The Grand Inquisitor's Manual (42 page)

The story is told that the execution of Kamenev and Zinoviev was sometimes reenacted for the amusement of Stalin in the privacy of his dacha, with his own bodyguard in the role of Zinoviev, “begging for Stalin to be fetched and then crying out ‘Hear O Israel.’” Even after the Great Terror subsided, Yiddish culture in general and Jewish writers in particular were repeatedly targeted by the Soviet secret police. After the defeat of Nazi Germany, a new wave of persecution was directed against the Jewish population of the Soviet Union, and Jewish figures in the Communist regimes of various satellite countries in Eastern Europe were put on display in a whole new round of show trials.
⁷⁵

A new purge was being prepared for the Jewish population of the Soviet Union in the last years of Stalin’s life. The signs of the impending catastrophe could be read between the lines in
Pravda,
where the phrase “rootless cosmopolitans” was adopted as a code for “Jews”—yet another repurposing of the figure of the Wandering Jew—and Jewish men and women were pointedly identified in print by their original family names in addition to their adopted revolutionary ones. The medieval slander of the Jew as a poisoner was revived in a campaign against the Jewish doctors serving on the medical staff of the Kremlin, who were accused of conspiring to murder the Soviet leadership en masse. Only the death of Stalin in 1953 prevented these seeds of anti-Semitism from flowering into yet another Great Terror.

It is also true, however, that both Hitler and Stalin singled out various other victims for mass arrest, deportation, and execution. Hitler persecuted homosexuals, Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and otherwise good Germans who suffered from birth defects and mental illness; Stalin persecuted the landowning peasantry called the kulaks, the Polish officer corps, and various national minorities—the Balts, Chechens, and Tartars. What the victims actually believed and what they actually did were ultimately less important than the fact that they provoked fear and loathing in these two powerful men. Here, then, is yet another example of how the inquisitorial apparatus can be repurposed and redirected at will: “[T]he task of the totalitarian police is not to discover crimes,” as Hannah Arendt puts its, “but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population.”
⁷⁶

What Hitler and Stalin had in common was the same aspiration that animated the first inquisitors—the simple but deadly notion that it was both possible and desirable to rid the world of anyone whom the regime deemed to be unworthy of life. Significantly, Hitler, Stalin, and Pope Innocent III all used the word
filth
to apply to a different set of victims, but each saw himself as the ordained agent of purification, each arrogated to himself the absolute power to decide who lived and died, and each was convinced of both the rightness and the inevitability of his role in history. If all three were arguably suffering from symptoms of megalomania, it is also true that all of them found a way to validate their madness in the inquisitorial idea.

On a few other points, though, useful distinctions can and should be made between Nazism and Stalinism. Like the medieval and Roman Inquisitions, the Stalinist regime insisted only on correct belief—at least in theory if not always in practice—and was willing to entertain the prospect that “deviationists” might recant their thought-crimes and return to the party line; but the Nazis, like the Spanish inquisitors, saw Jewish blood as a crime for which no expiation was possible. Again like the first inquisitors but unlike their Nazi counterparts, the Soviet secret police more often imprisoned and enslaved their victims rather than simply murdering them. And the Soviets felt obliged to preserve a faint semblance of “legal justice,” even if it was strained and sometimes wholly symbolic—a burden of conscience that never seemed to trouble the German police and soldiers who served in the death squads or the men and women who staffed the death camps.

“No one tried and sentenced the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, but the vast majority of inmates in Soviet camps had been interrogated (however cursorily), tried (however farcically) and found guilty (even if it took less than a minute),” observes Anne Applebaum. “Undoubtedly, the conviction that they were acting within the law was part of what motivated those working within the security services.”
⁷⁷

Yet there is a certain moral risk to making such fine distinctions in the culpability of torturers and executioners. We might conclude that one practitioner of terror is more egregious than all the others and thus more worthy of our condemnation. But if the long history of the Inquisition teaches us anything at all, it is that the machinery of persecution, once switched on, cannot be easily slowed or directed, much less stopped. Nor does the machinery require the high technology of a modern industrial state; little inquisitions have been conducted by impoverished regimes throughout the Third World, and we have seen for ourselves in recent years that it is quite possible to carry out a campaign of genocide in a jungle or a desert with nothing more than clubs and machetes.

