Though perhaps apocryphal, there is a Russian proverb (beloved of Economist editorialists, for some reason) about a bird buried in a cowpat that pokes it head out and starts singing. A fox, hearing the singing, pulls the bird out and eats it. The three morals of the story are; 1. not everybody that sh*ts on you is an enemy; 2. not everybody that pulls you out of the sh*t is a friend; and 3. if you are in the sh*t, don’t sing about it. Today, on the occasion of the global night of prayer for victims of torture (held in the run-up to the UN’s International Day in Support of Victims of Torture), my colleague Robert Madelin provided an example of a more poignant and macabre, though true, inverted version of such morals by posting on his Facebook blog a brief life of the English catholic saint and martyr, Thomas Garnett. So noble was Garnett in facing up to his impending death that the crowd to whom he had endeared himself pulled hard on his legs to make sure that the hanging killed him. Something similar happened to another English Catholic martyr, John Payne. In other words, in those awful times, not everybody who tried to kill you was necessarily an enemy. In 1606, gunpowder plotter Guido Fawkes meanwhile deliberately flung himself off of the gallows and broke his neck, thus avoiding the ‘fate worse than death’ that would otherwise have been meted out to him. All three men had already been tortured. In Fawkes’s case, he had to watch whilst fellow plotters Thomas Wintour, Ambrose Rookwood, and Robert Keyes were hanged, drawn and quartered. For this was the fate that Garnett’s and Payne’s friends helped them to avoid through immediate death. And when, I wondered, was the last time this vile, ghastly sentence (usually for treason) was carried out? The answer, shockingly, was 1820, though it was not taken off of the statute books until 1870. Our dark ages, of state-sanctioned and law-based torture, are not so far in the past…
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