By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
Published: January 27, 2012
In the moral atlas of Cullen Murphy, the road to Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay and the secret “black sites” of the war on terror begins in Montségur, a fortress in the foothills of the Pyrenees. There, in 1244, a French army assembled at the behest of the Roman Catholic Church besieged several hundred Cathars. Their sect’s heresy was dualism, a belief in both a beneficent God and an equivalent evil deity. Enticed into surrendering by the promise that their followers would be spared, the Cathars were burned alive on a pyre.
From the run-up to this massacre, Murphy dates the start of the Inquisition. By this, he means not only the Spanish iteration with its concentration on Jews converted to Christianity (Marranos) but several sequential inquisitions that over 700 years convulsed Europe, Central America and parts of Asia in pursuit of a wide variety of theological deviants. Even this expansive history, in turn, functions for Murphy as a kind of prologue, for the goal of this lucid, learned and ultimately predictable book is to present the Inquisition as the template for America during the “global war on terror” declared by President George W. Bush and still being fought.
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