Above all, we cannot and should not try to distance ourselves from any of these inquisitions by reassuring ourselves that no abuse of “moral justice” could occur in the American democracy. The naming of names as a test of earnest confession is hardly unique to the Inquisition, and neither is the insistence on referring to “harsh interrogation techniques” when we are talking about torture. We need only pause and reflect on the plain fact that at least one of the tools that was used for six centuries by the hooded friar-inquisitors has also been used more recently by young men and women in American uniforms. We call it “waterboarding,” they called it “ordeal by water,” but torture under any name is still torture, even if the inquisitorial habit of mind has always preferred a euphemism over plain speech.

AMERICAN INQUISITION

There is prodigious danger in the seeking of loose spirits. I fear it, I fear it. Let us rather blame ourselves….

ARTHUR MILLER,
The Crucible

O
nly once did the Inquisition operate on the soil of England, and then only because the pope prevailed upon a reluctant English king to grant permission to a flying squad of inquisitors to complete the destruction of the Knights Templar. Like other Templars across Europe, some 229 English members of the order were arrested and interrogated under torture on the same charges of heresy, blasphemy, and sexual perversion that resulted in the burning of so many of their fellow warrior-monks. With the exception of the Templars, the only other English victims of the Inquisition were a few inoffensive merchants and sailors who showed up in a Spanish port with an English translation of the Bible in their baggage and thus faced prosecution for the heresy of being Protestants.

The fact remains, however, that England had its own sorry tradition of terror in the name of God. The Jewish community of York, sheltering from a mob in the keep of a castle, was massacred en masse in 1190. A man who had converted to Judaism was burned at the stake as a heretic in Oxford in 1222, and every Jew in England was expelled by royal decree in 1290, more than two hundred years before the same idea occurred to Ferdinand and Isabella. The preaching of the Lollards, who resembled the Waldensians in their defiance of the Roman Catholic church and their insistence on the right to translate the Bible into vernacular languages, prompted Parliament to adopt the death penalty as “a settled punishment for heresy” in 1400. The persecution of religious dissenters ran so deep in England in the sixteenth century that one London goldsmith made a bequest in his will “to buy faggots for the burning of heretics.”
¹

Women accused of witchcraft fared no better in England than they did on the continent during the Witch Craze. Even without the assistance of the Inquisition, the civil courts were not reluctant to pass judgment on poor, eccentric, or troubled women who were imagined to have trafficked with the Devil and worked various kinds of diabolical mischief on their neighbors. So it was that the land of the Magna Carta also produced such horrors as the burning of a pregnant young woman on charges of sorcery in 1555—she suffered a miscarriage at the stake, and the baby, still alive, was “tossed back into the flames as an offspring of Satan.”
²

Defenders of the Inquisition like to point out that England, so proud to have avoided the worst excesses of the inquisitors, was hardly kind or gentle when it came to the use of torture and capital punishment. “The Spanish Inquisition was certainly no worse than contemporary secular courts in other countries,” writes one historian, “including England.” Defendants who refused to plead guilty or not guilty when charged with a crime under English common law, for example, were subjected to a form of torture called
peine forte et dure
(“strong and hard pain”) in which stones were piled on the victim’s chest until he or she answered or died. Convicted criminals were still being drawn and quartered—and hangings still served as a gruesome form of popular entertainment—well into the nineteenth century. Not until 1868, in fact, did the practice of public hanging come to an end in England.
³

Along with the common law and certain notions of civil liberty, all of these uglier traditions were carried to the New World in the baggage of the Pilgrim Fathers. Indeed, the Puritans were true believers and theocrats who sought religious liberty for themselves but refused to grant the same liberty to anyone else. One of the dirty little secrets of American history is the fact that the Quakers were ruthlessly persecuted in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the seventeenth century. Quaker men and women were flogged for their defiance of Puritan law—like the Cathars, they refused to recognize clerical authority and declined to take oaths on religious principle—and they were ultimately ordered to leave the colony on pain of death. A few of the Quakers who defied the order of expulsion were tried and hanged by the civil courts of Massachusetts as thought-criminals in a brave new world.

