A Pilgrim’s Digression

Yesterday I finished a book titled Faith and Treason by Antonia Frasier. Published in the mid-nineties, before 9/11, it tells the story of the Gunpowder Plot of November 1605. I cannot read history without reference to the historic time in which we are currently living.

Even a book as seemingly remote from the topic of terrorism as Evan Connell’s Son of the Morning Star suggests a number of possibilities for interpreting recent events. Understandably, Frasier’s book is even more suggestive. Clearly, 9/11 has become our own 11/5; only rather than celebrating a terrorist act narrowly averted, on 9/11 we can only grieve a terrorist act brought to fruition. Still, the cynic in me sees other comparisons that can be made between 9/11 and its aftermath and 11/5 and its aftermath.

The Gunpowder Plot was organized, however badly, by a large group of Catholic men in order to at one blow decapitate the English monarchy and institute a Catholic monarchy. When the plot was uncovered, the government used any means necessary not only to punish the traitors themselves, but to further its own political goals by cracking down on Catholics in general. At the time, it was illegal to practice Catholicism in England, and it remained illegal until something like 1825. Recusants, as unreformed Catholics were called, would often harbor priests in their homes and hold secret masses. 11/5 offered the English government an opportunity to attack this practice with all the power of the government. Even though no priests had a hand in planning the gunpowder plot, several were rounded up, tortured until they admitted complicity, and publicly executed as a way of tarring Catholics in general with the plot.

Despite our romantic notions about the English past, Renaissance England would be called a police state in modern terminology. While it is tempting to say “it can’t happen here,” there are indications that it is indeed happening here. No one is being tortured or publicly executed; however, the Bush administration has shown no qualms about turning a blind eye to the torture of individuals whom they turn over to the Jordanians and other uncrupulous states for interrogation. The American military itself practices a form of torture well-known to Sir William Waad and other English officials responsible for extracting needed information from reluctant Catholics: sleep deprivation. The interminable imprisonment of individuals at Guantanamo also suggests the kind of detentions of Catholics that took place after November 5, 1605. Notwithstanding Rumsfeld’s recent statements that 16 prisoners (out of about 660) are going to be released soon, many of these men—a few of them not even men, but boys of thirteen or fourteen—have been imprisoned there since the fall of 2001. The open-air cells in which they are contained have been billed by Rumsfeld as a necessity in the humid environment of tropical Cuba, but anyone who has read Michel Foucault knows that the real reason you keep a prisoner in an open-air cell is to deprive him of privacy and to keep the ever-unblinking eye of the State fastened upon his body. Is it any wonder that there have been 25 suicide attempts, 15 of them made this year, since the prison opened? I suppose one can attribute the suicide attempts to fanaticism or depression in the wake of the crushing of their terrorist dreams, but it is more likely a result of the limbo in which these people live. The English had their Black Tower; we have our Guantanamo.

On the other hand, one big difference between 9/11 and 11/5 is that 11/5 was a coordinated attack against a legitimate military target, the government of an oppressive state. At the time, a king or government was not considered a legitimate target. Regicide or parliamentaricide (new word there) was considered to be an upsetting of the natural order imposed by God. God crowns Kings, not men, and to kill them is to thwart God’s will. That view has long-since fallen by the wayside. Another significant difference is that history has significantly lessened the horror of November 5, 1605. Some even regard Fawkes and his men as heroes of sorts. That view rather misses the probablity that if they had indeed managed to kill King James, his queen, his heirs, and the entire Parliament, the resulting Catholic monarchy would have been as oppressive a government as the one it suceeded. The Bolshevik revolution is a good example of how terrorism on a large scale to depose a despised regime leads only to a violent, oppressive state equally hated by those poor people who must live under its iron heel.

Despite similarities and differences between these two terrorist incidents, I doubt any but a few Cassandras will have the temerity to look in the mirror and question the path we are heading down. We do not live in a police state. We reassure ourselves that it can’t happen here. It seems to me that what we might be missing is that the kind of democracy we practice here in America, if it can be called democracy, is in its own way a kind of beneficent police state. The price of our comfort and security is our freedom. We are like the dog who has spent his entire life on a chain; our conception of freedom is defined by the length of our chain. We would not want the chain to be taken off; we desire only a chain that is a bitlonger than the chain restraining other poor beasts. The government of the United States has unprecedented access to its subjects’ wallets. The chief executive alone now makes decisions about war. Due to misinterpretation of the 14th amendment, corporate entities are regarded by our courts as individuals, with the same rights as “natural” people under the constitution. Indeed, corporations have more rights than individuals. For example, an employee of a corporation can have no expectation of privacy when they walk through the company doors in the morning (see Thom Hartmann’s book Unequal Protection). Some day we must seriously ask ourselves what we are, and what we are becoming.