A Merciless and Unpredictable Tyrant

The Fragile Thinness of Civilization

English history--like most histories--is replete with tyrants and tyrannies.  Henry VIII was one of the worst.  We acknowledge that he was a creature of his times.  The administration of capital justice was so often based upon witnesses whose testimony, in turn, was based upon confessions extracted under torture.

Our times have seen plenty of this kind of evil malice.  Stalin, for example, wanted in some strange way to dress up his infamy and cruelty with show trials.  Testimonies extracted under torture, or the threat thereof, formed a large part of these trials.  Stalin knew all these confessions were garbage, but the formalities had to be adhered to.  Appearances needed to  be maintained.  Why Stalin persisted in such bizarre arrangements is hard to fathom.  Surely he could not have been trying to convince himself.  Was he trying to keep alive the myth of the New Model Man in the minds of the peasantry?

In Henry's case one driver was the need for a legitimate (male) heir; he had a hard time finding the right queen who would produce the goods.  His second queen, Anne was eventually convicted of multiple adulteries and executed.  Was Anne an adulteress?  It seems not.  The testimony against her was probably extracted under torture.

Lest We Forget

Persecution in North Korea

Christians Face Beatings, Rape, Torture for Professing Faith

Frances Martel
Breitbart News

Christian North Koreans who have escaped the brutal regime tell of outrageous human rights abuses against anyone suspected of professing the faith, including routine beatings and rapes and specialized torture for those involved in underground prayer.

In a report Wednesday, Fox News profiled North Korean defector Choi Kwanghyuk, who was arrested after founding an underground house church. Choi escaped a labor camp shortly before he believes the regime was ready to transfer him to a concentration camp to end his life.  Before he escaped, however, he asserted that he was tortured and witnessed the torture of many others.

“I decided to escape because I thought that once they sent me to the other camp, they could eventually send me to the concentration camp or kill me,” Choi told Fox News. “I was traveling back and forth between China and North Korea, but they kept searching for me, and I knew it could put my friends in danger too, so I left.”

According to Fox, Choi witnessed a wide variety of torture:

Pagan Practices

No Place For Torture In a Just War

We have the rather unusual situation where a sitting US president publicly claims that torture is ethical, whilst his Secretary of Defense says it is counter-productive and of no use.  James "Mad Dog" Mattis is reported as adopting a pragmatic position (implying that if were to work, he would endorse torture).  President Trump says he will abide by Mad Dog's greater experience and wisdom in matters military and engaging in war.  

This is hardly a satisfactory position.  One can easily foresee a particularly gruesome terrorist attack on US soil with many deaths and casualties (think Twin Towers) and with evident extensive conspiracies attached (think 1605 Gunpowder Plot in England).  Expect Donald Trump in fear and anger and frustration to order the use of torture out of retaliation and anger more than anything else, whilst justifying it by the supposed information it would reap.

The sad and unacceptable thing is that both Trump and Mattis appear to base their moral position on pragmatism, or, to put it in a wider philosophical context, on utilitarianism.  It has long been a fatal flaw of that particular philosophy that the end most certainly does not justify the means.  The Christian position is clear: both ends sought and means employed must be holy, just, and good.  The West--particularly the Anglo-Saxon West--has suffered under the barren amoral wasteland of utilitarianism far too long.

Man's Inhumanity to Man, Part II

Satan's Emissaries

The history of Burma (Myanmar) provides a case study in cruelty and man's inhumanity to man.  Part I canvassed British colonial inhumanity to the native Burmese tribes.  Ironically, British "civilised" cruelty was little different to the capricious personality cults of many Burmese kings in previous centuries.  

The twentieth century witnessed a global explosion of repressive, totalitarian regimes.  Millions upon millions lost their lives, sacrificed upon the altar of secularist ideologies (Mao, Hitler, Lenin/Stalin, Pol Pot).  The Killing Fields were liberally irrigated by the blood of  millions of sacrificial victims to cult of Man as God.  Burma has been one of the longest running totalitarian regimes.  Now, it appears, even its dark times may be coming to an end.  Its repressive military regime is one of the last to survive--along with North Korea.

