Read Online Mirrors by Eduardo Galeano - Free Book Online

she had been taking gold, ivory, and slaves for half a century.
    His intentions were not precisely the same as those that guided Admiral Zheng’s navigations. The pope gave away America and Africa “so that barbarian nations might be overpowered and converted to the Catholic faith.”
    At that point, America had fifteen times the population of Spain, and Africa a hundred times that of Portugal.

EVIL COPIES GOOD

    In one of his frescoes in a chapel in Padua, Giotto painted the torments that demons inflict on sinners in hell.
    As in other artistic works of the period, the instruments of infernal torture, which provoked shock and fear, were the very tools used by the Holy Inquisition to impose the Catholic faith. God inspired his worst enemy: in hell Satan imitated the technology of pain that the inquisitors applied on earth.
    Punishment confirmed that this world was but a dress rehearsal for hell. In the here and now and in the Great Beyond, disobedience merited the same reward.

ARGUMENTS OF THE FAITH

    For six centuries and in several countries, the Holy Inquisition punished rebels, heretics, witches, homosexuals, pagans . . .
    Many ended up at the stake, sentenced to roast over a slow fire fed with green wood. Many more were subjected to torture. Here are some of the instruments utilized to extract confessions, modify beliefs, and sow panic:
the barbed collar,
the hanging cage,
the iron gag that stifled unwanted screams,
the saw that cut you slowly in two,
the finger-stretching tourniquet,
the head-flattening tourniquet,
the bone-breaking pendulum,
the seat of pins,
the long needle that perforated the devil’s moles,
the iron claw that shredded flesh,
the pincer and tongs heated to fiery red,
the sarcophagus lined with sharp nails,
the iron bed that extended until arms and legs got pulled out of
their sockets,
the whip with a nail or knife at the tip,
the barrel filled with shit,
the shackles, the stocks, the block, the pillory, the gaff,
the ball that swelled and tore the mouths of heretics, the anuses of
homosexuals, and the vaginas of Satan’s lovers,
the pincer that ground up the tits of witches and adulterers,
and fire on the feet,
among other weapons of virtue.

THE TORTURER’S CONFESSION

    In the year 2003, Al-Qaeda leader Ibn al-Shaykh was tortured until he confessed that Iraq had trained him in the use of chemical and biological weaponry. Immediately, the government of the United States joyfully blandished his words as proof that Iraq deserved to be invaded.
    Not long thereafter, the truth came out: as usual, the tortured said what the torturer wanted to hear.
    But any discomfiture from that revelation did not impede the United States government from practicing or preaching torture around the world, calling it by its many stage names: alternative means of coercion, intensive interrogation technique, pressure and intimidation tactic, method of convincing . . .
    With less and less dissembling, the biggest of the mass media now exalt the merits of the machinery for grinding human flesh, while more and more people applaud or at least accept it. Don’t we have a right to defend ourselves from the terrorists and criminals threatening us?
    But the inquisitors of yesteryear knew only too well, as do the country snatchers of today: torture is useless for protecting people. It is only good for terrorizing them.
    The bureaucracy of pain tortures in order to perpetuate the power of the powers it serves. A confession extracted by torture is worth little or nothing. But in the torture chamber the powerful do drop their masks. By torturing, they confess that fear is their daily bread.

WE WERE ALL EXECUTIONERS

    Little or no change has come to Bòria Street in Barcelona, although now it devotes itself to serving other needs.
    During a good part of the Middle Ages, it was one of the settings where European justice was turned into public spectacle.
    The jester and the musicians headed up the procession. The condemned man or