The Child
2 November 2006 by Eve
For Sean, who among many other things, loved history and understood so well why we need to remember it
The Story Thus Far: All the newly-assembled Inquisition of Avila, Spain, needs to clinch its case against Converso Benito Garcia and his seven co-defendants are the identity of the boy they supposedly murdered and the location of his body (see The Jew).
Inquisitorial Log, Avila, 1491:
First Priority – Find out who the murdered child was.
• No reports of any missing children in La Guardia or environs.
• None of the prisoners knows who the dead boy was.
• None of the prisoners knows where he came from.
• Wait – under questioning one of them identifies the child as the son of one Alonso Martin of the village of Quintanar near La Guardia.
• Dead end: “Alonso Martin” is a name as common as “John Smith” in Quintanar.
• No Alonso Martin is missing a son.
• Back to the rack (see pic)…
Second priority – Find out where the boy is buried.
• None of the prisoners knows the body’s location.
• Wait – under questioning one of them confesses to interring the remains near the cave their Jewish ringleader Juce Franco finally pinpointed as the scene of the crime.
• It does look as though someone did dig a hole there at some point in time…
• Dead end: No corpse found in alleged grave.
• No heart buried there, either; wait – what about that heart? The one that they cut out of the child’s chest in order to mix with Garcia’s Communion wafer in their black magic potion?
• Dammit (sorry, God)! Most of the prisoners claim that Garcia was carrying the heart around in his knapsack along with the Host – but bishop’s vicar Pedro de Villada searched that pack when Garcia was brought before him in Astorga and found nothing but the wafer.
September – back to the rack:
• Dam – er, darn it, each and every confession is different! They must all be lying all the time!
November 2 – back to the rack:
• The confessions don’t agree on the date on which the Ritual Murder took place (in fact, they don’t even agree on the year in which it happened).
• The prisoners can’t seem to agree on who kidnapped the child, or how it was done, or from—
• Goddammit stop confessing so much there can’t possibly be more than one heart when there was only one victim why can’t you murdering m*****-f****rs get your stories straight it’s only pain!!!
Final Note: Never mind. Ignore the above. We can convict and sentence all of them anyway, since we have the wafer those people said they saw fall out of Garcia’s knapsack. They have to be guilty; after all, they did confess…a lot…
Next: The Holy Child of La Guardia
2 November 2006, on 11:10 pm
Eve, it’s good to know that the lessons of Torquemada and the Inquisition have been taken to heart by Darth Cheney and his legions. Goodness knows we wouldn’t want any real, actionable intelligence from hard work when we can just haul out the waterboard and get some cab driver to cough up whatever the neo-cons would like to hear.
3 November 2006, on 12:21 am
Eve, thanks so much for these. I’ve really enjoyed reading them. I love history and there are certain spots I am just terrible with. The Inquisition and Vietnam being two that are NEVER taught in school, at least not here.
3 November 2006, on 9:48 am
Just wondering… Isn’t the removal of habeas corpus a signal that we may be heading for a new Inquisition? I mean, you can’t seek removal from unlawful imprisonment, so sounds similar to me.
3 November 2006, on 3:20 pm
Yes, but I’ve been accused of being an alarmist so I haven’t mentioned that here. I agree that we are in more danger than most people realize. Is it silly for me to be scared that my kids could be taken from me and I could be imprisoned just for voicing an opinion? I don’t think so. Jeez, I hope the elections go well and the Congress can find a way to circumvent that travesty.
3 November 2006, on 3:21 pm
For clarification, no one here at GifS has ever accused me of being an alarmist! That came out wrong. I meant, I avoid the subject because of the way other people have reacted. :\
3 November 2006, on 4:57 pm
Unfortunately, the removal of habeas corpus is often a big, glowing, red harbinger of worse things to come. I’m with you guys: I hope the election goes well and brings some sanity and balance back into the government, because I wouldn’t put it past the monsters we have in office right now to use the rest of the tactics employed by Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition.
I mean, removal of habeas corpus, check; approval of torture as acceptable method of investigation, check; scapegoating against particular groups of people, check; conflating actual enemies with those same scapegoats with no, little, or invented evidence, check…
Bean: The Inquisition and Vietnam being two that are NEVER taught in school, at least not here.
They probably think you can’t handle it; there really are people in positions of authority just like Nicholson’s character in A Few Good Men who think it’s better not to give out what they consider “too much information.”
Or maybe they just prefer to teach what I call the “bright side” of history - which I happen to disagree with. I think students of all ages can surprise teachers with their capacity to learn and understand, even about atrocities.