This is not to imagine, of course, that there are no repressive regimes left upon earth.  One only has to glance at Islamic authoritarian states (Saudi Arabia, Iran, Palestinian Authority, ISIS) to see brutal injustice continuing its work.  But the size and scale of the repression in Burma  and North Korea have taken human deification to another level entirely.

Emma Larkin describes the tender embraces of Insein Prison in Yangon, a place of fearsome repression, torture, and human suffering.

Man's Inhumanity to Man, Part I

Blaming the Mongolian Race

In Emma Larkin's wonderful volume [Finding George Orwell in Burma (New York: The Penguin Group, 2011)] she describes the long history of tyranny which has afflicted that nation for many centuries.  Sadly, the British--as colonial masters--were little better.  By the time Burma became a colony the doctrines of evolutionism were becoming more and more embedded in the colonial mind.  This led to a "natural" conclusion that primitive native people were not sub-human.

She cites a government report at the time:

In Burma we are dealing with a Mongolian race . . . and Mongolian races appear to have always found an element of cruelty in their punishments necessary.  [Op cit., p. 146.]

In other words, "we need to treat them in the only way these brutes understand".  George Orwell served as a policeman in Burma for a time.  During his time there in the early 1920's some 20,000 criminals were being locked up every year.  He describes the horror of British run jails in Burma in The Road to Wigan Pier:

The wretched prisoners squatting in the reeking cages of the lock-ups, the grey cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been flogged with bamboos, the women and children howling when their menfolk were led away--things like these are beyond bearing when you are in any way directly responsible for them. [Ibid., p.46]

This is not to say, of course, that the British were any worse than the authoritarian rulers that preceded them.  Rather, it is to say they were as bad.

Nothing Wrong With a Little Torture

If It Works, It Has to Be Right

Torture has its apologists.  A US Senate committee released a report about CIA interrogation methods following the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon exposing and condemning the CIA's use of torture to get information from enemy (Al Qaeda) combatants. 

Its opponents have condemned the Senate report as misleading, inaccurate, and wrong.  Blogger Patterico provides a summary of their objections:

Three former CIA directors — George J. Tenet, Porter J. Goss and Michael V. Hayden — as well as three Deputy CIA Directors, took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to dispute the Democrat-penned torture report released yesterday:

What is wrong with the committee’s report?
First, its claim that the CIA’s interrogation program was ineffective in producing intelligence that helped us disrupt, capture, or kill terrorists is just not accurate. The program was invaluable in three critical ways:
• It led to the capture of senior al Qaeda operatives, thereby removing them from the battlefield.
• It led to the disruption of terrorist plots and prevented mass casualty attacks, saving American and Allied lives.
• It added enormously to what we knew about al Qaeda as an organization and therefore informed our approaches on how best to attack, thwart and degrade it.

The current CIA Director is reversing his previous declarations of agnosticism on the subject to agree that torture provided critical information.

Who is telling the truth?

The Senate report claimed that the information  gained under duress was of little worth, implying that if torture were useful in providing vital information it would somehow have been acceptable.  The supporters of the programme point out, on the contrary, how successful it was in providing information to combat the Islamist terrorists.

Both the detractors and supporters of torture are operating out of a profoundly degenerate moral abyss.

Modern Inquisitions

Bureaucracy, Data Management, and the  Inquisition


Bring Out the Spanish Tickler
Christopher Caldwell
A Book Review appearing in The Literary Review

God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World
By Cullen Murphy (Allen Lane/The Penguin Press 310pp £25)


The Spanish Inquisition was not run by a bunch of blockheads. It sought to root out heresy, which was a 'crime of the intellect'. Inquisitors were not interested in the blurtings of drunks or in what we would call Freudian slips. Testimony gathered under duress was admissible only if it was repeated freely on a later occasion. Nonetheless holy interrogators did feel the need, once in a while, to haul out the Pear of Anguish, Saint Elmo's Belt, the Heretic's Fork and the Spanish Tickler. These were all instruments of torture, although, as Cullen Murphy notes, 'they could just as easily be the names of pubs, or brands of condoms, or points of ascent on a climber's map'.

Murphy is a US magazine editor whose elegant books mine the ancient world for lessons about our own.