The revelations of the CIA torture programme reveals striking parallels to witch hunts of centuries past, with compelling lessons for the present
This month’s release of the United States Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the C.I.A’s Enhanced Interrogation Programme has seen the return of many Bush era operatives taking to the airwaves to defend the agency’s actions in the wake of 9/11. Among the least surprising champion of the program was former Vice President Dick Cheney. In a December 14 appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, Mr. Cheney was again steadfast in his endorsement of the program’s techniques, including waterboarding and indefinite detention, and insisted the program yielded actionable intelligence that would have not otherwise been available.
When pressed to provide his definition of torture, Mr. Cheney stated that torture is “what nineteen guys armed with airline tickets and box cutters did to three thousand Americans on 9/11.” This and other statements leave little doubt as to Mr. Cheney’s position on the subject of torture and by extension terrorism; he believes that inflicting physical pain or mental anguish on another human being, persons whom he has labeled as terrorists, is justified to save American lives; he believes that terrorism represents a real threat which has national implications and terrorists are to be greatly feared and that their crimes are special in nature. In short, Mr. Cheney believes in witches.
Give me a moment and I will explain. As a scholar who specialises in the witch persecutions of early modern Europe, I often find myself awestruck by the similarities between the approaches western nations take to the threat of terrorism today with those taken to deal with witchcraft almost 500 years ago.
Witchcraft during the 15th and 16th centuries, like 21st century terrorism, generated massive fear among the European populations and their governments. Our fear of these people of the night who could fly, cause weather to change, change shape, kill with concocted potions and cast all sorts of destructive spells occupied a disproportionately large amount of our political and literary dialogue.
Early modern western governments were obsessed with combating the threat and went so far as to enact special procedures to deal with the problem. Special executive and legal powers were given to witch-hunters and inquisitors and witches were housed in special facilities, called witch houses, which were often separate buildings constructed specifically for Satan’s followers. At trial, witches could be convicted on evidence that would normally be considered inadmissible, such as spectral evidence as was seen in Salem in 1692 and, most disconcertingly, investigators liberally used torture on suspects.
Among the most vocal early modern proponents of directly confronting witchcraft was Heinrich Kramer, the author of the Malleus Maleficarum (or The Hammer of Witches). Like many of his contemporaries, Kramer believed that witchcraft was a crimen exceptum, a special crime that could not be combatted using the normal laws of society and that special procedures were justified in combating it.
We have recreated many, if not all, of these motifs. The expansion of law enforcement and the military, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the Patriot Act, the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, the use of special tribunals and indefinite detention and, of course, the C.I.A’s programme stand as just a few concatenates. Mr. Cheney today is doing his best to stand in for Heinrich Kramer.
Witchcraft resembles 21st Century terrorism in other ways as well. According to some of the most reliable estimates, early modern witchcraft was an extremely rare crime. The likelihood that someone would be accused and executed or be actively practicing the black art (many actually believed they could perform magic) was extremely slight: less than one-quarter of one percent.
Similarly, 21st century terrorism is extremely rare. Including 9/11, just over 3,000 people have been killed by terrorism in the United States from 1970 to 2011. By comparison, guns in the United States killed more than 11,000 people in 2013 alone. In 2012, the number of Americans killed in motor vehicle accidents was 33,561. Terrorism is by far nowhere near the greatest threat to ordinary Americans.
Yet, despite the paucity of an actual threat, our fear has occupied a greater portion of our political and intellectual discourse than its impact justifies. There is no shortage of approaches one could utilise to explain this incongruity, and indeed several books could be written on the subject.
For explaining our current struggles with terrorism, examining the role that magic played in early modern society will be sufficient. For early modern peoples, magic was a real component of their everyday lives. It was the power of the Devil, given to him by God to punish mankind for their sins. Some scholars maintain that magic was a kind of folk power; a series of beliefs and abilities that allowed early modern peoples, most of whom resided at the lowest levels of society, to find agency in their lives. Magic was reliably accessible to the populace; thus, rulers, scholars and theologians feared it because it could upset the official structures of religion and politics. In short, magic was an unauthorised unchecked power that could threaten the very foundations of society.
Today, we approach terrorism in a similar fashion. It is a direct threat to the organisation of the state apparatus and thus requires special rules. We speak of terrorism in an odd manner as well. The term itself ‘terrorism’ – is a pejorative and does little to nothing in explaining the real threat. Terrorism is a tactic not an ideology, as much as ISIL would have one believe. Like magic, its utility is derived from its very existence and our effort to counter its effects illustrate as much.
In the United States, we are quite fond of treating the symptoms and not the disease. The war on terrorism utilises the same approach as the war on drugs or even the much-needed war on guns. Like the physical representations of magic in the early modern era we are keen to ban and erase the offending object rather than address the structures it is built upon.
When it comes to torture it is no surprise that we adopt this same approach. Witches, and all the characteristics ascribed to them (i.e. unsightly, old, feminine, anti-social), are the physical manifestation of witchcraft. Likewise, the physical manifestation of terrorism is of course the terrorists themselves and all the physical features we ascribe to them in our short-sightedness. (i.e. religious head dress and garb, beards, middle-eastern origin).
To defeat the physical witch, early modern societies would effectively erase their physical existence by burning them and disposing of the ashes. One does not have to travel far to draw a parallel between erasure by fire and the capture and indefinite isolation of terror suspects, many of whom have no hope of release or even being charged for their alleged crime. In advocating for the liberal application of these techniques, Dick Cheney sounds more like Heinrich Kramer than a politician with responsibilities in the 21st century.
Obviously stating flat-out that 21st century terrorism and early modern witchcraft are completely identical paradigms would be disingenuous. Terrorists in our age can obtain far more destructive capabilities than their early modern counterparts. Witches could never have possessed nuclear or biological weapons for example. They also did not have the most dangerous weapons available to terrorists today: televisions in every home and 24-hour news network more than willing to cover their activities. However, this greater danger is no justification for greater ignorance.
In addition, some terrorist groups are also guided by ideology and have real political objectives, which cannot be said of many, if any, European witches. The point is, however, to remind those responsible for combating these threats that 21st century paradigms require 21st century approaches. Not learning from our past mistakes only increases the probability they will occur in the future.
There are certainly more parallels that could be drawn between witchcraft and terrorism, at least more than can be explored fully here. For the purposes of assessing the belief in torture of one such as Dick Cheney, however, it would be safe to assume that terrorism, the equivalent of early modern magic today, is, in his eyes, more manifested in the physical world than the real evidence would suggest.
Image from: http://www.salon.com/2013/11/14/dick_cheney_even_bigger_monster_than_you_thought/