from
http://www.jackherer.com/chapter10.html"By the early Middle Ages, at the beginning of the 11th Century C.E., virtually all powers were placed in the hands of the Church and Pope; first, by Germanic conquerors, and later by powerful Spanish and French Kings and powerful Italian merchants and nobles (the Borgias, Medicis, and other megalomaniacs) probably to protect their trade secrets, alliances, and sources of wealth.
All European people were forced to adhere to the "Holy" Roman Empire policy: Zero tolerance by a fundamentalist church/police-state with blind faith in one, unquestioned version of how to worship God and the Pope's infallibility.
Political rulers aided and abetted the Church in this fraud, as their power now rested only on their new Christian dogma, the patriarchal "Divine right" to rule.
They enacted laws with fantastically vicious punishments for even the slightest infraction or heresy.* Heretics were mercilessly sought out by fanatical, sadistic inquisitors using perverted forms of torture to extract confessions and as punishment. "
Eerily familiar, no? Fanatics, sadists, fundamentalist church/police state, aiders and abetters to the fraud, hunting people down, extracting confessions with torture.
Interesting how torture used to create false confessions fits right in with Bush's other attempts to tamper, subvert and override the judicial function, the most basic right of civilization.