Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [257]
31. David Frum, after quitting as a presidential speechwriter, became a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a prolific columnist. Richard Perle, who chaired the Defense Department’s Defense Policy Board from 2001 to 2003, resigned from the board in February 2004. He too is a resident fellow at the AEI. As the authors say, An End to Evil was “written at high speed through high summer”—presumably 2003. See David Frum and Richard Perle, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, New York: Random House, 2003, p. 284.
32. See George Orwell, “Appendix: The Principles of Newspeak,” in Orwell, 1984; http://sami.is.free.fr/Oeuvres/orwell_1984_newspeak.html.
33. Frum and Perle, An End to Evil, p. 9.
34. There is a huge literature on the Holocaust, but on this specific aspect, the most dispassionate work is by Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1999. But see also Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, 2nd ed., London: Verso, 2003.
35. Frum and Perle, p. 279.
36. Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, The Malleus Malleficarum, trans. Montague Summers, London: Pushkin Press, 1948, Part 1, Question 14.
37. Sir Keith Thomas, in Religion and the Decline of Magic (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), presents a world in which magical cunning was one way to counteract a dangerous and uncertain world. However, a wise or “cunning” woman skilled with herbs and folk medicine could easily be constituted “a witch” by authority, often as a result of jealousy or a local denunciation. Thus it was possible to be a valued member of village society one week, and a witch the next. “Witch” was thus an unstable category, dependent less on what you did and much more on how authority and your neighbors decided to regard it.
38. According to Ian Bostridge, in “Witchcraft Repealed,” the intellectual foundations for the existence of witchcraft had “slipped” by the 1720s. See Jonathan Barry, Marianne Hester, and Gareth Roberts (eds.), Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Culture and Belief, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 316.
39. First, through the inquisitor Alonso de Salazar in 1612. While he had no problem with dispatching heretics, he did not believe in the existence of witches or witchcraft. See Gustav Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate: Basque Witchcraft and the Spanish Inquisition, 1609–1614, Reno, NV: University of Nevada Press, 1980. Charles Williams in his study of witchcraft honors his “immortal memory.”
40. Chadwick Hansen, Witchcraft at Salem, London: Arrow, 1971, p. 260.
41. Maier, Doing History, Doing Justice, is talking about the Israel-Palestine conflict. He here (274–5) lays out a strong argument for the “historical” narrative in the context of analyzing one recent “rational” attempt to resolve the problems of a malevolent past through truth and reconciliation commissions (TRC). He provides a convincing analysis of both the strengths and weaknesses of this approach. See Robert I. Rotberg and Dennis Thompson, Truth v. Justice: The Morality of Truth Commissions, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000, pp. 261–78. I am grateful for Geoffrey Best’s lead to this material.
Sources and Select Bibliography
With a topic ranging over so many different geographical areas and over such a long time span, the range of material is virtually