Saturday 30 December 2006

1:2 Why a new manual for the War on Evil is needed

It has recently been brought to our attention that the people on earth are once again faced with a great threat which has many features similar to those we fought against. Of course this has not been the first menace since our time, but the way in which you have reacted by calling it a great ‘War upon Terror’ indicates that it is very serious indeed. As the parallels between the world of contemporary terrorist activity and the world we investigated are so close, we felt that our humble services might again be of use to the powers in the world.

We understand that some of you are devout Christians and that all of you have proclaimed yourselves as Crusaders on behalf of western civilization. We hear that you have announced a ‘War Against Terrorism’ and, like us, defined an ‘Empire of Evil’, or ‘Axis of Evil’, which you will destroy. You have identified some of the central Evil Ones, people with names like Osama bin-Laden (the name of an infidel if ever we heard one). We know that you have already been actively destroying parts of his coven organization in many countries in the Middle East and elsewhere.

We do praise and thank God for your awareness and courage and feel that you have taken some good first steps. On the other hand we do not think that you have yet produced a coherent outline of your general goals, a ‘mission statement’, as we believe it is appropriately called nowadays.

So we would like to help draft such a statement from our extensive experience. For you really must be very forceful and clear in your goals, even if you do not let your often misguided and weak-spirited populace know what you have in your minds. To protect against this latest danger, we are writing to you privately and secretly and warn you not to let this Manual slip into the hands of your enemies who will make it widely known and hence weaken your efforts.

In the absence of a comprehensive Manual on how to discover and destroy the Axis of Evil, your political and legal procedures seem rather unsystematic and contradictory. Furthermore, and this is where we would like to broaden the scope of our original work, there does not seem to be an integrated approach between the three avenging arms of your attack.

The fight against Evil has to be conducted on a number of levels at the same time. You must create a political hammer, that is a political system which is honed and fine tuned to make it possible to act swiftly and decisively. We shall try to explain how this can be done. You will need to overhaul the legal system. And you will need to integrate these with a military system that is even more forceful than the one you have and can act against evil wherever it appears. We shall, in three parts of our work, try to provide you with each of these three hammers.

In the political, legal and military strategies you need to state the rules of engagement more clearly. As we explain these to you, you may at times feel a certain revulsion at what may seem a rather brutal and down-to-earth set of procedures to uncover and destroy your enemies. Yet, remember that you must have available new methods for a new situation. If innocent people suffer, you must always remember that the innocent Christ himself suffered on the Cross for our salvation.

The task ahead of you does not end here. You will also need to instil a new morality in your population. Many have become corrupted, lazy and godless. They need to be morally re-armed for the crusade you are fighting. Likewise you need to improve your bureaucratic control over your citizens. You need to know their every thought and action. And you need to control their hearts and minds by educating them, by re-shaping their culture, so that they stay, as people say nowadays, ‘on message’. We shall provide chapters of our Manual to help you with all of this.

Thursday 28 December 2006

1:1 Our special experience in the war against EVIL

Let us introduce ourselves and explain why we are writing to you at this time. Some five hundred years ago our Christian civilization was threatened by a giant conspiracy of Evil. The ever-threatening Anti-Christ, Satan himself, was again prowling the world. He was recruiting many humans to his cause through an obscene ritual in which they sold their souls and entered into a blood pact with the Devil.

Satan in his devious malevolence taught them how to attack Christians individually, killing their children, slaughtering unborn babies in the womb, causing disease and the death of animals. They were taught how to use secret weapons of a magical kind, spells, poisons, acting at a distance and almost undetectable. They also used weapons of mass destruction like bubonic and other plagues, they poisoned wells and sent swarms of locusts.

These witches, as they were known, formed secret cells or ‘covens’, usually numbering 13. They engaged in obscene rituals to cement them in their evil; they ate human babies, had obscene sex not only with their Master but with male and female demons (‘incubi’ and ‘succubi’ as they were known), flew through the air, committed blasphemous acts with the holy sacrament. It can be summed up as an inversion of all true Christian values, and indeed of all the true values of our western world.

It became clear that if they were not stopped our whole moral system, our religion, our society, our families, our leaders and all we valued would be undermined. The world would become a grotesque haunt of evil spirits, of people whose souls had been sucked out of them. Something clearly had to be done.

Yet there was no clear manual on how to deal with this menace. There had been previous threats from other infidels – Jews, the followers of Mani (Manichaeans) and other subversives. The Holy Church, in alliance with the Godly Rulers, had crushed them with fire and sword. But this was a new threat, unprecedented in its seriousness and scope. All that was available for guidance from the authorities were scraps of advice and a few precedents.

So our blessed leader, Pope Innocent VIII, issued a papal bull in which he outlined both the need for a new crusade, and instructed us to write the manual for this. Let us quote you a few little lines to show what we were instructed to try to counter. The Pope wrote:

"It has indeed lately come to Our ears, not without afflicting Us with bitter sorrow, that in some parts of Northern Germany, as well as in the provinces….many persons of both sexes, unmindful of their own salvation, and straying from the Catholic Faith, have abandoned themselves to devils, incubi and succubi, and by their incantations, spells, conjurations, and other accursed charms and crafts, enormities and horrid offences, have slain infants yet in the mother’s womb, as also the offspring of cattle, have blasted the produce of the earth, the grapes of the vine, the fruits of trees, nay, men and women, beasts of burthen, herd-beasts, as well as animals of other kinds, vineyards, orchards, meadows, pasture-land, corn, wheat, and all other cereals; these wretches furthermore afflict and torment men and women, beasts of burthen, herd-beasts, as well as animals of other kinds, with terrible and piteous pains and sore diseases, both internal and external; they hinder men from performing the sexual act and women from conceiving, whence husbands cannot know their wives nor wives receive their husbands; over and above this, they blasphemously renounce that Faith which is theirs by the Sacrament of Baptism, and at the instigation of the Enemy of Mankind they do not shrink from committing and perpetrating the foulest abominations and filthiest excesses to the deadly peril of their own souls, whereby they outrage the Divine Majesty and are a cause of scandal and danger to very many." (Malleus Maleficarum, ed.M.Summers, xliii)

Because some people were questioning our work and saying these witches did not exist, the Holy Father gave us express permission to carry out the work of extirpation. And if anyone obstructed us, our Blessed Father ended his bull by stating: ‘let him know that upon him will fall the wrath of Almighty God, and of the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul’, given out at St. Peter’s on 9th December 1484.

So we set out our thoughts in a Manual which the authorities elsewhere could use and which we called the Malleus Maleficarum, or Hammer of Evil. You may, indeed, have heard of it, for we are told that you are learned leaders of the world and have many close advisors who could bring our book to your attention.

This work gave the authorities what they needed and thereafter the conspiracy of Evil was faced properly and hundreds of thousands of witches were herded up. The danger spread from Germany, as we had feared, and the hunt was pursued all over Europe, from Sweden and Scotland, to Italy and Spain. Many thousands confessed, others died on the flaming pyre still urged on by Satan to protest their innocence. So for a very long time our book was a great source of strength and we feel proud that we helped to save Christ’s Kingdom from the Evil One and his deluded followers.