3 November 2006, on 9:06 pm
side note:
I wasn’t old enough to remember Vietnam, but I remember my turning against the war from a philosophical standpoint my Junior Year of High School (1987-88) just reading a simple book “An Eyewitness History of the Vietnam War”, which put together the work of many photo-journalists and mainstream factual reporting of the events leading up to Vietnam. I started asking myself questions like “ok, if we (the United States) support democracy, and it seems clear to me that Ho Chi Minh was the leader wanted by the MAJORITY of Vietnamese, north and south, then…WTF!? If they want to elect some damn commie, that’s their business!!” *sigh* the naivite of my youth. (…my kneejerk anti-communism took much longer to eradicate; I didn’t even know who Salvador Allende was in those days, nor what happened to him–nor Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, nor…a lot of other things they didn’t teach in my school either)
I think the fact that I was already an atheist back then meant my days as a clueless Republican were already definitely numbered. When Daddy Bush openly embraced the Religious Right circa, I became a Democrat overnight, without reservation; However, his utter incomrehension of the LA riots led me to the belief (woefully naive) that only the Democrats could begin to address racial injustice, the GOP clearly didn’t have a clue. (looking back, at most Clinton, et. al. just stuck a bandaid on an gaping wound–but I digress).
I think a really subversive thing to do is to put a copy of Howard Zinn’s _A People’s History of the United States_ into the hands of an intellectually curious High School student, then watch the sparks fly in class…
I sometimes wish there were more avenues for High School-age people just to talk and relate to 20-to-30 something year old people, those who are NOT teachers (nor sexual predators).
I actually was a teacher for a year–and not a very successful one, either; I’m far too introverted, sucked at classroom management, and rarely did an adequate job lesson-planning, etc.
But I found myself listening to these teens struggling with new ideas and concepts amongst themselves and found myself wishing I could toss aside my big bad TEACHER mask/role and just relate to them, person to person, in a non-coercive, free-exchange kind of way–share with them my life story and what *I* really thought, not what the school district wanted them to think. Just wasn’t possible. I resigned the position out of frustration, and because I could see I just wasn’t cut out to be an effective teacher. The succesful teachers I saw had the most beaming, radiant, positive, optimistic personalities I’ve ever seen. I was–and am–a lot more withdrawn, pessimistic, sarcastic. Succesful teachers are also super-organized; I am not.
One thing I do remember thinking as a teacher in the late 1990s is how much more explicitly religious these kids seemed than I recall me and my classmates being back in the late 1980s, when we mostly shunned/made fun of the really really religious kids. I do remember, though, someone passing around some kind of petition against abortion…i think it was a science class–and someone asked me if I’d sign and seemed shocked when I told them no, absolutely not. I stopped participating in Presbyterian Youth group by about the middle of middle school, but even there I don’t recall any of the kids I was hanging out with there as being particularly devout—and I was a closet atheist anyway–I was mostly there because my mom still had hopes for me staying on a religious path I’d pretty much left even before the farce that was my “confirmation” in the Presbyterian Church. I was fortunate enough to have a science teacher for a dad, who made little attempt to hide his utter contempt for religion, as I’ve mentioned before.
Anyway, sorry, rambling again…always enjoy the History posts, keep ‘em coming!
-JJR
3 November 2006, on 11:41 pm
Great idea about teen/young(er) adult interfacing, JJR; maybe there should be more of us in the Big Brother/Sister programs? Or do you have to be “religious” to become one (I can’t believe I don’t know)?
You’re welcome, and feel free to continue to ramble!
4 November 2006, on 12:09 am
Eve, you are amazing. This series is just great stuff, and I look forward to each new episode - as I know Sean did.
This one in particular really makes an interesting point: with the recent torture legislation proposed by our fearless and clueless leader’s admin, it would seem that:
BushCo = Spanish Inquisition
…with basically the same results.
This episode also makes an excellent mirror unto current events, in that it shows the motivation of torturers to seek “Truth” as a conclusion they have already reached, and torture as a method to create the information trail to that conclusion.
Never mind the lack of usable data that comes as a result.
Onward Xian Soldiers.
6 November 2006, on 7:03 pm
[...] The Story Thus Far: Failure to find anything out about the boy supposedly killed doesn’t stop the three Inquisitors of Avila, Spain from convicting and sentencing Converso Benito Garcia and his seven co-defendants in the Ritual Murder of La Guardia case (see The Child). [...]