“The question”

Voltaire can be quite uproarious. He often comes up with a delectable little piece of info out of the blue. Here is one such: -Jews never speak about torture in their books!

He has always been one of my favorites, not merely because of his wit or the vitriolic style he possessed. I like him more for his untiring effort to put down tyranny of all kind in his time. Once he was really fired up he would never stop till he achieved his aims. That is stellar quality in a man, or at least I believe so. He stood up against the Church in all its forms and fought and won epic battles against it.

Some would not dare even to speak of the church in these liberated times, going by he experience of the “true” left government that we have in my state. They visit the “Lordships” at their palaces and partake of the enjoyment that is on offer there. Well, one can’t but applaud the true communist spirit of the great leaders that we have.

They are purely suffering the indignity for the people you know!

I would have liked to quote Voltaire’s next few lines from his Philosophical Dictionary. But that does not seem possible now, for, there is such thing called living off a host, or so some say.

So I give up my terrible urge to copy his wonderful words.

Those of you who have heard of the work can get a copy of it and go through it. If you find pleasure in it you are human, and if not, you are a member of a much more advanced species- you belong to the species called the inhuman.

Voltaire traces the history of torture from the first highway men/robbers to inquisition and forward in a manner that he only can do. He was clear sighted enough to understand that torture is not about getting information out of the tortured. It is the first stage in a drama called murder.

The fate of the tortured would already be decided before the torture begins.
The criminals in authority naturally think of it as a very good pastime. You have to make human life richer somehow, you know, blood and spilled guts (preferably of other people) do enrich the effect of an ebbing life as you can imagine! It can be a very rewarding experience too, for you are sometimes dimly reminded of your own death at a distance. Only at an unseen distance, for the hardened villains never believe that they would ever die.

For that matter, who does?

At any rate Vultures term “The question” is a cute way to express torture.
It is all about ‘the question’ isn’t it, whether or not people have a right to decide the fate of an individual?

It reminds me of Myshkin’s arguments in the “Idiot”. He firmly believed that even a toughened criminal hope of a reprieve till such time that he is finally condemned to be executed and even later till his appeal against the sentence is rejected.

His description of the execution was terribly moving.

-Hope is what life is all about. We are all romantics in that sense, we hope and hope, that this would pass, something better would turn up, something marvelous to save us……..

Often there would be nothing other than the familiar and misshapen life you ever had. Still we hope on……

Oh let us fight and let us………… hope on!