It was the first American inquisition, but not the last.

“Who torments you?” is the simple question that set off a witch panic in Salem Village in the winter of 1692, the single most notorious example of how the machinery of persecution can be made to operate at any place and time, even here in America.

A clutch of bored teenage girls in the settlement of Salem began to spend their idle hours in the company of a household slave named Tituba, who amused them with some of the “tricks and spells” she recalled from her childhood in Barbados. Back home in their own strict households, the girls began to act out in strange and unsettling ways, barking like dogs and braying like donkeys, screaming and stamping their feet to drown out the words of the family at prayer. Surely these outbreaks of adolescent hysteria were evidence of nothing more than a guilty conscience; after all, if Quakerism was a capital crime in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the consequences of dabbling in black magic must have shaken the hearts of the Puritan girls who played in Tituba’s kitchen.
⁴

“Who torments you?” asked the credulous ministers and magistrates who assembled in Salem to investigate the curious phenomenon. Surely, they thought, the grotesque behavior was best explained as demon possession at the behest of a cult of Devil worshippers, and they wanted the girls to name names. At first, the girls were silent, but when their interrogators began to suggest a few likely culprits—including not only Tituba, an obvious suspect, but also various other citizens of Salem, all eccentric or unpopular—they saw a way to spare themselves by blaming others. They readily affirmed that Tituba was one of their tormentors, and they went on to denounce the wife of a common laborer who was thought to be “shrewish, idle, and above all slovenly,” and then a widow who was suspected of taking her handyman as a lover before marrying him. The list of accused witches and wizards grew ever longer, ranging from a five-year-old girl to an eighty-year-old man.
⁵

“They should be at the whipping post,” said a skeptical farmer named John Procter about the chorus of accusers. “If they are let alone we should all be devils and witches.”
⁶

Procter’s anxiety, as it turned out, was well founded. After the first few accused witches were formally put on trial in civil court on charges of sorcery, both Procter and his wife were denounced by the girls, who claimed that the diabolical couple was invisibly afflicting them even as they sat in the courtroom. “Why he can pinch as well as she!” one of the girls cried out. Such was the quality of “spectral evidence”—more accurately described by author Marion L. Starkey as “the crazed fantasies of wenches in their teens”—on which the judges were content to find the Procters and other defendants guilty of the crime of sorcery. A few of the accused witches managed to escape the gibbet by offering their own abject confessions, and when prompted by the prosecutors, the confessors were pressed to denounce yet others, the same chain of betrayal that had so often operated the gears of the inquisitorial apparatus in other times and places.
⁷

“There are wheels within wheels in this village,” one of the characters in Arthur Miller’s
The Crucible
is made to say, “and fires within fires.”
⁸

As with the Inquisition, not even spouses were safe from each other during the Salem witch trials. A woman named Martha Cory fell under suspicion when she reacted to the first news of the adolescent coven in Tituba’s kitchen by laughing out loud. Her eighty-year-old husband, Giles, was called as a witness at her trial, where he allowed that he found it hard to pray when she was around—an ambiguous remark, as was all his testimony, but damning words in the judges’ ears. Later, Giles himself was accused of witchcraft, and—perhaps because he had been so easily manipulated into betraying his wife—he fell silent in the face of the magistrates. So Giles was subjected to the traditional English torture of
peine forte et dure
in an effort to extract a plea from the stubborn old man; by refusing to answer as stones were piled on his chest, he effectively prevented the court from exercising its jurisdiction over him. According to tradition, if not the historical record, Giles Cory uttered only two words as he was crushed to death: “More weight.”
⁹