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By Root 1213 0

Kramer and Sprenger, wrote a tract against the great mortal evil of their day, what they saw as the most dangerous threat to human society. While Frum and Perle abominate the modern threat from terror or terrorists, the two monks in Cologne were obsessed with the more ancient threat posed by witchcraft and witches. Their manual, which they called The Hammer of Witches (Malleus Malleficarum), proved a best seller. Published for the first time in 1486, the Malleus appeared in thirteen editions between 1487 to 1520 and sixteen between 1574 and 1669. It remains one of the most malign texts ever produced, for it provided canonical and biblical backing for the idea of witchcraft and laid down the procedures for destroying the witches themselves. After the Reformation, their work continued to find equal favor with Protestants and Catholics alike.

A fifteenth-century manual against witchcraft and a twenty-first-century manual against terrorism read rather differently, but their methodology is strikingly similar. First, they both lay out the conditions and causes of evil; second, they detail how evil spread and how it can be defeated; and third, they present the operational necessities of a war on evil. There are other similarities. They castigate all who doubt or frustrate their great work. “Our vocation is to support justice with power. It is a vocation that has earned us terrible enemies” (Frum and Perle).35“There is in them [the enemies] an enormity of crime, exceeding all other” (Kramer and Sprenger).36 However, their similitude lies not so much in style, language, and method as in their ultimate objective, the destruction of an evil enemy. These modern authors’ purpose is not very different from their avatars; like Kramer and Sprenger, they wish to excise those whom they fear from human society, root and branch. This current assault on “evil” may be just a new variant of the witch craze.37

Killing witches ran its bloody course and eventually subsided. Can we halt a similar modern social panic in its tracks? History provides a suggestive parallel. Even at its apogee, in the seventeenth century, the idea of evil taking over a witch’s body was questioned, and undermined; gradually, the witch craze waned. As Chadwick Hansen succinctly put it: “Western civilisation stopped executing witches when the literate and balanced portion of its members stopped believing in their capacity to do harm.”38 The slow change was engendered through debate and argument, by a war of words, until eventually the very belief in witches became synonymous with a barbarous past.39 But Hansen then continued, ominously: “But new figures have arisen to take the spectral place in popular fears vacated by the witch.”40 That is, I believe, where we are now.

Malign ideas and utterances, maledicta, lie infectively in books, magazines, newspapers, in the ether, or on the Internet; they cannot effectively be constrained, censored, or controlled. But their virulence can be diminished, as Charles Maier suggests:

Perpetrators have a history as well as victims, but in what sense do they share a narrative? In fact, their narratives intertwine, just as all adversarial histories must … [These adversaries] will never write the same narrative, but historians … must render them both justice within a single story. This does not mean banally insisting that both have a point, or “splitting the difference” (which is a political strategy). It means listening to, testing and ultimately making public their respective sub-narratives or partial stories. To resort to a musical analogy: written history must be contrapuntal and not harmonic. That is, it must allow the particular histories of national groups to be woven together linearly alongside each other so that the careful listener can follow them distinctly but simultaneously, hearing the whole together with the parts.41

This is what normally happens over time: monolithic certainties tend to diminish, blur, or fade over the generations. Unless, that is, bitter memories are fostered, or as this book has suggested, deliberately