Story By: by NPR Staff
Cullen Murphy is the editor-at-large for Vanity Fair and previously served as managing editor at The Atlantic Monthly.
Interrogation at Guantanamo, for example, illustrates that the spirit of the Spanish Inquisition is alive and well today, Murphy says.
“The Inquisition tried to put restraints on torture. The problem was that in the moment, when people are trying to get information, those boundaries keep being pushed,” he says. “People think, ‘You know, one more turn of the screw will get us one more little piece of information’ … and torture creeps and creeps and creeps.”
Are We In Danger?
Murphy says the key ingredients for a modern day inquisition exist today.
In order for an inquisition to succeed, he says, there must be an individual or a group of people who believe they are in the right and want everyone else to toe the line.
“But that moral certainty isn’t enough,” Murphy says. There must also be a bureaucracy and methods of surveillance to sustain the persecution.
“All of those things are much more advanced right now by an order of magnitude than they were centuries ago,” Murphy says. “Nowadays [surveillance] is done almost automatically â every time you hit the keyboard on your computer or every time you walk by a camera on the street.”
Murphy fears what could happen if that moral certainty meets the kinds of monitoring tools that exist today.
“In the wrong hands, the tools of repression are just more available and dangerous than they have been in a long time,” he says.