The Contemporary Inquisitiion

I had begun an article in which I equate modern American policy — both domestic and foreign — with the Spanish Inquisition. I was drawing parallels between Scalia and Torquemada; the importance of fear as a tool of social control; the lawful cover used to justify the horrific, gratuitous, sadean torture of innocents; the spectacular and shameless display of hypocrisy as power's gauge of its own (illegitimate) authority; the necessary creation of the enemy as the Other to justify wholesale slaughter — which serves as nothing more than a strategic facade to mask a naked grab for resources; the modern economic re-definition of heresy, and of the heretic as one who doesn't believe in neo-liberal gangster capitalism (a topic for much further discussion, since economics is truly a modern religion); etc.

Michel Chossudovsky has done it for me, and with more clarity, encyclopedic knowledge and insight than I'm sure I would have brought to it.

Please read it — you will not find a better summation of our contemporary historical epoch.

[Here, for those who need it, is an exemplary refresher of American hypocrisy.]