inquisition has fallen into the center of an intense religious fight, with those of the side of the Catholics (who have good reason to be highly dissatisfied with Brown's book) struggling hard to refute the attacks from anti-Catholics who are using the Inquisition as a weapon against them.
I noticed that none of the people in "Rook's Rant" tried to deny the existence and use by the various Torquemadas of various unspeakable instruments of torture, such as the bastinado and the rack. But as to the number of deaths that ensued, it looks as if we have to resort to a line from Eugene Ionesco's "The Bald Soprano," a play from the Theatre of the Absurd that I much admired when it was first published, back in the 1950's. This line has the peculiar property of not sounding like much when taken by itself, but it is hilarious when you hear it during a performance of the play.
"The truth must lie somewhere between."
posted by Carl (aka Sofarsogoo) | 8:59 AM
3 Comments:
Hi, Mr. Musing! Thanks for dropping by.
Gee, my comment on Rook's Rant comparing Abu Ghraib to the Spanish Inquisition was mostly a toss off. I'm about as informed on the Spanish Inquisition as I am about international economics, that is hardly at all. I was actually speaking more about my perseption of the Spanish Inquisition. As all things, perseption is what really counts when people discuss issues. Also, as the years advance, so to do bars get raised and lowered. If the human race wishes to be seen as approaching the ideal that is considered "God", then raising the bar of humane treatment means considering Abu Ghraib to be as bad today as the Spanish Inquisition was bad then.
Gee, my comment on Rook's Rant comparing Abu Ghraib to the Spanish Inquisition was mostly a toss off. I'm about as informed on the Spanish Inquisition as I am about international economics, that is hardly at all. I was actually speaking more about my perseption of the Spanish Inquisition. As all things, perseption is what really counts when people discuss issues. Also, as the years advance, so to do bars get raised and lowered. If the human race wishes to be seen as approaching the ideal that is considered "God", then raising the bar of humane treatment means considering Abu Ghraib to be as bad today as the Spanish Inquisition was bad then.
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