The news that the Guardia Civil are breaking Catalan protestors' fingers one by one is an example of how some things never change.
It must be 25 years since I first heard the stories of that trick from nearly a decade earlier again, when it had been applied by the Police, and by people posing as the Police, to the miners. Just as it had been to their fathers and grandfathers in the 1920s, and so on back.
Back how far? Well, as a civil body, the Spanish Inquisition has to be compared to other civil bodies of the time; and it actually compares rather well, using torture in only two per cent of cases, and then for no longer than 15 minutes, with only one per cent experiencing torture more than once.
Of 49,092 cases between 1550 and 1700, fully 1,485, not even three per cent, ended with the death sentence, and only 776 were actually put to death by this agency, not of the Church, but of the State.
On average during that century and a half, the Spanish Inquisition executed five people per year.
Yet the Popes considered it unacceptably severe even in that day and age, when the English were executing anyone who damaged a shrub in a public garden, the Germans were gouging out the eyes of those who returned from banishment, and the French were disembowelling sheep-stealers.
The Spanish Inquisition dismissed anyone who broke its clearly set out Instructiones, and people before the secular courts in Barcelona would sometimes blaspheme in order to be sent to one of the much more humane prisons maintained by the Inquisition. Perhaps
it should be brought back?
It would certainly have been far less barbaric and more law-bound than the regime to which those whom the Thatcher Government had designated "the Enemy Within" were subjected. When Margaret Thatcher died, then Mariano Rajoy hailed her as "a true landmark of twentieth-century history". There is even a square named after her in Madrid.
I still do not like the Catalan separatists. I recognise them. But I like the other side even less. I recognise them, too.
That is a higher death rate per year, isn't it? Makes you think. Until this year, the working class had barely voted in 30 years, gave up after 1987 because her third victory meant there was no more point. We're back now, though.
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