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| Tomas de Torquemada |
Dostoevsky’s “Grand Inquisitor” was the embodiment of the
anti-Christ. Tomas de
Torquemada was the model and he himself would have ultimately been
sentenced to the tortures that Dante envisioned in his infamous ninth circle of
hell, where Satan is trapped in ice. But everyone has a Grand Inquisitor lurking inside them, in the form of a negative doppleganger or alter ego, the
self-immolating spirit that casts doubt on every assertion of the life force.
You may recognize it in the cynicism about motives. You like someone for being
kind and responsive, but immediately begin to look at the compassion they’ve
demonstrated as a kind of barter. You think about extending your hand to
another suffering soul, but then shrink from it fearing that you’re only trying
to inflate your own ego or exonerate yourself from guilt. Every step forward in
time becomes a potential mistake and every act that’s transpired is filled with
regret. The negative might be looked at as a necessary part of the dialectic of
existence. Joseph Schumpeter termed one of the dynamics of capitalism, “creative destruction." Looked at on a micro or macro, on an ontogenic, or
phylogenic level destruction has its place. It doesn’t have to be the kind of
genocide that Pol Pot inflicted on the Cambodian people, but the negative can sometimes be the only way to countermand
entrenched, anachronistic and maladaptive world views. The question is, how does one distinguish between spring cleaning and murder?
What if you woke up to find that the pieces on the chess
board had changed and there were no more pawns which moved one or two spaces
ahead, no castles moving perpendicular to each other or knights with their
L-shaped choreography. “The only constant is change,” goes the old saw, but the
politics of the Middle East and by proxy the rest of the world is going through
a cataclysmic shift equivalent to those periods of history like the fall of the
Roman Empire and the Rise of the Ottomans or the fall of Czarist Russia and
the rise of the Communist bloc. Of course at the end of the Hegelian dialectical day, the geography of Europe and the Middle East is the beneficiary of these
earlier historical watersheds. Nothing is what it seems to be. Isis was once an
Egyptian God. British archeological thrillers of the 30’s are filled with neocolonialists whose excavations ignite her rage. You remember the OxBridgian explorers in their safari hats prospecting among the tombs of Egyptian royalty with their pipes and copies of The Golden Bough and uttering “I say there old chap,” as sarcophagi come to
life. Now ISIS represents an Islamic State that threatens to swallow up Syria
and Iraq, not to speak of Libya and those parts of Yemen, the Sudan and Nigeria
which are its potential clients. By employing the example of the Crusades,
President Obama attempted to show that the current generation of Jihadists have no monopoly on terror and violence. Tomas de
Torquemada was the model for Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor. But how will the world look when
the dust has finally settled? Will Iranian Shiites attempt to wrest the torch
from the hands of their Sunni counterparts, as Netanyahu prophesied in his
recent speech before congress? Will the Muslim world continue to be divided or
will the vision of pan-Islamism put forth by millenarian thinkers like Sayyid Qutb
produce an even more frightening juggernaut. In The Man in the High Castle Philip K.
Dick imagined the axis powers in control of the United
States. Perhaps only a science fiction writer like Dick could foresee the realignments that will result from our current geopolitics. Democracy and liberty were products of
the mercantilism of 17th Europe. But we now seem to be living in age
of extremism, in which technology itself doesn’t provide the leveling anodyne
to ideology (that proto-capitalism did in earlier age). The late Samuel P. Huntington wrote a book entitled The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order which might
turn out to be prescient. Visions of utopia whose pay off may occur in the
after life are a tough nut to crack.
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| Sing Sing’s “Old Sparky" |
It’s not to demean the suffering of those who have been
POW’s on either side of the fence. But when you read about the latest ISIS
beheading, the infamous Hanoi Hilton really seems like the Hilton. Those who
have traveled to Poland to see Auschwitz, to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, to the Jewish Museum in Berlin, those remembering Katyn may have thought they have seen the limits
of depravity, but human innovation seems to know no bounds where the infliction
of pain and suffering are concerned. Of course if you go to Italy and visit one
of the Museo della Torturas you will find some pretty inventive contraptions
like the Judas cradle, the rack, head and testicle crushers.
Let’s not forget burning at the stake, boiling in oil, bastinado and crucifixion. What is often remarked about pornography can also be iterated about torture: if it’s been said it’s been done and if it’s been done it’s been said. And then there is the infamous torture scene
in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs.
Waterboarding and sleep deprivation might seem mild what’s compared to the failed death by lethal injection inflicted on
a death row inmate in Oklahoma named Clayton Lockett? And then there's mental torture of the kind
that was deployed on Lawrence Harvey in Manchurian Candidate and Dostoevsky,
who was put up in front of a firing squad for his revolutionary activities and
told he was going to die. Is there a limit to human torment, a point beyond
which even the most depraved executioner refuses to go? Too bad Tomas de
Torquemada, one of the stars of the Inquisition, is not here to answer the
question? Does agency lessen pain? Do Buddhist monks who set themselves on fire
or people who jump out of windows have something going for them. Would that Jan
Masaryk were here to testify about the downside of unwilling defenestration. A
scientist until the end Lavoisier reputedly performed an experiment involving
his own death at the guillotine, by attempting to blink his eyes after his head was severed from his neck. However, while he may have been successful, he wasn’t able to talk about it. What if the ISIS executioner with the English accent beheaded himself as a way of expressing his anger at the West? Would the pain he felt be less
than that which he inflicted on his victims, by virtue of the fact that relief was
in his grasp?
