Humans are social animals. Humans exist in societies. A society is a group of related individuals pursuing conventional goals by conventional means. Or, societies are maintained and defined by rules. The almost universal form of rules are religious commandments. Religious heresies destroy the society’s rules and fracture that society. Self-preservation, then, is the reason societies always attempt to resolve religious differences. Spain crushed various heresies by the Inquisition, although there were Inquisitions in Italy and other countries also. The Germans were one people, but the split into Protestant north and Catholic Bavaria produced two different societies (as anyone knowledgeable about human behavior would have predicted). I suppose this is a matter of taste, but I’ll take the happy, beer-swilling Bavarians over the tight-ass, money-grubbing Protestants any day. Ditto Papist Ireland and protty-bastard Scotland. If you prefer Cromwell to Charles II, be my frikkin’ guest. The fact remains that, Inquisitors or no, the first proto-totalitarian state was Elizabethan England, not Spain. Same with the definitely-totalitarian Spanish Republic vis-a-vis Franco’s Rightist Spain. Reviewing the history of post-Reformation Europe, I’m with the inquisitors.
