"[O]ften inquisitors create heretics. [...] Inquisitors repress the heretical putrefaction so vehemently that many are driven, to share in it, in their hatred for the judges."
-Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose.
-Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose.
I dearly miss #UmbertoEco with his clinical insights on everything, from religion/belief to fascism. The quote above also reminded me of Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, and in turn the Stalinist purges it was based on. A must read book for our times, I you ask me.
It's ironic that Stalin, the militant atheist, used methods that the Spanish Inquisition would have been proud of, to break down dissidents, on random pretenses, just like the former. And although the scale of those two is probably incomparable to other such instances ...
... Spanish Inquisition was not the first such instance in Human history, and Stalinist purges won't be the last. With the kind of surveillance apparatus the rulers have access to, imagine how easy it would be to break the dissidents -- when nothing is private anymore!
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